Menno Henselmans

Science to master your physique. Best-selling author, scientist, international public speaker & coach. https://mennohenselmans.com/bio/

Optimizing fat loss, muscle growth and strength development based on the most reasonable interpretation of the available data.

07/09/2026

The last Henselmans PT Course of 2026 is open for enrollment! DM “course” to learn more and enroll.

Low-calorie sweeteners are highly controversial, even among scientists, due to seemingly conflicting study outcomes. As usual when studies seem conflicting, there's a lack of deeper understanding. A new independent umbrella review reconciled the conflicting evidence from other systematic reviews and meta-analyses including ~25k participants from controlled trials and ~2.8M (!) participants from cohort studies.

The sweeteners studied included aspartame, sucralose, stevia glycosides, acesulfame-K and saccharin but not sugar alcohols.

Sweeteners appeared unhealthy in naive association studies, which is the evidence the World Health Organization relied on when they discouraged sweetener usage recently. These studies simply observe: 'Do people that use more sweeteners have more health problems?'

And then yes, they do, but it's due to confounding that disappears in bias-adjusted studies, not because sweeteners caused the health problems. One major confounder is reverse causality: people with health problems related to their weight or diabetes are more likely to use sweeteners, creating an association between sweetener use and health problems.

Controlled scientific interventions consistently show that giving people sweeteners is not only safe but also highly effective to improve their health when it replaces sugar consumption, causing a decrease in energy intake and subsequent fat loss and improved health. Compared to water, sweeteners generally have neutral health effects, although some data show that sweetened beverages make it easier for people to stick to their diet by satisfying their sweet tooth.

TL;DR Consuming sugar instead of sweeteners is like not using condoms during a hook-up because you're worried about plastic poisoning.

06/09/2026

Many sources still state that lactic acid is the primary source of fatigue during high-intensity exercise. The idea is that glycolysis during exercises forms lactic acid, which acidifies your muscles and causes fatigue. We feel this acidosis as 'the burn'.

This theory is wrong on almost every level.

1) Muscles barely produce any lactic acid. They produce lactate, which is a weak base, not an acid, and it therefore does not cause acidosis. It's actually fuel for our muscles. Infusing lactate into muscles more often improves than impairs exercise performance.

2) Acidosis comes from hydrogen ion accumulation, not lactic acid. (A chemist might even say it's not merely causation but the proton accumulation is literally the acidification.)

3) Acidosis does not cause fatigue directly, but saying they're completely unrelated is going too far in the opposite direction of the original myth. High levels of acidosis are linked to neuromuscular fatigue, suggesting it's a contributory factor, but this generally only happens in fast-twitch fibers and only after 1-2 minutes, so it's not very relevant for lifting weights.

4) None of these factors are what you feel as 'the burn'. Infusing lactate or hydrogen ions into live human muscles at rest does not make them feel the burn. During exercise they can intensify the burn, despite not reliably contributing to neuromuscular fatigue.

5) The real metabolic causes of fatigue are still being explored. Likely candidates include inorganic phosphate and calcium accumulation.

Take-home message: feeling 'the burn' during exercise doesn't mean much, especially not for lifters. It's some indicator of glucose usage and metabolic stress, but it's not a reliable indicator of neuromuscular fatigue, let alone muscle growth.

If you're interested in up-to-date scientific fitness education, check out my online PT Course: enrollments just opened for 3 October, your only chance until next year. DM 'COURSE' for more info.

05/09/2026

Ice baths kill gains. Does the sauna do the opposite?

Full video on my YouTube: link in bio

04/09/2026

The last Henselmans PT Course of 2026 is open for enrollment! DM “course” to learn more and enroll.

Many people believe going to the gym makes them hungry. This can seem like it if you always eat afterwards. We eat because we get hungry, but we also get hungry at times we usually eat. This is called biorhythm entrainment.

There's also a big expectation effect. If you expect to get hungry from exercise, you probably will. This is the well-documented nocebo effect in psychology. Some people also feel like they deserve a nice meal after busting their butt in the gym.

Yet research is very clear that under controlled study conditions, exercise lowers appetite. This is called exercise-induced anorexia. A new study further adds that training harder - closer to failure - increases the appetite suppression. Exercise activates the sympathetic fight-or-flight part of the nervous system, which suppresses the parasympathetic rest-and-digest system that makes us want to eat.

Exercise is actually one of the few ways we can induce an energy deficit without compensatory increase in hunger, one of the many benefits of exercise.

TL;DR If you get hungry in the gym, TRAIN HARDER.

03/09/2026

The last Henselmans PT Course of 2026 is open for enrollment! DM “course” to learn more and enroll.

You might have heard that fat cells are permanent: once you gain them, you don't lose them anymore, so once you've been overweight, you're disadvantaged for life. The first part is true. The second is not. And how we know this is even more interesting than the fact itself.

After World War II, nuclear testing dramatically increased the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere. This isn't as bad as it sounds, but the Limited Test Ban Treaty still ended above-ground testing in 1963. That radiocarbon is very slowly draining away now. Radiocarbon gets into plants; when we eat the plants, it gets into our bodies. When our cells divide, this carbon gets taken up into our DNA and DNA, unlike most tissues, never turns over again. The amount of radiocarbon in a cell thereby functions as a birthstamp of the cell.

By reading the radiocarbon-inferred birth dates of cells, researchers have found that fat cells, called adipocytes, are effectively permanent. They do have ~10% annual turnover, but the number stays the same. Most people's number of fat cells is set during childhood and then stays constant throughout life, unless we gain a lot of weight and the body has to produce more fat cells to increase storage capacity.

Even dramatic 33% body weight loss, like after gastric bypass, does not reduce our number of fat cells.

But fat cells aren't visible. A lump of adipose tissue looks like a blurb of grease even with the skin off. What you see is total adipose volume: cell number multiplied by mean cell volume. Cell number may be fixed, but cell volume changes majorly based on how much fat you have.

Imagine a million balloons filled with grease or 2 million balloons half-filled with grease. The total visible mass is the same. And if you empty the cells, you look lean either way.

Bottom line: how much fat you've had at any point in your life makes no metabolic difference to you now. You might still carry the fat cells around, but this doesn't affect how you look and doesn't make it any harder to get or stay lean.

02/09/2026

The last Henselmans PT Course of 2026 is open for enrollment! DM “course” to learn more and enroll.

Boosting growth hormone (GH) is all the rage with peptides, supplements and anti-aging clinics. GH is heavily marketed as an anti-aging drug by the commercial industry, despite this being off-label usage. A new scientific review warns that "considering [growth hormone] as the fountain of youth is currently fundamentally wrong".

People and animals with lower GH levels, such as from isolated GH deficiency (IGHD), live longer and age more slowly. That's despite the side-effects of GH deficiency. In contrast, acromegaly or 'gigantism' is associated with many long-term side-effects, including insulin resistance and a ~10 year shorter lifespan if left untreated. The treatment is lowering GH levels, which brings longevity back into the normal range.

A proper randomized controlled trial in hospitalized patients found that high-dose GH treatment increased mortality by an alarming 90-140%. This line of research was obviously stopped in its tracks after this.

At best, GH is 'anti-aging' in the sense that it can improve quality of life for deficient individuals and it can make you look younger by improving connective tissue synthesis and body composition. So you may have nicer hair and skin, but underneath your cells are aging faster.

Ironically, GH makes almost everything in the body grow, including your face and organs ('GH gut'/Palumboism), but not your contractile muscle tissue. The increase in lean body mass following growth hormone therapy in healthy individuals and athletes is not associated with increased contractile protein or strength: it’s water retention and connective tissue growth. (Caveat: high-dose insulin and anabolics may have an interaction effect.)

Overall, for the average healthy individual, boosting your GH into the supraphysiological range has a terrible risk-reward. Anyone telling you GH is anti-aging without informing you of the risks is either woefully uninformed or scamming you.

01/09/2026

In this study of 144k obese individuals, the researchers compared people who developed cancer (cases) to those who didn't (controls), looking at BMI changes over 3, 5, and 10 years before diagnosis. BMI reduction was 1-for-1 (linearly) related to lower subsequent odds of cancer.

These findings fit with the consensus medical view that high energy intakes and resulting excess body weight are a significant risk factor for cancer growth. Cancer is a cellular growth disease. Stimulating cell growth in the body (via the insulin/IGF-1 axis) is therefore inherently a risk, especially in individuals with deregulated hormone levels and chronic inflammation.

More generally, fat loss is one of the most effective ways to improve almost all health outcomes. Energy restriction is the #1 thing you can do for longevity.

31/08/2026

DM "MHAPP" to start your MH Physique Coaching App 14-day FREE trial.

MyFitnessPal (MFP) is by far the most popular macro tracking app, but a study concluded it's not the most reliable. 2 Scientists input the food records of Canadian athletes into MFP, Cronometer and the Canadian Nutrient File (CNF, the most reliable official database in Canada). MFP had 2 problems.

1) Different users inputting the same food often select different food entries from the database, even when they're trained. It can be hard to know which of the 10 chicken cutlets is the right one. The mean difference between loggers was 226 kcal per day with a confidence interval from -326 to +777 kcal(!)

2) The MFP database does not correspond well with the official CNF nutritional values, even when using the verified foods with the green checkmarks where possible. There was 94 kcal average daily error due to this.

The researchers concluded "MyFitnessPal provides low reliability and validity", whereas Cronometer scored well. I'd note that MFP *can* be reliable, if you input all foods based on your own food labels. Then MFP is basically just a spreadsheet though, so I've always recommended Cronometer and MyNetDiary to my students as the best free options with databases that are actually good enough to use.

Of course, I personally prefer my own new app the MH Physique App. It's not just a macro tracker using scientifically valid databases but also a nutrition and training coach that continually optimizes your program based on your progression data. You can check it out now with a 2-week free trial and a 33% lower price!

30/08/2026

Some bodybuilders say muscles compete with each other for a limited pool of anabolic resources. This is an argument for specialization phases and body part splits. A new study concluded this idea is not true.

105 untrained individuals trained their biceps either with or without also training their quads afterwards, or they did no training at all (control group).

After 6 weeks, gains in arm muscle thickness were virtually identical (17-19 mm at both sites as per ultrasound) regardless of whether they also trained legs, as were 1RM biceps curl strength gains.

"Skeletal muscles do not compete for growth: activating additional muscle mass does not compromise changes in muscle size." That may seem like a bit of an overreach for a 6-week study in untrained individuals only doing 6 sets of biceps training plus 12 sets of quads, albeit to failure with ~30RM loads, but it's very much in line with the total literature. Muscle growth is a local process without interference from what you do to other muscles.

In fact, some prior studies in this field found that training legs with compound lifts before training arms *increased* strength and size gains, possibly due to increased anabolic hormone production, but these studies have largely failed to replicate.

In practice, you can think of your total program as the sum of all the programs for each individual muscle. How much each muscle grows is purely a function of how you train that muscle. The only limits to mixing body parts or emphasizing multiple muscles are practical: many people don't have the time or motivation to train every single muscle group with the maximum adaptive volume.

For more detailed exercise science on how to take your physique to the next level, check out my online PT Certification: DM 'course' or check bio for more info on the last course of 2026. Limited spots.

29/08/2026

Why do modern elite bodybuilders have huge guts despite being insanely lean? Is “steroid gut” actually caused by steroids? Is growth hormone to blame? Or is there more to the story?

Watch the full video on my YouTube: link in bio

Endereço

Santo António Da Charneca

Website

https://MennoHenselmans.com/, https://MennoHenselmans.com/bio

Notificações

Seja o primeiro a receber as novidades e deixe-nos enviar-lhe um email quando Menno Henselmans publica notícias e promoções. O seu endereço de email não será utilizado para qualquer outro propósito, e pode cancelar a subscrição a qualquer momento.

Entre Em Contato Com A Escola/colégio

Envie uma mensagem para Menno Henselmans:

Quer que o seu escola/colégio seja a primeira Escola/colégio em Santo António da Charneca?