CategoriesFat Loss Motivational Nutrition

Smarter Science of Slim: Silly Strong LOLCats

First off:  I just want to take a few moments to say THANK YOU to all the brave men and women (past a present) who, in what’s arguably the most un-selfish act possible, have put their lives on the line to serve this great country.

In the words of a friend of mine, Greg, who stated it about as eloquently as possible:  Regardless of the situations our leaders put you in, you handle it so that others don’t have to and I respect the hell out of that. Often thankless, often overlooked, often taken for granted, you persevere to do the duty you pledged, voluntarily, to do and I respect the hell out of that too.

Thank you. Not just today, but every day.

Happy Veteran’s Day.

Secondly: Some of you may recall a video I linked to earlier this year by author Jonathan Bailor titled Slim is Simple.  In it, Jonathan discusses why it is we’re fatter and more unhealthy than ever before despite exercising and dieting in record numbers.

It was a message that I enjoyed and felt many people could relate with.  Simple, to the point, with no fluff and BS.

In an age where some grown adults are under the delusion that eating baby food is a viable dietary option, and even more nitpick over whether or not a bowl of oatmeal is considered “Paleo,”  it’s a breath of fresh air to hear people like Jonathan speak on why it doesn’t always (if ever) have to so complicated.

Not long after I posted my blog Jonathan invited me to hang out on is podcast, The Smarter Science of Slim, where we talked about a handful of things ranging from CrossFit to training athletes to goal setting to LOLCats.

Hence the title of the episode.

It just went live today, and if you have 30 minutes to spare I think it would be well worth the time.

Enjoy!

CategoriesFat Loss Nutrition

3 (Unorthodoxed) Reasons You Aren’t Getting Better at Lifting Heavy Things

Today’s guest post comes courtesy of the one and only Leigh Peele.  Leigh and I have known each other for about six years and in between co-hosting The FitCast together and exchanging numerous emails on Lord of the Rings philosophy we’ve grown to be good friends.

About two years ago Leigh kinda fell off the radar, and inexplicably went into stealth mode.  She and I lost touch, and in that time I moved in with my girlfriend, learned that wearing white past Labor Day is a big no-no, and became a cat owner while Leigh wrote a book.

A really good book.

Little did I know that the reason she “disappeared” was because she was knee deep in research and writing her butt off.

The end result?

Starve Mode: Explaining & Resetting Metabolic Problems That Can Come From Dieting.

Giving full disclosure:  The book was released a few weeks ago and I was a little late in the game and have only just begun reading it, but from what I have read thus far it’s a game changer.

Leigh truly outdid herself, and all the praise she has received from various fitness peeps – Tom Venuto, Jonathan Fass, Jen Sinkler, Nia Shanks, etc – is well deserved.

That said when Leigh extended the offer to write a little something for the site I happily agreed.  Not that she ever really left, but it’s great to have her back.

Enjoy.

3 (Unorthodoxed) Reasons You Aren’t Getting Better At Lifting Heavy Things

Tony is known for many things. Mostly it’s wearing small t-shirts and lifting heavy s**t. [Note from TG:  Excuse me, I wear smedium sized shirts thank you very much.] When he asked me if I had any knowledge I wanted to relay I thought first about those small shirts, but then I thought about you guys – the readers.

From what I understand you are a hodge podge of age and gender who also like to lift heavy s**t. What I am going to talk to you about is a major roadblock I see for people who have this as a goal. I am going to help some of you get better at picking up and putting down heavy things.

The best way for me to help you? Pointing out your flaws of course! Below you will see three problems on your journey to getting stronger. I tried to bypass the standard advice or calling you a wimp.

Problem #1 – Your Aren’t Making The Act Of Picking Up Heavy Things Your #1 Priority

Funny isn’t it? You say it’s your goal. You talk about the importance of your goal, but it is the furthest thing from priority when you look at their actions. Trying to lose fat while lifting heavy things? Not such a good idea. Trying to achieve the record title of endurance in push-ups or performing a couch to 5K trial run?

Yep, this is not action towards your goals.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t as if you shouldn’t lift those weights while losing fat, but how long do you want to drag this fat loss thing out for? Pacing your fat loss with intelligent deficits and refeeds – yes. Dragging it out and training in a constant state of barely fed, binge lifts, and weight regain fear – no.

Can you have other training goals while lifting heavy things? Yeah, but maximum strength takes focused energy and effort. So give it some.

Problem #2 – You’re Trying To Get Strong Lifting in a Stunted or Decreased Metabolic State

I am not saying you can’t get strong when you aren’t feeding yourself. I’ve actually been amazed with what I have seen people do who were robbed of solid nutrition. But less surprised when they end up crashing, binging for months, collecting injuries and bone fractures – you know the fun side effects of lifting heavy things and not feeding for it.

You might think, “Isn’t this the same as number one?” No. It isn’t and I will tell you why.

A certain subset of the fitness population will avoid weight regain from fat loss or increase of weight in general at all cost. This happens even with men, but more in “not losing definition” than scale weight alone.

At any point and time we fall on a certain line of being underfed, fed (roughly for our needs) and overfed. Technically we never achieve a perfect balance but you see what I am getting at. When an individual becomes nervous of any weight rebound or truly fueling their metabolic potential, they eat more towards the “underfed” state on a constant basis.

It might not be an intended deficit, but it can lead to a downgraded metabolic activity. Recovery gets robbed, nutrients get robbed and the next thing you know you are praying to find a PR or any sign of progress.

Take home point: If you hadn’t tested your metabolic potential or understood the difference between weight gain and fat gain – get on it.

See what you can do when fed and rested.

Note from TG: For those looking to dig a little deeper, Starve Mode is a fantastic resource for that.

Problem #3 – Not Resting or Going With The Flow

You can only drive yourself so hard before you reap the “benefits” of doing so. Are you the inspiration for the memes on Facebook telling people their legs giving out is “just an excuse to use your arms?” Let me appeal to you on a corkier level on why you should work smarter, not harder.

Apollo Robbins is a master of pickpocketing and misdirection. He gave a fantastic TedTalk recently explaining how we can manipulate attention. I highly encourage you watch it.

What does this have to do with anything? You can steal someone’s wallet by beating them up, ripping their pocket and running for your life (and the cops) or you can misdirect their attention and with minimal physical effort.

And just as fast as you can say abracadabra – the wallet is yours.

Clearly both are illegal and morally corrupt, but both expend two different energies and stress levels to achieve the same goal.

Sure you might reach your goals doing four lifting sessions a week, lots “metabolic work,” restricting carbs, and eating “clean.” But what if you can achieve the same physical and strength goals using strategy, feed timing, and pacing yourself?

The true misdirection in a large part of the fitness community is thinking you have to grind yourself into the ground to get what you want.

Be it concepts like biofeedback or simply enjoying yourself in the gym again, get back to working smarter.

CategoriesNutrition

How Did Your Food Live? Know the Health Behind Your Food – Part II

If you missed Part One (shame on you), I’d suggest taking a few moments to read that before moving forward.  Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

For those who are already caught up and anxiously awaiting Part Two, today Luke digs a little deeper into the rabbit hole and sheds some light on HOW our food is produced.  It’s pretty shocking to say the least.

And not to leave us hanging by a thread, Luke also offers a plan of attack moving forward on how we can be more cognizant as well as proactive with regards to not only the quality of the food we eat, but where it comes from too. 

This is something that affects ALL of us, and I’d be remiss not to encourage everyone to take some time to read it and let it sink in.

If you don’t a kitten cries.  You’re a real jerk you know that!?

One of my major concerns with human health is related to the combining of animal products from many animals.  It is estimated that 1 in 10,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella and this is usually passed on from either an infection from the mother hen (so long healthy gut flora) or fecal contamination.

I don’t know how the CDC extrapolates that this number exists, did they test 10,000 eggs before finding Salmonella?  Searching online it seems that this data is assumed when comparing illnesses from Salmonella compared to how many eggs are purchased/consumed in a year.  This sort of makes sense but when you consider that not everyone who gets sick sees a doctor and not everyone who eats an egg contaminated with Salmonella actually gets sick from it – as cooking can destroy the bacteria – the numbers seem too gray for me.

Either way I’d rather eat a dozen eggs from one or two chickens rather than 12, and much more preferred than eating a dozen eggs laid by 12 chickens in a crowd of 1,000.

Ground beef suffers a similar fate.  At this point in the argument, I won’t even address factory farm treatment of animals but rather how the food is produced and packaged.

In general there are two kinds of cows: those bred for milk production and those bred for meat.  Obviously, not all milk cows are female and the male milk cow must now be used for beef or veal, to avoid monetary loss.  As a whole, dairy cows put so much energy into milk production that they do not gain much in terms of muscle and fat, making them less suitable for meat production.

To answer this issue, these two breeds are cross-bred so that male dairy cows can be more easily fattened up for meat production.  Now we have dairy cows that produce less milk than they should and beef cattle that don’t fatten up as much as normal because they are both half-breeds of each other.  Here we add continual stimulation from antibiotics, hormones and cheap feed like soy to boost the half-rate milk and beef production we genetically engineered ourselves.

Let’s assume half of all cows are bred for meat and half for dairy, with half of the dairy cows being male and thus used in meat production.  Most beef cattle are slaughtered at  twelve to eighteen months compared to the two or three years it takes normally.  Now we have 75% of all beef entering our supermarkets from underage, half-bred, antibiotic injected and artificially fattened cattle.

Aside from ALL of this is the fact that the one pound package of beef you buy can be the meat from literally dozens of cows.

Just as in the dizzying possibility of your eggs coming from so many different and possibly sick chickens, the same applies to all ground meat.

Added to this is the fact that meat carcasses are sprayed with high-powered air guns to detach all remaining flesh from the animal after production.  This meat mush is then either added into existing ground beef or mixed for sausage and other pre-made meat products.

This certainly makes economical sense but it just contributes to the overwhelming vastness of where our food comes from.  I actually have a Meat Buyers Guide from the North American Meat Processors Association and it lists standards, practices and guidelines for all cuts of meat and how they are produced.  Ground beef in particular is allowed to be “chopped or machine-cut by any method provided the texture and appearance of the product after final grinding is typical of ground beef prepared by grinding only”.

So….you can process ground beef any way you want so long as it looks like ground beef in the end?

Also, the processing allows bone collectors and extruders to be used in the process so that companies can literally grind anything on the animal for ground beef.

Lastly,  purchasers may “waive” an examination for trimming defects as long as they use a bone extruder.  I don’t think I even need to explain this one as it is pretty self evident, but it basically says that anything in the final product is OK since you used a bone extruder, and using a bone extruder allows you to grind any part of the animal.

The reason this all ties into the USDA is because they allow food to be produced and processed this way.  In my goal to continually steer this article away from animal welfare e.g Eating Animals, and the fact that this aside could be and already is the topic of other books, I want to focus on how this food affects us.

Already discussed above is how the use of antibiotics affects both our health and that of animals.  If you think that eating meat with compromised digestion and immunity does not impact your health, it would be a claim to ignorance.  You could argue that cooking inactivates many of the hormones given to these animals, as is the case with milk and other dairy products.

My nutrition professor at UCONN claimed that the crossover from animals being fed and injected hormones has a weak transfer from the animal to us and combined with pasteurization of dairy, she claimed it was a non-issue.  I can’t help but think that this is a cop-out when you look at the research even seemingly benign foods like cabbage, kale and tomatoes have on our health.

 

These foods can inhibit iodine absorption, increase blood clotting factors and enhance immunity, respectively.  Yet meat that is raised as noted above has no impact on our body chemistry and health?

This brings me back to my original question about the rice.

Think of each grain of rice in that bowl as a bit of meat from hundreds of different animals.  Even with the antibiotic agents added, wouldn’t you rather eat the rice if it came from just one restaurant?  And wouldn’t it be a little better if you knew what the standards were that that restaurant judged the rice by?

And wouldn’t be better still if you knew the rice had no added chemicals because it was handled and cooked responsibly?

There is a level of damage control that we need to face here, especially as athletes who consume a lot of food and namely a lot of meat, dairy and eggs.  You already know the benefits of eating pastured, grass fed meat both for your health and the animals.  You already know organic is better than conventional, despite somewhat shady and interpretive “standards”.

What’s the average meat-head with a limited income to do, since most of us won’t adopt veganism or vegetarianism? Making the best of a bad situation is a reality for many of us.  I propose that since poultry has it the worst that we make the best effort to eat as naturally here.  Free-range eggs aren’t actually that expensive if you have someone near you with chickens and it is becoming increasingly more popular to grow your own hens, I have multiple friends who do this.

Second, focus on buying whole-bird organic chickens.  Since you’re buying whole, it is usually cheaper by the pound because some of what you buy is bone and extra fat.  Take advantage of this though and challenge yourself to roast, braise, grill and smoke whole and half-birds.  Eat the innards, they are delicious; take time to learn how to truss or break down a whole chicken.

Beef is harder to eat grass-fed and organic because it is usually only affordable when you buy in bulk and have a freezer to store it in.

Instead, if you can adopt the suggestions above, practice damage control by purchasing whole cuts of beef like chuck, top round and other pot roasts and slow cooking them.  Another option, which I have done myself is visit a butcher that grinds their own meat.  You can either bring them some top round or other cut to grind or have them do it with their own supply.  At least in this scenario you can get ground meat from one animal, not dozens.

This movement should not be much more expensive than what you are doing now and only a little more time consuming.  People will argue that you should go cold turkey (pun intended) and switch right over to grass-fed and pastured meat, eggs and dairy or just stop eating meat.

In what other context do we do this?

How many people do you know that just stopped driving until they could afford an electric car or quit smoking without adding in something like nicotine patches, gum or coffee to titrate them off?  The staggering enormity of finding, purchasing and storing completely grass-fed and pastured animal products will turn most people off.

However, as in a new exercise or diet program, we all know as coaches and athletes that small progressions often yield the best long-term results.

To this I say start making a small difference NOW, instead of no difference at all.

References:

World Health Organization.  Risk Assessment of Salmonella in Eggs and Broiler Chickens, 2008.

Google Books, May 17th, 2013.

Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh.  The River Cottage Meat Book.  Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004. Print.

NAMP.  The Meat Buyers Guide.  United States: North American Meat Processors Association, 2003.  Print

Lipski, Elizabeth.  Digestive Wellness.  United States:  McGraw Hill, 2012.  Print

Campbell-McBride, Natasha.  Gut and Psychology Syndrome.  United Kingdom:  Medinform Publishing, 2012.  Print.

Author’s Bio

Lucas Serwinski is a Strength and Conditioning coach and nutritional consultant for athletes and weekend warriors alike. Lucas holds a Bachelor’s in Strength and Conditioning from UCONN as well as an Associate’s in Culinary Arts from NECI.

Lucas has interned at Cressey Performance in Hudson, MA, worked on low-carbohydrate research for fat loss and health,and  trained and competed in powerlifting. He extensively studies the roles of digestion, sleep, nutritional habits and homeopathic medicine to help people of all walks achieve greater health. Lucas has also worked in multiple award-winning restaurants, including Arrow’s which was named 14th best restaurant in the country by Food magazine. Lucas incorporates knowledge and skill from cooking experience into creating a comprehensive plan for those he works with. Lucas has also worked as a social worked for years and takes mental and emotional considerations into each person’s plan and goals for success.  You can visit his blog HERE.

CategoriesNutrition

How Did Your Food Live? Know the Health Behind Your Food

I don’t post enough content on nutrition.  But I should, especially after reading THIS walking ball of fail of an article yesterday – in which the woman who wrote it, a registered dietician mind you – linked egg consumption to colon cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and probably global warming for all I know.

It was a glowing example of cherry picking data. Example:  I’m pretty sure all the studies she linked to about egg consumption causing the next apocalypse were debunked by a lot of people much smarter than myself.  Namely the fact that many of the aforementioned studies, as quick as they were to demonize eggs, and not coincidentally backed by vegan or vegetarian groups with an agenda, used surveys to extrapolate their data.  

Surveys, as we all know, most of the time, and especially as it relates to research studies, are about as useful as a poop flavored lollypop, and not much more valid.

Okay, people who eat eggs have a high(er) risk of diabetes and heart diseases.  But is it the eggs that are the issue or the fact that these same people fail to note that they also smoke like a chimney, don’t exercise, and eat a ton of highly processed, sugary, gooped up foods as well?

Nevertheless, I was pretty dumbfounded that someone who gives nutritional advice for a living would write something so off-base and overtly biased. Then again, given the context and the site for which it was written, I’m not surprised.  

Still: it’s disconcerting to think that this article is no doubt making its rounds around the internets and people are probably throwing out their eggs and high-tailing it to their local bomb shelters.

On the bright side, I was very happy to see that many, many, MANY people chimed in in the comments section to debunk many of the author’s claims.

In any case, today (and tomorrow) you’ll be treated to some good ol’ fashioned nutrition content.  

I want to introduce everyone to Luke Serwinski, who was an intern at Cressey Performance earlier this year and who is now a Strength and Conditioning coach in Connecticut.

Luke has a Bachelors in Strength and Conditioning from UCONN, as well as an Associates degree in Culinary Arts.  So, ladies, Luke can lift heavy things and make a killer duck confit….;o)

In this two-part article Luke goes into details about how the health and lifestyle of our food directly impacts us and ways to correct and operate damage control in an imperfect world.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope you do too!

If I offered you a bowl of rice from my fridge and as you ate it explained that it was collected from 30 different restaurants around town, cooked at different times to different standards, scraped off bottoms of pots and then thrown together in one bowl, would you eat it?

If I assured you that each restaurant had conducted their own inspection of their rice to unknown standards and added some cleaning agents to keep bacterial growth from occurring on it, just to be safe, would you eat it?

Ever since attending culinary school and getting hands-on experience in a real functioning butcher shop (what we’d call meat fabrication), I have had an affinity for animal products.  All of our classes were taught hands-on in working kitchens for pastry, baking, buffets, fine dining and so on.

One class I couldn’t wait to take and loved more than any other was meat fabrication.  The term meat fabrication itself sounds very industrial and out of touch with humanity but in fact it was quite the opposite.

While I never got the experience of helping to butcher an entire cow, I had the opportunity to work on half a cow all the way down to dicing chunks of fat for sausage making and pate.  There were plenty of classmates who were not very keen on handling so much dead animal and plenty more who tried to act like it didn’t bother them but I felt like it put me in touch with food on a deeper level.

If you get the chance to watch, like I did, a butcher turn half a cow into edible portions you’d understand how important it is to know more about what you are eating and not distancing yourself from where our protein comes from, as it is an awe inspiring experience.

While it sounds like I might be some meat wunder-kid, believe me, I’m not and I had the smallest understanding of animal products when I began(I wasn’t even sure if meat was the actual muscle of the animal or not!).

Every passing day I appreciated more and more how important it was to treat the products with absolute care, never wasting a piece of meat, bone or fat.

Duck fat would be rendered for cooking with, beef and pork fat would be ground with lean meat for sausage, and bones would be simmered for stock.  My instructor, Chef Danny was very well versed in physiology and I remember him telling our class that we tumble meat with a little water before grinding it into sausage because the tumbling works the myosin to the surface of the meat and helps to create a consistent texture.

The same myosin I learned years later was partly responsible for muscle contractility. That is the kind of understanding I always desired and continue to pursue.  These lessons now illuminate issues for me that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, such as seeing inter and intra-muscular fat in chicken breast.  Poultry, as a whole, store fat almost exclusively subcutaneously, or under the skin, rather then in and between the muscles as in beef.

Over the years I have noticed chicken breast in supermarkets with what looks like marbling and see color shading from pink to gray.

What happened to the meat I used to know, and what is causing these changes?

Part of the problem is that our grocery stores now serve ground meat that is combined from many cows, poultry or pigs, up to 100+.

Note from TG:  I knew this, but still……….groooooooosss.

A package of chicken breasts could come from God knows how many birds and the same goes for milk, yogurt and cheese products.

No longer does our food come from one singular animal that lived a good life, was slaughtered humanely and became food to nourish and sustain us.

If you’ve read Eating Animals (TG:  I still eat animals, but this book made me think twice about where my animal sources come from. And I wouldn’t recommend reading it if you have a weak stomach) or The Omnivores Dilemma (TG:  easily one of my ten favorite books I’ve ever read), then you have heard the same type of story and much worse.

The goal of this article isn’t to list the animal treatment horrors of factory farming but give some insight into why we should be more skeptical about “assured” food production practices and possible health concerns.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discussed with my grandfather why it’s important to pay attention to where our food comes from now.  He just can’t seem to understand that meat today is not the meat he used to eat, and likewise for vegetables and dairy.

He used to work for a milk delivery company in his 20s and 30s and delivered milk from specific small farms to people in the community.  He also grew up on a farm and grew most of his own produce, which was not heavily sprayed or laden with chemicals.  He also didn’t breathe air from pollution caused partly by automobiles and mostly by factory farming.  While he doesn’t understand the changes in food he will note how many more obese and sick people he sees at all ages these days…

To understand our food we must understand our own bodies.

Reading work by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, I’ve come to a greater understanding of how we are raised and even more telling, how we’re born affects our entire lives and health.

For instance, when a baby is born it has a sterile gut.  It’s first exposure to bacteria, good or bad, comes from a mouthful of flora inside the mother’s vagina.  The mother’s ( as well as father’s) reproductive organ flora is directly influenced by their own gut flora.

If a child is born into C-section, not breast fed and/or exposed to antibiotics at an early age, its immune system is devastatingly compromised.    Dr. Campbell-McBride n0tes that any women with chronic yeast infections invariably have compromised digestive flora; one aspect of our health reflects the rest of the system.

Great, what does that mean for our food?

To start all baby chickens born for egg production, known as “layers,” and those born for meat, known as “broilers” are born from chickens raised in absolute filth and fed a heavy dose of antibiotics.

These baby chicks are grown apart from their mothers and do not get passed any beneficial gut flora that they would be exposed to from sharing feeding space with the parents.

If you look at what abnormal gut flora, or disbysosis, does in humans, you can correlate what it might do to animals.

Symptoms of disbyosis in humans are chronic infections, autoimmune diseases, lack of neurotransmitters, food malabsorption, allergies, skin conditions, arthritis, Celiacs and so on.

Imagine eating an animal with one or many of those symptoms, not very appetizing.

You might even notice that your food cooks differently now too.

Staying with the chicken example, most birds are now slaughtered around 40-45 days old, one third what it takes naturally.  Young birds often retain light-red and pinkish hues around their joints even when fully cooked.

My mom asked me a while back why a chicken she roasted just didn’t seem like it was fully cooked no matter how long she had it in the oven, I believe she threw it out without eating it.  I explained the natural phenomena occurring with young birds, most likely because the bones have not fully formed and leak marrow.

I don’t think this is problematic and makes sense from a physiological standpoint until you also consider that in addition to this, many of these birds are too large to stand on their own legs and spend most of their lives on their knees.

This creates what is known as “hock burns”, burns caused by ammonia from the litter on the floor.  Now we have partially formed, burned and arthritic bones in chickens two months old….yikes.

Note from TG: And on that cliffhanger, I’ll post part II of Luke’s article tomorrow.  In the meantime I hope part I at least spurned a dialogue in your mind which gets you thinking about where you get your food from. There’s much more to the equation than just purchasing what’s on the shelves in your local supermarket, or what’s on sale.

As the saying goes, you are what you eat…….eats.

Author’s Bio

Lucas Serwinski is a Strength and Conditioning coach and nutritional consultant for athletes and weekend warriors alike. Lucas holds a Bachelor’s in Strength and Conditioning from UCONN as well as an Associate’s in Culinary Arts from NECI.

Lucas has interned at Cressey Performance in Hudson, MA, worked on low-carbohydrate research for fat loss and health,and  trained and competed in powerlifting. He extensively studies the roles of digestion, sleep, nutritional habits and homeopathic medicine to help people of all walks achieve greater health. Lucas has also worked in multiple award-winning restaurants, including Arrow’s which was named 14th best restaurant in the country by Food magazine. Lucas incorporates knowledge and skill from cooking experience into creating a comprehensive plan for those he works with. Lucas has also worked as a social worked for years and takes mental and emotional considerations into each person’s plan and goals for success.  You can visit his blog HERE.

CategoriesNutrition

Another Cholesterol Rant

It’s not something I’m proud to admit it, but up until last week it’s been about eleven years since I’ve stepped foot into a doctor’s office.

While I’d like to sit here and say it’s due to some irrational fear – akin to some people’s fear of say, clowns – sadly, it has more to do with plain ol’ stubbornness peppered with a hint of laziness and a touch of cynicism.

Knock on wood it’s not that often that I get sick.  I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been legitimately out of commission in the last decade, to the point where staying home and watching re-runs of Knight Rider seemed like a better option than “manning up” and heading to work.  And even then I was usually back to normal within a 24-36 hour period.

Fever? Headache? Upset stomach? Ebola?  Whatevs. Doctor schmoctor.

I think much of my “beef” with the primary care industry (and yes, it IS an industry:  they’re just as interested in making money as your local Audi dealership) is that a large portion of it (not all of it) is more interested in being reactive instead of proactive.

It’s much easier to tell the type II diabetic to take eight different pills to treat their symptoms than it is educate him or her on the benefits of exercise and making wiser food choices.

I get it:  doctors are trained to use medicine, not dumbbells and fish oil, to treat symptoms.  It’s just kind of frustrating when I know we can save a metric shit-ton of money in preventative health care costs by educating people rather than circumventing everything with “band aid” fixes.

So yeah, I generally steer clear of the doctor’s office more so out of spite than anything else.  It’s stupid and childish, I know.

But what can I say? I like Boobies.

Well, Lisa put an end to the nonsense. She’s been on me for a while now to go to the doctor’s office if for nothing else just to get a check up and make sure things are a-okay.

To her credit, Lisa absolutely adores her doctor – she’s very attentive, listens, takes her time, and takes a much more proactive approach – and mentioned to me last fall that she was accepting new patients.

I made the appointment and conveniently missed it.  Oops.

I know it came across as self-sabotage, but I totally blanked and got my dates mixed up, and unfortunately, because she’s so popular, in order to reschedule I would have had to wait until January in order to see her.

To make a long story short, I ended up making an appointment with one of the resident doctors (who’s under the supervision of Lisa’s doctor) and well, it was awesome!

She asked a lot of questions, took her time, and didn’t blink an eye when I told her I ate 5-10 eggs per day.  I mentioned that I was interested in getting my vitamin D checked, as well as my cholesterol but that I didn’t want the ordinary test that just gives you your total cholesterol (HDL/LDL) count.

Total cholesterol is a meaningless number and should be the basis for absolutely nothing.  The old division into “good” (HDL) cholesterol and “bad” (LDL) cholesterol is out of date and provides only marginally better information than a “total” cholesterol reading.

As noted in their fantastic book, The Great Cholesterol Myth, Jonny Bowden and Dr. Stephen Sinatra state:

Both good and bad cholesterol have a number of different components (or subtypes) that behave quite differently, and the twenty-first-century version of cholesterol test should always tell you exactly which subtypes you have.

More to the point they HIGHLY recommend a Particle Size Test.

Although LDL cholesterol is known as the “bad” cholesterol, the fact is that it comes in several shapes and sizes, as does HDL cholesterol, the so-called “good” kind.  These different subtypes of cholesterol behave very differently.  Seen under a microscope, some LDL particles are big, fluffy, and harmless.  Some are small, dense, and “angry,” and much more likely to become oxidized, slipping through  the cells that line the walls of arteries and beginning the inflammatory cascade that leads to heart disease.

Total cholesterol doesn’t mean shit and should NOT be the basis for any treatment.  While the media is quick to demonize high total cholesterol for the cause of heart disease, what they fail to dictate to the pubic is that 45-50% of the people who die from heart disease have what’s deemed “acceptable” total cholesterol readings.

There’s much more of the onion that needs to be peeled back than TOTAL cholesterol.  What’s more, the fact that cholesterol is demonized in the first place is a bunch of BS.

Alas, the public has been programmed to think that cholesterol is our enemy……….so it only makes sense that the amount of eggs I ingest on a weekly basis would make most people cringe.

I got my blood work back the other day, and in the words of my doctor:  everything came back perfectly normal.

So to all the random checkout line cashiers throughout the years who shit a tofu brick and went out of their way to express their concern about my cholesterol levels (I can’t tell how many have asked whether or not I’m ever concerned about my cholesterol) because of the number of cartons of eggs (and beef, and bacon, and cheese) I buy each week, but never said a word to the person a head of me with a cart filled with soda, ice-cream, chips, cookies, and organic Pop-Tarts…… all I have to say is:

Nah nah nah nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I win.

And, I have the coolest doctor like, ever.

CategoriesNutrition Strength Training Supplements

Two Things You Should Check Out

Note from TG:  I try my best not to come across as someone who overhypes stuff to my readers on a daily basis. 

I mean, it’s not really THAT big of a deal that The Wolverine opens this weekend.  You’d think based off how excited I am that I’d be walking around all week with toy Wolverine claws on or something.  That’s just silly talk.  Nope, not me.  That’s just absurd.

The Wolverine!!  Arrrrrggghhhh%@*!*!*^$*@!!

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system. I like to think that when I do go out of my way to promote something on this site that it’s something I know works and that I KNOW will help a lot of people.

It just so happens that today marks a unique instance where two things deserve your attention.

You know the pivotal scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when that evil Nazi Gestapo agent’s, Arnold Ernst Toht, face was melted off his, um, face?

Well I just had a similar experience from all the knowledge bombs that were thrown my direction after watching a sneak peak of Mike Robertson’s Mobility, Flexibility and Stability Training presentation.

A (40+ minute) presentation, mind you, he’s offering for FREE in anticipation of the release of his brand spankin new product, Bulletproof Athlete, next week.

Yeah, yeah I get it: mobility schmamility.  We need another mobility presentation about as much as we need another Tracy Anderson workout DVD.

Fist pump for that one, right?

But this is Mike freakin Robertson we’re talking about here. The guy trains his fair share of professional athletes and world record holders in powerlifting. Not to mention the numerous physique athletes and average Joes and Janes who trust him to keep them healthy, kicking-ass, and taking names.

There aren’t many coaches out there I trust more than Mike, and you can rest assured that whenever you have the opportunity to listen to him, you’re going to learn at least one thing.  Or in my case, 20.

In this presentation you’ll learn:

  • The three BEST methods for improving mobility from head to toe.
  • A definition of what mobility really is (as well as what it isn’t!)
  • Why mobility and stability are critical components of smart training, and why you need both to dominate in the gym or on the field.
  • How improving mobility can help you get rid of aches and pains in your knees, back and shoulders.
  • And most importantly how mobility training can help take your performance to the next level – whether that’s running fast, jumping high, or lifting heavy things for fun, Mike can help you out.

Again, this video is totally FREE, but only for the next couple of days.

Check it out HERE.

Something else I think many of you may find valuable and will want to check out is Examine.com’s Supplement Goals Reference Guide.

As a strength coach, and as someone who works with numerous high-school, collegiate, and professional athletes myself, on an almost daily basis I get asked “dude, is it customary to coach with your shirt off?” “dude, what supplements should I be taking?”

I’m not one to bag on supplements, as there’s a mountain of evidence to back their use.  But more often than not I fall into the camp which views supplements as progress enhancers, not progress starters.

Put another way:  if you’re current training and/or nutritional approach isn’t garnering the results you wanted, whether it’s to pack on mass, finally get rid of that ‘muffin top,’ or squat a rhinoceros (just go with it), taking a pill or adding a powder to your drink typically isn’t going to amass to much other than an empty wallet.

Nevertheless I do feel (s0me) supplements have their place, and serve a purpose. I believe things like fish oil, vitamin D, and protein powder, to name a few, should be utilized if for nothing else than their health benefits alone.

Where things get murky is when walk into your local GNC or open the latest MuscleRag and are inundated with supplements left and right that will claim to give you a six pack in three weeks, increase your testosterone levels by 217%, and make you shit rainbows (if that’s your bag).

The main monkey wrench is finding a reputable resource which doesn’t have an ulterior motive other than to give you evidence based research; something which will either confirm or dispute said claims.

Well here it is:

 

Supplement Goals Reference Guide

 

Some of you may recall a guest post that Examine.com’s very own, Sol Orwell, wrote earlier this year titled Supplements That Suck, Supplements That Work, and Supplements That Are Underrated – Part One, and Part Two, which you can think of as the Spark Notes version of the reference guide.

And that really isn’t giving it its due diligence.  We’re talking about a 700+ page manual that’s taken over two years to put together, encompassing over 20,000 individual studies, for only $29!

Needless to say, these guys know what works and what doesn’t.

Anytime you need to find out what a particular supplement does (creatine, for example) or are interested in a particular health goal (lowering blood glucose levels) this guide should be your go to source.  And you can feel confident that you won’t be misguided with smoke and mirrors or disingenuous intentions.

It’s just solid, evidence based information all around.

CategoriesNutrition

5 Reasons to Join a CSA

I don’t go out of my way to write a lot about nutrition on this site for a few reasons.  For starters it’s a highly debated topic with so many varying opinions and foods for thought (Ha!  Pun intended), that I just assume avoid any confrontation with the Paleo Bullies for having the gall to tell someone that it’s okay to have a scoop of ice-cream every now and then.

And for the record:  while I definitely lean more towards a “Paleo(ish)” style of eating, I also recognize that Gronk and his kin weren’t crushing broccoli and asparagus back in the day.

So back off Paleo peeps!

Secondly, I have a lot of very smart friends in this industry that I can defer people to if needed. As soon as someone reaches out to me and starts busting out verbiage like Glut-4 receptors, gluconeogenesis, or any number of similar big words, I point them in the direction of people like Brian St. Pierre, Dr. Cassandra Forsythe, Dr. Mike Roussell, Dr. John Berardi, Alan Aragon, and Gandalf.

Because, you know, Gandalf knows everything.

But really I just like to keep things as simple as possible.  At the end of the day it generally comes down to a handful of things:

1. Helping people make better food choices.

2. Helping them get over some behavioral humps which block success.

I mean, it’s not rocket science that crushing a bag of chocolate covered pretzels right before bed isn’t the best choice and that it probably won’t help in one’s fat-loss endeavors. But people do it anyway despite knowing better.

Much of the time it’s about helping people set themselves up for success and come up with specific behavioral strategies that will keep then on task.

For example:  how about not having the bag of chocolate covered pretzels in the house in the first place?

Nonetheless, I don’t want to get too off-track because I actually do have something I want to bring to light today.

Lisa and I joined a CSA!!!!

This is something we’ve both discussed doing together for at least two years now (since we moved in together), but for some reason have been putting it off for whatever reasons.

Whether it was cost, too long of a waiting list, busy schedules, some Star Wars convention that got in the way, what have you, we made excuses.

Which is weird because we’re both very health conscious, and go out of our way to buy a metric shit-ton (ie:  a lot) of greens, organic this, gluten-free that every week when we do our grocery shopping.

Whenever we walk into Whole Foods and Lisa sees something she’s never seen before (OMG rutabaga is on sale Tony!!!!) her eyes immediately widen and she’s like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, sans the creepy Oompa Loompas.

So a few weeks ago we decided to nip things in the bud and join our very first local CSA here in Massachusetts.

For those scratching their heads and wondering what the heck CSA stands for, it’s Community Supported Agriculture.

Essentially the nuts and bolts is this:  it’s a commitment between individuals or families and farmers, where people pay a lump sum into a farm as members at the start of the growing season, and in exchange receive a weekly “share” of the farm’s harvest.

What’s cool about the one Lisa and I joined is that it offers several different options like a vegetable share, egg share, flower share, and fruit share.

We opted for the vegetable share, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I try to snake some eggs and fruit into the mix on occasion.

Additionally, to sweeten the pot our CSA is one that delivers to area Whole Foods markets throughout Mass. and Boston. So all we have to do is show up between “x” hours on a specific day at our local Whole Foods parking lot (which is less than a mile away from our apartment) and pick up our basket of locally grown, fresh, organic, veggies.

So with that I figured I’d give what I feel are the top FIVE reasons to join a CSA.

1.  You Support Local Agriculture

More to the point, you KNOW where you’re food is coming from. While I understand people have great intentions when buying organic at their local supermarket, does it really make any difference if the food is being shipped from half-way across the world in order to make it to your dinner plate?

When you support local agriculture, you’re supporting your LOCAL economy and ensuring that your local farms will prosper and continue to produce delicious, nutrient-dense foods in the long-term.

And this doesn’t even take into consideration the substantial reduction in the carbon footprint when you purchase locally.

2. More Nutrient Dense

How “nutritious” is that head of kale or romaine by the time it’s shipped from 2,000 miles away to your market? This isn’t to say that you’re still not going to get a bevy of nutrients, but I’d garner a guess that buying more local produce is a heckuva lot more nutritious in the long run.

3. It Tastes Better

I think this one goes without saying. Once you’ve biten into a locally grown apple fresh off the tree, you’ll understand that those apples you’ve been eating from Whereeverthef*** taste like sandpaper dipped in lice poop.

4.  You’ll Eat More Seasonal Produce

We’ve grown accustomed to having the opportunity to eat what we want, when we want, all year round. While this is great – hey, I want my bananas year round too – it pigeon holes us into not venturing out and trying new things.

Joining a CSA forces you to try more seasonal foods, and opens up your “foodie” repertoire.

You’ll just die when you try your first roasted parsnip.

5.  It’s Cheaper!?

I know some may balk at the price-tag of some CSAs – and admittedly, some are pretty expensive.  But I’d venture a guess that most will end up saving money in the long run.

It’s not uncommon for Lisa and I to spend roughly $50 per week on produce alone between Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Take a peek into your grocery cart and you’d think we were feeding an army of rabbits.

The CSA we joined has 24 total distributions starting in early June running all the way through early December, which is going to significantly reduce our weekly grocery bill.

Holla!

Those are just a handful of course, and certainly don’t represent all the benefits of joining a CSA. I also heard through the grapevine that joining one increases t-levels by like 47%.  Give you take.*

Either way, I’d love to hear everyone else sound off. Do you have your own CSA story to share?  Did you like it?  Hate it? Felt it was a waste of time or the best thing since sliced bread?

Please, share your comments below.

* = For the record: I completely made that up.  It’s more like 49%

CategoriesFemale Training Miscellaneous Miscellany Nutrition Product Review

Miscellaneous Miscellany Monday: Lots of Catching Up to Do Edition

1. Another busy weekend in the books!  Yesterday I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at the New Hampshire Athletic Trainer’s Association annual symposium.

A few year’s back I remember attending a similar function with Eric at Northeastern University and walking in with jeans on and feeling completely out of place.  Apparently I missed the memo (and it’s an unspoken rule) that athletic trainers have a tendency of wearing nothing but tan khaki pants!  LOLz.

Not that I would ever consider speaking in a pair of jeans (unless I was speaking at Google), but I did make it a point of wearing tan khaki pants yesterday so that I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Success!

And speaking of success, yesterday was awesome.  First on the docket was Dr. Eric. Berkson (Director, MGH Sports Performance Center, Instructor in Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and team physician to the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots), who talked at length about common shoulder and elbow injuries seen in pitchers. Many of his thoughts, not surprisingly, mirrored that of ours at Cressey Performance – especially with regards to placing more credence in symmetry of TOTAL range of motion between (IR + ER) between the dominant and non-throwing shoulder.

Expectantly, lack of IR, commonly referred to at GIRD (Glenohumeral Internal Rotation Deficit), is predictive and not quite the “red flag” it was 2-3 years ago.

Additionally he stressed that many of the throwing injuries we see in young(er) baseball players is due to overuse, misuse, and not paying attention to pitch counts.

And then there was me, Tony Gentilcore (who has no affiliation with Harvard what-so-ever other than having a teeny-tiny man crush on one of their alumni, Matt Damon) who spoke more on the performance side of things.  I delved into how we go about managing our overhead athletes, discussed some of the assessment process, spoke to the intricacies of dealing with a population that, unlike everyone else, lives in extension for a good portion of the year, gave the Cliff Notes version to breathing patterns and how we implement them, and maybe had a tip or two on how to improve one’s spin on their curveball….;o)

All in all it was an awesome afternoon and it was truly an honor to be involved in it.

2.  Just a quick reminder that slots are still open for the Elite Training Workshop at Cressey Performance the weekend of April 20th.  The line-up is BALLER, with the likes of Eric Cressey, Mike Roberson, Mike Reinold, Dave Schmitz, myself, Greg Long, and Jared Woolever slated to speak.

For $99 you can’t beat the price.

Go HERE for more details.

3. Last week I wrote a little sumthin sunthin on Strong Curves, the new book by my good friends Bret Contreras and Kellie Davis that I feel is going to be a game changer in the realm of women and fitness.

I won’t continue to sing its praises here (you can read my review HERE), but I do want to give everyone a heads up on another fantastic product by another good friend of mine, Nia Shanks.

Nia has openly discussed her (past) battle with disordered eating routinely on her blog, and I can’t tell you how much I respect her for not only showing how human she is, but that she’s so willing to help others in the process.

I don’t think I have to tell everyone reading that it takes a lot of guts to open yourself up like that to the masses.

Myself, many of my colleagues, as well as Nia have noticed an unfortunate trend in the nutrition world where things have gotten so convoluted and complicated that people have no idea what the hell they should be eating!  This phenomena – thanks in no small part to the likes of the mainstream media and gossip magazines – seems to be hitting its tipping point in the female demographic.

To the point where I overhead a woman talking to her friend not too long ago in Panera explaining that she wasn’t sure if she should have an apple included with her lunch because of the carbs.  Mind you, she was crushing a massive sandwich.

Anyways, Nia felt it was high-time to put an end to the madness so she developed her own answer to the problem.

===> Sane and Simple Nutrition <===

Cue slow cap here.

It’s an ebook, it’s nothing fancy (it doesn’t have to be), but the information is SOLID.  I (along with Nia) don’t ever claim to have all the answers, but sometimes we just need to filter through the stupid and come back to common sense.  And that is exactly what I wholeheartedly encourage anyone interested to check it our for themselves.

This ain’t NASA.  Eat the apple!

4.  Speaking of nutriton, I’m really, really fascinated by the food industry.  More to the point, I’m almost at awe at the food industry’s Jedi-like “mind trick” powers at convincing people that certain foods are “healthy” when they’re clearly anything but.  ORGANIC Toaster Pastries anyone???

Lisa dragged me into a Target yesterday (don’t judge me!), and we happened to walk through the food section and I couldn’t help but drown in the bullshit.  I noticed that General Mills has a new variation of Cheerios out called Multi-Grain Cheerios w/ Peanut Butter!

The kicker is the advertising and how they gloat that the first ingredient is WHOLE GRAIN!!!!!  Like whoa! I should be doing cartwheels down the aisle and kissing every baby I see within a mile radius.

Upon further inspection, the “whole grain” they’re referring to is none other than whole grain corn, followed by sugar. Naturally.

Sigh.

While it’s technically not wrong of them to say the first ingredient is a “whole grain,” I think it’s fairly egregious of them to use that as a selling point of tactic.

Now if you excuse me I need to go throw my face on an ax.

NOTE:  for those interested in food industry shenanigans I’d highly recommend becoming a regular reader of Dr. Yoni Freedhoff’s blog Weighty Matters.

Awesome stuff.

5.  For those looking to kill roughly five minutes, HERE’s a radio interview I did while I was back in my hometown last week prior to speaking at my Alma Mater.

The guy doing the interview LOVED my “abs are made in the kitchen” comment.

6.  If you ever would have told me at some point in my life that I’d see my name in the likes of Forbes, I would have laughed. While I didn’t make the any list such as Most Powerful or Top Five People Most Likely to Be Issued a Restraining Order From Kate Beckinsale World’s Richest People, it was still pretty neat to see my name in print on their site.

Thanks for Greatest.com’s Chief Research Officer and Editor, David Tao, for asking me contribute on THIS article on Interval (or HIIT) training has changed the industry – for better or worse.

7.  In other cameo appearance news, I also helped contribute to another article titled 16 Exercises from the World’s Best Trainers collected by Jon-Erik Kawamoto on Livestrong.com.

And that’s that.

CategoriesMotivational Nutrition

An Athlete’s Approach to Optimal Eating

I’ve had a great run of weekly guest posts from various people in the fitness world as of late, and I wanted to keep the streak going with another one from Nate Miyaki.

For those unfamiliar, Nate is a regular contributor at T-Nation and generally leans more on the nutrition side of things.  I’ve grown to really respect his body of work and appreciate his simple, minimalist (yet very effective) approach to nutrition. In addition, I KNOW he walks the walk and doesn’t just talk a big game.  My man is shredded!

I hate to say it, but there are A LOT of people out there that seem (maybe prefer?) to make things waaaaaaay more complicated than they have to be, and the topic of what to eat and when ranks right up there.

Is it better to eat low carb or high carb?  Is it okay to eat past 6 PM? Because fruit contains fructose, we should avoid it at all costs, right? Is 1.0 grams of protein per lb of bodyweight best for optimal results or is 1.376 a better number to shoot for?  And since everyone and their Little League coach is doing it, what’s the deal with Intermittent Fasting?  

You would think, based off how some people dissect every nook and cranny of their diet, that they’re  performing rocket science or trying to figure out why it is women are drawn to the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon.

Nonetheless, in today’s post Nate dives into how athlete’s should strive to eat, and offers a sorta pre-game speech to set people straight.  His sentiments mirror much of mine, and I think many of you will appreciate it.

Enjoy! 

From the moment you put on that jersey, grab a bat, strap on the gloves, buckle up the chin strap, climb under the bar, or lace up a pair of sneakers, cleats, or skates; the sands of time start ticking away.

Most athletes only get a relatively short window within which to accomplish something great.  That’s a gift in itself, because the majority of people were just not born with the natural talents or skills to even get a chance.

If you’re one of the lucky few, you need to take advantage of that privilege.  For once its gone, it’s gone forever.   Don’t wake up one morning wishing you had done more when you had the chance.  You have the rest of your life to kick back, follow the crowd, and be mediocre.

But while your opportunity is here, right now in this moment, why not do everything possible to give yourself the best chance of succeeding?  Why not use every weapon at your disposal to maximize your true athletic potential?

Dietary Discipline & Maximizing Your Potential

One of the most important weapons is your diet.  Unfortunately, it is often the most overlooked by performance athletes, because the truth is you can perform decently on a suboptimal diet.  Anecdotally, there is no arguing that given some of the sh*t lists I’ve seen from some of my own athletes.  Do you even know what a caramel dumpling is?

But you certainly are not maximizing your true potential and performing at your genetic peak with this approach.

Our generation has lost something.  We’ve become a bunch of entitled whiners expecting something for nothing, always looking for that quick fix.  We’ve lost that ability to strive, to sacrifice, to set goals, to do everything possible to achieve them, and to never waver in their pursuit.

We’ll take short cuts and cheat the system any chance we can get; yet we shy away from the day-to-day grind that is really necessary to climb to the top.  We’ll take a pill, but won’t change our daily habits.

So before we spend time getting into dietary details, which we will, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.  If we don’t solve this riddle first, all subsequent nutrition articles will be meaningless.

Athlete or Average?

You have to decide right now whether you consider yourself an athlete or an average dude (or girl).  One gets more leeway, sympathy, and handholding.  The other gets a swift kick in the nuts (or female equivalent, metaphorically speaking) when they show up to a training session with a bagel in hand, sipping on a latte.

Are you preparing to fuel your body for battle, or are you, in stealing a line from the great Dan John, “eating like a child”  that needs a bag of Skittles to much on while sending your BFF texts about the Twilight Saga?

The average dude comes in for a few workouts a week, then goes and hangs out at Applebee’s.  An athlete lives like one 24/7, whether their coach is watching over them or not, whether its “hard” and “inconvenient” or not.

Which are you?  There’s no right or wrong answer.  But as a coach, I need to know.  Because you talk to guys on the field a lot different than the ones sitting in the stands.

It amazes me to see guys and gals train like madmen, then go out and eat pizza and ice cream.  They have the discipline of a warrior within the lines, but a bullsh*t excuse-maker outside of it.

You’re saying you have dreams and want to be the best, but your actions are screaming something very different.

It’s Not Just How You Lift, It’s How You Live

Don’t you need to junk-load to increase calories and support your training?  No.  Never.  Do you want to follow plans based on marketing material or plans based on science, or just pure common sense?

What do you think a dietary induced, chronically inflamed body is doing to your ability to recover from your training sessions, or for your nagging knee and shoulder pain?

That pastry sounds like sh*ts and giggles to the average, but its not if you have elite goals.

Cellular integrity, insulin sensitivity, and optimal nutrient partitioning can all degrade over time with a poor diet.  What do you think that does to your ability to put on functional muscle that makes you faster and more powerful vs. non-functional fat that makes you slower and less explosive?

And sure, you may be able get away with whatever you want nutritionally in your 20’s.  But the small percentage who extend their careers into their latter years are the ones who took care of their bodies and followed an informed path right from the beginning.

You call yourself an athlete, than live like an athlete — on the field, in the gym, and in the kitchen.

Start With the Simple – Optimize Food Choices

I don’t want this article to be just about philosophy, psychology, pontification, and rah-rah ramblings. You need some practicality as well.

So how should an athlete nutritionally support their competition and training demands?  Do it through quality, nutrient dense foods that serve a physiological and metabolic purpose.

So hit those high quality animal proteins for the essential amino acids necessary to build lean muscle mass, and for the essential fatty acids and good fats necessary to support optimum hormone production.

We’re talking grass-fed beef, wild fish, free-range poultry, and eggs — all hormone and anti-biotic free, of course.

Don’t eat fast food, salami slices, or candy bars with protein added to it to justify “getting your protein in”.  The #5 combo will be waiting for you when you’re trying to grow some chins, not be fast and powerful enough to land that knockout punch on your opponent’s chin.

Include some plant foods like vegetables and whole fruits for a variety of micronutrients and phytonutrients, not a bunch of empty calories combined with randomly shot-gunning a bunch of pills to try and make up for the nutrient deficiencies.

Maybe your mama thinks eating a bowl of cornflakes and chewing on a Flintstones vitamin is the Athlete’s Way.  I don’t.

And carbs?  I love Paleo nutrition as a baseline template. It automatically gets rid of many of the problematic compounds in the modern Y2K diet.  That’s why 80% of my dietary recommendations are based off of it.

But as a high performance athlete, you can’t follow it all the way down the rabbit hole and end up in some dietary cult.  You’re not a sedentary, pre-diabetic, insulin resistant office worker.  And you are certainly not a frickin’ caveman.  You’re a modern athlete with modern performance goals.

The game is different.  You need to understand a thing or two about exercise physiology, and integrate some modern, researched, Sports Nutrition principles to properly fuel and recover from your training sessions.

Many athletes get caught up in following the universal, dogmatic proclamations of carbophobic academics whose only sport has ever been jogging (Ron Burgundy pronounces it Yogging).  But high intensity strength and intermittent sprint sports are fueled by anaerobic metabolism, which can only run on glucose/glycogen.

That doesn’t mean loading up on bologne sandwiches and fruit roll ups.  You want starches without the toxic compounds, potential food allergens, or “anti-nutrients” that can wreck the digestive system, impair nutrient absorption, and leave you tired and lethargic.

So cut the sugar, refined flour, and gluten-based starches.  Stick with starchy tubers (yams, sweet potatoes, white potatoes) and white rice to support your training.

Drink some high quality H20 like the Water Boy recommends, not Diet Coke.

Conclusion

I get it.  It’s easy to watch highlights of your favorite athlete, or film on your next opponent, or just flip through the pages of Playboy, crank up some AC/DC, and get amped up like a madman to train.

When the adrenaline subsides, and some semblance of a normal human being returns, however, it is a lot harder to get fired up to eat a grass-fed steak and potato instead of pizza and fries.  But I believe it’s equally important to your long-term athletic success.

For every one genetically gifted or drug enhanced athlete that can get away with a crappy diet, there are ten that can’t.  Everything you put into your body makes a difference.  It’s up to you whether that difference is positive or negative.

Author’s Bio

 

 

Nate Miyaki is a fitness author, athlete, and coach. He is the author of the new book “Intermittent Feast: An Evolutionary & Scientific Approach to Slashing Fat”.  Visit his site at www.NateMiyaki.com.

CategoriesNutrition Supplements

Supplement Review: Supplements That Suck, Supplements That Work, and Supplements That Are Underrated Part I

The topic of supplements is about as controversial as they come – right up there with homeland security, government deficit spending,  global warming, that silly ban on big gulp sodas in NYC, and trying to figure out who the best Spice Girl was back in the day.

Scary Spice obviously.  No, wait…..Sporty Spice! 

On one end of the spectrum you have those who take a minimalist approach (like myself) and generally advocate people to lean more towards those supplements which elicit positive health benefits outright; such as fish oil, vitamin D, multi-vitamin (or a Green’s product), protein powder, and I’d even throw creatine into the mix.

On the other end of the spectrum you have those who take anything and everything under the sun and whose kitchen cabinets look more like a pharmacy than where they keep their peanut butter and canned peas.

Regardless of which side of the spectrum you fall on, to say that the supplement industry is a bit confusing is a massive understatement.  Which ones work?  Which ones are a waste of money?  Which ones cause explosive diarrhea?  These are all very important questions.

Thankfully my buddy, Sol Orwell of Examine.com, offered to sift through the muddy waters and provide some much needed insight on some common supplements and whether or not they’re worth the hype.

Enjoy!

Overrated Supplements

Glucosamine

Glucosamine is usually marketed as a joint health supplement, and is commonly used by many athletes to either help alleviate joint pain and/or increase the mobility of joints.

Despite how popular glucosamine is (one survey found that 5% of the entire population had taken glucosamine), beyond exhaustive research into people with osteoarthritis, there is very little research done into glucosamine usage by athletes.

Glucosamine is usually associated with being a building block of collagen or otherwise stimulating its synthesis. While glucosamine can do that, it’s in concentrations that you cannot achieve with oral supplementation. What it can do is help decrease the rate of collagen breakdown; essentially it can slow down further degeneration, but it cannot actual cure the problem.

Glucosamine is not outright crap; it could potentially be an anti-catabolic (but not anabolic) agent for connective tissue in athletes undergoing high impact training.

However, using it to help deal with joint health is likely wasted money. It can slightly help (a meta analysis found that it can slightly reduce pain), but it is nowhere near as amazing as marketed.

Tribulus Terrestris (and “testosterone boosters” in general)

Tribulus is a triumph in marketing and human psychology. It is one of the few supplements that has ample evidence to outright demonstrate that it doesn’t work. Still, it is the most popular testosterone booster on the market (with d-aspartic acid coming up fast).

Tribulus is a libido enhancer, confers some urogenital benefits (reduced formation of kidney stones), is generally a healthy herb, has some antioxidant and antiinflammatory properties, and is potentially heart healthy.

It does not boost testosterone, nor luteinizing hormone, at all; there is no evidence to support this claim and there is quite a bit of evidence against it. Treat it like a vegetable (good for you) that also makes you horny, but does not actually increase testosterone

On the topic of testosterone boosters in general – they do exist, there are a few studies (mostly  in animals) to support their actions and efficacy in increasing testosterone.

The category is just overhyped; no testosterone booster will give you the muscular gains that are classically ascribed to testosterone boosters and no study has actually measured the muscular gains from a testosterone boosting herb intervention. Theoretically, it should be dose-dependent (assuming you eat right and work out, the more testosterone the better) but the magnitude of benefit could be so small it isn’t even that visible.

Statistically? Significant. Practically? Irrelevant. Most of the testosterone boosters being marketed increase your libido; people incorrectly assume their increased libido is due to a correlated increase in testosterone.

Testosterone boosters should be viewed as cognitive enhancers. They make you horny and a bit confident and might increase cognition and output in the gym, but the ones currently on the market are unlikely to ‘pack on muscle’.

Glutamine

With the importance of dietary protein come the individual amino acids being sold as their own supplements. Common ones include BCAAs, leucine, glutamine, arginine, and tyrosine. Glutamine is one of the more popular ones, and really the only one that truly does not fit its claim (arginine technically does, although is subpar; glutamine just seems to be lying).

Glutamine is said to build muscle, and supplementation of glutamine in real-life situations just does not.

Glutamine is involved in cell anabolism, and is especially important for the cell when it is sitting outside of a body in a culture. When glutamine is introduced to a muscle cell in isolation, there is dose-dependent muscle growth; this has been demonstrated repeatedly, and glutamine is basically a requirement for a proper in vitro study to just keep the cell alive (glutamine being the food source).

That being said, glutamine is highly regulated in a living system; there will not be such an excess of glutamine at a cellular level since it can simply be converted to carbohydrates in excess or otherwise partitioned to other organs. Oral glutamine supplementation is well known to be sequestered by the intestines and liver, leaving barely any to reach the muscle cell (only as much as the body seems to allow).

The only time glutamine builds muscle mass is when the body is in a glutamine deficient state. This is obscenely rare, and seems to only frequently occur in physical trauma patients or burn victims. Glutamine can build muscle in these settings (or at least, slow the incredible rate of muscle loss) and has absolutely no evidence beyond these settings.

There is a school of thought that glutamine can be a sacrificial amino acid during periods of carbohydrate and caloric restriction, and thus provide an anti-catabolic effect by being gluconeogenerated itself in place of skeletal muscle; this works in theory, but has not yet been demonstrated.

Check back tomorrow for part two, where I’ll cover supplements that I actually like and those I feel are drastically underrated.

Author’s Bio

 

Kurtis Frank and Sol Orwell are cofounders of Examine.com, where they spend their time making sense of scientific studies on supplements and nutrition. They also have a Beginners Guide to Supplements, which you should really, really check out (subtle hint).