For example, why do women want men to have broad shoulders? The answers to those questions are grounded in hard science. We view certain physical traits as desirable in members of each sex. An X-shaped physique for men implies virility and strength, just as an hourglass body on a woman suggests fertility. We view what is attractive partially through the eyes of people looking for mates because of scientifically proven numbers.

Sex Appeal: It’s In The Numbers

Believe it or not, our definition of what’s attractive is only partially a matter of “taste” and is more a matter of math. Put another way, the immediate internal decision about whether we’re attracted to something or someone is, in large part, a highly mathematical process. That process, like all math, is based on certain formulas – in this case, something we call the golden ratio.

This is a number that shows up all over the human body (for example, the length of the arms and legs, compared to the torso), and it seems to define what proportions look best.

In fact, artists and sculptors have known about the golden ratio for a long time and have used it to create sculptures and artwork of the ideal human figure. To this day, surgeons and dentists use it to restructure the human face.

The Golden Ration Defined

OK, so what is the golden ratio, exactly? It is, in mathematical terms, a comparison of any two aspects that leads us to proportion them in the ideal way. Algebraically, if you have two numbers, A and B, it has to be such that (A + B) divided by A = A divided by B.

In most cases, this is going to be a comparison result in a ratio of 1:1.618. This appears naturally all over your body. For example, if the length of the hand has the value of 1, then the combined length of hand and forearm has the approximate value of 1.618. Similarly, the proportion of upper arm to hand + forearm is in the same ratio of 1:618.

Measure your lower body and you’ll find the same: If the foot is 1, then the length of the foot + the shin is 1.618.

Looking elsewhere on the body, the face is another great example. In fact, the human face abounds with examples of the golden ratio. The head forms a golden rectangle with the eyes at its midpoint.The mouth and nose are each placed at golden sections of the distance between the eyes and the bottom of the chin.

Source: Fox News

A hardgainer can be defined as a man who has difficulty putting on muscle mass despite consistent workouts in the gym and consumption of vast amounts of food. It is not uncommon to see some of these individuals eating upwards of 5,000 calories per day to simply maintain the mass they have, let alone add new muscle tissue. For the average guy, consuming 5,000 calories per day would be a short track to a rather robust stomach.

The major issue here is likely a very fast metabolism; one that, when fed more, just speeds right up. Along with the increased intake, burning off the extra calories as heat or through additional movements also means that large amounts of food will have little or no effect on this individual’s weight and size. If you ever notice a guy who just can’t seem to sit still, he is likely the type who would be a hardgainer at the gym.

Luckily, as long as these individuals take a few things into consideration with their training and diet, they can overcome this problem to some extent.

The first, and probably the most important, thing for a hardgainer to realize is that his body simply cannot handle the volume that others can. They should be limiting the total number of sets during their workout and should never be working out in a rep range that exceeds 10 reps per set.

Hardgainers need to focus on doing compound lifts only and ditching all the isolation exercises that are only going to force their body to burn calories and use up its reserved energy—energy that could have been used to build muscle tissue.

This means their program should consist of bench presses, squats, deadlifts, lunges, military presses, and bent-over rows.

What it should not consist of are lateral raises, reverse flyes, sets of leg extensions, and every variation of bicep curl you can think of. All of those exercises are really only targeting one muscle group, and the hardgainer needs to be getting the biggest bang for his buck in terms of total number of muscles worked. So, aim for exercises that target multiple muscle groups.

Rest

The next important workout step for the hardgainer is rest. These individuals need more rest and recovery time than others, so they should spend less time in the gym and more time relaxing.

If there is a lot of additional stress in the hardgainer’s life as well, that is going to further impact recovery ability, so it is a good idea to minimize stress as much as possible.

Sleep is also of critical importance here, and a hardgainer should be aiming for a minimum of seven to eight hours of sleep; some find they even need more. This is really the prime time when your body will be recovering and repairing muscle tissue, so it is very important not to short-circuit your rest.

Nutrition

Lastly: nutrition. Half of what makes a hardgainer a hardgainer is not being able to eat enough to put on muscle mass. They constantly complain of feeling full and having a hard time fitting in more calories, hence they see no growth.

The best way to approach this is to really focus in on calorie-dense foods while limiting high-volume foods like vegetables, popcorn, lots of diet soda (the volume in the drink will make you feel full) and other foods that have relatively few calories but tend to fill you up quickly.

Instead, hardgainers should concentrate on foods such as nuts, dried fruit, bagels, peanut and other nut butters, olive oil, avocados, lean red meat, chicken breasts, and cottage cheese. These are going to give them good nutrition while also making it more tolerable to stomach the volume they need.

Source: Fox News

Bethesda, MD—If you are looking to lean out, add muscle mass, and get ripped, a new research report published in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) suggests that you might want to look to your garden for a little help. That’s because scientists have found that when a specific plant steroid was given orally to rats, it triggered a response similar to anabolic steroids, with minimal side effects. In addition, the research found that the stimulatory effect of homobrassinolide (a type of brassinosteroid found in plants) on protein synthesis in muscle cells led to increases in lean body mass, muscle mass and physical performance.

“We hope that one day brassinosteroids may provide an effective, natural, and safe alternative for age- and disease-associated muscle loss, or be used to improve endurance and physical performance,” said Slavko Komarnytsky, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Plants for Human Health Institute, FBNS at North Carolina State University in Kannapolis, N.C. “Because some plants we eat contain these compounds, like mustards, in the future we may be able to breed or engineer these plants for higher brassinosteroid content, thus producing functional foods that can treat or prevent diseases and increase physical performance.”

To make this discovery, Komarnytsky and colleagues exposed rat skeletal muscle cells to different amounts of homobrassinolide and measured protein synthesis in cell culture. The result was increased protein synthesis and decreased protein degradation in these cells. Healthy rats then received oral administration of homobrassinolide daily for 24 days. Changes in body weight, food consumption, and body composition were measured. Rats receiving homobrassinolide gained more weight and slightly increased their food intake. Body composition was measured using dual-emission X-ray absorptiometry analysis and showed increased lean body mass in treated animals over those who were not treated. This study was repeated in rats fed high protein diet and similar results were observed. Additionally, researchers used surgically castrated peri-pubertal rat models to examine the ability of homobrassinolide to restore androgen-dependent tissues after androgen deprivation following castration. Results showed increased grip strength and an increase in the number and size of muscle fibers crucial for increased physical performance.

“The temptation is to see this discovery as another quick fix to help you go from fat to fit,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, “and to a very small degree, this may be true. In reality, however, this study identifies an important drug target for a wide range of conditions that cause muscle wasting.”

Source: Cody Mooneyhan, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, via EurekAlert

An effective workout depends on many factors – the most important one being your diet. What you eat before a workout prepares your body for the stress and the meal after that is responsible for muscle building and body repair. Here’s what you must keep in mind so as to tailor your meals and maximise your workout.

Pre Workout:

Get the carbs

Give your body a dose of carbohydrates one hour before you hit the gym. Eat a fruit (apple would be ideal). You may also have toast, cornflakes or idlis. You could also just eat a banana for the complex carbohydrates it provides. These foods need comparatively little time to digest, are easy on the body and provide you with maximum energy during the workout. Also, ensure that you drink a glass of water before the workout, so that your body is well hydrated.

Never go hungry

Do not hit the gym on an empty stomach. The stress that exercise has on the body, combined with the lack of sugar (energy) will lead to hypoglycemia, a condition that will make you prone to fatigue.

After a heavy meal

For a diabetic, it is very important to workout soon after a heavy meal. However, normal individuals must maintain a gap of two to three hours between a heavy meal and the workout. The logic is to allow the sugar level in the body to reach an optimum level.

Post Workout:

Use the window

During a workout, the level of cortisol (also known as the destructive hormone) in the body increases, thereby making it prone to infections. That’s precisely why the hour just after a workout is known as the ‘window period’, as it allows for infections to enter the body. Use this opportunity and eat as soon as possible.

Get a drink

The body loses salt due to sweating. That is why it’s very important to compensate via a rich source of electrolyte such as ORT.

Have proteins, but…

Do not rely completely on proteins for your supply of energy, as they are far more difficult to digest and take a toll on your kidneys. To aid digestion, make sure you include lots of greens in your meal, as they are rich in fibre.

Create supplements

The body needs a high-protein diet for muscle building. However, relying on supplements is not the answer. The best option for a post workout DIY supplement is to take the watery part of curd (that is very rich in proteins), chop a banana and apple into it and put it in the blender. It’s a perfect combination of proteins and carbohydrates. Not to forget, the apple is rich in fibre.

Source: Times of India

The researchers had expected that the volunteers with the sturdiest cores would outshine the others on the tests of physical performance. But they did not. There was little correlation in this study between robust core muscles and athleticism. Despite the emphasis that many coaches, trainers and athletes themselves place on “core training for increased performance,” the authors write, “our results suggest otherwise” — and in the process raise some intriguing questions about just how core strength affects fitness and whether a rippling abdomen, while attractive, is worth the effort.

The role of the core in physical performance has been a topic of considerable interest and controversy among sports scientists, as well as coaches and trainers, for years. Most of us think that a taut midsection, achieved usually by multiple crunches and perhaps some medicine-ball exercises and side planks, will make us not just less self-conscious in our swimsuits but also better athletes.

Findings about the effect of standard core exercises on athleticism, though, have been mixed. A representative study of collegiate rowers, for instance, found that after eight weeks of an arduous core-exercise regimen — added to their normal workout routines — the rowers had great-looking abs but weren’t better rowers; their performance was unchanged in a rowing-machine time trial, compared with measurements before they’d undertaken the extensive core routines.

But in another study, this time of novice adult runners who displayed weak core strength in preliminary testing, those who completed six weeks of core training drills lowered their five-kilometer run times significantly more than a control group of beginning runners who did not focus on their midsections.

How much core strength most of us need, how to achieve it, how to measure it and how to define core stability and core strength are questions that remain largely unanswered by available science, said Stuart McGill, a professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and author of the book “Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance,” as well as of numerous, much-cited studies of core performance. “Core performance is quite an involved concept,” he said.

Even the importance or desirability of performing crunches, probably the most iconic and certainly the most common of core exercises, is uncertain. Research by Dr. McGill and others has shown that repeated bending of the spine, such as occurs when most of us do crunches, can over time contribute to damage of the spinal discs. When cadaver pig spines were placed in machines as part of a series of recent experiments and bent and flexed hundreds of times, the pigs’ spinal discs almost always ruptured, eventually.

No one needs to perform hundreds or even dozens of crunches, said Brad Schoenfeld, a professor of exercise science at Lehman College in the Bronx and an author of a newly published review article about core exercises titled “To Crunch or Not to Crunch.” And while everyone needs some basic minimum of core strength — getting up out of a chair requires a certain amount of core strength; serving a tennis ball requires more – “six or eight crunches would be plenty,” he said, “and only a few times a week.”

It’s also important you perform them correctly, Dr. McGill said. “Don’t flatten your back into the ground,” he said. Instead, place your hands, palm down, beneath your lower back to lessen pressure on the spine. Bend your knees, and “pretend that your head and shoulders are resting on a bathroom scale,” he said. Lift them only enough to send the imaginary scale’s reading to zero. “You don’t need to crunch up very much” to achieve the desired workload on the abdominal muscles, he said.

Or forgo the crunches altogether. “Personally, I do not believe that it is necessary to specifically train the core,” said Thomas Nesser, an associate professor of exercise science at Indiana State and senior author of the study about core stability and performance. In most instances, if you “train for your sport, core strength will develop,” he said, and it will be the right amount and type of core strength for that sport.

But what about those taut, topo-map abs sported by celebrities like Mike Sorrentino, better known as The Situation from “Jersey Shore”? It’s all about low body fat, Dr. McGill said, and not the crunches.

Source: The New York Times