Are you hungry right now? Have you eaten enough? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, it sounds like something’s wrong. After all, if you’ve eaten enough, you shouldn’t be hungry, right? The answer to this may lie in the hormone leptin, which has a direct influence on whether you feel full, …
A lot of the time, losing weight is an attempt to improve your health. It can reduce your risk of developing diabetes, heart problems and other health conditions. But what about people who don’t actually want to lose weight? Sometimes you find yourself shedding the pounds without really knowing why. If you haven’t changed your …
It’s all very well singing the benefits of exercise to try to build your muscle, but it’s harder to be enthusiastic when your muscles start aching. Muscle soreness is inevitable, but how does it affect your overall performance, and how can you alleviate its impact? Muscle soreness can be divided into two different types. Acute …
When you start your program to try to lose some body fat, how do you know it’s working? You can’t just look at your weight because weight measures muscle and fluid as well as fat. If you’re trying to be healthy, you don’t want smaller muscles and dehydration. That means you need a way to …
Lifting weights is the most obvious type of exercise if you want to build some muscle. Of course, as with most things, it’s not as simple as just grabbing a heavy object. You need to know the right kind of weight, how to lift it, how many times to lift it and when to stop. …
We’re used to thinking of bacteria as a bad thing. We go around wiping our kitchen counters, cleaning our bathrooms and washing our hands because we’re trying to avoid them. It’s true that bacteria are responsible for some of the most upsetting illnesses around. However, only some of them are problematic; we actually need other …
There are two basic elements to trying to gain muscle. One is exercise, particularly resistance training. The other is your diet, which needs to include lots of muscle-building protein. You may find that some athletes use a cycle of what’s known as bulking and cutting to plan their diet. What exactly does this mean, and …
Fat loss and weight loss are not the same thing. Not all of your body’s weight is fat. That’s important because a focus on fat alone can lead to missing the subtleties and complexities of weight. That includes making sure you’re not unhealthily losing the wrong mass in your quest for weight loss. Losing weight …
We say often, and it’s always worth remembering, that there’s no such thing as a magical pill for fat loss. There are things you can do to improve your chances, but there’s no single, one-size-fits-all approach. Supplements are one of the most controversial aspects of the weight loss industry, but there is at least one …
Have you noticed how health and fitness seem to have lots of big words to express what you might have thought were simple concepts? Hypertrophy is one of them. It’s a fancy turn of phrase that you probably don’t use every day, but if you’re someone who cares about growing your muscles, muscle hypertrophy is …
