Not a bad idea to keep track of your sleep, and anything else that you think might affect your neural recovery. I did 7 taps/s yesterday on good sleep, around 5 today after the dog woke me up early...

Wow that's a big swing.

I'm waiting for them to roll out some awesome sleep + heart rate monitor that is accurate and not bulky. I haven't seen any devices that do a good job of both for a reasonable price. But I pretty much am always asleep by 11 and woken up by my alarm at 6:15, so I don't think I can infer much from that.

Pummi,

Are you claiming to have strength?

ETA: I guess what I'm saying is that, since this is the HC thread and all, it seems kind of ridiculous for either one of us to either directly or obliquely reference the pros/cons of body composition on extreme strength athletes without citing something, since to say we're both a fair bit outside of that arena. Can you expand on your point a bit?

DF,

It would require me to do some lifting but I have monitoring equipment within arms reach during most portions of the day if you're inclined to turn me into an experiment.

Does anyone here have an opinion on creatine transporter down-regulation as a result of daily supplementation? Most of the non-******s at bb.com seem pretty convinced. They recommend 2-3 grams 3-4x/week (on workout days), and one guy takes 1 week off completely per month.

I know we're talking about what's probably a small rock inside of another small rock, but I'm curious.

ETA: I think there may be some info in some links in this thread: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=3319711 but I didn't read through it carefully. Given the magnitude (small) of this issue, I didn't want to waste time and was hoping some of the smarties here already had opinions.

Seems pretty weird and even internally inconsistent. The study linked in the OP does not appear to suggest that skipping a day or two would be particularly helpful.

http://www.researchgate.net/publicat...5d6d5b268c.pdf

From ISSN position paper on creatine http://www.jissn.com/content/4/1/6

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9...,f1000m,isrctn

So sure, daily dosing is not mandatory, but where is the evidence for greater uptake from skipping a day or two? Why only workout days- is there an acute effect I'm missing? And do these guys also skip meat and fish on non-workout days?

Thanks for the response, AB!

Agreed on the OP, I said the exact same thing. But they had two relevant responses for me:

and

I have basically zero knowledge of biology and chemistry, so I wasn't too confident in responding. I'm taking a look at that jissn link in the 2nd post now though (http://www.jissn.com/content/3/1/60).

I remain pretty unconvinced, although once again, I stress my ignorance within the field.

Important paragraph from the above article:

Is the whole "training legs boosts testosterone and therefore promotes upper body growth too" argument overblown?

http://www.fitforcombatsystem.com/th...-arent-so-big/

Overblown how? I haven't heard anyone you should take seriously ever suggest that it'd be something significant enough to really matter.

I'd guess that the intensity loss in your curls caused by fatigue from squats would actually hinder your bicep gains, if anything. Obviously I'm basing this on absolutely nothing but guessing.

Great.
Now I can forget the only reason to have leg days.

They'll grow from standing and walking around, anyway.

Hooray!



ETA:
Now, don't be ridiculous, of course I'm not claiming to have strength.

But I will, before 2020.

And I'm not planning on having a spare tire around my waist at that point.
Fat strength is pretty much bogus, maaaaaaybe being on the fatter side might offer marginally better leverages for some of the lifts but the only reason I can think of to have a gut is if you fear you'll find yourself on a deserted island with no food and therefore need to possess your very own energy reserves around your waist or if you're planning on employing yourself as a human punching bag.

but strength training is one of the most important methods for fixing projected force vectors from the floor through various joints

Looks like t-nation reads our little HC thread: http://www.t-nation.com/training/4-w...-recovery-rate

Neither of these metrics are doing much for me. The mouse click test is nearly random, though I did train extremely heavy a couple weekends back and my subsequent average clicks were very low the following morning. But besides that single instance it has been unusable, because the standard deviation of performance seems larger than the magnitude of the effect of fatigue of most training sessions.

The grip strength is problematic right now because I'm very out of practice with the CoC. So even doing a few closes with each hand to assess grip strength in the morning is enough of a training effect to make closing the CoC the next day slightly easier.

I'm becoming more convinced that documenting sleep quality would be a better predictive variable of readiness to train than any reasonable physical measurement.

It'd be interesting to see if something like 'time to feeling wakeful' provided any predictive value. Or something weird like 'number of blinks in first waking hour'.

On a separate note I've been wondering about the use of objective force measurements in neurological examinations to assess power deficits. I can't ever remember seeing anything about it but it doesn't seem a bad idea.

I haven't done this religiously, but the effect of a good night's sleep vs. like a crappy 5 hours was definitely noticeable on the finger tap test. I was getting around 5.1 clicks/s after short sleep, and 5.9 after a full night's rest where I wake up naturally. The 7 clicks/s instance I mentioned earlier itt was a mistake where I had allowed my wrist to aid in the clicking.

When I googled around for info about it last time, it seemed like some people used it as a tool to determine a little bit earlier if they were overtraining or overreaching. Presumably you could use a longer term average for that after you switched programs to marginalize the daily variance.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here.

I just started reading Supertraining. It is mentioned early on that high velocity full ROM isokinetics have good carryover to low velocity (i.e. heavy), and the most resistance to detraining. Maybe because isokinetics should address power deficits throughout the ROM.

It seems like we're at the point in smartphone land where in a few years you might be able to have your phone tell you where to attach the extra weight to your chainz to approximate isokinetic work.

I haven't put enough time into it to figure out from the barsense app some approximation of what Supertraining calls the strength deficit, but it feels like that can be done pretty easily at home now.

I'm positive that treating resting heart rate stuff has some merit. I just recently started tracking it again and will have more to offer soon, but in the past I did notice that higher bpm meant it was gonna be a trash day.

For cardiotards it's a standard measure of over-training but I am too lazy to remember to check it every morning. I compensate by not training very hard, just to be sure.

Both of this is consistent with how Mike Ts/RTS TRAC system works.

Back in an older version they used to have a keyboard tapping test (max reps for time bro) and a reaction time test, along with an orthostatic heart rate {and a subjective component re: alertness, soreness levels, etc}. Mike told me that over time they figured out the keyboard tapping/reaction time components were pretty worthless for providing training recommendations.

Seems to be very much driven by the orthostatic test, and if I were going to provide a "cheap" metric it would be tracking your resting heart rate boht laying down and standing up, and the lower the better, and the smaller the gap between the two the better as well. (though I guess the latter part just goes without saying).

Current neurological examination standard is 'well, I think that arm feels weaker than the other, let's call it a 4/5'.

I would be interested in correlating above subjectivity with objective number of newtons of force output by the various movements involved.

Evidence-based recommendations for natural bodybuilding contest preparation: nutrition and supplementation by Helms and AA. Beast of an article. I'll be reading it over the next few days. Some of you might be interested as well. It's a pre-published provisional pdf btw.

Thanks for the link saw. I am reading it as we speak.

Do you know of articles that investigates the effects of a gross caloric surplus, ie is it possible that eating far over maintenance at some point develops negative returns on strength gains? Or is it consensus that even if you get fat, a gross surplus will only feed strength gains?

Printed it out as well.

Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity May Not Exist: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog...not_exist.html

Cliffs: An unusually rigorously controlled nutritional study. Very refreshing. Subjects reported gastrointestinal distress from both placebo and high-gluten diets because they're dumb and expected gluten to make them feel ****ty. Lolpeople.