Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds
unsw.edu.au
unsw.edu.au
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/6/10812.3.4. Resistance Training Program
After the 7-day wash-in, both groups followed the same RT program that comprising 3 full-body sessions a week for 12 weeks (Supplementary Materials, Table S1). All sessions were supervised by tertiary qualified exercise physiologists and commenced with a standardised warm-up of dynamic flexibility exercises. Each session consisted of 5 exercises: 2 compound movements each for the upper and lower body, and 1 isolation movement for the upper body. Four sets were prescribed for all movements to ensure an adequate weekly training volume for hypertrophy [32]. Training intensities were 6 to 12 repetition maximums (RM) with 60 and 120 s of rest between sets and exercises, respectively. To adhere to the prescribed RM, an individual’s rating of perceived exertion (RPE) on a Likert scale of 1–10 was recorded. RPE corresponds to the number of repetitions an individual perceives they will be able to perform after the set is complete, where an RPE 5 equates to 5 reps more, RPE 6 is 4 reps more, RPE 7 is 3 reps more, and so on [33]. When a RPE of 8 or lower was recorded, the external load (kg) was adjusted on successive sets to ensure that subjects achieved the target RM. The RM method was used to ensure that training intensities were relative to the individual’s abilities while also standardising the training intensity across all participants [34].
I'm not quite sure this is clear enough for me, though it does somehow suggest that they were pushing the participants to do as much as they could. But like I say, unclear.
Small N as well - only a few dozen people.
It's good that it's studied, but it does sound that they've "conclusively" proven something, and I'm not so sure. Small sample size too, like you said.
The wording is a little technical. They're saying that, if the subject thought they could do at least 2 more reps at the end of this set, they increased the weight on the next set. So if creatine does allow people to do more reps at a given weight, subjects on creatine should have lifted heavier weights. (To me, that doesn't seem like the right way to adjust for creatine, which is thought to provide extra energy, not the ability to lift heavier.)
Still, this cohort might suffer from the issue of lack of awareness about _how exertive_ the actual workout is. I feel this is also something you should learn.
I have the same impression. Possibly it could be made less subjective by literally repping to failure, but I'd guess that has potential ethical implications.
Reps to failure can be done pretty darn safely with machines and incredibly low risk of injury if done on the higher rep ranges (say 20 per set). You’re not going to get rid or risk of injury but in order to even do this study, my opinion is you have to be at a normal level of injury risk or the study is pretty much flawed by design.
So it gives you more energy at molecular level. But as you said, you have to actually use that energy.
For example, you could be using it in athletics, running, etc and it’s not inherently going to give you growth.
The effects have been known to be small. You get a little extra energy that might push you a little further in a set going to failure or with one or two reps in reserve. Maybe you slide in some lengthened partial that you go a bit more through the range of motion that you would have had energy to do otherwise.
And that happens again and again over the course of years and you get a tiny bit extra from it, probably. I’m not sure this study design disproves that at all.
So no, taking creatine without doing the work probably won't make a difference (except to your wallet), but use in conjunction with consistent and effective exercise, the effect is real.
One thing though: don't bother with the creatine loading phase, it's a marketing scheme to sell more product.
ChatGPT: "This process, known as cell volumization, contributes to muscle size gains."
So there's also that reason to take it :)
Creatine is dirt cheap. Anything expensive is probably a scam.
After the 7-day wash-in, both groups followed the same RT program that comprising 3 full-body sessions a week for 12 weeks (Supplementary Materials, Table S1). All sessions were supervised by tertiary qualified exercise physiologists and commenced with a standardised warm-up of dynamic flexibility exercises. Each session consisted of 5 exercises: 2 compound movements each for the upper and lower body, and 1 isolation movement for the upper body. Four sets were prescribed for all movements to ensure an adequate weekly training volume for hypertrophy [32]. Training intensities were 6 to 12 repetition maximums (RM) with 60 and 120 s of rest between sets and exercises, respectively. To adhere to the prescribed RM, an individual’s rating of perceived exertion (RPE) on a Likert scale of 1–10 was recorded. RPE corresponds to the number of repetitions an individual perceives they will be able to perform after the set is complete, where an RPE 5 equates to 5 reps more, RPE 6 is 4 reps more, RPE 7 is 3 reps more, and so on [33]. When a RPE of 8 or lower was recorded, the external load (kg) was adjusted on successive sets to ensure that subjects achieved the target RM. The RM method was used to ensure that training intensities were relative to the individual’s abilities while also standardising the training intensity across all participants [34].
1/ on this RPE stuff, it sounds like they are trying to keep two reps in the tank which is fine but..when? the first set? The last set?
2/ perhaps I'm misreading the supplemental data but the error bars are pretty huge when it comes to changes in LBM, not sure how any conclusions can be drawn
3/ 12 weeks is a short program and it sounds like they chose people who were generally not in shape/beginners. Anyone who has lifted in their life can tell you initial gains are almost always mostly in strength, not mass.
4/ Their choice of lifts for this population also looks unusual.
I'm sure they have the data but I could not find any evaluation of relative strength gains between the two groups. Even if their hypothesis that the LBM gain is identical, strength gains may not be.
It is possible it doesn’t capture everything, because they don’t say anything here about setting the initial load, or adjusting the load up for low perceived exertion, only down for high perceived exertion.
It makes sense that the body's adenosine re-phosphorylation is not rate limited by creatine at all (which the body produces naturally). In that case, having extra creatine lying around would just make your pee more expensive and give you a nice placebo effect from believing you can lift more. (And placebo effects are real effects, particularly for effort related tasks. Just not due to chemistry of the treatment.)
(1) Yes, that the loading phase was BYPASSED. = (
"Those on creatine did bypass a loading phase, which includes taking 20 to 25 grams daily for up to one week. While it is common to start with a loading phase, it can cause gastrointestinal issues and is not necessary to reach saturation levels – the maximum that the body can store at any one time. "
My understanding, to reach saturation without a loading phase - it takes about 3 to 4 weeks. (Could be wrong, going off of memory there.)
With loading, I've read it takes 1 to 2 weeks to reach saturation.
(2) Without measuring creatine levels, what was even tested? How many people were creatine "non-responders?" How many people were getting plenty of creatine from their diets already?
(3) Was the creatine regimen effective and optimal? Water intake is another factor. I don't think a set of 50 people divided between 2 groups is going to be anywhere near enough to capture a nuance like efficacy of the regimen vs no regimen.
> Also, their study is looking at lean body mass changes after the "wash-in" period, so any effect that increased recovery is supposed to have on lean body mass when following the exercise protocol they give for the time period they studied should be captured, no?
I'd say no, simply because it is not known whether the wash-in period was actually a wash-in period without knowing if creatine levels actually changed in a significant way. Second, the study group of beginner weight lift lifters is a chaotic data set. The gains of lifting weights vs not lifting weights is likely magnitudes different from creatine vs no-creatine supplementation. Some beginners might easily get 10% more muscle mass vs 5% for others. An effect that is expected be very low is going to be completely lost in the noisy data. Let alone that we are starting from a questionable baseline.
Overall, since the body can absorb up to about 5g of creatine a day, and the body is likely already intaking 1 or 2g per day - this study is kinda only looking at the effect of an increase of creatine from a moderate dosage to a maximal dosage, across beginner weight lifters. It's like, say you're a bit dehydrated, instead of drinking 500ml of water per day, you now start drinking 550ml of water and then measure any changes from starting a brand new weight lifting routine.
Note that this link is not the study! The published paper makes much more specific claims.
Is the scientific community "focused" on creatine?
Study it to death, I care not. If I had research money, I wouldn't use it to kick a dead horse.
That's not an entirely fair description of the situation actually.
Imagine the 4 groups from the cross product of WorksOut?(Yes/No) cross Steroids?(Y/N).
It's intuitive, obvious, and supported by the data that The WorksOut(Y) + Steroids(Y) Group reliably gains more muscle over time than other groups. And similarly that the WorksOut(N) + Steroids(N) group gains the least (including losses too!) .
The interesting groups are WorksOut without Steroids, vs Steroids without WorksOut.
The sad truth is those on steroids, though sedentary, gain more muscle than those who workout without steroids.
Here's the source of what I'm talking about from Jeff Nippard's Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD9p9tEP9RE around 4:05
And it's important we educate folks about who is likely on them and what's realistic naturally. Because many young people are innudated with drug enhanced bodies on social media and think that's possible without steroids (and their negative sideeffects). It's particularly troublesome in the case of sexual selection and competition, for example using the hetero normative pairings, when young women are attracted to the steroidal bodies and when young men are pressured to take damaging gear to compete with peers who are. (There's the equivalent analogues for other sexual pairings/preferences).
- It’s obvious to me that I (n=1) gained a ton of muscle and lost a ton of fat very quickly without having done dramatic changes in workouts at first
- It also made it waaaay easier to work out. I used to hate it bc I was exhausted all the time, and now I don’t really mind, and sometimes even enjoy it. In actual practice pulling these variables apart is hard
PSA: T levels have declined markedly over the past generation or two. But when one tests for low T, the goalposts move bc every time a new population is studied for setting benchmarks (generally every decade or two), the definition of clinically “low” is moved to the new 2.5%ile of that study, such that someone in the current 3rd %ile (considered A-okay by most doctors) would have been in maybe 2.4th %ile (considered red alert by most doctors) using the previous benchmarks (made up numbers but roughly right).
(This is a dumb approach, the binary magic of the 2.5%ile (2 standard deviations), and it frustrates me greatly bc i was denied care bc my first test was 2.4%ile and 2nd was 2.6%ile and thus i was told i was fine bc of the 2nd result and offered anti-depressants instead).
Fixing this is not about muscles, it’s about having energy to live life fully and not be cranky.
So if you’re constantly tired, consider testing for this. And use a functional doc, as in my experience from shepherding 5-10 other folks through this process, the standard doc knows little about this stuff and thinks that having a condition like this is binary
Sorry, a bit off-topic, but no change in my life has been more important besides kids, so I try to spread the word where even somewhat appropriate
Quick note to add: if you're reading the above comment and you still want kids, it's important to note that loss of fertility is one of the most significant side effects of testosterone (or any steroid). There are additional medications that can reduce the risk (and possibly reverse it after fertility is already lost), but it's not guaranteed.
When a man takes exogenous testosterone, their endogenous production (in the testicles) plummets. This is largely fine, but the production in the testicles also leads to sperm production, and that gets lost.
The solution to this is HCG, which stimulates some testicular production. But it is not a perfect solution, and recently CA has made it much harder to use HCG for this purpose (which was always off-label).
> "The sad truth is those on steroids, though sedentary, gain more muscle than those who workout without steroids."
These sorts of adapations are not linear and consistent, similar to the "noob gains" experienced in the first few months by novice lifters.
Anyone who has trained in a somewhat serious gym can tell you that there are many people taking steroids, often times in dosages manyfold what this study use, who have mediocre physiques.
Do you have a longitudinal study source?
> "Untrained males without prior AAS use gained more muscle over a 10 week non-exercise period than similar males who performed exercise."
There's lots of studies that show steroid users accumulate about 2x as much muscle as non steroid users, but those are both in trained groups. Unclear about what happens if someone takes steroids across 10 years, and how much total muscle they accumulate relative to a natural over the same time period.
So you don’t always have to work for them, especially if you used a steroid like Tren which is 5x more anabolic than testosterone.
So it's fundamentally different from the creatine mechanism above.
For example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5989848/
Here's one on steroids with a no exercise group, they saw gains: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8637535/
I recover so much better when on roughly 5mg of Creatine for an extended period of time versus when I am not taking any. I also very clearly notice added water weight. That recovery leads to better training sessions which in turn leads to increased muscle and strength.
The difference in water retention and recovery is measurable whether doing a PPL or something like Tactical Barbell blocks.. call me crazy.
EDIT: 5g not 5mg
I think this study may have been too flawed to reach a strong conclusion.
> After the 7-day wash-in, both groups followed the same RT program that comprising 3 full-body sessions a week for 12 weeks...
> For all assessments, participants reported to the Exercise Physiology Research Lab (UNSW Sydney, Australia) at the same time of day between 8 h and 9 h following an 8-h fast which included refraining from all liquids except water...
So extra stamina isn't rewarded due to the same workout plan and conventional wisdom on insulin and its effect on muscle absorption of creatine is completely ignored due to the 8 hour fasting period.
This study seems to paint creatine as a magic muscle bullet where it seems to be common knowledge in the fitness community that it aids recovery and stamina. I have my doubts.
I'm able to do a few more reps and recover a bit faster between sets and from one session to the next. That will definitely have a positive impact on muscle mass in the medium/long term.
If you've never felt like your body was beat up for 1-2 days afterwards, then I'd suggest you've never pushed your exertion level high enough. You can certainly make good progress relatively far away from failure up to a certain point, but eventually that won't be good enough. I'd suggest your overall volume on the muscle you're hitting probably wasn't high enough. If you're just sticking to 3x5 with a simple progression, then that's pretty limiting.
If you do a lot of activity, the amount of exertion can be measured in EPOC - how much extra oxygen your body needs for the extra metabolism to support repair (this is when any gains happen, growth, endurance, efficiency). When that’s back to baseline your body has done repairing, you’ve “recovered”.
If you aren’t recovered, your body still hasn’t repaired the damage you’ve done to it in the previous round, and you probably won’t be able to repeat the effort, whichever discipline. You’re digging yourself deeper in a hole. If you keep doing this, that’s overtraining, and you can get worse.
If you never experienced this, congratulations, you were operating inside your body’s natural limits! You may have good genes, and having good sleep and nutrition is probably more important than supplements.
You weren't loading enough. At my max weights (600lbs Deadlift, 400lbs Squat, 340 Bench) , I needed to take 2-3 days off minimum
Maybe I wasn't pushing myself hard enough, but I also never got injured. How much more could I have realistically achieved by pushing harder? I don't think much. I got really put off trying so hard when I realised how many people were on gear.
Were you having issues with plateaus at all?
If you're repping things with no problem, you're at the your current "optimal" level so yeah, you won't feel like you need to recover.
Like in cardio, I could rip out a half-marathon at a 8:00m pace and feel fine the next day, but try and reach 7:30 and I would be shattered.
At 30, probably better not to try and go too ham, but you have plenty of room to get much stronger. I don't know why other people using gear influenced you. Get fit for yourself, fuck the others.
I find the whole thing super fake now. People eating 5 chickens a week that were slaughtered for them in horrible conditions. Burning fossil fuels to move their obese body to the gym every day to go do pretend work in air conditioned boxes. Tell themselves BMI is bullshit and doesn't work for extremely muscular outliers like them and they're just "bulking" and that somehow eating 3000+ calories a day is good for them. Oh and I guess tell themselves that not being able to walk after a workout is somehow good for them.
Nowadays I walk, run and cycle outside, do calisthenics at home, do intermittent fasting every single day, eat delicious food, remain shredded, take no supplements and still have my hair.
Gyms are good for adults to train from the general blob like form we all seem to regress to after childhood into the form they always should have been. I think the ideal would be just maintaining childhood strength all the way into adulthood, so just doing exercise basically. Gyms are only necessary because there are adults with so little functional strength that they'd injure themselves if they tried to do a single dip or lift a box.
Standard strength goals should be being able to walk 30km, 1000m ascent with a 10kg pack. Being able to cycle 100 miles. Being able to lift your own bodyweight from a dead hang. Being able to lift a 100kg box shaped load etc. Real strength.
I'm not saying nobody should do it for a sport, though. I love strongman (specifically World's Strongest Man). But you have to realise to compete there you need to be on copious amounts of gear, just like any other sport. You just have to be real with yourself about what your goals are.
Anecdotally I do also notice a cognitive impact when taking it, e.g. I seem to have improved concentration. Or more that when I have stopped taking it I have decreased concentration. Anecdata 1 of 1.
There are we-are-human reasons, but are there any logical reasons?
A single study probably can't answer the high-level questions (like, "does creatine help build muscle?") but can nevertheless be pretty interesting to read and discuss. (Personally, I found this discussion interesting, and I don't care about the high-level question at all.)
This is what is happening in all nutrition science, where most studies are trash.
That is why you can prove any hypothesis you want by picking (meta) studies in nutrition science.
Participants were instructed to maintain their current
dietary habits and physical activity levels for the
duration of the study.
Is that the creatine, or the caffeine added to virtually ALL creatine supplements?
I pretty much don't see any creatine supplements with caffeine.
> “The people taking the creatine supplement saw changes before they even started exercising, which leads us to believe that it wasn’t actual real muscle growth, but potentially fluid retention,” Dr Hagstrom said.
I think this is well-known, right? People take creatine specifically because it increases water retention in muscles, making them look slightly bigger. I'm not sure if many people think it will help build muscles and strength directly in the way "TRT" does, but maybe I'm wrong!
My understanding of the conventional wisdom:
- Caffeine and other uppers work from a motivational perspective during workouts
- "TRT" provides massive gains, and nasty side effects
- Creatine makes your muscles look slightly bigger
- Nothing else works“By taking a creatine supplement, such as creatine monohydrate, you can change the amount of phosphocreatine and creatine in your muscles. The extra creatine can help your muscles make more ATP faster as you use it to fuel your cells during high-intensity exercise.
One reason your body builds more lean muscle tissue when you take creatine is that your muscles will hold more water. The pressure from the water in your cells causes your muscles to swell. This water and swelling can also make cells grow.” https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/creatine
On average it also improves cognitive function slightly etc, but like most supplements individual results vary. “especially as you get older. But studies have not shown a strong effect.”
General marker is x4-6 weekly dose for free test, so I'd wager you're taking somewhere between 150-200mg?
I found that contrary to popular advice, I felt much better without taking an aromatase inhibitor and letting my estradiol float at the higher end of the reference range.
There's some science backing the idea that Test/E2 are meant to exist in terms of a relative ratio to each other, rather than concrete numbers.
IE, if your free test is 1,000ng/dL, you'd want more E2 than if you were sitting at 300ng/dL.
Could be that at some bodyfat percentages you don't need an AI at all, while at higher levels you do.
Creatine has been studied to have other small effects too..
What too, the above have effects on muscle endurance, though for resistance training the effects may vary well be small. Further, this study took people that were not trained. 5lbs of muscle is a lot.. these folks might have gone from 50lbs to 55lbs, an extra 0.1lbs due to a supplement would be noise. I think this study needs muscle biopsies to measure creatine levels accurately to tease out those that are getting plenty from their diet vs not. Or.. try to have a large control group that gets zero creatine in their diet.
AFAIK creatine supplementation is something to think about after a year or two of training, for advanced intermediates.
Here are some sources with how caffeine and nitrates help at least endurance performance:
Direct link to this study: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/6/1081
Sometimes supplements are just the better option.
The more I personally know the person, or the more connectedness I have, the more his anecdote is worth listening to.
This study is a collection of mere 54 random anecdotes (!), random people of the street.
Anecdote of a random min-maxing turbo nerd on hackernews >= 54 random people from the street.
Amazing, great job buddy, very proud of you
It don't work like that.
The amount you can work out (at intensity) is limited by your recovery time.
Thus you take that "supplement" and can do one more rep, or go to gym extra time a week, especially if it comes to "regulated and risky" supplements, then you can do many, many more reps.
I didn't even know about the cognitive benefits until I felt them so strongly that I did a search to see if it was a common thing people experienced.
Other effects too, like better recall, but stuff like that's hard to untangle from those first two.
This study is just one study, but to me just highlights her same observation even more.
You hear this a lot, but it is incredibly difficult to eat eg 175g of protein every day. That's 4 chicken breasts, every day.
It's harder if you're not eating a lot overall, but still doable with some planning and the occasional protein shake.
I'm curious what the same study would say about athletes of various disciplines. It makes sense to me that creatine does not make a difference for these folks.
As other commenters have posted, the popular suggested use of creatine use it to either increase resistance (extra reps at a greater weight) or decrease downtime (lack of atp / lactic acid buildup that breaks down muscles)
https://www.mdpi.com/nutrients/nutrients-17-01081/article_de...
Poor interpretation of the study.
Compare this study vs this: https://www.cptips.com/creatine.htm, cites multiple studies and later concluded that most likely older vegetarians are likely to see a benefit, everyone else maybe will see a benefit or nothing at all. Given that, without knowing creatine levels of the participants, I find it no surprise the study found no significant results. I do not think this study actually even measured creatine impact.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/16/21/3665#:~:text=In%20the%2... and Creatine Supplementation for Muscle Growth: A Scoping Review of Randomized Clinical Trials from 2012 to 2021 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8949037/
Small studies like this are usually combined with others in order to get a better picture. Given the huge variety of ways to run a resistance training program, a single protocol study is unlikely to explore the space very well. So lots of small studies trying things different ways is going to be a more effective exploration of the space (in addition to matching the amount of funding that any researcher is able to get).
Unfortunately lots of little studies does not make for good press releases, nor does it fit the news media cycle very well.
Muscle gains require an adequate protein intake, but creatine has no relationship with that.
Creatine, as phosphocreatine, provides energy storage for short-time anaerobic effort. After the available phosphocreatine is exhausted, only a lower power can be sustained, at the level that can be supported by the conversion of glucose into lactic acid. For even longer times, the power that can be sustained must drop to the level supported by aerobic metabolism.
It is known that the daily capacity of creatine synthesis in humans is usually limited to less than the optimal requirement for intense exercise, so some creatine must be provided by food, for the best results.
I take a little creatine, because I eat vegan food, which does not contain creatine. For someone who eats meat, it is very unlikely that a creatine supplement can be useful, because meat should contain enough additional creatine, besides the creatine that is synthesized internally.
However, I am grateful to the sport fans who may have taken creatine without any good reasons, because that has ensured the widespread availability at modest prices of creatine supplements, which are useful for vegans like myself.
I agree with another poster, who says that while creatine cannot have a direct effect on muscle gains, it can have an indirect effect on someone who trains regularly, by allowing more exercise repetitions, which may stimulate muscle gains.
Obviously, such an indirect effect is conditioned by actually training regularly and really doing more intense trainings than when not taking the supplement.
However, that has just restored the level of performance from when eating non-vegan food.
The effects of creatine should vary both between humans, because they may have different capacities for internal creatine synthesis, and depending on the kind of food that they eat, i.e. whether it is naturally rich in creatine, or not.
This is the entire fitness/supplement industry.
How can you build muscle without amino acids, the building blocks of protein, which muscles need to grow?
Simple. Being able to work out harder and longer, assuming proper sleep and nutrition, leads to greater muscle gain. There's no mystery.
Not worth it. Seemingly does nothing.
Agreed on the loading phase. It's not worth it.
EDIT: should add that I've been taking creatine for several years
Try it and see if it works for you. If it does - great! If it doesn't - great!
Some people have high creatine by themselves from meat sources or from own body, or some already have muscles saturated with it.
Creatine slightly boosts pure lean muscle growth. But most importantly it saturated muscle with creatine and increases its mass, ofcourse the increase isn't muscle tissue but water and resources bond to it. People usually count sarcoplasmic hypertrophy from glycogen as "muscle gains" even when they are short term and goes away after low carbs or depletion. Also as with anything when you stop doing it, it will go away. Also muscles are mostly water (75-80%), Mike Menzter also said that which reminded me.
Who will benefit from creatine? The ones who has it low. How can it help? Allows to push harder, allows to store more fluid and hydrate cells internally, may trigger MPS more often/recovers better.
It is like, "by itself" creatine don't go and build muscle, but it boosts whatever mechanism if they weren't already.
Some reality checks, don't expect signifiant size, don't expect significant contractile muscle size increase, expect water weight and boosted performance, but that is if only your muscles weren't actually saturated with creatine.
Ps: not sure about the boosted MPS signalling.
https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/?show_conditions=tr...
And as a general rule of thumb: Don't take anything from 4chan seriously.
Also hell, your own damn link says that elite athletes seem to get no benefit from creatine vs younger ones, meaning that its not really increasing muscle mass, just a combination of placebo, water retention, and maybe a burst of energy in the early stages of getting fit.
"improve strength, and power output" -> ability to train harder -> more muscle growth to put it simply.
Why is this one study more believable than the others?
> Also hell, your own damn link says that elite athletes seem to get no benefit from creatine vs younger ones,
Where are you seeing that? All I could find was the opposite:
> In trained athletes, creatine has been reported to reduce body fat and improve some measures of anaerobic exercise performance, strength, and power output.
But regardless,
> meaning that its not really increasing muscle mass, just a combination of placebo, water retention, and maybe a burst of energy in the early stages of getting fit.
doesn't follow; it's perfectly plausible that something could help more in initial training but actually work then.
That's a lot of extrapolation, Marmite-flavored protein powder, no doubt?
> that comprising 3 full-body sessions a week for 12 weeks (Supplementary Materials, Table S1) [Table S1 describes 3 different bro-splits, comprised of 45 different assistance exercises and no planned progression in intensity, excepting "To failure"]
Ah yes, I see they've confused resistance exercise with resistance training, indeed a mistake.
Granted, it does seem like a fine time to avoid "fitness powders" in light of "The Rhisotope Project" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819617
It's the only supplement that's actually given insanely effective results for my own anecdotal use.
Any study that says otherwise I'm just going to assume is complete BS. Normally I'd give something a chance and read their evidence, but this is practically up there with someone trying to argue the world is flat for me.