Ep. #932: Research Roundup: Walking Increases Lifespan, Extra Sleep Boosts Body and Brain, OMAD Eats Your Muscle, and More

Hey there and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for another installment of my Research Roundup series where I dissect three to five studies on body composition, exercise, nutrition, lifestyle. and other such things related to living a fitter and healthier and happier life.

And in today’s episode, you’re going to be learning about how sleeping longer helps make you mentally and physically sharper, how unilateral exercises can benefit athletes. and the rest of us, but I’ll get into that. You’re going to learn about how the one meal a day OMAD diet affects body composition.

And you’re going to learn about walking and how doing more of it can improve your health and longevity. And finally, you’re going to learn about betaine and how supplementing with it can boost your athletic performance bigly. Before we get started, research shows that getting enough omega 3 fatty acids in your diet can benefit you in many ways, including reducing the risk of heart disease, increasing muscle growth, increasing cognitive performance, increasing fat loss, decreasing inflammation, improving mood, reducing muscle soreness after exercise, and more.

There is a problem though. It’s hard to get enough of these vital molecules through diet alone. And that’s why fish oil is a popular supplement. It is a safe, easy, and healthy alternative to eating a lot of fatty fish, for example. And that’s why I created fish oil. Triton. It is a high potency, molecularly distilled fish oil with 2, 400 milligrams of EPA and DHA per serving.

And those are omega 3 fatty acids that have been specifically linked to a lot of the benefits I just mentioned. And Triton also has vitamin E and lemon oil to prevent oxidation, rancidity, and nasty fish oils. Burps. Triton is also produced from deep water Peruvian anchovies and sardines caught by fisheries approved by Friend of the Sea.

And Triton meets the very stringent purity standards of the European Pharmacopeia Reference Standards, the Council for Responsible Nutrition, and the Global Organization for EPA and DHA. Omega 3. And all that is why I’ve sold over 100, 000 bottles of Triton and why it has over 900 four and five star reviews on Amazon and my website.

So if you want to optimize your physical and mental health and performance, and if you want to reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction, you want to try Triton today, go to buylegion. com slash Triton, T R I T O N. N and use the coupon code muscle at checkout and you will save 20 percent on your first order.

And if it is not your first order, you will get double reward points. So that is 10 percent cash back. And if you don’t love Triton for any reason, just let us know and we will give you a full refund on the spot. No form and no return is even necessary. You really can’t lose. Go to buylegion. com slash Triton, use the coupon code muscle at checkout and save 20 percent or get 10 percent cash back and try Triton risk free and see what you think.

Okay, let’s start with sleep and how sleeping longer than normal can boost your mental and physical performance. So my source here is a paper called Extended Sleep Maintains Endurance Performance Better Than Normal or Restricted Sleep. And this was published in December of 2019 in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

So many people have compared sleep hygiene. To saving money, something that is boring and that we all know we should do, but something that has a considerable and compounding positive effect in many areas of our lives, especially as time goes on. And the study that I’m going to share with you here, which was conducted by scientists at Deakin University, that adds more Wait to the evidence of just how beneficial good sleep hygiene is.

So in this study, nine endurance athletes completed three protocols, each a normal sleep condition, a sleep restriction condition, and a sleep extension condition. Each protocol lasted four days and during each period, the participants completed a cycling time trial every day. Now, before the experiment started, researchers measured what a normal night Sleep was for each person for four nights to serve as a baseline.

This worked out to about seven hours of sleep per night. Now, during the sleep restriction condition, the participants slept 30 percent less than their normal duration. So about five hours per night. And then during the sleep extension Condition 30 percent more than normal, which was about 8. 5 hours of sleep per night.

So what happened? First, when the participants slept a normal amount, about seven hours per night, their performance was about the same across all four time trials. Second, when the participants slept less than normal. About five hours per night, their performance decreased significantly over the four time trials, dropping from 57.

6 minutes on day one to 62 minutes on day four. And in case you were wondering how that time trial worked, it simply required participants to do a certain amount of work measured in kilojoules. And once they completed the. work target, they were done with the time trial. So a shorter time is better than a longer time because it indicates that they were working harder.

Anyway, finally, in the sleep extension condition, the participants improved their performance slightly over the four time trials and when the researchers studied the participants mood and mental alertness, they found that during the normal and sleep restricted conditions, the participants tended to show signs of fatigue, disturbed mood and decreased vigor and mental acuity.

But in the sleep extension condition, participants were less fatigued. They showed no signs of disturbed mood or decreased vigor and became more vigilant. Now, it’s worth highlighting that the normal sleep duration in this study was only 7 hours, which based on the results was still insufficient to maximize the benefits of sleep.

And therefore, the main takeaway from this study is if you are currently getting by with just, let’s say 6 or 7 hours of sleep per night, which is very common, if you were to bump that up to 8 or 9 hours. It would probably benefit your mental and physical performance and being, and it might benefit them rather substantially.

And if you can’t do that regularly for whatever reason, maybe start with trying to do it strategically, trying to do it maybe the night before a particularly difficult workout, like your big squat day or deadlift day, for example, or maybe before a big exam that you have to take, or an important competition, a game.

And so forth. All right. Now let’s talk about unilateral exercises and how they can improve athletic performance more than bilateral exercises. So my source here is a study called effects of unilateral versus bilateral resistance training interventions on measures of strength, jump linear and change of direction, speed, a systematic review and meta analysis.

And this was published on July 3rd, 2021 in biology of sports. sport. So first, let’s define our terms. A unilateral exercise is an exercise that trains one side of your body at a time. And a bilateral exercise is an exercise that trains both sides of your body simultaneously. So for example, the Bulgarian split squat, that’s a unilateral exercise, whereas the barbell back squat, that’s a bilateral exercise.

Now, Unilateral exercises are often touted as more functional and better at improving athleticism by many personal trainers. But is that based on sound science or is that locker room logic? Is that gym lore? That’s what researchers at Shanghai University of Sport wanted to find out when they performed a meta analysis on 14 studies that looked at the effects of unilateral and bilateral exercises on.

unilateral strength, bilateral strength, unilateral jumping height, bilateral jumping height, change of direction ability, and sprint speed. So several measures of athleticism. And there were two statistically significant findings, and neither are surprising. Bilateral exercises improved bilateral strength more than unilateral exercises, and then unilateral exercises improved unilateral jumping height more than bilateral exercises.

So basically, the participants, they got better at whatever they practiced. Again, not surprising specificity, right? But, The scientists also found that unilateral exercises tended to be better than bilateral exercises for improving unilateral and bilateral jumping agility and speed, although not to a statistically significant degree.

However, if you play a sport that requires power, agility, and speed, which is basically any sport, it might be smart to include some unilateral training in your program. Because although those findings were not statistically significant, they might still be valid. It would just require more research to determine that.

And as even relatively small increases in power, in speed, in agility can make a big difference in many sports and your ability to play those sports, especially if you are playing them at a high level. And what’s more, there are other benefits of including unilateral exercises in your strength training programming.

One is they help prevent or correct muscle imbalances. What can happen sometimes with bilateral exercises is the stronger side of your body can start to take over, especially as you get deeper into a set and it gets more and more difficult. Like for me, I’m right. Legged and right handed. I’m just a right dominant person.

And if I don’t pay attention in my squats, as I get deeper into sets and as I’m getting closer to failure, I will tend to favor my right side. I will tend to shift my weight a little bit more over to the right. And if you do that consistently enough and for long enough, you can start to imbalances where the right side becomes.

Stronger, more developed, and the same thing can happen with many other bilateral exercises. The barbell bench press, the barbell overhead press, the barbell row the barbell biceps curl and so on. So if you are not currently doing any unilateral exercises and you want to give it a go, a few of my favorites are the Bulgarian split squat, the lunge and the walking lunge in particular the step up.

the single arm dumbbell overhead and chest press. So two variations there the single arm dumbbell row and the machine row where you can train one arm at a time. All right, now let’s talk about some more research on the many benefits of overhead. Walking and why it is just one of the best ways to live longer and stay healthier.

And my source here is a paper called daily step count and all cause mortality, a dose response meta analysis of prospective cohort studies published on August 21st, 2021 in sports medicine. So for some time now, I have been saying that doing a lot of walking is one of the most underrated forms of exercise.

Many people think that it is too easy to make any real difference in their body composition and health. But this study that I’m going to share with you, it shows that walking is indeed one of the best ways, certainly one of the easiest ways, to stave off disease and prolong your life. And in this study, researchers from Semnen University of Medical Sciences analyzed the results of seven papers involving a total of 28, 141 participants, 175, 370 person years, and 2, 310 deaths.

And what they found is That rates of all cause mortality dropped about 12 percent for every 1000 steps that people took per day. And in case you are not familiar with all cause mortality, that is death from any and all causes. Now, when the scientists. Compared the people with the highest and lowest daily step counts, they found that walking 16, 000 steps per day was associated with a 66 percent reduction in all cause mortality compared to walking just 2, 700 steps per day.

That is massive. That is literally life altering. That is more than the benefit you would get from quitting smoking, for example, or just losing a bunch of weight. Now, the results were based on observational studies, so they only show that walking is correlated with better health and longer life, but not necessarily the cause or the only cause.

But, Previous research has shown that walking as little as 20 to 30 minutes per day directly boosts cardiovascular fitness and decreases systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting heart rate, body fat percentage, BMI, total cholesterol, depression, and aches and pains. And while the findings in this all cause mortality study are just a correlation, they do add to the body of evidence that shows that walking is a great way to improve your health, and especially when you combine it with a proper diet and some strength training.

If you don’t already, try to find some time to walk every day. And if you can get outside, that’s great. Out around nature, do that because it’s going to make you feel even better. Those daily walks can help you stay healthy. They can help you stay happy and they can help you stay alive. Next up, we have some research on betaine and how it can boost athletic performance.

Performance. My source here is a paper called Effects of Chronic Betaine Supplementation on Performance in Professional Young Soccer Players During a Competitive Season, a Double Blind Randomized Placebo Controlled Trial, and this was published on October 18th, 2021 in Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.

Now, what is beteine? Also pronounced B E T E I N, by the way. It can be pronounced either way, if you’re wondering, but I first learned beteine and it has stuck. So anyways, it is a sweet substance found in various plants, obtained especially from sugar beets, hence the name, and many people supplement it.

With it with betaine to improve their heart and liver function as well as their digestion. And there is research to support those uses, but more and more studies like the one I’m covering today, which was conducted by scientists at the university of Isfahan. show that betaine is also effective at boosting athletic performance.

So in this study, researchers split 29 young professional soccer players into two groups. One group supplemented with two grams of betaine per day, and the other group supplemented with a placebo, and both groups took two capsules per day, two hours before and one hour after training, and they ate a standardized diet created by a nutritionist.

And in the week leading up to the study, At the midpoint and at the end of this 14 week experiment, the researchers put the participants through five days of testing and recorded the following data. So on the first day, bodily proportions and body composition, lower body power and agility. On the second day, bench and leg press, one rep max.

On the third day, sprints. sprint and acceleration time. Day four was repeated sprint ability and then day five was aerobic capacity, their endurance, and what the results showed is that those who supplemented with betaine improved their lower body power 17. 5%. 1 percent versus 5. 5 percent in the placebo group, their bench and their leg press strength, 7.

7 percent versus 3. 4 and 4. 5 percent versus 1. 7 percent respectively. Their 30 meter sprint time negative 5. 8 percent versus plus 0. 8%. So the BTE group got faster and the placebo group got a little bit slower and their peak power during the sprint test also was improved 19. 3 percent with BTE versus 6.

8 percent with the placebo as well as endurance 4. 9 percent versus 1. 4%. And so those are some pretty significant improvements. And this study bolsters previous research, which found that BTN improves cycling, sprint performance, muscle endurance, jump power, as well as the number of reps you can perform.

And that was particularly on the bench press in that paper. And while there isn’t Enough research yet to put betaine on the varsity team with stuff like caffeine, creatine, and beta alanine. The more betaine is studied, the more promising it appears. And that, by the way, is why I have included a clinically effective dose, 2.

5 grams, of betaine in every serving of my 100 percent natural pre workout. Pulse. We’ve been using BTN for years now because several years ago, there was less evidence for its efficacy, but we believe that there was enough evidence to stand by it. And we also believed based on the mechanisms of action and the quality of the evidence that existed, that more studies would indeed support those findings.

And. We were right. So anyway, if you want to check out pulse, you can find it over at by legion. com slash pulse B U I L E G I O N dot com slash pulse. Of course, that has more than just BTN, but if you want to get your BTN in along with several other ingredients that have proven to increase strength and endurance and energy and mood, check out pulse.

All right, let’s move on now to the final study. In today’s episode, which is regarding eating one meal a day, the OMAD diet and how, yes, it can help you lose fat, but it also is probably going to eat up more muscle than if you just followed a more traditional style of dieting. And my source here is Differential effects of one meal per day in the evening on metabolic health and physical performance in lean individuals.

And this was published on January 11th, 2022 in Frontiers in Physiology. So OMAD one meal a day. This has been around for a while, but it is experiencing a bit of a resurgence, because of how popular intermittent fasting is. Is in general these days and proponents of one meal a day claim that it can help you lose fat quickly, usually even faster than traditional dieting without losing muscle, without having to deal with extreme hunger or sagging energy and performance.

And. This study that I’m covering today shows that a little bit of that is true. Yes, you can use it to lose fat quickly, but the rest. So here, researchers from Amsterdam University put 11 healthy adults on two different diets for 11 days each. One. diet involved eating three meals evenly spaced throughout the day, and the other one involved eating one meal per day between 5 p.

1. and 7 p. m. Now, both of these diets were designed to help participants maintain their weight. They didn’t put the participants in a calorie deficit or surplus, just maintenance calories. But the researchers did not control how much protein, carbs, and fat each participant consumed. So the macros were not controlled.

Now, before and after each diet. The scientists measured the participant’s body composition markers of cardiometabolic health and fitness using a barrage of aerobic and anaerobic strength and power tests. And what the researchers found is that the people following the OMA diet lost more fat, 0.1 versus 0.7 kilograms, and overall weight 0.5 with the.

Traditional diet versus 1. 4 kilograms and the people following the normal feeding schedule, but they also lost more muscle 0. 3 kilograms with the traditional dieters versus 0. 7 kilograms with the O matters. And also the O mad group saw a larger rise in LDL cholesterol, which is the quote unquote bad cholesterol.

At least it’s bad if it gets too high. And so in that case, the Traditional dieters, they saw an increase of 2. 4 millimoles per liter, and with the OMAD group, it was 2. 8 millimoles per liter. And finally, physical performance was the same regardless of what feeding schedule people followed. My comments here are diets that restrict when you can eat or double edged swords, because on one hand, they do give you a simple, flexible and reliable method for eating less simply because if you eat fewer larger meals, or at least I would say some people, maybe not even most people, but many people find that if they eat fewer, larger meals, they tend to just eat fewer calories than if they eat more smaller meals.

For example, many people find that if they just start skipping breakfast, That can help them lose fat because they don’t make up for those calories that they are skipping at least not all of them with their bigger lunches and dinners, for example, on the other hand, though, many people find intermittent fasting diets of any kind too uncomfortable because they just get too hungry or they like eating breakfast and they don’t like skipping breakfast.

Some people also find it hard to eat enough protein in their feeding window, especially with OMAD. Meal to eat all of your daily protein. So for me, that would be 180 to 200 grams of protein in one meal. And then I’m also supposed to eat a bunch of other stuff as well. And I can eat a lot of food and sometimes I enjoy eating a lot of food, but I would not enjoy.

And research also shows that eating all of your protein in one or two meals is generally worse for building muscle and retaining muscle if you are cutting than spreading it more evenly throughout the day. And in this study, people’s athletic performance wasn’t significantly affected by OMAD. But this study only lasted 11 days, and I would wager that the workouts would have started to skid.

With the OMAD group, if the study was longer and since OMAD did cause muscle loss in this short study, that, of course, alone would undermine your performance at some point, right? And there is other research that shows that fasting diets do tend to. To hinder muscle growth over time, which of course tends to hinder performance.

Now, the rise that was seen in this study in LDL cholesterol is a bit of a, an anomaly since most research shows that fasting reduces LDL cholesterol levels. So it’s probably not. Worth worrying about that unless that finding is replicated in future studies. And all in all, OMAD certainly can help you lose weight.

It can limit your ability to overeat because you can only eat so many calories in one meal, especially if it’s a high protein meal that also contains vegetables and whole grains and healthy fat. It is very difficult to go beyond probably 1, 500 to 2, 000 calories in a meal like that is not You know, pizza, ice cream and donuts.

That said, OMAD does come with some pretty major disadvantages. And so I would say it is not an ideal way to improve your body composition. A much better approach is to use a meal plan to maintain A calorie deficit, something moderate, maybe even aggressive, but not reckless, maybe something between 15 and 25%.

So eating, let’s say anywhere between 75 and 85 percent of the calories that you burn every day and eating enough protein, eating it anywhere from three to six times per day and eating a few servings of fruit and four to six servings of vegetables per day and maybe a serving of whole grains. And just being patient, not trying to rush the process by severely restricting calories or severely restricting your feeding window.

I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me Because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you.

And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just Feedback to share, shoot me an email, Mike at muscle for life. com. Muscle F O R life. com and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future.

I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.