Strength Science
Does muscle damage matter for growth?
Muscle damage was long assumed to be one of the mechanisms driving hypertrophy. The evidence increasingly suggests it is a side effect that carries a cost.
Strength Science
What the research says, and how badly it gets quoted.
Strength Science
What we still do not know
A survey of the open questions in strength training, which is a more useful thing to read than another confident answer to a settled one.
Strength Science
Who to trust: evaluating fitness information sources
The volume of training content vastly exceeds the volume of reliable training content. There are reasonably good signals for telling them apart.
Strength Science
What muscle protein synthesis measurements actually tell you
A large share of nutrition advice for lifters is built on acute measurements of muscle protein synthesis, which turn out to be a poor predictor of long-term muscle growth.
Strength Science
Women in strength research: what we know and what is missing
A large majority of exercise science participants have historically been men, which means a lot of confident advice given to women rests on studies that did not include any.
Strength Science
Range of motion and the case for training muscles long
One of the more interesting recent lines of research suggests that where in the range you load a muscle affects how much it grows.
Strength Science
Hormones: what training does to them and what that means
Post-workout hormonal spikes were once considered a central mechanism of muscle growth. The evidence has moved substantially, and the marketing has not.
Strength Science
Muscle fibre types and why you cannot train around them
Fast-twitch and slow-twitch is a real distinction that gets applied to training in ways the physiology does not support.
Strength Science
Why two people on the same programme get different results
Individual response to identical training varies enormously, and understanding that variance changes how you should interpret both research and your own results.
Strength Science
Muscle confusion and other things that are not real
A collection of gym beliefs that survived long past their evidence, and what the research actually supports instead.
Strength Science
Reading a study without being fooled by it
A single paper is almost never news. Knowing which questions to ask of a study is what separates useful information from a headline built on twelve untrained undergraduates.