I’ve only found two references to Doug McGuff across the forum. I think his ideas merit further interest of the community.
Background
McGuff wrote Body by Science, an update of Ken Hutchins’s Super Slow training protocols, which themselves evolved out of the high intensity training protocols developed by Arthur Jones of Nautilus fame (Hitchins worked with Jones).
No gimmicks in what McGuff does. His and Hutchins’s training protocols use brief very intense resistance training - as little as 12 minutes under actual load and when advanced, just once per week. One trains as much to develop capacity for intensity as anything else.
Done properly, I’ve found it safe and incredibly demanding. One needs a week to recover sufficiently to train again.
In my late 50s I trained in this manner exclusively for nearly 5 years. No “cardio” or aerobic training. My job sent me for a stress test. The cardiologist said I seemed like a marathoner.
I recently came across the following video of a talk McGuff gave. It doesn’t really promote his particular training methods, but rather the benefits and mechanisms of the benefits of strength/resistance training.
McGuff identifies Ten Biomarkers of Health
- Muscle mass
- Strength
- Bone density
- Body composition
- Blood lipids
- Hemodynamics
- Glucose control
- Aerobic capacity
- Gene expression
- Brain factors
Pretty non-controversial.
Its all about skeletal muscle mass
McGuff goes on to show how increased skeletal mass from strength training (see attached screen clip) beneficially affects all of these biomarkers.
re: Gene expression
Of particular interest he cites a study wherein, a Dr. Simon Melov identified 179 genes related to aging that reverted back to youthful levels of expression from 26 weeks of strength training.
Subjects of the study realized a 50% increase in strength. Not certain how they measured it.
McGuff claims this as the first successfully observed reversal of aging at the genetic level in humans.
(The forum may have others McGuff doesn’t know about, by still…)
re: the affects on Body Composition
From his slide:
- Its not just calories in/calories out
- Your body’s tissues in competition
- Myokines shift the home field advantage toward lean muscle
- IL-I5 leverages the battle
- mTOR/AMP balanced
Worth the watch.