Category
The proportion of a nutrient that is actually absorbed and available for use — as distinct from the amount present in the food. It is why the number on a label can substantially overstate what you
Because satiety is driven by several mechanisms that have little to do with calories — and foods engineered to be easy to overeat are engineered to defeat each one of them. What actually produces
Through several mechanisms at once — impaired protein synthesis, disrupted sleep, dehydration, and altered fuel handling — and the sleep effect alone is large enough to matter even at modest intakes.
Skeletal muscle contains fibres with different contractile and metabolic properties, conventionally grouped as type I (slow) and type II (fast). You can shift them substantially within the fast
They reliably reduce soreness and how you feel, and the evidence is much less flattering about whether they help you adapt — in fact, for strength and muscle growth, regular post-training cold
Every available method is an estimate built on assumptions, not a direct measurement — and knowing which assumption each one makes tells you when it will be wrong. The methods, roughly in order of
The age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and function — and the important correction is that meaningful decline starts far earlier than most people assume, and that strength is lost faster than
Prepare you for the specific work about to be done — raising tissue temperature, rehearsing the movement, and switching on the relevant muscles. Most of what people do instead is either generic or
It can — the phenomenon is called the interference effect — but the magnitude depends heavily on how much, what type, and how it is scheduled, and for most people training recreationally it is small
EPOC — excess post-exercise oxygen consumption — is the elevated metabolic rate that persists after exercise while the body restores itself. It is real, it is measurable, and the fat-loss claims
They adapt through collagen remodelling, which is a fundamentally slower process than muscle protein turnover — and this mismatch is the single most common reason enthusiastic training produces
Yes — but not in the way the phrase suggests. What the body needs is adequate recovery relative to the stress applied, which is not the same as a fixed number of blank days per week. Training
Yes — and it refers to two genuinely different phenomena that share a name, which is why discussions of it become confused. One is about movement skill; the other is about muscle size, and the second
Training at a low, sustainable intensity — roughly the top of the range where you can hold a conversation — for long durations. It has become fashionable recently, but it is not new: it is what
Overtraining syndrome is a prolonged, systemic decline in performance that does not resolve with ordinary rest — as distinct from the normal fatigue that a few easy days fix. The distinction is one
The intensity above which lactate appears in the blood faster than it can be cleared, so it accumulates. It is one of the best predictors of endurance performance — and almost everything people
Vitamins are organic compounds made by living things; minerals are chemical elements that come from soil and water. Both are needed in small amounts, and both can be harmful in excess — though not
Heart rate variability (HRV) is the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats — and counterintuitively, more variation is generally better, because it reflects a nervous system responding
NEAT — non-exercise activity thermogenesis — is the energy you spend on everything that is not sleeping, eating or deliberate exercise: walking, fidgeting, standing, gesturing, climbing stairs,
Bone is living tissue that responds to load — it adds material where it is stressed and loses it where it is not, which makes the right kind of exercise one of the few things that genuinely builds
Planning training in structured phases with different goals, rather than doing the same thing indefinitely — the recognition that you cannot push hard in every direction all the time. The underlying
Because it is the part of food your body cannot digest, and almost everything useful about it follows from that — including feeding the bacteria that can. What it is. Plant carbohydrates that resist
Far less strictly — and the difference is fundamental: a medicine must prove it works before sale; a supplement does not. Medicines. Require a marketing authorisation from a regulator. The
The glycaemic index (GI) ranks carbohydrate-containing foods by how quickly and how much they raise blood glucose, compared with a reference — usually pure glucose at 100. How it is measured.