Fitness & Lifestyle Notes

General Health

  • Meditation and mindfulness training seem to be quite effective at lowering cortisol1.
  • Exercise (both cardio and lifting weights) improve cognitive function significantly2.
  • Weightlifting/strength training have strong anti-depressive effects3.
  • Sauna use has significant health benefits, increasing life span and lowering CVD risk4.
  • Gaining muscle seems to be just as possible at 85+ as it is at 65-755.

Diet & Nutrition

  • Coffee is shown to be healthy when consumed in normal amounts, with decreased risk in many health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease6. Having caffeine later in than 1PM can cause sleep issues however.
  • The benefit of coffee seems to be largely due to antioxidants contained within7. These make up the majority of antioxidants in standard diets, which is why it’s still beneficial to drink decaf.
  • Dark chocolate is also very healthy despite the high saturated fat content largely due to high polyphenol content8.
  • Non-nutritive sweeteners (sucralose, aspartame, etc) can help with weight loss9.
  • Resistance training is likely better than cardio for weight loss 10. This is largely because it burns a similar amount of calories to cardio during training (with the exception of elite endurance athletes) while also requiring more energy for repair afterwards and increasing BMR overall because of larger muscle mass.
  • Interestingly, the body will also begin to compensate more the more exercise you do11 (usually by lowering NEAT), so beyond a certain point more exercise might not yield much benefit in terms of weight loss.
  • Diet breaks (intermittent dieting) seems to be effective at maintaining BMR compared to baseline calorie restriction when dieting (due to lowering metabolic adaptations to CR), however the effect is isn’t hugely substantial (~50cals a day)12.
  • 40 - 60g of dietary fat generally considered the safe lower limit for hormone production during diet13.
  • The notion that protein consumption past 30g does not lead to more muscle growth seems to be false - the anabolic window will extend for a longer time frame when higher amounts of protein are consumed. There is likely still benefit to spacing protein out during the day, to a point14.
  • Protein timing is also largely irrelevant15, with total protein consumed being a much more important variable.
  • Pre-workout carbs don’t seem to do anything for weightlifting16 - this makes sense as stored muscle glycogen should be more than sufficient for most anaerobic workouts.
  • Beyond beginner muscle gains, bulking too quickly seems to cause more fat gain without any additional muscle gains 17.
  • Cutting calories significantly during deloading may be counter-productive, as muscle growth can occur days (maybe even weeks) after an exercise bout18.

Exercise & Weightlifting

  • Free weights and machines offer similar size gains - strength is specific to certain movement patterns19.
  • 1-2 minutes of rest seems to be sufficient for hypertrophy20. It’s likely more rest time is required for strength, however.
  • Resistance training through proper full ROM seems to improve flexibility as much as stretching21 - this makes intuitive sense as lifting weights is essentially weighted dynamic stretching.
  • Supersets, particularly antagonist supersets, save time and appear to be just as effective for strength and muscle building22. The only downside is greater cardio requirements, although this can be interpreted as a positive as well.
  • Another time saving method, drop sets, are also just as effective as straight sets for muscle growth23, though they also incur a lot of fatigue.
  • Front squats and back squats seem roughly equal when it comes to quad growth24.

Injury Management

  • Injury & risk reduction not shown with limiting round-back lifting25.
  • Injury risk is reduced by increasing sleep to 8 hours26, reducing psychological stress27, believing your body is not fragile28 and proper load management29.
  • There is no linear relationship between tissue damage and pain - pain can occur without tissue damage and tissue damage can occur without pain30.
  • After disc herniation, most people experience reabsorption of the disc31 without any treatment.

Footnotes

  1. Meditation/mindfulness performed the best out of several stress management interventions in this meta-analysis.↩︎

  2. Meta-analysis showing improvements in memory, attention, information processing, etc. Another study showing increased creativity, and another showing improved learning after resistance training.↩︎

  3. Large magnitude depression reduction during this study. Even lower-intensity strength training shows the same.↩︎

  4. Review of sauna health benefits.↩︎

  5. No difference between age groups observed in this study.↩︎

  6. The largest coffee meta-analysis I’ve found shows health improvements with normal consumption (less than 5 cups a day).↩︎

  7. Some supporting studies.↩︎

  8. Large meta-analysis of RCTs.↩︎

  9. Tons of studies on this, but here’s one example.↩︎

  10. Large meta-analysis on this topic, and RCT with similar topic & results.↩︎

  11. Energy compensation study.↩︎

  12. Diet break meta-analysis.↩︎

  13. The following stronger by science article has information supporting this number.↩︎

  14. Cell Reports Medicine study reference.↩︎

  15. Protein timing (pre, post workout) had no impact on muscle growth in this study.↩︎

  16. Pre-workout carb study for crossfit showed no difference - this is probably even more true for most typical strength training routines, as crossfit incurs more of a cardio burden than strength training.↩︎

  17. Study on this by Eric Helms.↩︎

  18. Study showing delayed myonuclear addition after strength training.↩︎

  19. Stronger by science reference.↩︎

  20. Pre-print study investigating rest times.↩︎

  21. RCT suggesting this.↩︎

  22. Pre-print for now.↩︎

  23. Drop set study.↩︎

  24. Similar results in this study, even with front squats having less volume.↩︎

  25. A few different PubMed articles related to this.↩︎

  26. Shown in adolescents and adult USAF.↩︎

  27. Shown in dancers and other athletes.↩︎

  28. Shoulder pain study and other meta-analyses on fear-related pain beliefs.↩︎

  29. Review on training load and injury.↩︎

  30. Non-symptomatic disc herniations are a good example of this.↩︎

  31. Most herniations resolve on their own, with more severe herniations slightly less likely to regress on their own. Even in cases of unresolved herniation, there is no linear relationship between bulging/herniated discs and injury/pain[^9].↩︎