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Science Update
How many sets, how many reps, which exercises? How much protein, which supplements and what’s your take on carbohydrates? Training, Nutrition and Supplementation are probably the most common topics physique athletes are talking about. But when was the last time you heard someone talk about his or her ‘regeneration regimen’? Especially among semi-professional athletes the notion that you can out-train your regenerative capacity is still receiving way too little attention.
Tapering, a Viable Strategy to Keep Gaining Strength and Give Your Body Time to Recuperate
In a 2007 paper, Izquierdo et al. [1] report that trained athletes cannot just maintain all their strength gains over a 4-week period of deliberate tapering (training at a very low volume and high intensity), but even increased their leg and arm maximal strength by +2%. 4 weeks of total detraining on the other hand led to profound decreases in both maximal strength and total muscle power output (-17% and -14%). Click here for details
A Hot Bath, Isometric Contractions and Posing Two Days Before a Hard Workout Could Perpetuate Your Gains
Taking 
ice-cold or cold/hot baths (cryotherapy) has long been touted as a means to improve and accelerate regeneration after a strenuous workout. Two recently published studies by Touchberry et al. [2] and Chen et al. [3] do now suggest that it could be wise to start your “pre-regeneration” regimen as early as two days before a meet or specifically strenuous workout. Whether you prefer spending 20-minutes in a 42°C hot bath or rather choose to practice some posing, perform 2-10 maximal isometric contractions per muscle group, or simply combine both techniques, the underlying working principle of all these techniques are similar: The non muscle-damaging heat-/tension-induced preconditioning effect protects the myofibres against future damage and increases the net protein accretion and accumulation of new myosin heavy chain motor proteins in the first 48h after the subsequent workout. Click here for details
100mg DHEA Per Day Can Protect Skeletal Muscle From Damage During Short Phases of Intensified Training
In 
one of their latest papers researchers from the University of Texas at Austin report the adrenal hormone and steroid precursor dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) had profound ameliorative effects on the exercise induced skeletal muscle damage in 16 young college aged men who completed a 5-day mixed-type (5x steady state cardio + 5x strength training + 1x shuttle run / HIIT) exercise protocol [4]. The 100mg/day of supplemental DHEA the subjects in the active arm of the study received totally blunted the profound creatine kinase increase (+300%) on day 4 of the intervention and lead to sustained increases in serum DHEA and transient increases in serum testosterone levels, which reached statistical significance only in the first two days of the experiment. These results, which stand in contrast to previous studies by Brown et al. [5] and Ostojic et al. [6] involving less taxing exercise regimen, suggest that the usefulness of DHEA supplementation may depend on exercise intensity. Incidentally, the dreaded pro-estrogenic effects of DHEA supplementation were observed in none of the studies: While Liao et al. did not even bother measuring estrogen levels, Brown et al. found no changes in estrogen or one of its metabolites after 8 weeks of strength training and 50mg DHEA and Ostelic et al. observed increases in both estrogen (+21%) and total testosterone (+37%) in 20 healthy young soccer players in response to 100mg/day of DHEA after 4 weeks. Click here for details
References:
[1] Liao YH, Liao KF, Kao CL, Chen CY, Huang CY, Chang WH, Ivy JL, Bernard JR, Lee SD, Kuo CH. Effect of dehydroepiandrosterone administration on recovery from mix-type exercise training-induced muscle damage. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2012 May 16. [Epub ahead of print]
[2] Brown GA, Vukovich MD, Sharp RL, Reifenrath TA, Parsons KA, King DS. Effect of oral DHEA on serum testosterone and adaptations to resistance training in young men. J Appl Physiol. 1999 Dec;87(6):2274-83.
[3] Ostojic SM, Calleja J, Jourkesh M. Effects of short-term dehydroepiandrosterone supplementation on body composition in young athletes. Chin J Physiol. 2010 Feb 28;53(1):19-25.
[4] Izquierdo M, Ibañez J, González-Badillo JJ, Ratamess NA, Kraemer WJ, Häkkinen K, Bonnabau H, Granados C, French DN, orostiaga EM. Detraining and tapering effects on hormonal responses and strength performance. J Strength Cond Res. 2007 Aug;21(3):768-75.
[5] Touchberry CD, Gupte AA, Bomhoff GL, Graham ZA, Geiger PC, Gallagher PM. Acute heat stress prior to downhill running may enhance skeletal muscle remodeling. Cell Stress Chaperones. 2012 May 17. [Epub ahead of print]
[6] Chen HL, Nosaka K, Pearce AJ, Chen TC. Two maximal isometric contractions attenuate the magnitude of eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2012 May 11. [Epub ahead of print]
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