Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Decisions, decisions!
Last week I mentioned that the MP4 team is going to train me for an upcoming event. Now all I need to do is pick the event. The question is…
Do I tri again in twenty-ten?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Are you a bit Type A?
Would you say you need a bit of therapy because of it?
I don’t know if I would say that I am Type A, but I am definitely quirky.
If I was a dog, I would be the type that would have to walk in 5 circles before lying down and taking a nap. If I was a cat, I would dig my claws into the chair and pull at it about 5 times each paw til I was comfy and then I would lay down. So I am not so much Type A as I am “routined” or “ritualized”.
Call it whatever you want but make sure when you are done calling it a name, you also call it effective.
If you were to analyze the majority of successful athletes (from novice to elite) you would find a high percentage of Type A personalities in that bunch. (I, personally, would never put that bunch together, but that’s just me—can you imagine? OY!) From folks who plan their days with excruciating detail to others who know what they are eating to the gram, they most likely are thriving at their sport. Yeah, you could say it is inevitable considering how much they plan or that they are like that because they were already good so they were just extra motivated to make it happen because of that but neither would be true. They are good at their sport because of the structure.
Now I don’t want to hang here on the obvious and have this long diatribe about structuring your workouts and etc. because that’s not where the beauty lies in this. No, where the beauty lies is in the not-so-obvious stuff regarding nutrition and recovery.
Your body is a machine. A well oiled, well engineered, beautifully designed machine. It is a work of art. Whether you believe in the big bang theory, two tadpoles and a cesspool of hocus pocus or creationism, it does not matter because no matter how you slice it, the human body is a marvel. If you decided tomorrow that you wanted to wake up and shuttle fat out of your liver faster, you would be hard pressed to make it happen. If you wanted to slow down how often you pee’d, you would still be at the mercy of your kidneys no matter what you did. See, you have zero control of your bodily functions. You are just along for the ride. Knowing this and knowing that your body is a machine that does the same thing day in and day out with or without you, what do you think you would do to maximize the output it is giving you? Structure it.
Structure is what the body craves and when you oblige and give it that consistency, it sings like a tuning fork in perfect resonance. Why? Because that’s how it operates everyday: consistently.
Stop. Do not reach for your planner. If you are not already Type A, you cannot become it overnight. If you are quirky like me, you may be able to put some semblance of a schedule together but you will have lots of “odd” things in there as well that might make your day a bit more complicated (must you always eat oatmeal from the yellow bowl? *sigh*). No. You don’t have to become the ultra planner tomorrow to take advantage of this, you just need to establish some basic rules and let all the mayhem happen in between.
Those are the basic rules. They are simple and do not require you to be this super duper organized Type A maniac who seems to have 25 hours in a 24 hour day. Just about anybody can do these 3 simple steps and begin to see a marked improvement in their athleticism.
What you are doing here when you regulate your body like this is you are “releasing the brakes”. Those little involuntary actions that your body performs without you knowing that slowly eat away at your progress on the field are being minimized by regularity. You are taking the fear of never eating again away from your digestive tract. It worries about that you know. You are eliminating the anxiety of exhaustion every time you go to bed on time.
So many times we think to improve it must be complicated. We want a difficult program, a complicated diet, a load of supplements. No one wants to hear, have lunch every day at noon and you’ll be more agile. Who would believe that? Or, have your pwo 10 min. before training ends every time. They would worry more about the ratio of protein to carbs in the pwo drink than they would the timing.
Your body wants what it gives itself: stability. So the next time you want to buy the latest supplement/gadget/shoe and etc., just try incorporating these three suggestions instead and save yourself some money. You never know, this could be the thing that takes you to the next level.
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
My thing is head to toe beauty, from the inside out.
A beautiful woman (and of course, we are all beautiful women) is soooo many things, exterior and interior, tangible and intangible, heart and soul … I’m not even going there. But speaking strictly physically, a beautiful face is be made up of any combination of gorgeous features, and without a doubt, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To me, and this is just me, the most beautiful faces are the ones with smooth, clear, glowing skin. I’m even down with age appropriate wrinkling! Gorgeous skin communicates health, and health is a beautiful thing!
I want my skin to be as beautiful and healthy as I can possibly manage for the rest of my life. Lots of things contribute to good skin … genes, lifestyle, sleep, diet, exercise, stress, etc. … but, the big one, I’m convinced, is sun exposure. Protecting your skin from the sun needs to be a priority if you want beautiful skin. Plus, skin cancer is no joke, and sun exposure is the major cause of skin cancer. Research shows that UV exposure of any kind accounts for 80% of the skin’s aging process! (Wrinkles, dark spots, and dryness, flaking, you know the list.)
Here is the quick version of how sun damage works. Short UVB radiation waves hit the epidermis (the upper portion of the skin) and cause the skin to tan and burn, which are both actually skin damage. The longer UVA rays penetrate further into the dermis (the mid-layer), causing not only a tan but also prematurely ages the skin by dissolving collagen and elastin (protein-based connective tissue that form the skin’s infrastructure and give it strength and resilience). UVB rays are much stronger than UVA radiation, however, UVA radiation is the larger danger for skin because the earth receives about 100 times as much UVA as UVB radiation.
Keeping the skin youthful and beautiful is impossible w/ out protecting it from sun exposure. Period. Besides moving into a cave and never leaving it, the only way to protect your skin from increased risk of cancer and premature aging is with sunscreens and blocks that offer protection from both UVA and UVB rays. Select a product w/ an appropriate SPF for your skin and one that lists ingredients that shield both UVA and UVB rays, indicating broad screen protection, and USE IT!
The sun protection factor, SPF, measures a product’s ability to protect the skin from UVB rays only. It quantifies the amount of time you can be in the sun wearing sunscreen before you are burned. This obviously depends on you. If you burn w/ in 10 minutes of being in the sun, then wearing an SPF of 15 will protect you for 15 times as long, or 150 minutes. SPF 30 is not exactly double the protection of SPF 15, but it’s close. Spf 2 blocks about 50% of UVB rays; spf 10 filters out about 85% of UVB rays; spf 15 stops about 95%; and spf 30 stops about 97%. An SPF that’s higher than 30 does not provide any more UV protection, it just offers more time that you can stay in the sun without burning. Choosing to wear a higher SPF product means that you still need to reapply after swimming or sweating to ensure continued protection.
In addition, a moisturizer w/ SPF 15 and a foundation make up with SPF 15 don’t add up to SPF 30. You still have just SPF 15; you’ve simply used more of it, which is a good thing. Also, the concentrations of sunscreen ingredients needed to reach the very high SPF (55+) available these days can be potentially irritating (more on this later) to your skin. There aren’t enough daylight hours to ever need one shot of so much sunscreen. It’s better to find a concentration that works for you and be diligent about reapplication.
Remember that SPF only refers to protection from UVB radiation. You’ll need to look for products that specifically list protection from UVA rays too.
A few more things to know about the sun and its affects on your skin …
* UVB radiation is the sun’s burning ray and has an immediate, harmful impact on skin. Damage from UVB rays takes place within the very first minute (yes, 60 seconds) of walking outside.
* Even on a cloudy or hazy day, the sun’s rays are present and impacting the skin.
* Regular clothing has an SPF of about 10.
* Surfaces such as water, sand, snow, cement, and grass reflect the rays from the ground to your skin giving you a double dose of exposure.
* UVB rays increase as the ozone layer is depleted, meaning more serious burns for unprotected skin.
* There is no risk of sunburn when you sit in a car or next to a window, because UVB rays can’t pass through glass, however UVA rays can.
* It’s best to apply sunscreen at least 15 to 20 minutes before sun exposure. This gives the sunscreen time to absorb and to spread over and into the uppermost layers of skin.
Come back next week because I’ll be tackling the pros and cons of sunscreen formulas and ingredients – sadly it’s complicated, and the when and how much of which product to use – not as complicated but a large enough discussion to get it’s own post. Plus, I’ll share my opinions and favorite products.
Resources
Simple Skin Beauty, Ellen Marmur, MD
The Original Beauty Bible, Paula Begoun
Mind-Beauty Connection, Amy Wechsler, MD
You Being Beautiful, Michael F Roizen, MD and Mehmet C Oz, MD
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Last week I wrote about starting at the beginning. But what happens when you’ve done that, are now advanced at your sport, and injure yourself? Yes, I said it, the one thing all athletes fear, injury! I’ve had quite a few injuries over the years and they all have seemed insurmountable at the time.
Take a walk down memory lane with me, I am a 20 year old college student going on a cruise for spring break. I was already over a year into my yoga practice and could sit down and bring my chest to my legs without any problem. I was also an avid gym goer and trained every day.
While on this cruise I drank heavily every night but still felt it was necessary to workout ever day (yeah, yeah, I know, but I was 20, what do you expect). I even thought I would practice my splits, something I had just mastered in yoga. Well, I drop down into my split and heard it, the sound no athlete wants to hear, the sound of hamstring fibers tearing. By the time I got back from the cruise I could barely walk, my hamstring was inflamed, and I could not even bend down to touch my toes, let alone do a split, deadlift, squat, or even cardio on the elliptical.
About 3 years later, during my first year of law school, I was home visiting my parents and decided to go snowboarding. When I was in middle and high school I would snowboard on the weekends, but by the time I was in law school, it had been about 7 years since my last ride. It was my first run of the day and I was on the main green trail, the EASY trail, when I bit it. I went down hard and the result, a broken wrist.
You know what went through my head (once the pain wore off), how am I going to practice yoga with a broken wrist, how am I going to rock climb or lift with a broken wrist? I should have been concerned with how I was going to get through my first year of law school without typing, but I was more concerned with my training.
With both injuries I had to start all over again; except now, I already knew how far I’d advanced and so it was painfully clear how limited I was from the injury. When I tore my hamstring I went through months of physical therapy and deep tissue work to break up the scar tissue and heal the hamstring. One of my most humbling moments occurred back in my yoga class, the class in which I was one of the few to have a full split. I was barely be able to sit on the ground with my legs straight out in front of me. It took a long time but I kept at it and day by day I regained a little more flexibility.
Recovering from a wrist break was a whole different ball game. I never knew you could practice yoga, and we are talking about a complete practice, without the use of your hands/wrists. Having just moved to Boston, I searched for a yoga teacher who could guide me through a practice despite my broken wrist, and I found one! For the next 3 months I met with my teacher once/week and he took me through the best yoga practices I had ever had. We modified a lot of poses but the great thing was that I learned a myriad of new poses I had never seen before.
Injuries are mortifying to an athlete and the recovery time feels interminable. The feeling of defeat does not quite describe it, helpless is more accurate. Nevertheless, I honestly believe there is a silver lining. I never would have learned a hands-free yoga practice had I not broken my wrist, nor would I appreciate my flexibility had I not lost it when I tore my hamstring. When we are injured we are forced to move outside of our comfort zone, to find a way to work around and through the injury. We find comfort in and often define ourselves by what we do day in and day out, by our routines. When you are injured that normalcy is lost. I had to get over myself and the fact that I was an “advanced” yogi. I had to start again, and not even from the beginning, I was worse off than when I first started yoga. But once I got over myself, moved my ego out of the way, the experience made me better.
Even now, 9 years since the cruise, I still feel the tear every now and again. I may go months dropping in and out of splits with no pain and all of a sudden, one day when I am a little dehydrated or my muscles are not warm enough, I feel it. I also always carry wrist straps or tiger paws in my gym bag. Weeks or months may go by without any wrist pain and then the weather changes or I do too many plyo push-ups and my wrists feel it. But I no longer panic. I have learned to work with and work through my injuries. And in the end of the day, I have learned a whole lot more about the sports I enjoy, I have become better at my sports, and an all around better athlete.
So what about you? Have you had that injury that just mortifies you? How did you work though it? Did you learn anything throughout the process or were you too caught up in how the injury limited you to search for alternatives? One of the coolest things I learned was acro-yoga and how to do a hands-free backbend. I’d love to hear your stories/thoughts on injuries, and any modifications you learned along the way.
Monday, January 18th, 2010
A Look at Food Intolerances and Their Effect on Your Training
By Heather Morgan
Around “the office” I’m known as the one to freely chat about poop, gas, and other things most consider inappropriate in mixed company. And I’ll do it over lunch. What can I say? If it’s a normal body process, I’m cool with it whether I have a meal in front of me or not. I’d stop (maybe) but for the fact that I find my earthiness (my mother’s term: “Oh Heather, you’re just so earrrrrthy!”) to be a handy tool in putting my patients and trainees at ease with themselves. That and it opens the door for dialogue about health issues they are experiencing that they might have been too embarrassed to ask. I’m from New Jersey, but I live in the South now, and there’s a definite tendency for those born South of the Mason-Dixon to keep their personal hygiene problems personal. So I consider it my professional duty to bring all things internal into the light.
While there will no doubt be more blog posts to come regarding our innards and how they affect our aging, performance, and overall quality of life, right now I’d like to address food intolerances. Most of us are familiar with the term “food allergy”. By now you’ve undoubtedly come across someone with one or more of them, such as the kid in elementary school who couldn’t sit next to you if you were eating a peanut butter sandwich, or a current friend who makes sure the pesto in the meal s/he’s ordering is pine nut-free. Sort of annoying at first until you realize that a dietary slip-up can mean a trip to the emergency room for your buddy. Another reason not to be all judgy and impatient with it? You could very well be a sufferer of a similar ailment, albeit a milder and harder to detect form of it. All the same, food intolerances can affect your health, sometimes to a devastating point. Read on.
You’re probably wondering what the difference is between a food allergy and a food intolerance, so let’s clear that up before moving on to how it can mess up your next workout. An allergy, food or otherwise, causes an IgE antibody mediated reaction. This is the immune response that causes anaphylaxis, a life-threatening situation characterized by a sudden or fairly sudden (usually within 15-30 minutes at the most) flushing of the skin, swelling of the tongue, sneezing, itching, rapid and erratic pulse, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, difficulty breathing or swallowing, and sometimes drops in blood pressure leading to lightheadedness or even fainting. Later on signs can also develop, such as eczema. As you can see, if you have a food allergy, you most likely know by now and have the Epipen to prove it. Food intolerances, on the other hand, are IgG antibody mediated reactions. They don’t involve histamine, so the signs and symptoms are usually milder with less specific complaints along with a delayed onset. All of this makes them more difficult to pinpoint, not to mention harder to connect with the intake of a certain food. The common ground food allergies and intolerances share is that they are an immune system over-reaction to a food protein recognized as foreign. So while an intolerance to something in last night’s dinner is tough to diagnose, it is a possibility worth investigating further if you regularly suffer from some of the following without any other explanation:
Most food intolerance sufferers have “their thing”, meaning their tendency to experience one or two of the above fairly chronically, and they have accepted them as their lot in life. And it’s obvious just scanning the list that any of these are attributable to a myriad of reasons, stress and poor diet being just two very common ones. Many, many folks are so used to feeling crappy all of the time, it’s not a stretch to imagine that more food intolerances go undetected than detected. That’s one advantage to being an athlete: You are more connected to your body—how it feels and performs—and you are much less apt to put up with it functioning suboptimally. Likewise, you are even more motivated than a couch jockey to get to the root of a problem. Ever had to cut a run short because you haven’t had a good poop in days? Find yourself timing your training schedule to avoid crowds at the gym because of your gas? Miss your cycling group’s workout because you were doubled over with stomach cramps after eating your pre-ride sport bar? Your body is telling you something and it’s time to listen.
First you need to find out if you indeed have a food intolerance. While there are probably dozens of at-home tests you can buy online by now, we strongly recommend that you consult with a health care practitioner for testing and analysis. They can choose the right testing protocol as some tests only detect allergies, not intolerances, and so forth. That said and emphasized, if you decided to go rogue and order a test (see resources below), at least take your results to a professional for review. [Heads up!: Most of these require mailing a sample of your poop to a lab. Suck it up, it’s worth it.] Also, a health care professional who specializes in gastrointestinal disorders can determine if your problem stems from other, often related, issues, such as Increased Intestinal Permeability (aka. “Leaky Gut Syndrome”), Candida (yeast) Overgrowth, Dysbiosis, or something even more serious. Better safe than sorry. No matter what, be prepared for an elimination diet where the most likely culprits will be taken from your diet for a period of time and then introduced to see if you react or not. As an athlete, you should already be tracking your nutrition. In fact, if you are noting the timing and content of your meals, a lot of your detective work has already been done. Start including notes about when you have adverse reactions—even if you’ve never previously tied them to something you ate or drank.
To motivate you beyond wanting to feel better and rock your training harder, there’s some good news to being slapped with a diagnosis of food intolerance. A) The cause of your issues may no longer be a mystery; B) The intestinal tract is home to some of the quickest healing tissue in the body. (Over-achievers rejoice!) While your healthcare professional will undoubtedly set a dietary course of action for you, here are some supplements that they may recommend to help speed up the pace of gut repair: glutamine; quercitin; zinc; omega-3 fatty acids; probiotics. We recommend seeking out whole food sources of these nutrients (see below), but higher concentrations may very well be prescribed by your healthcare practitioner via appropriate supplement dosages taken at specific times. Nothing says you can’t get a head start on healthy guts by regularly including many of these nutrient-dense foods below, assuming they agree with you, of course!
So, was it the gluten-rich pasta you were banging down the night before that caused you to frequent the Port-o-lets during your 10K? Or was it the soy in your pre-race sport bar? But doesn’t that happen after ice cream too? Oh, and there was that course of antibiotics you took last month for yet-another sinus infection. Come to think of it though, wasn’t it just last week you had nothing but headaches, itchy arms, and a jammed up colon? Stop guessing! Athletic endeavors aside, your long-term health and successful aging depend on it.
References:
Doyle, Marek. The basics of food intolerance. http://www.ei-resource.org/articles/allergy-articles/the-basics-of-food-intolerance/
Melina, Vesanto, MS, RD, Stepaniak, Jo, MSEd & Aronson, Dina, MS, RD. (2004). Food allergy survival guide: Delicious recipes & complete nutrition. Summertown, TN: Healthy Living Publications.
Resources (testing and practitioner location):
