You always knew touching your toes — or trying to — before a run made that first mile feel doubly long. Now two studies, one really a study of studies, suggest that the mechanics of stretching are the culprit. The meta-study had researchers at the University of Zagreb combing through hundreds of earlier experiments in [ more... ]

Every week another study tells you how to lose weight. This one is interesting for what it didn’t find. The study, conducted on 72 middle-aged women, divided them into three groups: one set worked out twice a week, another four times a week, and a third six times a week. What researchers expected was that [ more... ]

If you can get your ass out the door before a slug of yogurt and granola, a new study suggests you’ll cook off 20 percent more body fat by exercising on an empty stomach. Researchers from Northumbria University in the U.K. studied two sets of subjects: one that ate breakfast before hitting a treadmill at [ more... ]

Energy drinks makers make a lot of claims. 5-Hour Energy, for example, says that consumers of its stimulant won’t experience a letdown after the stuff wears off…but a close reading of the label actually means that you won’t get a SUGAR-related crash. Because, um, it doesn’t have any sugar. What it does have, just like [ more... ]

The idea that a round as golf is just as effective at extending your life as banging out a road century seems just plain counterintuitive, but that’s what a new study from the U.K. is claiming. The British Medical Journal looked at Olympians from the late 1800s and early 1900s and found that “engaging in [ more... ]

Researchers at McMaster University, in Ontario, found that whether you work out with a very heavy weight, say, that you only life for 10 reps, or a very light weight, which might take 30 reps to get to exhaustion, the results are nearly the same. Meaning: You don’t need to leg press 300 pounds to build [ more... ]

Yeah, we just told you about a Swiss study recently that suggests that neurochemicals are there to protect us from over-revving our systems (a.k.a., VO2 max isn’t purely physiological) but this South African study suggests that the “brain fuse” can be bypassed. They took subjects and had them start at their previously achieved “maximum,” which [ more... ]

The endurance formula works because caffeine increases the number of fatty acids in the blood, preserving the carbs in the blood and burning the fat instead, allowing you to go longer. But this isn’t what you need in the gym. Instead, researchers have found that caffeine limits the buildup of a substance called adenosine, a [ more... ]