A little over a month ago, I posted my nutrient breakdown from FitDay. Jenjen asked me to list a breakdown of what I actually eat to hit those nutrient levels. So here are five days of eating, pulled from July 14-18. Just click on the thumbnails and you’ll get a lightbox with the full-sized picture.
July 14
July 15
July 16
July 17
July 18
It was actually tequila with lime juice, not whiskey with lime juice, but FitDay doesn’t have tequila. I figured it was close enough.
The thing I don’t like about FitDay is that most of those foods were combined. I try to keep them all grouped though. So if you look at July 14th, you see “Lettuce” then a few vegetables and then “Vinegar”; that comprises a salad (plus the two eggs down below that I forgot to add earlier). Then you have chicken and chard cooked in coconut oil. Then there’s soup, which is comprised of homemade chicken broth, chicken, carrots, zucchini, onions, wakame (or some other seaweed that I had). Also blueberries in coconut milk and a sweet potato with coconut cream and coconut oil. So you can kind of figure out how I put things together from this.
Nutrient Breakdown
So when we look at the nutrient breakdowns, you can see that I fell short on a few days this week, mainly in vitamin D and calcium. This was actually an odd week as I ran out of eggs and sardines. I get a good bit of both of these nutrients from those two foods, calcium especially from the sardines. However, here’s a shot of the report for the previous month.
As you see, I met all categories except calcium with no problem over the course of the month, which is really more important. The body doesn’t work on a daily basis. It’s the average over time that matters most. I’m also not concerned about the calcium. As I’ve discussed before, there’s far more to bone health than calcium intake.
There’s also no guarantee that the nutrients are 100% accurate. My homemade chicken broth was comprised of two chicken carcasses boiled down. I can tell you that much less bone came out of the pot than went in as the long boiling with a bit of apple cider vinegar added to the pot disintegrated about half of each carcass. That seems to make a much richer broth than FitDay probably gives credit for.
Also, I made my journal public, so you’re free to dig around in there if you have an interest in seeing any other days. Saturday, July 19th is the last day that I’ve recorded data for and probably will be for a little while. But you can look at that and see that I actually drank a small Gatorade G2 Saturday (only had an hour between events, so not enough time for solid food), along with some beers before crashing way early. Feel free to dig around in the archives.
But Let Me Tell You What I Ate Sunday
I didn’t record my eating for Sunday. Here’s the story: I got up, ate a few hardboiled eggs and some sweet potatoes, then went to the track for Sunday’s running events. After that, I drove the hour or so back home from Lexington and had absolutely no desire to even look at an oven. So I decided that I was going to celebrate the culmination of three months and a pretty successful track meet. And what did I want to celebrate with? Tons of meat, some crappy carbs, and dessert. I picked Golden Corral.
After a huge salad with eggs, bacon, steak, and blue cheese, I went through two plates of meat, totaling about 12 oz of steak with onions and mushrooms and half a chicken, plus a bit of turkey with gravy, and 1.5 of those huge rolls doused in butter. And after that, I had a big slice of chocolate cake with ice cream and a bit of hot fudge. It was delightful. Yes, occasionally it’s just fine to go out and just have an absolute blowout. Just get back on the wagon the next day and make sure the things you gorge on are worth it.
Anyone else care to share their daily intake?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
You can click on the links to see video footage if you’re so inclined. My 200m is pretty bad in light of my 100m time. I ran the 200m first and think I just wasn’t running smoothly during it. I can’t complain about the 100m time though as I’ve had an injured hamstring for the past 6 weeks and that’s the fastest I’ve gone since starting training. The 4 x 100m was pretty impressive considering we didn’t have a team until an hour before the event and didn’t even get to practice hand-offs before the race…that 45.24 is with a 44-year old leading us off (he runs an 11.7 100m), a 27-year old, me at 28, and a 17/18-year old anchoring.
Here are fifteen things I learned in the past three months:
The clock is an incredible task-master. Trying to hit 100m splits on tempo days means being driven by the incessant beeping of a countdown timer. If the clock says to hit 20 second splits, you’ll hit it. If it says to hit 17 second splits, you’ll find a way.
It can be difficult to get enough Paleo carbs to fuel intensive sprint training. It takes a lot of fruit and a good bit of sweet potatoes. Probably more than I ate.
Work up to volume. I started too fast with the plyometrics and tweaked my hamstring, which forced a layoff from plyos and speed work for a couple weeks in my first 4-week training cycle.
Shin splints suck. Midway through training, I developed a case of posteromedial shin splints. Luckily, through ice and both light and deep massage, I was able to keep them managed. Now it’s time to let them heal.
It’s a thin line between “just enough training” and “too much training”. Once you cross that line, the body doesn’t typically let you just step back to “just enough” and go one as if nothing happened. See the above note about shin splints and hamstrings.
When an old man interrupts your track workout to talk for 30 minutes, warm up again before coming out of the blocks at 100% lest you aggravate the aforementioned hamstring injury and have to lay off of speed work and plyos for another 6 weeks (it’s still not completely healed). It doesn’t matter that it’s 99 degrees with a 105 heat index; warm up again.
Commit to what you’re doing. The more focused you are on performing at the highest level you can, the more you need to exclude extraneous activities. Early on, one day of hard-core basketball hindered my training for 4 days. Two CrossFit workouts at the Level 1 Certification left me with a workout hangover for a week.
It’s really hard to practice starts without someone to give you a “Ready, Set, Go”. The trick I use is the Countdown/Chrono function on my Timex. I set a 4-second countdown, get into the blocks, hit “Start,” count to 2, raise into Set position, and go on the beep. The Chrono starts at the beep. Two hurdles set behind your blocks will keep them from sliding.
The 400m Dash may not be the hardest race (I think a convincing argument could be made for the 800m and possibly even the 1500m), but it’s darn sure in the top 3. It’s a painful race, but so much fun. The dread starts before you even get in the blocks and doesn’t stop until at least 5 minutes afterwards when your lungs quit burning, your legs quit shaking, and you can finally sit down without turning into one big cramp.
On that note, how do they always manage to build tracks with pockets of extra-dense gravity on the final stretch?
It’s worth every second you spend training to push yourself to the limit of what your body can handle and enjoy a little friendly competition. The people you meet at events like this are unbelievably friendly. Competition begets camaraderie. Win or lose, it’s a great time.
No matter how fast you go in practice alone, you will probably go a few ticks faster in competition. Someone running in front of, beside, or behind you is an incredible motivator to find that extra ounce of energy.
It’s amazing how much the competitive atmosphere saps your energy. I ran a total of 800m over two days, a total of less than 1:45 of total running. I am absolutely beat and that’s only about half the volume of a normal training day, which don’t leave me this tired. Let’s not discount the sunny 95 degree weather, though.
I still wish I had taken the opportunity to run for the small college that recruited me to run track for them. There’s no telling how much farther I could’ve gone with a real sprinting and strength coach. At least I have that engineering degree that I decided to pursue instead. Oh, wait…
I’m going to thoroughly enjoy taking 3 weeks off to heal. I mean I’m not even going to look at a track. My legs will appreciate having time to heal the shin splints, hamstring, and blisters from spikes.
I asked around at the meet about other Open events like this. It turns out that there are a few throughout the year that anyone can enter, so that gives me something else to continue this training for. If you’re interested in entering a track meet, here is a site that might help: Mile Split. For Kentuckians, check KTCCCA for Open meets by clicking on the Track and Field links for the year you want. It looks like the meets are over for this year, but that gives me about 8 months to get faster.
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
A study came out yesterday showing that an Atkins diet is better for weight loss, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar control. Let’s take a look.
So first, some good points:
It was a 2-year trial, meaning no one can say “well, it works well in the short-term, but…”. I suppose they can still say it (and they will), but it just shows their density.
At baseline, the participants’ diets were significantly the same in terms of composition. That means we can attribute benefits to the diets prescribed.
It’s peer-reviewed and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the top medical journals.
And a few bad points:
Very few women were enrolled in the study. There were 277 men (86%) and 45 women (14%).
The diets weren’t really “low-fat” or “Atkins”. See the discussion below.
Why was the Atkins group advised to eat vegetable proteins and fats instead of animal sources?
Now the results:
First of all, let me just establish that if I were obese and spent two years on a diet and only lost 12 pounds, I’d be very loathe to call that much of a good thing. So we’re already starting out knowing that the weight loss isn’t very impressive. For men, the average weight loss for the low-fat group was 7.5 pounds, 8.8 pounds for the Mediterranean group, and 10.8 pounds for the low-carb group. The women lost 0.2 pounds, 13.6 pounds, and 5.2 pounds, in the low-fat, Mediterranean, and low-carb groups, respectively. I’m having trouble seeing what conclusions can be drawn from such a small sample of women though.
If you look at the graph, you can see that every group pretty well leveled out after the 1-year mark. Of course, some disingenuous twit is going to point to the low-carb line and say, “See, the weight loss is unsustainable.” And the correct answer would be, “The low-fat line looks the same, only at a lower level of weight loss.”
Second, let’s look at adherence. Adherence was 95.4% at 1 year and 84.6% at 2 years, overall. But looking at the individual diets, we get values of 90.4% in the low-fat group, 85.3% in the Mediterranean-diet group, and 78.0% in the low-carbohydrate group. Basically, the low-carb group lost more weight, for men at least, with a lower level of adherence. Hmmm…
Neither blood pressure nor waist circumference reached significance. But changes in cholesterol levels did. Let’s look at that graph. The low-carbers jumped out to an immediate lead in HDL increase and triglyceride decrease. The advantage in increased HDL was sustained throughout the 24 months, though the triglyceride improvements fell back some to be about even with the Mediterranean Diet. LDL decreased 6x more in the low-carb group than in the low-fat group, but only half as much as in the Mediterranean group. But the all important Total CHOL:HDL ratio fell more in the low-carb group than in the others.
Third, the diets were most certainly not what they are categorized as (chart). The low-fat diet was 50.5% carbohydrate, 19.6% protein, and 30.7% fat at 6 months. The Mediterranean Diet came in at 49.8% carb, 18.9% protein, and 33.2% fat. And the so-called Atkins Diet came in at 41.4% carb, 21.6% protein, and 38.8% fat. The low-fat is hardly low-fat, at least as defined by people like Ornish and only barely as defined by the study (30% of calories as fat). The Mediterranean Diet, which is supposed to be pretty low fat as well (25-35% of calories), fell in its proper range. And the Atkins Diet group was most certainly not eating low-carb at 40% of calories from carbs. Nonetheless, it is instructive that the group eating the least carbs lost the most weight, at least in the men.
Other changes of note:
- C-reactive protein fell 21% in the Mediterranean group and 29% in the low-carb group. That is indicative that there is less inflammation going on.
- Amongst those with diabetes, only the Mediterranean group had decreases in fasting blood glucose levels. The low-fat group’s fasting levels increased. Oops!
- All groups saw a decrease in insulin levels, differences being insignificant.
- The low-carb group saw the only statistically significant decrease in glycated hemoglobin, a marker of blood sugar control.
It’s pretty obvious that the low-carb diet, which wasn’t even all that low-carb, soundly trounced the low-fat diet and was superior to the Mediterranean Diet as well in nearly all relevant markers.
And yet the AHA says:
“The American Heart Association doesn’t recommend high-protein diets for weight loss,” the statement reads in part. “Some of these diets restrict healthful foods that provide essential nutrients and don’t provide the variety of foods needed to adequately meet nutritional needs. People who stay on these diets very long may not get enough vitamins and minerals and face other potential health risks.”
What level of absolute absurdity does one have to possess to come up with this stuff? First of all, they call it a “high-protein diet”. Scroll back up and tell me what the percentage difference was between the low-fat and low-carb diets. Am I subtracting 19.6 from 20.6 correctly and getting 1%?! Yet it’s a high-protein diet.
Some high-protein diets de-emphasize high-carbohydrate, high-fiber plant foods. These foods help lower cholesterol when eaten as part of a nutritionally balanced diet. Reducing consumption of these foods usually means other, higher-fat foods are eaten instead. This raises cholesterol levels even more and increases cardiovascular risk.
I’ll wait again while you scroll up to see that the low-carb diet was markedly better than the low-fat at decreasing cholesterol levels. I guess when you keep your head in the sand, it really is possible to keep repeating this nonsense. But no logical thinking person can read this data and reconcile it with what the AHA spews.
They also continue with the garbage about low-carb diets restricting fruits and vegetables. Recall that my diet is about 15% carbohydrates. Anyone want to find me a low-fat dieter that eats more vegetation than me? I’m sure they exist, but I bet they’re rare.
So In The End
We get unsurprising results: the low-carb diet tops the others and the Mediterranean Diet, which is a pretty decent choice as well, tops the low-fat diet. We also get another unsurprising result: The AHA refuses to face reality and even think about advising a *cough cough* “high-protein diet”. It’s a sad state of affairs in the AHA world.
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
Has anyone here ever had the joy of experiencing Shingles? I’m not talking about re-roofing your house. I’m talking about the wonderful painful, burning, itching sensation caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox. Well, for the last couple weeks, I have been getting a mild taste of it. And a mild taste is enough to make me feel really bad for people that get knocked out with it hard.
What It Is
If you’ve had chicken pox, you have the Varicella zoster virus (VZV) lying dormant somewhere in your body, specifically in your trigeminal nerve and/or dorsal root ganglion. It is one of eight Herpes viruses that affect humans. Well, for 10-20% of us lucky ducks that have had chicken pox (which is most of us in civilization), the VZV virus rears its ugly head again, causing Herpes zoster, otherwise known as Shingles.
The hallmark symptoms of this wonderful little critter are a painful, burning, itching rash of blisters that affects only one side of the body and pain in the affected nerve. For me, the rash runs on the right side of my body, from right next to my spine at shoulder blade height, around under my arm and onto the right side of my chest. The worst of it has been under my arm and on my chest. But the real fun of Shingles is that, since the virus infects the nerves, it can leave lingering pain in the nerves for a months. It can be so bad for some people that just a shirt brushing over it or a stiff wind sends pain shooting through their body.
Eventually, the blisters break open, oozing liquid full of the virus. At this point, it is possible to pass along chicken pox to someone that hasn’t had it before, like children. You cannot, however, pass along Shingles to anyone. Shingles isn’t contagious. Chicken pox is. Somehow I escaped this part and the blisters are just drying out and crusting over without oozing anything.
How Does It Reactivate
How the virus stays dormant in the nerve cells is scientifically unknown. How it reactivates seems to be some combination of factors that compromise the immune system. For me, I’m assuming it was a combination of training very hard for this weekend’s track meet, sub-par diet while traveling (still better than most Americans, but sub-par for me), the stress of life events, the stress of trying to sell a house, and the combination of too little sleep and one or two drinks more than just one or two drinks due to hanging out with old friends.
Other things that can cause VZV to wake up and say hello are certain cancers and contact with a chicken pox infected person, neither of which I think happened in my case, though I could be wrong about the chicken pox considering I did just spend plenty of time in airports and traveling. I guess when the virus comes in contact with someone that already has dormant VZV in their body, it can cause a reactivation of the virus and give this pleasurable experience.
The Onset
About two weeks ago, I bought some new soap, a different kind than I had been using. The next day, I noticed a weird very slight sensitivity under my arm and on my chest. Another day later and it was stronger with a slight itch. I changed soaps back, thinking I was having some reaction to that. Then the first spots broke out under my arm, then on my back, then finally on my chest. By that point, I had kind of deduced what was going on considering that it was definitely affecting the nerves, as I judged by the sensation of the skin and coupled with the itching, I did some sleuthing. And once I was certain it was Shingles, I determined not to be laid out with this for weeks like some people are. Frankly, it would take a broken leg to keep me out of that track meet this weekend.
And I’d Say I’m Lucky
Here is a beautiful picture of the “belt” of rashes that Shingles causes in some people. Mine is nowhere near that bad. In fact, mine is more like five areas of rashes that fall in a single line, not a belt like that. It’s mildly itchy and occasionally mildly burning, but nothing like what I read described online.
I’ve known one person that had this back in college. He was knocked out of work for 2 or 3 weeks. I’ve been working away, no one at work the wiser, and even continued training for the Bluegrass State Games, which I’ll be competing in this weekend. There’s been no shooting nerve pains as I’ve heard described. Which means I should be lucky enough to avoid the Postherpetic neuralgia. Really what I’ve had has been an irritation more than anything else. A constant low-level itch with occasional burning, especially now that the rash has started healing, typically after I sweat. It’s not even as bad as the rash of poison ivy I had up my arm last year, though not something I’d sign up for again either (unless the alternative was poison ivy).
The good news is that few people suffer more than three recurrences. But here’s hoping I don’t get it two more times to complete that trifecta.
Treatment
Basically, short of taking antiviral drugs to stop the virus from replicating, the only course of action is to let it run its course and manage the symptoms. Since my symptoms have been mild, I didn’t seek out any prescriptions. I contacted Dr. Smith, explained the situation to him, and he told me to take 1000mg of L-lysine three times per day. Beyond that, I started using vitamin E oil on the rash once it started itching as it seems to keep it moist enough to not itch/burn as much. Later, I read that vitamin E oil is a good treatment for it. A cold compress works well to keep the itching at bay as well, at least temporarily.
Lysine is an inhibitor of Herpes activity, whereas the amino acid arginine can promote Herpes growth. That means that arginine-rich foods are a no-no right now, which include chocolate, nuts, grains, and seeds. That also means that when traveling in the future, I’ll keep a watch on how many nuts I include in my diet as I tend to use them to keep my fat intake higher, a situation would possibly added to the above list of circumstances. Luckily, I already eat lots of lysine-rich foods in the form of meat and fish, along with fruits and vegetables.
As I mentioned, there are antiviral drugs that can be prescribed to stop the virus from being able to replicate and may shorten the duration. For the painful itchy rash, a capsaicin lotion is a regularly suggested over-the-counter treatment. Other suggested treatments are oral vitamins C and E, along with lysine cream. I haven’t used any of these treatments yet as it didn’t get that bad, but if it does, I’ll be off to find some.
As I mentioned above, it took a few days to figure out what was going on, but once I did, I made sure to keep myself on the dietary straight-and-narrow. I’m making sure to give my body every resource it can to fight this garbage off. I have no doubt that the fact that I do have a strong immune system, temporarily tainted by some abnormal circumstances, has kept this as a minor annoyance rather than a major life disturbance.
Anyone else had this pleasure?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
So after I published the last post on Overdoing The Sauce a few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link with a bit more information (Thanks Brian!). Now, it would’ve been nice to have had this before I hit Publish, but that’s what happens when you pick friends that can’t read your mind. So here are some facts with which you can impress your friends, courtesy of How Stuff Works:
Alcohol in the bloodstream causes the pituitary gland to stop excreting vasopressin. This hormone tells the kidneys to reabsorb water for recirculation. Without it, you make trips to the restroom constantly. “According to studies, drinking about 250 milliliters of an alcoholic beverage causes the body to expel 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water; that’s four times as much liquid lost as gained.”
Women have less acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione, both necessary for breaking down ethanol into acetate, making their hangovers worse, even after factoring in body weight differences.
Alcohol inhibits the natural stimulant glutamine, hence you get drowsy. After you stop drinking, the body tries to catch up and produces more glutamine than normal. Because of that, you don’t sleep well.
Alcohol irritates the cells lining the stomach along with increasing hydrochloric acid production. This can send a message to the brain that damage is being done (it is) and cause vomiting. Yeah, I’m sure some of you have been there and now you know why it happened.
A few things that won’t cure your hangover: another drink, burnt toast, coffee, greasy food
A few things that may help prevent a hangover: greasy food, water, painkillers, carbon-based OTC medicines
A few things that can help cure your hangover: eggs, bananas, fruit juice, water, painkillers, carbon-based OTC medicines
And the #1 hangover prevention tip: Don’t drink like you’re at a college frat party. Have a drink or two with your meal and enjoy the company. Basically, don’t get a hangover.
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
First, there was Fen-Phen with its promises of weight loss, but which carried the additional benefits of valvular heart disease and pulmonary hypertension. Then there was Vioxx, an NSAID which delivered great benefits in treating arthritis, but only if you weren’t too concerned about the minor risks of heart attack and stroke. And that’s just two of the major recalls. There is also quite a list of lesser-known drugs that were voluntarily (cough!) withdrawn from the market. There are also some like Crestor that have had certain high doses pulled from the market, lesser doses still being sold.
After adjusting for other risk factors, individuals who were currently taking rosiglitazone and pioglitazone had approximately double or triple the odds of hip and other non-spine fractures than those who did not take these drugs. The odds for fracture were increased among patients who took the drugs for approximately 12 to 18 months and the risk was highest for those with two or more years of therapy.
“Having ever used alendronate was associated with an 86 percent higher risk of newly detected atrial fibrillation compared with never having used the drug,” said Dr. Heckbert, who is also an affiliate investigator at the Group Health Center for Health Studies.
It’s a good thing Sally Field is taking once-a-month Boniva. I suppose you could take Fosamax with your diabetes drugs to try to protect your bones, at the expense of your heart. Or you could face the reality that diabetes especially is a lifestyle disease that can be treated with diet without sacrificing your bones.
It’s interesting how all of these drugs make it through the supposedly rigorous FDA approval process. In the book Death By Prescription, Dr. Ray Strand discusses the entire process, conflicts of interest and all. But there’s another odious force working behind the scenes to keep complete information from you. And yes, I am bold enough to say that it’s not innocent. I wrote once before about ghost writing of studies by pharmaceutical companies. Here is an article with a nice step-by-step of how the ghost-writing process happens.
Let’s not forget about recent trials showing the “wonder combination” of Zetia and Zocor, marketed as Vytorin. This combination of a statin drug (Zocor) and a non-statin drug (Zetia) was supposed to work even better than either drug by itself. Too bad for the millions of people that took the drug that it actually caused arterial plaques to grow at nearly twice the rate of patients taking Zocor alone. Bad news, right? Not as bad as the news that Schering-Plough and Merck withheld the results of the study for two years. Nefarious? The companies say no, but if the data had been positive, it’s unlikely it would have taken quite so long.
If you’re interested in keeping up on what’s happening in the world of drug recalls, check the Drug Recalls site. I won’t say don’t take pharmaceuticals. There are definite situations that call for the use of drugs. But don’t take drugs without exhausting other options and without considering the serious side effects that some of them carry. Don’t take drugs without asking lots of questions. And don’t forget that you’re in charge of your health; a doctor is simply there to help guide you along the path.
How do we get people to take control of their health rather than putting it in the hands of companies with a motive to get them on pharmaceuticals?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
One of the current buzz-words in the fitness community is “core”. Everyone talks about “core work” and devices that “activate your core.” Stay up a bit too late and catch an infomercial and you’re sure to find something that will “shred your core” (for only four easy installments of $19.99) Frankly, I hate the word. It’s another case of a word being overused, misused, and turned into a marketing term like “organic” or “natural”. But I’m going to use it anyway for the sake of simplicity. I’m not using it in the cliche marketing way, just as a simple way to capture this discussion about the abdominals and lower back.
Defining The Core
Typically, when the word “core” is used, it is in reference to the six-pack abdominals and lower back. However, the list of muscles responsible for stabilization of the body is much more extensive: “pelvic floor muscles, transversus abdominis (TVA), multifidus, internal and external obliques, rectus abdominis, erector spinae (sacrospinalis) especially the longissimus thoracis, and the diaphragm. Minor core muscles include the latissimus dorsi, gluteus maximus, and trapezius.” So there are lots of muscles at work and we need to make sure we’re moving in ways that involve all of them.
The Role of The Abdominals and Lower Back
While the rectus abdominis is the pretty muscle that we see flexed on the cover of so many fitness magazines, it is only a very small piece of the puzzle. It’s role is actually to pull the shoulders towards the hips, obviously not the only role your midsection plays. The easiest word to sum up what the muscles of your core do is “posture.” By that, I mean they are responsible for holding the upper body in the proper posture for whatever it is you’re doing, be that standing at attention, lifting a bag of garbage into the trash can, or spiking a volleyball.
Obviously posture, as in pulling your shoulders back and standing up tall and proud, is an easy one to see. Support is another major role of these muscles. Think of picking up a basket of laundry, squatting 300 pounds, or putting something up over your head. Your core musculature contracts to hold the body rigid while you control an external object. If you don’t tense your muscles in support of the upper body, you will either falter under the weight of the object or look pretty silly trying to put the can of paint on the shelf.
Finally, the core is responsible for efficient movement. Think of walking up an incline (or walking in general) or a running back stopping on a dime to make a sharp change in direction. If the core is not adequately tensed, the upper body is like a rope, sloppy, moving about, and wasting the energy that the hips and legs are transmitting downwards and upwards (think Equal, But Opposite Forces).
Why You Need A Strong Core
The takeaway from the last section is that there is really one key role of the musculature wrapping your core: support. This is necessary to prevent injury to the spinal column. The spine is a rather weak set of joints and is quite prone to injury. So on the surface, there’s the ultimate goal of maintaining function throughout life as a reason to keep your abdominals and lower back adequately strong. But for so many of us, there’s a greater goal than just picking up a three-year old. Quite a few of you, and me included, have an interest in pursuing athletics at some level, whether that’s as an amateur or at a high school or collegiate level. So let’s see how the core is involved in sports.
Since I’m the author of this post, I’m going to start with my love, sprinting. Form is of the utmost importance when running or sprinting. Notice that when you fatigue, the first thing to go is form. As your form deteriorates, your body moves less efficiently. There is more wasted motion in trying to move your weight as there is more slack. Let’s look at a great example (for a point/counter-point and because I love watching this race):
Notice how Michael Johnson keeps his torso upright, shoulders back, and head forward the whole way? Coming down the final stretch, I guarantee he’s working his tail off to keep his upper body from slumping. Now notice the guy in the lane to his right…with about 50m to go, his form breaks down, his speed slows, and he gives up what appears to be two places, from second to fourth. Just like that, he went from medaling to not getting on the stand by running out of steam and not being able to maintain form. His arms could no longer help transmit force through his upper body to his hips due to the sloppiness of his torso. Of course, there’s more to it than just fatigue in the core, but you can’t discount that.
Powerlifters understand the necessity of strong muscles around the midsection. Show me a guy with a triple bodyweight deadlift and I’ll show you someone with unbelievably strong abs and lower back. This guy is unlikely to injure himself picking up a couch. In gymnastics, these support muscles are necessary to hold everything from an L-sit to an Iron Cross. Slop in the torso means slop in the hold.
Pick any sport. Basketball? Try jumping as high as you can, but leave your core slack. Your legs and hips generate force into a sloppy mess of an upper body. How high did you jump? Football…you can’t make a strong tackle without strong support of your spine. Again, your lower body is generating driving force and without a strong, rigid upper body, the force is absorbed by a flexing of the spine. Baseball…swinging a bat involves a drive from the feet through the hips, up the body, and through the arms to the bat, as does throwing the ball from the outfield to gun down a runner heading home.
Basically, it boils down to this: if your core is weak, your athletic abilities are diminished. You aren’t fast, you aren’t agile, you aren’t strong, and you’re not powerful if these muscles lack the ability to hold the body in the proper position throughout the movement.
How Not To Work Your “Core”
With all of that, let’s consider how most people work their abs: crunches. What exactly are crunches? I doubt I need to explain this movement to anyone: lay on your back and contract your shoulders towards your hips. But make sure you don’t go through the full range of motion because to use a muscle and joint through its entire range would be just asinine. The average gym-goer is predominantly working just one of the muscles listed above, the rectus abdominis, and then only through part of its range of motion.
The other craze, which seems to have died out some, but not enough, is to do everything on those huge purple balls known as Swiss balls. Dumbbell bench press? Sure thing. Squats? But of course! Handstands? Ok, I haven’t seen that one yet, but I have no doubt someone has tried. I could probably search YouTube and find an example of Darwin at work.
And then there’s the much neglected lower back. Few people do ANY lower back work to speak of. Couple that with poor stretching that actually reduces the support capabilities of the spinal erectors and you can see why so many people are laid up after something as minor as picking up a box.
Five Better Ways To Work Your “Core”
So if not crunches and not Swiss balls, what should you be doing to keep your midsection strong. As with all areas of fitness, I’m not a big fan of exercises that are solely intended to isolate one muscle group. I prefer to work the abs and lower back as part of the system that is the body. Focus on movements that mimic daily living and the muscles will take care of themselves. With that, here are five exercises that I feel are primo to achieving a well-functioning, strong, supportive core.
Overhead Squats - See the girl in the picture above? You can’t do that without seriously flexing everything in your upper body. Here is an article by Dan John on why the overhead squat is important to athletics and here you can check out Becca Borawski with a nice overhead squat. Notice the maintenance of an arch in her lower back. This exercise is also excellent for flexibility.
Deadlift - I wrote once before about the importance of the deadlift. This exercise is as basic as it gets: bend down, lock in your lower back, and pick something up. It’s primal, it’s functional. Here is a good how-to.
Plank - This involves holding the body rigid parallel to the floor, keeping everything from shoulders to ankles in a straight line. Lauren B has a couple of videos here demonstrating several plank variations.
L-sit - This one is rough, but really shows how deficient the abs are. The legs are held at 90 degrees to the torso, forming an L, like sitting in a chair except, uhh…without the chair. Here is a nice walk-through on how to work up to an L-sit.
Reverse Hyper - Want to squat more? Do reverse hypers. Want to heal your injured lower back? Do reverse hypers. This exercise is king for building lower back, gluteal, and hamstring strength. Unfortunately, the device is rather expensive and most gyms don’t have one. But if you have access to a Reverse Hyper machine, use it! There is some argument about the best way to do these. I tend to agree with Eric Cressey in that the movement should be controlled (like this), not just a giant swing.
So there they are, five exercises that you should be incorporating into your workouts. Overhead squats and deadlifts are obviously movements that can comprise an entire workout in themselves. The others can and should be used as warm-ups and supplemental exercises. You can’t go wrong by giving your abs and lower back the attention they deserve.
What is your favorite exercise for keeping these all-important muscles up to snuff?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
For the study, investigators tracked responses to a first infection after birth and found that breast-fed girls were the least likely to be hospitalized with an acute respiratory disease. Only 6 percent (two of 31) of breast-fed girls had first infections severe enough to require hospitalization compared to 50 percent (12 out 24) of the non-breast-fed girls. There was virtually no difference in hospitalization for first infection in breast-fed versus non-breast-fed boys, with 18 percent from both the breast-fed and non-breast-fed groups developing severe respiratory infections. This pattern repeated itself throughout the first year of life and in subsequent infections, with breast-fed girls showing fewer complications and hospitalizations than both formula-fed girls and breast-fed and formula-fed boys. In the first year of life, formula-fed girls continued to have the highest risk for severe respiratory disease and hospitalization.
…compared the offspring of rats fed a diet of processed junk food such as doughnuts, muffins, biscuits, crisps and sweets during pregnancy and lactation, and compared their offspring with those fed a healthy diet of regular feed. The offspring of the mothers fed junk food diets had raised levels of cholesterol as well as higher levels of triglycerides, a type of fat found in the bloodstream.
The researchers studied the rats beyond adolescence through to adulthood and observed that the rats were still fatter than those whose mothers had eaten a healthier diet whilst pregnant and breastfeeding…increased fat mass surrounding the kidneys relative to body mass; this so-called perirenal fat is also involved in the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
Participants who attended Weight Watchers for 12 weeks lost an average of 5 percent of their body weight, or about nine pounds. However…”Participants’ body fat percentage did not improve at all because they lost a much higher percentage than expected of lean tissue,” said Ball, MU Extension state fitness specialist. “It is advantageous to keep lean tissue because it is correlated with higher metabolism. Losing lean tissue often slows metabolism. What your body is made of is more important than what you weigh.”
The majority of other Weight Watcher studies had not considered body fat percentage change and only focused on body weight.
The results of the study suggested that relatively low amounts of cruciferous vegetables in the diet — a few portions per week — can have large effects on gene expression by changing cell signalling pathways. These signalling pathways are the routes by which information is transmitted through a molecular cascade which amplifies the signal to the nucleus of the cell where gene expression occurs.
“Erectile dysfunction is a portal into men’s health,” said the study’s senior author, Aksam Yassin, MD, PhD, of the Clinic for Urology and Andrology of the Segeberger Clinics in Norderstedt, Germany. “It is becoming clear that obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems and erectile difficulties are intertwined, and a common denominator is testosterone deficiency.”
The study clearly indicates that regular intercourse protects men from the development of erectile dysfunction, which may, in turn, impact general health and quality of life. The investigators advise clinicians to support the sexual activity of their patients.
Of course, there’s always the logical conclusion that men with ED don’t have sex more often because they have ED and not that sex is protecting the other men from having ED.
If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth showing up on time and staying for the duration. Learning requires commitment. All the ancient masters knew this to be true; there was no drop-in training at the Shaolin temple, we can be sure of that.
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
Happy Fourth of July all. Get out to a cookout and have some delicious grilled flesh. Be careful with the fireworks too. We don’t need anybody coming back with fingers blown off. As for me, after the family affair, I’m off to the Waterfront Independence Festival to see some live music and fireworks. On the docket is Los Lobos, JJ Grey and Mofro (awesome blues/southern rock/R&B group), and George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Yes, that’s right, the Atomic Dog himself is gracing Louisville.
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
Today, a short post on something very simple: trying foods you dislike a second or third time. This came to me a week or so ago when I got my CSA box. In it were cherries. I’ve never liked cherries. I always liked cherry flavoring. Hated cherries. So when I first saw the cherries in there, I thought, “I suppose Brian [a friend in the CSA with me] will be getting a bag of cherries.” Then I reconsidered and tried one. Well, to Brian’s dismay, I loved them, so he only got his rightful half of the bag we received.
But it made me think. I could have went with my first instinct and just passed them along, knowing that I hate them anyway. Instead, I popped one in my mouth and thoroughly enjoyed it. Strawberries were another food that I never really enjoyed until about 2 years ago. Strawberry flavoring was good. Strawberries, not so much. It was something about the texture. Now I eat strawberries with abandon.
Olives are another food that I couldn’t eat before. Too pungent. Now I can sit and eat olives straight from the jar. What’s the reason for these three (among many) changes in taste?
Why Does It Happen?
One theory, which up until a few hours was the one I’d heard and believed, is that our taste buds are refreshed every seven years. It turns out that’s an old wives’ tale, likely made up by a mother trying to get her kids to eat a bit of broccoli or some lima beans. Another urban legend is that the tongue is mapped into regions that taste sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Putting salt on the tip of your tongue should be enough to prove that wrong.
Of course, there’s another, more realistic, possibility than that my taste buds magically changed. I finally quit assaulting my taste buds with overly sweet and overly salty foods and learned to appreciate the natural flavors and textures of foods. There was certainly an adjustment period when I first cleaned up my diet. I found foods rather bland and boring, but kept eating them for the sake of eating the right stuff. I think my palate has finally acclimated itself to real foods.
One final theory: the more foods you try, the more your taste buds get used to enjoying new foods. My diet is so much broader now than it was even a year or two ago. Maybe working the taste buds makes them “stronger”.
So the real question is, do the taste buds actually change what they’re tasting or does our cognitive interpretation of that taste change? Hmm…perplexing, though in the end, it’s an irrelevant question. One thing is for sure. The sense of taste dulls as you age, whether due to a dulling of the taste buds or a dulling of the sense of smell.
How Do You Know When It’s Time To Try Something Again?
It’s always time to try something again. The absolute worst case scenario is that your mouth will revolt again and you’ll spit it out. I have heard a theory that parents should have their child try a particular food eight times on different occasions (and not eight days in a row) before accepting “I don’t like that.”
The same rule should hold for adults. You never know if you just didn’t like the way it was prepared, the way it was presented, something else in the meal that left a bad taste in your mouth, or perhaps your tastes were just off that day. So try it again a week later. If you steamed the broccoli you (or your kids) hated last time, try it stir-fried or raw.
So the whole point of this post is to say, “Keep trying things!” You never know what incredibly healthful foods you’ll rediscover from your past that you now enjoy.
What foods do you eat now that you hated a decade or less ago? How did you learn to like them?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
RSS Feed
