Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Do you ever feel like what you're missing in your program is really simple?
Then get faster.
Ok, it is not that simple, but it is a start.
Our passion here at MP4 is the everyday athlete: the person who gets up every single day rain or shine and just gets it done. You are not looking to go to the Tour De France, but you are looking to win your local race or sporting event without having to give up life with your kids or weekends with the friends. We love working with folks like you for 2 reasons: your resolve is absolutely no joke. Some of you scare us with how focused and detailed you are (although we love it) and the second reason is the room for improvement is tremendous.
For the majority of clients, you are not doing many things “wrong” as much as you have no focus and are just doing whatever the latest magazine told you to do and you either switch up every week as to what you should be working on or you start right into a pro athletes program and fizzle out after a few months. The following is a checklist needed to build a solid foundation as an athlete who really does want to win their 5k, 10k, marathon, hockey tournament, soccer match, etc.
Nutrition:
Get the junk out of the cabinet and actually eat breakfast. There is a new type of food in town, it is called protein. Try it. It works. I have been doing this for years and it still amazes me in this day and age how many people do not eat enough protein. I am not asking you to kill a deer on the way home from work and stock up your freezer with some meat, but a stop at your local supermarket should land you some gems like fresh fish, lean meats and poultry. Heck, I’ll take beans and tofu, too, if we are anti-meat. Don’t hold back now. You need to have some with every meal.
Workout:
Get an assessment of some kind. I know many of the tests out there are expensive and that may not be where your head is at, but that info is worth it. But say you really are “anti” formal assessment. Perform your own standardized test. Pick a distance that you run or a drill your league does every week and measure your performance in some manner. This is baseline. You must have this info. Then, start basic and easy with your workout program BUT ramp it up every week in a way that actually makes sense. Do not follow your favorite pro athlete’s plan that he/she used to get ready for the Olympics! OY! Instead, find a beginner plan or better yet, have us put one together for you and you’ll be good to go.
Recovery:
Take a day off, psycho. Yeah, I called you psycho. What else should I call you when you workout 7 days a week with no rest because you think that’s going to make you lose weight faster? Contrary to everyone’s belief, a protein shake (just whey protein only) is not a recovery drink. You need a lot more in there. You are not “recovering” by throwing back plain protein (although I am impressed that you are eating protein), but at least you are on the right track. You get an A for effort with this one.
Nutrition:
Now that you have a foundation you need to work on three things: meal timing, meal components and supplementation. When you start feeling like you have a bit of a swagger in your step because you are eating clean and showing restraint, begin to hone in on perfection by eating on a consistent time basis with all the right foods in each meal. And then top it all off with the right recovery nutrition at the right time. Having this together is a mark of maturity and is rarely seen with athletes whose workouts are at the “progression” level.
Workout:
Once you are consistent with your workouts (and I mean for your sport—not the weight room), now it is time to track them. Here is another sign of maturity. Yes, you are running a marathon and distance is important. But please do not just get up and run every day without tracking *something*. And once you start tracking, go back and *compare* to see if you are improving. If you are not, come see us and we’ll get you there.
Recovery:
Now you have ample days off built into your plan and you are not trying to fit everything you possibly can into one week. You have time to rest and you even have a few mind/body classes built into your schedule. Lastly, you take your multi-vit everyday and your protein shake has more than protein in it. Life is starting to take shape.
This is a very simplified check list of “where to start” to begin improving in your sport. This is not for the mature athlete who is now looking to dominate a national event but more for the athlete that is trying to do this on their own for the first time but are not ready yet to invest in the “Lance Armstrong” treatment.
Next week we’ll talk about the Advanced Progression and I will be much more specific as to what this looks like. Stay tuned because it will be worth your while. Til then, can you please just have some protein?
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
YOU KNOW YOU’RE OLD WHEN…
Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the guys with the Live Doppler 10,000.
It takes longer to rest than it did to get tired.
Your back goes out more than you do.
It takes twice as long – to look half as good.
Everything that works hurts, and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work.
Enough of the old jokes! Funny, yes, but in this case not applicable.
Ok...last joke. I feel this is a cruel joke for all women who go out for a quick run/workout.
For most of us, it’s not that we are getting older. It is that we are feeling older before our time. Not recovering from our workouts and our hectic lifestyles robs us of our youth.
Wrinkles, joint pain, memory loss, etc. are tragic signs of youth gone bad too early when you have these concerns and you aren’t even 50 yet!
The reason we make such a big deal of recovery is you can age faster than you should simply because you beat the living tar out of your body and never give back to it! You are not an endless resource, nor do you have an endless resource, of energy, nutrients, hormones or anti oxidants. If you are not replenishing them through your diet or your supplement regimen, you are behind the times and creeping up on “old age” fast.
Lately, I got a hair across my behind (that is a saying, you know) to go after my max lifts again. Not for any other reason than I abandoned them with my love for functional training and just felt compelled to go after them again (oh, slap me now). I totally forgot all about lifting as heavy as I could in exchange for greater mobility and agility. *Sigh* Now I am back at it and I am DEAD. No…seriously…dead. Not sore, not hungry, not tired…dead. I could be in the middle of talking to you and could possibly zone out on you to the point of no return. Scary. What’s going on here? CNS overload. It’s been a long time since I have tapped into my CNS like this. I’m not even close to my full max, yet, either so this is going to be a long summer. But right now, I am not thinking that I am lacking in post workout nutrition—because I am not; nor am I thinking that I am not sleeping enough—because I am. In fact, I am sleeping like a baby right now. What I am concerned about and know that I need to fortify is my immune system and it feels much different than you think.
I am not sore. I am not lacking sleep. I am not overworked. In other words, this doesn’t feel like what you may be used to in terms of recovery. If you did not know what was going on with you, you might attribute this to feeling run down by allergies or stress from work because this is not physical in a literal sense—it’s deeper than that. I have an overall sense of being depleted of energy that almost seems insatiable. Now I know what’s going on here but if I didn’t, I would most likely make the mistake of trying to sleep more and then possibly changing my pwo nutrition to compensate. Neither would do the trick. Instead, I need to speak directly to the source of my angst: my energy reserves.
Since I am worn-out to the core, I am leaving myself open to sickness from just about any free floating buggy around. Lofty goals such as mine right now call for a greater demand from your immune system by shunting all of your energy to repair and leaving you open for attack. In order to make this happen and to avoid getting sick, I have been supplementing with some great immune boosters:
Vitamin C
Most of us know about it and many of us drink it: Emergen-C. This is a 1000 mg packet of powdered Vitamin C that you add to your water. When I become this run down, I begin supplementing with as much as 3000mg/day. How much I take depends on how long I am going to train this hard and how deep the rut feels. Vitamin C is a well documented anti oxidant/immune system booster and is readily available.
Probiotics
Heather has covered these in great detail and Kas has stunk up her refrigerator with them, too!haha I am not the girl who is going to take them in the form of cabbage, though. Let me put that right out there. Instead, they sit in my fridge in a bottle and I pop them with the rest of my Vitamins.
Vitamin D
You would think because I am black that I have this covered but I really don’t and can actually tell when I am deficient. I am no longer a sun whore and can become so light in the winter time that my husband begins to refer to me as “red bone” (look that one up…old saying there, too) so I have to stay on top of this one. I do not have a daily dose per se. It is more that I supplement when needed. (I don’t recommend you do that. I am really on top of my nutrition much more than most. Consult your doctor before taking Vit D. In fact, consult your doctor before taking anything mentioned here.)
Magnesium
A powerhouse in terms of producing and transferring energy, this little gem can really help you in your time of need. Biggest problem here: it’s a tummy rumbler. Too much and it’ll cut through you like a hot knife in butter. (Did someone say butter?) You ease into magnesium but once you are there, you are golden. Deficiency depresses thyroid hormone levels thereby killing even more of your energy so you want to stay on top of this bugger.
Zinc
Last one I am going to mention but no less important than the others. When it comes to lists that will give you vitamins and minerals that will help with anything—you name it—immunity, heart health, metabolism and so on, zinc is always on the list. Although it is recognized for its role in reproductive function, zinc is an all around powerful mineral and a little bit goes a long way. Make sure you have enough zinc in your diet.
All of these guys are helping me through my zombie stage right now. Silly me for trying to keep myself going with new goals.;) The glazed over eyeball look with the obvious and almost disturbing lack of attention span have subsided once I reached for a few more of these vitamins and minerals to help me along. Some I take in supplement form and others I increase the foods in my diet that are rich in them.
Regardless, recognize all the different ways that your body needs to recover from the beat down you keep putting it through. Check out all of the different methods we have spoken about thus far and try to see where you may be lacking in your recovery. If you have any questions, hit us up below, we are all happy to chime in and help you out. In the mean time, I’ll let you know by the end of the summer where I max out. That’ll be an interesting post. Stay tuned for it.
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
I just recently attended a conference on restoration and recovery. At MP4, this is a big part of our mantra. See, you want to train like the pros do by working out really hard, mimicking the amount of volume they do and/or doing as many events as they do and so on. But you’re missing out on one of their major training secrets: structured rest.
Many pro athletes do not work anywhere near as much as you do. Most of them are sponsored so that they do not have to work. This makes all the difference in the world. Not having the obligation of a 9 to 5 means that when they rest (albeit as short as it may seem), it really is a rest.
I enjoyed the conference because for one, it’s always nice to rub elbows with other coaches and two, there was a nice eclectic mix of presenters there so you got a nice mix of information from all different backgrounds. For instance:
Basically, they ran some athletes into the ground during a long weekend event. Let’s call it a tournament. Then they measured the athletes’ ability to recover through bodily markers (such as CK markers in the muscle). The study showed that the athletes’ bodies had recovered long before (almost 36 hours) their minds had perceived this to have happened. So if you had asked that athlete if they felt recovered from the past weekend event, they would say no to you, that they felt lethargic and lacked all will but their body will tell you that they are ready to go.
This got me to thinking…(get nervous, this is never good for anybody) how much of that is our own programming (in other words you think you should feel tired so you are) and how much of that is a real phenomenon (like our brains need recovery, too)? If someone had told Suzie Psycho that her body was recovered before they asked her, would her answer have been any different? This is good stuff because at least 90% of the game is mental and if your body/brain connection is more than just “positive” thinking, someone needs to get on that now with a rest protocol. They need to ask the athlete at 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours and then 48. Then they need to do the same thing but tell them they are recovered. See if it is any different. This was not lost on anybody at the conference. You had a few questions and some fervent writing because this can make a break a team that may be in a tournament of 5 games or on a playoff track with a bunch of events that are happening in a row.
I enjoyed hearing more about the latest research, but I also liked that I now need a guinea pig to run into the floor…Kas, where are you? 
Stay tuned for more…hehe
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Okay, a bit dramatic there with the title, but these items really just make things easier, more convenient, and, well, just better for me. Holy high maintenance, Batman!
Me and My BFF
My blender bottle has been to Jamaica, how about yours?
Attending a Mike Mahler KB Wkshp in NYC. I didn't start sweating until I got this close to him. 
Honorable Mentions:
Monday, February 1st, 2010
By Heather Morgan
Most of you fit-o-holics are up on vitamin D and have even jumped on the bandwagon. If nothing else, you’re aware of the bone-building bennies. But it turns out the level of service provided to us by vitamin D is manifold. And we’re still just at the tip of the iceberg in our knowledge of it! So let’s take a look and see what it can do for your performance now and long into future.
According to Robert Heany, MD, about 99% of what we know about vitamin D has been revealed in the century we are in now. Some of that is because we can more easily measure it, which I’ll get to at the end. One thing we do know is that vitamin D is, in fact, not just a “vitamin”, per se. Vitamins are nutrients that must be brought into the body via the ingestion of food. It is common knowledge, however, that vitamin D can also be synthesized by the body when it is exposed to adequate sunlight with the proper amount of stimulating UV rays, in particular UVB. But really, vitamin D is defined as a “pluripotent pleiotropic secosteroid hormone”. (Thanks for clearing that up, right?) Translation: It’s a prehormone that is able to have many effects on various cell types and body systems. When produced in your skin or ingested, precholesterol (present in your tissues) is turned into cholecalciferol (aka. vitamin D), which is metabolized into [25(OH)D] (remember that for later) which is more like a hormone in structure, and then metabolized in your organs into a potent hormone [1,25(OH)2D]. It is also now known that vitamin D affects around 2000 genes (perspective: that’s about 10% of ‘em, which in the bio-geek world is huge) when previously it was only considered to affect the kidneys and blood phosphate and calcium levels. In other words, vitamin D—misnamed or not—is an over-achiever. An over-achiever that it is woefully under-present in most of us.
It is estimated that 80-90% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. How was this arrived at, you ask? By examining dietary and environmental links to chronic diseases. Specifically, the higher incidence of cancers in those at living at higher latitudes and with lower sun exposure. “Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.” (Vitamin D Council)
While I’ll be getting to how vitamin D can put the mojo into your workouts, I think we can all agree that nothing throws a monkey wrench into a training schedule like one of those chronic illnesses just listed. The links between vitamin D and these problems are so strong, and the research is so copious now, that many experts, such as John Cannell, MD and others, aren’t just suggesting but screaming from the mountain tops that bazillions of dollars can be saved in chronic disease treatment alone by bringing peoples’ vitamin D levels up to snuff. Cannell, a researcher and vitamin D expert, even put this in the final slide of his renowned presentation on Vitamin D: “We don’t truly know the burden of chronic disease. And we won’t, until everyone has enough vitamin D”. Makes you think.
It’s no shocker that we don’t get enough of the stuff. We work in buildings with artificial (non-UV) light with windows that block UVB rays, we slather ourselves with full spectrum sunscreens and blocks, and we hide from the sun like it’s it the creature in a horror movie and we’re the screaming chick just two more strides from twisting her ankle. But I’m going to save most sun-related stuff for another post because it’s just that kind of topic, so you can get all up in my grill about it then. Rather, I’ll use it as a segue into athletic performance and vitamin D findings. So {segue!} it might interest you to know that Eastern European athletes used UV light as part of their training regimen. German literature documents this and that country’s athletes were certainly known for being dominant in world sports. (And I’m talking about the ones who passed the drug tests). Also, in one study, some Russian sprinters were treated with UV light, another group was not. Then both groups underwent identical training programs for the 100-meter dash. The control group improved their sprint times by 1.7 percent while the radiated ones lowered their times by 7.4 percent.
In a review of historical and current literature, it was concluded that “…[P]hysical and athletic performance is seasonal; it peaks when 25-hydroxy-vitamin D [25(OH)D] levels peak, declines as they decline, and reaches its nadir when 25(OH)D levels are at their lowest. Vitamin D also increases the size and number of Type II (fast twitch) muscle fibers.” And, in another article about vitamin D and athletic performance, its importance in the normal growth and development of muscle fibers and proper immune system functioning was highlighted. So, even if it isn’t cancer sidelining you (and I sincerely hope it never ever is), a bad case of the flu can be enough to keep you out of the game for a while. Harking back to vitamin D’s bone-building role, stress fractures are markedly reduced in those athletes with good vitamin D levels as well. Finally, I’d like to mention that several studies have “…also shown that, among athletes who train outside year-round, maximal oxygen intake tends to be highest in late summer…The athletes, in other words, are fittest in August, when ultraviolet radiation from the sun is near its zenith.” They go on to reveal that these athletes then experience sharp drops—as early as a month later—in maximal oxygen intake even when their training intensity remains the same. If you can get past the sun part for now, and realize they are looking at it from the athletes’ vitamin D production capability, you get the idea: low D = lowered performance.
So what’s an athlete to do in the middle of -8 degree Fahrenheit weather, knowing her summer vitamin-D stores are dwindling, and with no Spring in sight? You got it. Supplementation! If you’re thinking about banging down untold quantities of dairy, head over to last week’s “Truth or Dairy?” post, then come back (grabbing a big spinach salad on the way). And most fortified foods aren’t cutting it—the amount in it is often lower than what it contains, and even more often it’s not well absorbed. Plus, we’re whole food gals! “Fortified” food almost always means “processed” food. No thanks. Your first step is to get your vitamin D levels tested. Specifically you want to get your (remember from paragraph 2?) [25(OH)D] levels tested. Often your doc (for a lot of us this means our GYN) will add this to a blood draw. You can also order a test online if necessary at www.zrtlab.com. This is an imperative first step before supplementing with vitamin D so that you know: a) if you have an insufficiency or deficiency to begin with; b) how severe it is if the answer to “a” is yes; c) how much to supplement with; d) whether or not your supplementation is adequate with subsequent testing. Even if you are absolutely sure you need more vitamin D, your supplementation will be safer and much more meaningful overall if you do this. This is why I won’t continue with current research and opinions about dosage recommendations. For that you’ll need to wait for your results and for an upcoming Model Per4mance MP3 series, part of which will address that topic. {plug plug}
References:
Athletic performance and vitamin D. Cannell JJ, Hollis BW, Sorenson MB, Taft TN, Anderson JJ. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 209 May;41(5):1102-10.
Phys Ed: Can Vitamin D Improve Your Athletic Performance? Reynolds, Gretchen. New York Times Well Blog, Sept 23, 2009. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/phys-ed-can-vitamin-d-improve-your-athletic-performance/
Take Control of Your Health by Joseph Mercola, MD
Dark Deception by Joseph Mercola, MD
