The Year in Strength Science 2012

[stef]

by Jonathon Sullivan

“A review of the strength science literature for 2011, the first in this annual series, was conceived in the Autumn of that year, gestated quickly, and got pushed out in early January 2012. This second review has had a year to incubate, and in the interim I’ve tweaked my search parameters and expanded my net. ”

Article

[alo]

A quick question on the first paragraph from page 10:

All of this in spite of the fact that the front squatters added more weight to their squat variant than full- or front squatters.

Is that supposed to read quarter squatters instead of front squatters, or am I reading it wrong?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Typo. We'll fix it next week.

[ChessGuy]

I read the whole thing. Does that mean I'm a nerd?



NASM-CPT

[steven-miller]

I am glad the review is finally out, thanks for putting the time into this. Now I have to find time to read.

[blandrick]

When I try to read the article, the PDF shows up as if it were printed from a printer nearly out of ink, and then scanned back in. I can't read any of it. Anyone else have this issue, or am I having some weird problem?

[Jonathon Sullivan]

I read the whole thing. Does that mean I'm a nerd?

Yup.

[Jonathon Sullivan]

When I try to read the article, the PDF shows up as if it were printed from a printer nearly out of ink, and then scanned back in. I can't read any of it. Anyone else have this issue, or am I having some weird problem?

You are having some weird problem. It seems to be working okay for others.

[Jonathon Sullivan]

A quick question on the first paragraph from page 10:



Is that supposed to read quarter squatters instead of front squatters...?

Yes. Goddammit.

[morbidlyfat]

Fantastic work as usual. There should be a prize or something.

Anyway, unfortunately most of my comments are shakily-based in pure broscience, but that hardly seems to be any obstacle to getting published, so I shall proceed.

First of all: in the coming year, if we happen to run across something that looks or sounds sort of interesting, should be bother with shooting Sullivan a note about it? I can't tell from here if that'd be more signal or more noise.

protein spread theory states that for a study comparing high and low protein
supplementation to show a difference between the groups in muscle hypertrophy or strength gain, there must be a sufficient spread or difference in the daily protein intake

I don't know if I should be more depressed that this is the sort of thing people can claim to invent and name, or that it seems to be actively required by large swaths of alleged researchers. I mean, yes, if you're studying the effects of a stimulus, it's helpful to actually vary the levels of that stimulus.

Strength Training for the Warfighter...

Fascinating topic and apparently a solid paper; I'll need to run this one down. One of the interesting things is that the average load on the average soldier -- about 65 pounds, plus or minus a bit -- has remained constant since the Roman Empire (and probably earlier.) (Sorry, I don't have a citation handy on that, but I warned you this was broscience.) I'm always shocked every time that that's the case. It seems to directly refute all those people who think omg we were so strong back in ye olden days, wtf happened to us all, as well as all those people who think omg we're so much stronger now, good thing we have science etc. Anyway.

On the off chance that you care, two major variants of the original Smith design are the counterweighted Smith and the viscous resistance Smith.

On the vital topic of the history of the Smith machine, for some reason I had thought that the original design was in fact counterweighted. But it's quite likely I'm misinformed on this burning issue. I'd suggest the other major varient is the 2-degrees-of-freedom design, which one sees from time to time. But I guess that wasn't studied by this study studying the Smith machine.