5 Quick and Easy Ways to Feel and Move Better: Installment 3
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Blog, Corrective Exercise, Cressey Performance, deadlift, deadlift technique, Deadlifts, Distance Running, Greg Robins, How to Deadlift, Knee Pain, Off-Season Training for Pitchers, Sports Nutrition Comments OffHere are this week's random tips to get you headed in the right direction with your workout routine and nutrition program, with assistance from Cressey Performance strength and conditioning coach Greg Robins.
1. Take a preventative approach.
Often times nagging pain, injuries, and adverse health effects are an issue of negligence. It is is important as a coach, athlete, or weekend warrior to take a preventative approach to keeping your body healthy. There is no shortage of information on how to deal with various joint pain, or why its important to do "this" to prevent "that". At Cressey Performance, we take a preventive approach to keep our athletes on the field, but the ball doesn't stop there.
A common example is resistance training among older women to prevent bone degeneration. A recent study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that younger women, in their mid twenties, who participated in a 12-week resistance training program showed significant increases in the hormones responsible for new bone growth. This isn't revolutionary, but the take home point is to promote heavy lifting long before signs of degeneration begin to present themselves.
Similarly, anterior knee pain is a hot topic with active individuals. This pain can be debilitating, especially as an athlete or someone with a more active job / lifestyle. Another recent study conducted at The University of Cincinnati found that an intervention with four daily close chained kinetic exercises among military recruits (undergoing rigorous training) greatly reduced incidents of knee pain when compared to a control group who did not. Military personnel underwent daily physical training for 3-4 hours per day, including endurance marching, military field exercises, running, weapons and foot drill, and strength and conditioning. If as little as four exercises were able to help these individuals, imagine what they can do for you.
2. Eat more fish - and preferably ones that did cool stuff like this while they were still alive.
3. Wear a pedometer for a day.
If you talk to a lot of people "in the know," non-exercise physical activity (NEPA) is an often overlooked factor contributing to fat loss success (or failure). Some people just move all the time, whether it's because of their occupation (e.g., manual laborer) or the simple fact that they are constantly fidgeting. It might surprise you, but this NEPA can really help get you lean - or keep you there.
One quick and easy way to get a feeling of where you stand on this front is to simply wear a pedometer for a day. I did this about two years ago and discovered that I actually walk about four miles in eight hours of coaching at Cressey Performance. That's a lot of calories burned!
Just like writing down everything you eat can force you to consider what you're putting in your mouth, wearing a pedometer can motivate you to take some extra steps each day. Give it a shot; you may be surprised at how many or few steps you take each day.
4. Count your blessings.
Being happy, and finding fulfillment in your life and training, can be as easy as remembering all that you already have. Stop stressing about what you don't have, and focus on the many things you do have. Take five minutes and write down everything you are grateful for. Every morning start your day by reading through your list, and add to it as you see fit. Doing so will give you a positive start to each day. Try it out!
5. Be more specific with your "conditioning."
The term conditioning is grossly misunderstood. The lack of understanding, in consideration of the demands of an individual within their chosen sports or activities, has led to many asinine training protocols developed by misinformed coaches and general people alike. An elite powerlifter may not be able to run a six-minute mile, but they are perfectly conditioned for their sport. Likewise, a baseball pitcher has no business doing extensive distance running when they a play a sport that involves covering as little as 100ft of total ground per outing (if that). More appropriately, they need to develop the energy systems conducive to producing explosive movements repetitively for the amount of time they spend on the mound. This will differ within the position as well: Starters, long relievers, closers, etc.
Using resources such as "time motion analysis" is a great place to investigate the actual demands placed on an athlete in a given sport. You can access A LOT of these through a basic google search. As a team sport coach, take a critical look at what you assign as "conditioning" work to your athletes during practice. In this day and age, many kids are participating in strength and conditioning programs outside of their practice and game schedules. Assuming that they are receiving intelligent programming, you do not want to interfere with their training by having them do additional work that is detrimental to their progress. Solutions: stop the ridiculous amounts of distance running and "suicides," and instead form a relationship with their strength and conditioning coach.
For you weekend warriors: Your approach to conditioning will be as specific as your main goal. Many general fitness people are kind of across the board on what they are trying to accomplish. With that in mind, try to keep a similar stimulus in your conditioning work to what the rest of your training for that day is. For example, place sprint work with adequate rest on heavy lifting days, place more aerobic work on off days, and include a day of high intense intervals with shorter rest later in the week after training.
Co-Author Greg Robins is strength and conditioning coach at Cressey Performance in Hudson, MA. Check out his website, www.GregTrainer.com, for more great content.
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Strength and Conditioning Stuff You Should Read: 5/17/12
Posted: May 17, 2012 Filed under: Adam Bornstein, Blog, deadlift, deadlift technique, Deadlifts, Exercise Science, Exercise Science Degree, How to Deadlift, Mike Reinold, Strength and Conditioning Comments OffHere's this week's list of recommended strength and conditioning reading:
The Coming Meltdown in College Education and Why the Economy Won't Get Better Anytime Soon - I stay away from politics with this blog, but this post from Mark Cuban was too good to resist - particularly because it was a great follow-up to my series, Is an Exercise Science Degree Really Worth It? In case you missed my previous articles, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. I think it's a really important consideration in our field, where the average personal trainer makes less than $30,000, yet an exercise science degree can cost well over $200,000 even before student loan interest is included. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Advanced Rotary Stability Plank Progressions - Be sure to check out this post from Mike Reinold, where he outlines some great core stability exercise progressions, many of which can be found in our Functional Stability Training DVD set.
The 10 Things Fitness Magazines Won't Tell You - I have gotten to work with Adam Bornstein quite a bit through both Men's Health and LiveStrong, and I like doing so because he isn't just a bright guy, but also a straight-shooter. This article demonstrates both!
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Tips for Long-Term Triceps Health
Posted: May 16, 2012 Filed under: Articles, Blog, Corrective Exercise, strength training program, strength training programs, T-Muscle, T-Nation Comments OffI’d wager that if you chatted with 100 lifters over the age of 30 with more than five years of strength training experience, they’d tell you that their triceps exercise selection has increasingly diminished with each passing year.
It's sad and disturbing, but not unexpected.
Barbell and dumbbell triceps extension variations can kill the underside of the elbows.
Dips can irritate the medial aspect of the elbow in the bottom position, or just bother the AC joint at the shoulder girdle.
Beet It: Can Beets Help You Run Faster?
Posted: May 15, 2012 Filed under: Blog, Food and Nutrition, Research Reviews, Training and Sport Comments Off| Summary: Supplementing with sodium nitrate has been shown to improve exercise capacity. Yet sodium nitrate in processed foods is a health hazard. New research suggests that you might be able to eliminate those health risks yet still reap the performance benefits by eating beets before exercise. |
Eating a diet rich in vegetables is one of the best ways to decrease your risk for chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. Vegetables are low in calories but high in fibre, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytochemicals.
But what about the nitrate content? Would that be on your list? When it comes to exercise, mounting evidence shows the nitrate content of vegetables may exert a natural ergogenic — or performance-enhancing — effect.
Nitrates are found in all vegetables but are especially abundant in leafy green vegetables and in beetroot.
Okay, but aren’t nitrates also found in hot dogs and bacon, and aren’t these foods supposed to be bad for you?
Good question!
Nitrate versus nitrite
What a difference a vowel makes!
Sodium nitrate (note the “a”) is a naturally occurring compound found in almost all leafy green vegetables as well as in beetroot. For a list of foods high in nitrates see the Research Review “Do Veggies Improve Endurance Performance?” Sodium nitrate has antimicrobial properties so it’s used as a food preservative in lunch meats, sausage and bacon. When it combines with the myoglobin in meat it increases the meat’s colour during cooking. Sodium nitrate is also one of the ingredients in pesticides, fireworks and fertilizers.
Sodium nitrite (note the “i”) is a close relative of sodium nitrate and is also used as a preservative, but some of its byproducts have been linked to cancer and other serious health conditions. Because of this, the USDA, EPA and WHO have all placed limits on the amount of nitrates and nitrites that are added to food and water.
Here’s the catch: Dietary nitrates and nitrites seem to be harmful… except when consumed in their naturally occurring vegetable form. (Just one more reason to eat whole, unprocessed foods.) So don’t run out and load up on bacon and hot dogs to increase the amount of nitrate in your diet.
Beets and performance
Back to dietary nitrate and improved exercise performance. A number of studies show that beetroot juice improves time to exhaustion during exercise (in other words, you have more energy for a longer period) and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise (1, 2).
Researchers have hypothesized that the nitrate in beetroot juice reduces the oxygen cost of endurance exercise by allowing you to burn less energy (ATP) to produce the muscular force that propels you forward, allowing you to last longer.
So how does this all work?
Beets contain a lot of great things, including phytochemicals like quercetin and resveratrol. But the positive effects of beets on exercise performance are probably due to their nitrate content.
The breakdown and use of dietary nitrates in the body is actually pretty cool. It begins in the mouth with your saliva. About a quarter of the dietary nitrate (NO3) found in foods like beets enter the salivary circulation after combining with bacteria on your tongue. There, the NO3 is converted to active nitrite (NO2). Neat, huh? Then you swallow the nitrite and it is reduced to nitric oxide (NO) when it interacts with your stomach acid.
It is this form, nitric oxide, that produces the positive effects during exercise. You’ve probably heard of nitric oxide, especially if you hang out in the supplement aisles of your local health food store. Nitric oxide does a lot of things, but in terms of exercise it increases blood flow to the muscles, making it easier for your power generators (mitochondria) to produce energy (ATP). It also governs blood pressure and regulates muscle contraction.
The majority of beetroot studies so far have used time to exhaustion protocols – and those results don’t always translate into actual performance gains. What most enquiring minds really want to know is: will eating beets or drinking beetroot juice help me to run (cycle, swim, walk, etc) faster?
One study showed that drinking beetroot juice improves cycling time trial performance (3), but what about eating plain ol’ beets – and what if you are a runner, not a cyclist?
Research question
The study in this week’s review looked at whether eating 200 grams of whole beetroot (containing ~500 mg of nitrates) before exercise improves running performance during a 5 km treadmill time trial.
Murphy, M., Eliot, K., Heuertz, R., Weiss, E. Whole beetroot consumption acutely improves running performance. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2012 Apr;112(4):548-552.
Methods
The participants in this study consisted of five recreationally fit men and six women in their 20s. The study used a double-blind crossover design in which the subjects ate either 200 grams of baked beets or a placebo (cranberry relish) before completing a 5 kilometer treadmill time trial test. All participants completed two trials in random sequence separated by a 1-week “washout” period. The purpose of the washout was to decrease the chances that the intervention effects (eating beets or cranberries) would overlap and interfere with the results of either of the trials.
Trial 1: The subjects ate 200 grams of baked beets (about 2 medium-sized beets) and 75 minutes later ran 5 kilometers on a treadmill.
Trial 2: The subjects ate 200 grams of a cranberry relish and 75 minutes later ran 5 kilometers on a treadmill.
For each of the trials, the subjects arrived at the laboratory after an 8 hour fast. They were asked to avoid eating other nitrate-rich foods (they were given a list), dietary supplements, and medications for 72 hours before the test. They were also told not to lift weights in that same time period and in the 24 hours before were asked not to consume alcohol, caffeine or do any sort of exercise. All these “rules” made for a stronger study by levelling the playing field as best as possible between subjects.
While it is pretty easy to distinguish the taste of beets from that of cranberry relish, the researchers kept the portions and calories similar and used the same spices. Because the participants didn’t know what the study was about, the researchers thought it unlikely that the difference in taste would create a placebo effect and change the outcome of the study.
Resting blood pressure was measured before and one hour after eating the beetroot or cranberry relish. During the time trial the researchers recorded average running velocity, heart rate and rating of perceived exertion at one mile intervals and at the end of the 5 km run.
200 g beets = about 2 medium beets
Results
Improved running performance
The researchers wanted to find out if eating 200 grams of beetroot (containing ~500 mg nitrates) before exercise improved running times enough to be significant. What they found was that yes, average running velocity (speed in a given direction) was slightly faster (3%) after eating the beetroot compared to the placebo 12.3+ 2.7 vs 11.9+ 2.6 km.
Interestingly, the difference was greatest (5%) during the last mile.
While the difference may not look like much, a 3% faster running velocity translates to about a 41 second faster finishing time. In a short race like a 5 km run, 41 seconds is a lot! For example if your pace is 8 minutes per mile, you would finish a 5 km in 24:51 minutes. But if you ate 200 grams of beetroot before the run you could potentially shave 3% off of your time.
So we know the subjects ran at a faster velocity. But were there any differences in heart rate or did they feel like the run was easier after eating the beetroot?
Heart rate and rating of perceived exertion
Even though the subjects ran at a slightly faster velocity during the beetroot trial, there were no differences in exercise heart rate compared to the placebo trial.
What does that mean?
Well, the most likely explanation is that the nitrate content of the beets reduced the oxygen cost of exercise. Unfortunately, this study did not take direct measurements of oxygen use or of respiratory exchange rate (RER is a measure of the ratio of carbon dioxide produced to oxygen used) so this doesn’t fully prove cause and effect. However, it does support the results of similar types of studies evaluating the performance effects of dietary nitrates.
Perceived exertion was measured using the Borg 6 to 20 point scale. Perceived exertion was rated lower during the first mile of the beetroot trial with no differences later in the run. If perceived exertion was lower during the first mile of the beetroot trial this may have contributed to the faster running velocity later in the run, perhaps because the subjects didn’t feel as tired.
A major limitation of this study is that serum nitrate levels weren’t measured, so there is no way to know how great an increase there was after eating the beetroot compared with the placebo. Also, the nitrate content in the beetroot was not measured. Still, given what we know about the nitrite content of beets, it is pretty likely that the beetroot did in fact increase serum nitrate levels and enhance performance.
Conclusion
Eating 200 grams of baked beets 75 minutes before exercise improved the running performance of recreationally fit men and women.
The increase in performance was most likely due to the conversion of the dietary nitrate to nitrite to nitric oxide in the body. Nitric oxide reduces the oxygen cost of exercise by requiring your muscles to use less energy or ATP to produce the same amount of work.
What this means is that eating a couple of medium sized beets at least 60 minutes before a run could help you shave at least half a minute off of your 5 km time!
Of course, this was a very small study. If you want to help out with your own science project, why not try it yourself? At minimum, it’s worth a shot to see if it makes a difference. (Just don’t be alarmed if you’re peeing pink for a little while.)
Bottom line
- The results of this study have some real value and potential application to the athletic setting. Most previous studies evaluating the performance effects of nitrate-rich vegetables have used time to exhaustion protocols (which test exercise capacity, rather than athletic performance).
- You can try this yourself! If you are a juice fan, you could easily juice a couple of beets and drink the juice down before your morning run and see how you feel. Just make certain you stick to real foods. Don’t risk your life by supplementing with nitrite salts.
- We still need more research to determine the optimal amounts of dietary nitrate needed to enhance athletic performance.
References
- Bailey, Stephen J., Winyard, Paul, Vanhatalo, Anni, Blackwell, Jamie R., DiMenna, Fred J., Wilkerson, Daryl P., Tarr, Joanna, Benjamin, Nigel, and Jones, Andrew M. Dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the O2 cost of low-intensity exercise and enhances tolerance to high-intensity exercise in humans. J Applied Physiol. 2009; 107(4): 1144-1155.
- Bailey, Stephen J., Fulford Jonathan., Vanhatalo, Anni, Winyard, Paul, Blackwell, Jamie R., DiMenna, Fred J., Wilkerson, Daryl P., Benjamin, Nigel, and Jones, Andrew M. Dietary nitrate supplementation enhances muscle contractile efficiency during knee-extensor exercise in humans. J Applied Physiol. 2010; 109(1): 135-148.
- Lansley, KE, Winyard, Paul G., Bailey, Stephen J., Vanhatalo, Anni, Wilkerson, Daryl P., Blackwell, Jamie R., Gilchrist M., Benjamin, Nigel, and Jones, Andrew M. Acute dietary nitrate supplementation improves cycling time trial performance. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2011; 43(6): 1125-1131.
Learn more
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Training the Rotator Cuff and Scapular Stabilizers Simultaneously
Posted: May 15, 2012 Filed under: Baseball Content, Blog, deadlift, deadlift technique, Deadlifts, How to Deadlift, Oliver Drake, Rotator Cuff Exercises, Strength Exercises, Tim Collins Comments OffI'm always surprised when I see "arm care" portions of baseball strength and conditioning programs that attempt to break rotator cuff exercises and scapular stability exercises into different categories. In my eyes, while you can certainly prioritize one over the other, treating them as mutually exclusive means that you're missing out on a great opportunity to educate an athlete on "positional stability." Here are a few examples to demonstrate my point:
In Band Distractions w/Rhythmic Stabilizations, you'll see that Orioles prospect (and Twitter phenom) Oliver Drake, actively counteracts the distraction force created by the band by pulling the scapula back onto the rib cage. Then, we challenge the rotator cuff with rhythmic stabilizations.
Likewise, in this Half-Kneeling 1-arm Manual Resistance External Rotation, Sam needs to make sure to position the scapula appropriately on the rib cage to make sure that he's in the best position to create eccentric strength for the cuff. This is of particular importance in guys with low shoulders who may be very lat-dominant; gravity will have an additional downward pull on the scapula, so many guys need to intentionally activate upper trapezius prior to starting the set.
Or, consider a Prone External Rotation (one of our old Strength Exercises of the Week). This is definitely viewed as a rotator cuff exercise, as the goal is to learn to externally the humeral head in the socket without the "ball" migrating forward (preventing anterior instability). However, you also have to appreciate that gravity is forcing the scapula forward into anterior tilt, so the lower trapezius must be turned on to counteract it.
Likewise, just about every time you do any exercise that involves holding weights in your hands, your rotator cuff is firing reflexively.
With all these examples - and surely many more - in mind, we realize that "categorizing" arm care exercises can be pretty difficult, as we're always looking to find a balance between doing enough and doing too much.
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