Hi!
It’s Nick, Lead Researcher at Examine. We just reworked one of our most popular pages and I wanted to tell you about it.
We’ve turned the “Muscle Gain” page into “Muscle Size & Strength”. Check it out here. We made the change so that we could help you find interventions that would be most effective for boosting muscle size, strength, or both. Since size and strength are very closely related, it makes more sense to discuss them together.
I say this to you all the time, but it’s hard to understate how big of a task it is to keep so much information organized. There are myriad different reasons why it’s a challenge, but a big one is that the same goal can be measured with different outcomes, and even require different interventions, based on the type of person you are.
There were a lot of different goals and kinds of people being talked about on the old “Muscle Gain” page, which included an amalgam of studies conducted in people who were looking to get swole as well as people living with sarcopenia. Even though these populations may benefit from conceptually similar interventions (i.e., exercise), back squats at 8–9 RPE might be a bit much for an 80-year-old with sarcopenia.
So our solution was to split things up. Now, we have pages for athletes, like “general athletic performance” and “rowing performance” (expect to see those pages fleshed out very soon), and “Muscle Size and Strength” for people who aren’t looking to improve several aspects of a specific sport-based pursuit (outside of competitive bodybuilding and strength training, that is!). Instead, they’re looking to be stronger and more muscular. We think this change will make the information presented on each page more intuitive and useful.
Of course, we didn’t just shift information around. We added tons of new information, too. (We just couldn’t help ourselves.) Here’s a small selection of the topics we discuss on the new page:
- How does the response to a resistance exercise program vary between and within individuals?
- What type of exercise is best for promoting muscle size and strength?
- Do I need to be sore after resistance exercise to build muscle?
- If I have limited time to exercise, how should I structure my training?
- Are machines as good as free weights?
- Are light weights as good as heavy weights?
- Is an energy surplus required to gain muscle?
- Does the distribution of protein intake throughout the day matter?
I hope you enjoy the new page! As always, feel free to contact us with any topics you’d like us to cover.
Until next time!
Nick Milazzo, MS, MPH
Lead Researcher, Examine