Search

Articles archive

Stronger By Science publishes articles on topics like lifting technique (squatbench, and deadlift), body composition and hypertrophyprogrammingnutritionprehab and rehab, and cardio.

Don’t know where to start? Check out our Complete Strength Training Guide or the How to SquatHow to Bench, and How to Deadlift guides.

If you like our articles, make sure to join 200,000 others who receive the newsletter. You’ll be the first to know about new articles and guides.

Poor Recovery and Increased Muscle Breakdown: Insufficient Sleep Part 2!

I’m really thrilled about how the first part of this series went over.  To date, it’s the most-read article on this site, and beat the old one-day record by more than 30%. Now, I’m not primarily happy because of the site traffic.  I’m primarily happy because of how near and dear to me this topic is, so I was stoked that it got a lot of attention.  There’s probably an encyclopedia’s worth of training and

Tying a lot of things together – individualization, genetics, and biofeedback

Today I got another article published on T-Nation, and it covers a topic I need to tie back into some other concepts I’ve written about – genetic limitations and personalization of training. In many training studies, you get 30% of “nonresponders!”  Between 1/5 and 1/3 of people who take up an exercise protocol don’t get any stronger, don’t improve their endurance, and/or don’t gain any muscle. This runs counter to essentially everything “we” fitness people

Two Easy Ways to Make Your Novice Strength Training Program More Effective

There are a lot of popular novice strength training programs.  Though people like to obsess about the differences between them, they’re all basically set up the same way (example one, two, three, four). All of them accomplish their intended purpose relatively well:  getting you somewhat proficient with the core barbell lifts.  However, they all have two major pitfalls that can be easily remedied to a) make them more effective and b) set you up for greater success

Daily Undulating Periodization

Daily Undulating Periodization: The Bogeyman of Training Programs

It’s always interesting to see how long it takes for scientific practices to gain traction on the internet, and then in gyms everywhere. Sometimes there’s an exciting paper, it gets discussed on reddit and forums across the internet, and then people become guinea pigs within weeks or months. Other times, it’s a slow burn – creatine has been researched for well over 2 decades, but only recently (in no small part because of the great

Sleep, Pt 1: Wrecking Your Diet, One Night At a Time

“Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity“ The title of the study says it all. If there’s one subject I tend to get preachy about, it’s sleep.  It’s not exciting like a new exercise protocol or as sexy as some new diet trend, so it doesn’t get the coverage it deserves.  But it is absolutely crucial that you get a full night of sleep.  This is probably going to turn into a 3-4 post

The REST of your program: what to do when primarily focusing on a single lift

Here’s a common dilemma.  Someone decides that it’s finally time to get a lagging lift moving.  Maybe they have a good squat and deadlift, but the bench press of a prepubescent child.  Maybe they’re built like a T-rex and can squat and bench just fine, but their deadlift is lagging.  In such situations, people often seek out specialization programs for a single lift.  Some popular ones are the Coan/Phillipi deadlift routine, the Russian squat routine,

The Three Laws of Protein

The purpose of this article is straightforward and simple – help you reach your fitness or physique goals with three simple, science-backed tips for getting the most from your dietary protein.  Protein consumption is such a popular subject that the basics can be lost in all the noise (and supplement company hype), so the goal here is to simplify and get to what’s actually important. 1.  Eat enough protein How much?  .82g/lb (1.8g/kg).  Rounding up

Practical Considerations for Combining Cardio and Lifting

Hey guys, after the huge response to my recent article about combining aerobic and resistance training, I got my friend Alex Viada to go into a little more depth on the subject.  Combining the two is what he does for a living, so he’s the guy to really talk about application.  I’m just a guy going through the research – he’s the expert that REALLY knows this subject inside and out.  I hope you enjoy! 

Cardio and Lifting – Cardio won’t hugely impact your gains in the short run, and may be beneficial for strength and size in the long run

The strength and fitness worlds have, unfortunately, fallen prey to cardio fear-mongering, and I think that’s to their detriment.  At this point, it should be indisputable that aerobic training can improve almost every major marker of health, however, I think that it might actually improve your strength and size gains (or, at the very least, not hurt them) as well. Short-Term For starters, we don’t really have to guess about the short-term effects of cardio

Steroids, dosage, and the placebo effect

  A MUCH more thorough treatment of this subject can be found here:  The Science of Steroids Steroids.  Just start talking about ‘roids and most people get antsy.  They have an air of danger and mystique around them.  Obviously steroids have substantial physiological effects – that’s not debateable at all.  However, you can’t chalk all the gains (especially strength gains) people get from steroids up simply to physiological causes. The main issue with steroids is

High Frequency Training for a Bigger Total: Research on highly trained Norwegian powerlifters

[note: edits were made and figures were removed on 2-26-2014 at the request of the orignal study’s authors] Hey guys.  Today we have a guest post from my friend Martijn Koevoets.  He’s one the top powerlifters in his weight class in the Netherlands, and through some of his connections in the European powerlifting world, he got his hands on a really awesome study that hasn’t gotten much press yet, but which has obvious applications for

Scroll to Top