☕️ S&C Daily — The Dose Didn't Matter

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A meta-analysis in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition pooled 63 studies and 1,489 people to answer one question. Take two lifters running the same program, give creatine to one of them and nothing to the other, and does the one on creatine end up stronger? Yes. The creatine group gained more upper-body strength and more lower-body strength than the group lifting alone, and in both cases the difference was moderate rather than small (g = 0.54 and 0.55, where 0.5 is the usual cutoff for moderate). They also put on more lean mass, though that gap was smaller (g = 0.30).

What they put on was muscle, not fat. Fat mass did not change at all. Body mass rose a little, and because that extra weight was lean tissue, body-fat percentage actually came down slightly.

Then the authors went looking for what makes creatine work better, and found nothing. They tested how many grams a day, whether lifters front-loaded with a big dose for the first week, how long they stayed on it, and how often they trained. None of it changed the result.

In a new article, strength coach Philip Reichhoff lays out the nine-week block he runs with middle and high school athletes, built on a rule that runs backwards from how most programs assign load. He does not write a percentage on the sheet and ask the athlete to hit it. He writes a bar speed, and the weight moves to meet it. Weeks one through three are 3 sets of 3 at 0.75 to 0.85 meters per second. Weeks four through six, 3 sets of 4 at 0.85 to 1.0. Weeks seven through nine, 3 sets of 5 at 1.0 and up. The volume climbs while the bar gets faster.

In practice he starts an athlete near whatever worked last cycle, reads the first working rep, and moves in 5 to 10 pound steps until they land inside the band. Too slow, take weight off. Too fast with no sign of fatigue, add. One rep outside the range means nothing, but a set that keeps drifting or drops off sharply is the cue to cut a rep or end it there. Reichhoff is careful about where this holds up. The zones are reliable on loadable bilateral lifts, trap bar jumps, squat variations, bench throws, and on split squats or single-arm work he watches the trend across the cycle instead of chasing a number.

A study in Sports Medicine - Open put 22 highly trained female soccer players, average age 14.9, through a 12-week in-season block. Eleven added two strength sessions a week on top of their soccer training, upper and lower body, 3 sets of 12 at 60 to 80% of one-rep max. Eleven carried on with five soccer sessions a week. Total training volume was matched, so the comparison is what the time was spent on, not how much of it there was.

The lifting group improved bench press, lat pull-down and leg press, and also improved on the Loughborough Soccer Passing Test and the Stroop test, which measures how well someone handles conflicting information. The control group improved on neither. Blood markers did not move, so the authors cannot say why it worked, and eleven players a group is small enough that this is a signal rather than a settled finding. What it does say is that the two sessions cost nothing on the pitch and appear to have bought something.

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