A profitable cooperation starts with the Professor Atko Viru, one of the worlds top experts of the relationship between hormones and exercise. This opens the door to the understanding of the long term adaptation to exercise mediated by hormones, an essential aspect in order to develop new and more effective training methodologies and equipment. It is during this phase that two fundamental aspects of the hormonal response to exercise are brought to light.

Thanks to the development and the validation of a new dynamometer named Muscle LAB ™ (Bosco et al., Eur J Appl Occup Physiol 70, 1995) it has been possible to measure muscular work during exercise and to observe the different hormonal answers caused by various speeds of execution. Movements with elevated power output, executed at high speed, stimulate testosterone, while strength movements with high loads and low speed induce the production of growth hormone.

Moreover it became evident that testosterone, always considered a hormone regulating protein synthesis, is in reality related to speed of movement and to muscular contraction through an action on the calcium pump. (Bosco and Viru Biology of Sport, 5, 1998; Bosco et al., Med Sci Sport Exerc, 32, 2000).