Research Roundup: Lifting for Fat Loss, Vegetables to Boost Recovery, Spotters Affect Performance, and More

Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews

Does caffeine boost your performance even if you’re a habitual coffee drinker? How does strength training influence fat burning? Can eating vegetables boost your recovery? How does the carnivore diet affect health markers? Will having a spotter boost your bench press? This is what the latest research says about these questions.

This podcast is part of a new series I’m going to call Research Roundups. What is it going to be? Well, there is a ton of scientific research that gets published every year, and even if you narrow your focus to fitness research, it would still take several lifetimes to unravel the hairball of studies on nutrition, training, supplementation, and related fields.

That's why my team and I put a lot of time into reviewing, dissecting, and describing scientific studies in articles, podcasts, and books. And while the principles of proper eating and exercising are relatively simple and fairly immutable at this point, new research can help us understand why the fundamentals work. They can help us understand how to better implement them, and how to get better results with them.

And occasionally every so often there are new and better methods of eating, exercising, supplementing, and living to achieve our health and fitness goals faster. And so in this series of episodes, you’re going to learn about new research on various things related to building muscle, losing fat, getting healthy, improving wellbeing, and so on.

In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about how lifting weights affects gene expression, whether caffeine boosts performance if you’re a regular coffee drinker, the health effects of the carnivore diet, and more. So listen if you want to learn the answers to those questions and more.

Oh and if you like this type of episode, let me know. Send me an email ([e-mail]) or direct message me on Instagram (@muscleforlifefitness). And if you don’t like it, let me know that too or how you think it could be better.

Timestamps

0:00 - My award-winning fitness books for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/

3:56 - How does strength training burn fat and help you lose weight?

6:42 - Can eating cruciferous vegetables improve your muscle recovery?

9:13 - How does caffeine affect physical performance if you regularly drink coffee?

14:23 - Is the carnivore diet good for you?

18:05 - How can spotting improve bench press performance?

Mentioned on the Show:

My award-winning fitness books for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/