Articles tagged: strength training

A careful review of autoregulation, RPE, sleep, and daily plan changes—what research supports, what remains uncertain, and how Dorsi applies the ideas.

Heavier loads usually improve maximum strength, but 151 trials show that low-volume training can still build muscle and function after 60.

A 60-year-old body still responds to progressive resistance training. The evidence shows what aging changes, and what it does not justify changing.

Older muscle has plausible reasons to repair more slowly, but human studies disagree. Here is what recovery research after 60 can and cannot support.

Older muscle is less sensitive to small protein doses. Consensus starts at 1.0–1.2 g/kg daily, but extra protein adds less than supplement marketing implies.

Training after 50 improved strength and function in the pooled trials. What it did not clearly change was muscle mass, and that is worth understanding.

In one trial, squat and hip thrust training grew the gluteus maximus but not the smaller hip muscles. What a modelling study estimated about loading them.

Heavy lifting is usually discouraged for women with low bone mass. One trial tested it in 101 postmenopausal women and measured what happened.

The hip thrust beats the squat on muscle activation by a wide margin. When a trial measured glute growth by MRI over nine weeks, it could not separate them.

What resistance training reliably did for older men, what it did not improve in a 2025 meta-analysis, and why the research is not really about fifty-year-olds.

Chest exercises are sold as a breast lift. The anatomy and the one clinic study that looked at exercise say something narrower than either side claims.

Most research on older women studies people well past 50, or people already diagnosed with sarcopenia. Here is what it does support, and where it stops.

What the research does and does not say about women and upper-body pressing, including one practical barrier that rarely makes it into a training programme.

A 16-week trial compared aerobic against resistance training and measured the skin. Both improved elasticity. The dermal-thickness result is weaker than quoted.

Forward head posture is measurable, and exercise measurably changes it. What ten trials found about tech neck, and how big the change actually is.

How much neck and shoulder training actually reduces pain? One hour a week works, and how you split that hour barely matters. The real constraint is week six.

One trial cut chronic neck and shoulder pain with two exercises that avoid the muscle that hurts. What it trained, and what that does not prove.

A standing desk improves where your head sits, not the muscle holding it there. What the research says about desk job neck pain, and the small dose that helped.

The most quietly powerful finding in cycling strength research isn't about how to build power in winter. It's about how cheap it is to keep it through summer.

A 2021 study found acute sleep deprivation drops muscle protein synthesis by 18%. Five nights of restricted sleep replicate the loss. Here's the math.

Stanford basketball extended sleep to 10 hours a night for 7 weeks. Free throws improved 9 percentage points, sprint times dropped 0.7 seconds. The lesson for l

Every climber's quiet fear: lift heavy, get heavy, lose your W/kg. Three decades of cycling RCTs say it doesn't happen — and once you see the mechanism, you'll know why.

70% of your daily growth hormone pulses during the first 90 minutes of deep sleep. Here's the mechanism, what fragments it, and how to protect it.

Twenty squat jumps, twenty walking lunges, twenty kettlebell swings, twenty plank shoulder taps. The cyclist's circuit class is everywhere — and the cycling literature is unusually blunt about its actual effect on performance.

Most plateaus aren't fixed by a new program. They're fixed by figuring out which of four problems is actually the cause — and they each have a different fix.

A head cold won't kill your training, but the way most lifters handle the week around it usually does. Here's the small set of rules that protects the next month of work.

Your 5RM keeps going up. Your bodyweight hasn't moved. Your legs don't look any different. But your FTP is creeping up. The mechanism is one cyclists almost never talk about.

The interference effect is real but smaller and more manageable than the lifting internet thinks. Here's how much cardio you can run alongside a strength block before the bar starts moving wrong.

Foam roller, twenty minutes of band work, three stretches — and the bar still feels heavy on set one. Here's what the research and the logbook actually say about getting ready to lift.

A cut starts well, then strength tanks in week three. Here's what actually changes in your body when calories are low, and how to train so the muscle you cut for is still there at the end.

Most deload weeks are forced, not planned. The forced ones cost you a month. The planned ones cost you four days and pay them back with interest.

Most lifters use soreness as a scoreboard for the workout. It isn't. Here's what DOMS actually measures, when it matters, and when it's quietly lying to you.

Your training plan looks great until Tuesday morning at the airport. Here's why most people lose four days of training every business trip — and what actually works in a hotel room.

When the 2025 meta-analysis came out, cyclists kept reading it as bad news. Read it again — the part that looks like failure is the entire mechanism.

There's a quiet shift that happens to cyclists around forty. The gym session that was an optional performance edge in your twenties becomes the most cost-effective medical intervention of your week.