Hit It and Quit It

No, this didn’t turn into a sex or relationship advice column, but it is a good piece of advice. For training. And stuff (uh, NSFW for language?).



When you walk out of the gym, do you know how much time has passed? Or do you feel like you’re surfacing from underwater, breathing heavily, and gasping, “What happened, I blacked out?” Knowing how much time is relevant, because you most likely need to decrease that amount of time. I spent about half an hour looking for references on this topic, but I don’t have access to scholarly sources and my textbooks were vague, but Dr. Pascuale’s “Amino Acids and Proteins for the Athlete” provided the following:

Androgens such as testosterone (and trophic hormones such as LH) increase with intense exercise as long as it is not exhausting. Thus, short intense training sessions will give the best results and maximize lean body mass and strength. When exercise duration is too long, the level of testosterone decreases. Thus repetitive and prolonged heavy exercise results in overtraining and in decreased protein synthesis and increased muscle catabolism (pg 340-341).

CONTINUE READING Continue reading