Aging is associated with lower muscle mass and an increase in body fat. We examined whether creatine monohydrate (CrM) and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) could enhance strength gains and improve body composition (i.e., increase fat-free mass (FFM); decrease body fat) following resistance exercise training in older adults (>65 y). Men (N = 19) and women (N = 20) completed six months of resistance exercise training with CrM (5g/d)+CLA (6g/d) or placebo with randomized, double blind, allocation. Outcomes included: strength and muscular endurance, functional tasks, body composition (DEXA scan), blood tests (lipids, liver function, CK, glucose, systemic inflammation markers (IL-6, C-reactive protein)), urinary markers of compliance (creatine/creatinine), oxidative stress (8-OH-2dG, 8-isoP) and bone resorption (Ν-telopeptides). Exercise training improved all measurements of functional capacity (P<0.05) and strength (P<0.001), with greater improvement for the CrM+CLA group in most measurements of muscular endurance, isokinetic knee extension strength, FFM, and lower fat mass (P<0.05). Plasma creatinine (P<0.05), but not creatinine clearance, increased for CrM+CLA, with no changes in serum CK activity or liver function tests. Together, this data confirms that supervised resistance exercise training is safe and effective for increasing strength in older adults and that a combination of CrM and CLA can enhance some of the beneficial effects of training over a six-month period. Trial Registration. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00473902

In this paper we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for the Kobayashi metric on a convex domain to be Gromov hyperbolic. In particular we show that for convex domains with C ∞ boundary being of finite type in the sense of D'Angelo is equivalent to the Gromov hyperbolicity of the Kobayashi metric. We also show that bounded domains which are locally convexifiable and have finite type in the sense of D'Angelo have Gromov hyperbolic Kobayashi metric. The proofs use ideas from the theory of the Hilbert metric. Contents

In this paper we introduce a new class of domains in complex Euclidean space, called Goldilocks domains, and study their complex geometry. These domains are defined in terms of a lower bound on how fast the Kobayashi metric grows and an upper bound on how fast the Kobayashi distance grows as one approaches the boundary. Strongly pseudoconvex domains and weakly pseudoconvex domains of finite type always satisfy this Goldilocks condition, but we also present families of Goldilocks domains that have low boundary regularity or have boundary points of infinite type. We will show that the Kobayashi metric on these domains behaves, in some sense, like a negatively curved Riemannian metric. In particular, it satisfies a visibility condition in the sense of Eberlein and O'Neill. This behavior allows us to prove a variety of results concerning boundary extension of maps and to establish Wolff-Denjoy theorems for a wide collection of domains.

Abstract. In this paper we study the automorphism group of smoothly bounded convex domains. We show that such a domain is biholomorphic to a "polynomial ellipsoid" (that is, a domain defined by a weighted homogeneous balanced polynomial) if and only if the limit set of the automorphism group intersects at least two closed complex faces of the set. The proof relies on a detailed study of the geometry of the Kobayashi metric and ideas from the theory of non-positively curved metric spaces. We also obtain a number of other results including the Greene-Krantz conjecture in the case of uniform non-tangential convergence, new results about continuous extensions (of biholomorphisms and complex geodesics), and a new Wolff-Denjoy theorem.

Let (φ t ) be a holomorphic semigroup of the unit disc (i.e., the flow of a semicomplete holomorphic vector field) without fixed points in the unit disc and let Ω be the starlike at infinity domain image of the Koenigs function of (φ t ). In this paper we completely characterize the type of convergence of the orbits of (φ t ) to the Denjoy-Wolff point in terms of the shape of Ω. In particular we prove that the convergence is nontangential if and only if the domain Ω is "quasi-symmetric with respect to vertical axes". We also prove that such conditions are equivalent to the curve [0, ∞) ∋ t → φ t (z) being a quasi-geodesic in the sense of Gromov. Also, we characterize the tangential convergence in terms of the shape of Ω.