Supplements for sports performance

For some time I've been supplementing my diet with a post-workout whey protein recovery formula that includes both fast- and slow-digesting carbohydrates and protein isolytes high in the amino acid leucine. Check the results:

                                                                   62" Tuck Jump

A few months ago I walked into the local GNC (Cumberland Parkway in Mechanicsburg) to price protein powder and to do some field study for a writing time such as this.

"How can I help you today sir?" 

"Can (may) I get a price on a 2.2 lb container of whey protein powder?"

"Well, we carry...[ya-ta-ta-razzledazzle-yadayadayada]." 

"No thanks man, just straight protein." 

Mr. Push then offered me a host of vitamins and oils that support whey protein and proceeded to ask what I'm training for.

"Oh, you mean like, my training goals?"

At that point I decided to humor him. Kind of. I told him that I'd just like to gain weight, and also to lose weight. Without pause he turned to walk toward a corner of the store where they display five types of fat burners next to male enhancement formulas. He handed me a red and yellow labeled fat burner and some low caloric effervescent creatine.

I glossed over the fine print on a few of the labels. He stood there. I looked up and allowed for awkward silence. THAT was far too much to bear for either of us. So I jumped in and said something like this:

"I'm not so sure. What I really need is something that will just make me better at life."

He paused and smirked. He was FINALLY getting it. I think.

Back to the video, which hopefully serves as more than a showcase for showboating.

A 5'2" tuck jump? Yeah. That just happened.

It happened with no supplements outside of a sporadic scoop of whey protein powder that probably does very little other than make me think I'm "consuming" something good for me. Oh, yeah, and caffeine.

The GNC guy didn't ask if I've set specific training goals and what I may be doing in my work or other life that's pushing me toward or away from them. He didn't care about any physical impairments or my training history. There was no mention of exactly how I'm exercising, much less recovering. He didn't ask if I ate anything for breakfast. I once came across that idea and loved it:

What supplements should you be taking? Well, what did you eat for breakfast today? If you have no time to eat a decent breakfast, then you have no business asking about supplements. 

And this is honestly the best site for supplements EVER. It's evidence-based with nearly 20,000 citations and 0 marketing hype. The search format makes it super user friendly. And right here is a huge Debbie Downer where I go ahead and tell you that outside of caffeine/taurine and creatine, they ALL have a minimal effect. 

Seriously check this out:  http://examine.com/blog/weve-solved-supplement-confusion/

Sorry GNC guy.

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Treating shin splints - you can do better

Shin splints are miserable. They attack one of the boniest, most splintery places in the entire anatomy.

This writing is for those who have already tried the typical ice, soft tissue massage, electric stimulation, activity modification, and anti-inflammatory drugs, only to find the splints remaining firmly in place when they resume the provocative activity, which is almost always running and jumping.

At that point, you probably tried to rectify the problem with something like this:

Dear Shin Splints, ...


Contrary to common belief, shin splints are not due to splintering of bone, but from the tendons of the lower leg muscles being repeatedly pulled from their insertion point on the tibia (the thicker lower leg bone). Shin splints are an inflammatory over-use condition due excessive tensile strain along the lower leg muscles. There's simply too much force, too often, for too long, or some combination of the these.

"Two weeks off" is common first-line medical advice. But you can't afford to waste that two weeks droning away on a stationary bike or [YAWN] elliptical trainer. Running through this problem without treating the root cause can easily progress to a tibial stress fracture. And let me tell you that no matter how badass your lower legs appear in their elaborate kinesiotape patterns, you're going to need more than two weeks to recover from a stress fracture.

Here are some suggestions on how to spend your two weeks off.

1. Be evaluated by a physical therapist who's trained in this area. Seriously. A detailed look at the strength and mobility of the trunk, hip, knee, ankle, and foot, isolated as well as how they work in combination, will usually reveal something contributing to the excessive strain on the lower leg. Analysis of running and jumping technique is invaluable.

 Even if your personal trainer or athletic trainer has the knowledge to identify a portion of these, he or she probably doesn't have the time to assess much less correct the issues.

2. Along those lines, get strong in corrective exercises that target any identified poor movement patterns or other impairments.  Most resistance exercise demands very little impact. A handful of low intensity foot/ankle mobility drills and light resistance work can be performed multiple times per day in order to increase the resiliency of the tissue for when you return to high intensity activities.

3.  Give attention to your shoes. If you train regularly and intensely in shoes that were on sale at Kohls for $34.99, well, you get what you pay for. Serious athletes should not be training in random shoes made with materials fit for driving the kids to soccer practice. There's no substitute for quality shoes correctly fitted and suited for your foot type.

4. Orthotics (off-the-shelf or custom), braces, and taping techniques all hold great potential for decreasing the tensile strain demands of the involved muscles. It's difficult to say which of these may be best for any given individual, but we usually start with the least invasive and costly means and work from there as needed.

5. Return Gradually. Once your two weeks of "rest" are up, do not try to accomplish too much too quickly. That's likely a large portion of what got you into shin splints in the first place.

Keep careful tabs on distance, duration, and repetitions (that's foot contacts for jumpers etc.). Especially watch out for running on hard and graded surfaces. It's the down hill that kills, as well as the plod plod plodding, pounding along when the legs fatigue. This occurs relatively quickly for those who are generally deconditioned, especially if they are above ideal body mass.

I often advise clients to begin with some modified up-hill sprints, in grass if possible. Hill sprints are a semi-specific way to prepare the body for normal running, jumping, and cutting, with plenty of conditioning effect but far less impact.

Miracle Pill

"The real value of running is that it is not work but play," concludes Mark Rowlands in this essay
that attempts to answer the question of why people run. The author goes on to ask if you would still run if you could take a pill that would provide all the health, fitness, aesthetic, and feel-good benefits.



...and you feel happier when you're awesome ; )

The idea of doing something for its intrinsic worth rather than toward another end can be applied to many things in life. I still have a chip on my shoulder about running and other general long-drawn-out cardio exercise. The people who run even though they hate it. The people who love running and just know that running is THE panacea of all fitness. The coaches who overly push distance running onto their athletes to achieve ends that are inconsistent with their goals or the demands of their sport.

But those are not the points of this writing. Running because you like it as play and not work -  certainly no arguments there!

Would I still lift weights and do sprints/plyos and basketball and mountain biking if there were a pill that provided all of the same benefits? That idea seems delusional to me. It smells bad. Dysfunctional. Like sitting down hungry to a nice meal and spitting out every bite.

Pills cannot capture the process of challenging, pushing, building, and growing the entire system. It is literally the mechanical compression and tensile strain that stimulates the body to signal the brain to release an entire army of various hormones, endorphins being among them. The body and mind and spirit benefit most from squaring up to discomfort (in its many forms - definitely not just exercise or physical discomfort). The mental gymnastics, physiological toil, and some sort of objective outcome or aim are all irreducibly connected. Health and vitality and joy come by saying "not today" as you swallow the bitter pill of discomfort.

So yes, when it comes to exercising our bodies, what we call "work outs" can and probably should be considered play. But may we also consider this a process of applying structured, controlled dosages of discomfort that forms and reforms our mind and body and spirit into something it previously was not. This we call "exercise."

This is not true suffering (well, at least it shouldn't be). This is not to say that "zoning out" to the point of hardly noticing the discomfort isn't a valuable experience. But discomfort in this context may be the closest thing we have to a miracle pill.

get heavy to lose weight

[On the heels of this post about how I train, here's an entry about how I eat. People question that about half as often. Thankfully.]

At around the age of six I discovered my grandfather eating Penrose sausages. We polished off a jar of them babies in no time. I requested that mom add them to our grocery list, and for a few weeks I was eating a lot of Penrose.

That happened to coincide with a time when I was learning to read. At one point, while sitting down to more smoked and processed, ready-to-eat bliss, I read the ingredients on the back of the jar.

...chicken, pork, salt, beef lips,...

"WHAT? MOOOM. Does this say really say BEEF LIPS???" 

I couldn't get the image out of my head. I never thought about the lips of a cow, but now I went to bed and woke up thinking about how many lips I had eaten. I haven't since had a single Penrose and the number of hot dogs I've eaten can be counted on both hands. 

I'm no dietitian or nutritionist or finicky food nazi. To this day I can and will eat certain things at McDonalds or wherever else typical Healthfitnessdiet People (usually with a sales agenda) bastardize.

So here they are, without further beef lips, the three rules that I live by.

1. Read the ingredients. 

This is the first rule I learned to follow far before I knew about the relationship between how you eat and how you feel and function.

You don't need a PhD as a dietitian or chemist or biologist to know that putting too many ingredients like yellow coloring no. 6 and partially hydrogenated oils and propylene glycols into your system is probably not good for you. Beef lips, while high on the gross factor, are ironically low on the list of things we should be concerned about.

I'm not suggesting that you (or I) never eat foods with such ingredients. Personally, I'm okay with taking in a little high fructose corn syrup, caramel coloring, and sodium nitrate. But I don't want to over do it. Merely reading the ingredients of the foods and beverages you often eat ensures you're not the one setting a new record for Lamb Fries.

This summarized exactly how I felt after reading beef lips:



2. No deep fried foods.

Simple as that. There are too many other healthy and unhealthy options that are measurable less toxic on your system. 

3. Get heavy. 

Losing weight and looking lean and fit are not the same thing. At around 200 pounds, I carry 15 to 25 pounds more than my frame would naturally carry without all the resistance training. Because of this, my energy furnace is pretty huge. Functional and lean mass provide plenty of margin for a non-precision diet. The mind and body do not pay for occasional treats or hogging out or even eating like a normal person without time for dishes that require an hour to prepare.

If you want to look good without dieting hard, lift heavy. Seriously, put on some weight. I've rehabbed and trained and simply observed what's going on with a lot of people. Being lean and fit is highly challenging when you have little muscle to support your efforts.

Further observation:


Maintaining fitness and leanness is MUCH easier than achieving it. Things are easy once you get the ball rolling with a regular training routine. You lose the taste for a lot of junk (but probably not all junk).

Diets are good and necessary but they are always hard to sustain. Keep in mind that MUCH of their effectiveness comes by the fact that they are restrictive. Most of the bazillion food products that you normally have easy access to are now simply off limits. You have fewer options and get bored. So you simply end up eating less.

If you're underwhelmed at all the diet/fitness information overload here and on all the innernets, I recommend the Paleo Diet. If you ain't even got time fodat, take 10 minutes to read the two chapters on diet in The Four Hour Body. Timothy Ferris is no scientist, but he's a great writer and summarizes all you need to know.

- - - - -

Also, for further reading, here's the strict regimen I maintain in my personal diet plan:
THE PERSPECTIVE DIET.

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repping out in circuits with twice your 1-rep max

I'm going to apologize up front for sounding like a chief here.

It's approximately 5 times per week that someone asks what I'm doing to stay in shape, what, how, or how often I train. My entries here often touch on different aspects of this. I strive to inform and inspire without being that trainer guy who thinks his is THE way and really just wants to show you his package. [Package in every sense of the word.] 

I do little personal training. The hardcore weightlifting and conditioning is more of a hobby that gets me through the days as an employee and otherwise responsible citizen. My day-to-day work grants some opportunity to train athletes, but the far majority of my time involves assisting people to where they can get on with their everyday life and work and training to be awesome.

Maybe they expect some grand secret, complex and cutting-edge. Most shrug and seem fairly disappointed when I say that I lift pretty hard twice per week with just a handful of the "big"moves.

So here is exactly what I did last Saturday. I began with some light warm-ups then 4 sets of this circuit:

Chin-ups with 125 extra lbs around my waist for 5 reps, to
"Lawn Mower" row with barbell loaded to 150 lbs for 5 reps on each side, to
Single arm clean to overhead press using 85 lb dumbbell, 5 reps each arm, to
Push up/row combo holding long plank position over 50 lb dumbbells, 5 reps each arm.

I finished up with a few sets of barbell shoulder presses before finishing the workout with a brutal set of squats (455 lbs X 20 reps).

I refrained from posting video footage, but I have it.The relevant points here are:

1. I've gradually built to handle awfully heavy resistance (for me) on total body movements.
2. It does not take a lot of time or equipment to be in shape or what-have-you.
3. Working hard at a few of the big moves that are suited for your body and goals are far more important than many other technical details that bog people down.
4. If there's anything special about my body or physiology or whatever, it's only that I show up consistently and (these days) do a decent job of allowing my body to adapt and recover.

Maybe I should take a different strategy the next time someone asks how I train. I'll strike a front double biceps (pose), lean in close and say "THE secret is this."

While you were screwing around with high tech machines and training schedule algorithms, exercise intensifiers and muscle confusion and changing it up every two weeks, I was repping out in circuits with twice your 1 rep max.

if you could bottle this and sell it

...I tried to name it, but alas, I could not find a worthy label, much less bottle this thing people want.   

Exhibit A: 20-rep squats

Did you know that it's awesome to barbell squat 315 lbs? That's a 45-lb barbell with three 45-lb plates loaded on each side. Merely the sight of it is something to behold.

Do you know what it feels like to squat 315-lbs? With good form? No knees buckling inward. No plia half reps or rounding of the spine or exaggerated forward trunk lean? I think that feeling is something like miseraspectacular.

Do you know what you can do in life if you can squat 315 with good form? Your posture is good. Your trunk and legs are strong and stable. Unless you're a huge meat head, you probably have a deep well from which to draw when jumping and sprinting and practicing various feats of athleticism to your hearts content.

Now imagine what it's like to squat 315-pounds for 20 repetitions in a row. With each effortful rep comes an additional heaping of misery and mental fortitude and awesomeness broad and wide. You don't need repeated death circuits or 45 minutes of running (though you probably could if you had to) because you just squatted 315-lbs for 20 freakin reps.

Why 20-reps? Well, because. If you care, read THIS IS 20-REP SQUATS.

Exhibit B: Kyle Kohler

Last week Kyle squatted 315 for 20*. He's fast. He can tuck jump close to 5 feet. From what I hear he's a force on the (hockey) ice.

My 1-year old daughter runs to him with open arms, which may be a larger accomplishment than all the rest.

I don't want to hear excuses. When I first met Kyle he had severe right hip pain that was possibly a torn hip labrum. He was weak in the hips and core. His ankle and hip mobility were terrible in all directions. He literally could not squat 20 reps with a broom stick over his head.

When many athletes and gym rats his age were fooling around with fads and high tech-looking gadgets, Kyle put his nose to the grindstone at square one. He worked on controlled mobility (flexibility and stability). I recall performing some manual hip "adjustments" but he probably did close to 1000 total reps in appropriate wimpy rehab type moves. He revised his training. He could run and ice skate and lift weights without hip pain.

He showed up to train in a little basement with a crappy ipod player and less than $1200 worth of gear. He didn't change his set and rep and exercise scheme every other week. When squatting 225 for twenty was brutal he took on 230 the next week. When the weights increased but his form dwindled he cut back. When butterflies and vertigo struck BEFORE going under the bar for 275, 280, ...300 X 20, he went there and got 'er done.

He listened. Well, he 80% listened, which is about 40% better than I could achieve at his age.

How do you get a person to define exactly what they want and actually listen and work hard at pursuing it for longer than 8 or 12 weeks? I'm not suggesting that these goals are the best goals for everyone or that my way of training is the only good way. But our ADD technology driven population sure could benefit from trying some consistent, basic, hard work done well.

These qualities seem too familiar and simple, but they cannot be bundled into a neat package. Hopefully there's value in the understanding gained from reading about it!


*Squats were technically 1/2 to 3/4 depth squats. Not butt-to-heels as required for an official powerlifting meet or whatever. Depth is sufficient to be miseraspectacular and safe given Kyles stature and slight impairments in hip and ankle ROM that he's still working through. I rarely advise heavy full squats due to patellofemoral damage that they usually do impose over time.

Kyle dead lifting 350X5:

                                                               "Nobody Elllssseeee???"
                                   

elbow pain from throwing

"ice. rest. wimpy wrist curl."

If you have sought the attention of a medical doctor, physical therapist, athletic trainer, or personal trainer for the treatment of throwing related elbow pain, you MUST demand more out of them than the old stand-by treatments that even a cave man can advise.

-Take two weeks off. 

-Apply ice.

-Apply electric stimulation and/or ultrasound.

-Do these 12 variations of wimpy wrist curls. 

There is a time and a place for these modalities. They often help control pain and inflammation and promote healing in the first few weeks after an injury. But what do you think is likely to happen when the athlete attempts to return to awesome beast-like throwing?

Medical professionals should at least attempt to track down the source of the elbow injury. There's almost always a clear reason why the tissue is being over loaded. Really, it doesn't require a huge amount of effort or knowledge base to show the world that you're more than a cave man. Your PT, trainer, etc should consider these as a minimal demonstration of non cave man competency:

-Shoulder strength and range of motion.

-Thoracic mobility and scapular stability. 

-Hip strength and range of motion.

-At least ask if the athlete or parent has a video of them throwing, and at some point, take a video if possible. 

Any decent non-cave sports medicine man or women knows that medial elbow pain (near the "funny bone") is generally due to overload of the ligaments and stabilizing muscles during the acceleration phase of throwing, and that lateral elbow pain (thumb side) is due to overload when the arm is decelerating after ball release. They know when and how core and hip strength applies to throwing. They know that throwing with a higher arm slot tends to protect the elbow and strain the shoulder, while a lower arm slot (often referred to as "three quarters") tends to protect the shoulder and strain the elbow.

Over the years of evaluating and treating shoulder and elbow injuries, this grunt has learned to be suspicious of the hips. Lack of hip and/or shoulder external rotation (ER) or internal rotation (IR) often results in more torque at the elbow. The shoulder IR/ER values that are acceptable for an overhead athlete are not what the textbook says.

Years of hard headed trial and error experience as an athlete and working as a small private practice medical professional tends to help my patients/clients survive the modern era.