"A Better Body Comp Testing Method" with Alysha D'Souza

Episode 23! The Jordan Podcast! And that's appropriate because today I have one of the GOATS in the field of Exercise Science Research!

In this episode I'm joined by PhD student Alysha D'Souza (IG HERE) from McMaster University in Canada. Alysha is a student in Dr. Stu Phillips lab and is leading the way in a new generation of female focused exercise science research (an area that's currently severely lacking in the field).

In this episode we discuss a new and exciting muscle composition modality the "COSIAM" method. A combination of multiple isotopes to test the actual amount of skeletal muscle you currently have.

This is exciting because most body composition tools use algorithms and proxy measures to estimate muscle mass. Till now, besides performing an autopsy (which means no more gains anyways), there hasn't been a tool to allow researchers to not just distinguish between lean tissue and fat, but actual "skeletal muscle". Which is really what we want to measure in strength research.

The value of muscle mass and the link to resistance training is now widely known and propagated, but we've always relied on tools that have a significant margin of error to make our best educated guess at what is happening internally. Though this method will probably never be widely available, it sheds valuable insight on the variability in these tools (i.e. you're probably not as jacked as you think).

This episode is research dense and I do my best to bring everything down to a level that's easy to understand. But if you're interested in how to actually measure muscle, you don't want to miss this!

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