☕️ S&C Daily — Same Muscle, Half the Fat

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In a new Journal of Nutrition trial, 23 resistance-trained lifters ran a 12-week bulk - training three days a week with a prescribed 300-500 calorie surplus - with one group eating on a 16:8 time-restricted schedule and the other eating normally. Both groups gained the same muscle (about 1.1 kg) and made nearly identical strength gains, adding roughly 26 kg to their deadlift and 11-13 kg to their bench.

The difference: the time-restricted group gained less than half the fat (2.0 vs 4.4 kg), because the 8-hour window naturally kept them from hitting the full surplus - they ate fewer total calories, carbs and protein, and still built just as much muscle.

At SEC Media Days, Florida coach Jon Sumrall didn't sugarcoat what he found in Gainesville: "I was very underwhelmed with our strength when I got to Gainesville with our offensive line. The weight being moved wasn't up to the standard of what I was comfortable with."

After a summer under strength and conditioning coach Rusty Whitt, he says, "the guys in that room, they've gotten really comfortable pushing heavy weight" - timely, with three starters to replace up front. The weight room is also where his open quarterback battle lives: Aaron Philo and Tramell Jones Jr. "lift from the same rack together," and per Sumrall, "the quickest way they can lose the job... is to be a bad teammate."

Alcorn State announced Stephen Houston as its new strength and conditioning coach for all 15 varsity sports, plus cheer. Houston arrives from FIU, where he ran strength, speed and conditioning programs for football and implemented Catapult GPS tracking through specially designed vests. Before that he spent two years at Colorado under Deion Sanders, working with linemen and specialists and assisting in the development of Heisman winner Travis Hunter. His earlier stops include Purdue, where he collected and analyzed force plate and GPS data, Charleston Southern and New Mexico.

In an X thread that's blown past 160K views, orthopedic surgeon Howard Luks says tendon pain is the single most common complaint in his office after three decades in practice - more than fractures, more than arthritis - and that most patients and plenty of physicians get one basic thing wrong about it.

Chronic tendon pain is usually tendinopathy, not tendinitis: under the microscope those tendons show disorganized collagen and microscopic tearing, with little to no inflammation. That's why rest and ice so often fail - "rest is not a treatment," and a tendon asked to do nothing deconditions and comes back weaker. The fix is the opposite: load it. Tendons need load to remodel - though not all load is equal, and the wrong kind, too much too soon, is exactly how athletes re-injure them mid-recovery. One more wrinkle: how a tendon looks on MRI and how much it hurts correlate far less than people assume.

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