An Introduction to Sports Nutrition

The aim of this article should facilitate a foundation from which you can analyse your own nutritional programme, alongside both your physiological and psychological development in order to allow you to reach your full potential

From the perspective of a budding clinical sports nutritionist, I will always look for development and improvement in the aspect of nutrition to find a potential gain for every athlete

The saying that working out is “20% in the gym, 80% in the kitchen” is as true in my eyes as it would have been decades ago, yet the aspect of nutrition and the substantial role it plays in elite performance has only been recognised in a serious manner in recent years

Your nutritional training and planning should always run in sync with your current phase of training within your periodisation/ macrocycle e.g. hypertrophy, and should provide you essentially with the macronutrients and calorific intake to achieve your goals, with a focus afterwards on nutritional intake to maximise recovery. Just as your training programme will be constantly adapted and adjusted according to your goals, so should your diet alongside it. Following the goals and training programmes of other individuals may not leads to any advances or gains in your training and performance, especially if the training is sport specific or aimed towards achieving a different aim.

The first step is an initial assessment of your diet. With the foundation of a healthy dietary intake, you will be able to build upon this with the correct supplementation to support you achieving your goals. Cleaning up your diet will require planning, dedication and hard work, along with some sacrifices. Although this may seem tough in the beginning, remember that this is what is required to achieve your maximum potential. Bad habits will be difficult to change, but once they have been and you begin to feel the benefits of your new lifestyle you will wonder why you made those choices in the first place

Take 3 to 4 months to turn your current diet into a clean programme, optimised to get the most out of your training. Your main goals, from a long-term point of view, will never be achieved with a quick fix or scheme, and so shouldn’t be attempted with the new ‘quick fix’ diet or developing a nutritional bad habit.

The other problem with the thought of “diets” is that during the “diet” period you feel like you are always missing something or being denied. This is why people often cheat and fail.

One problem with what we are asked you to do is that, to succeed, you have you have to pay a great deal of attention to the detail and some people may view you as boring. There are a lot of obvious answers to this criticism, but a point that is commonly missed is that once you have made behavioural changes to your diet you will have more flexibility in what you can and cannot eat. So after an initial period of very hard work you will re-enter the real world again, only now you will be succeeding in it, with what will appear to you and those around you as very little effort! Success is never boring.

Realism and Flexibility

When completing an assessment of your overall nutrition, two words must stay prominent in the your mind – realism and flexibility. Both of these are crucial components in you achieving your goals, and both go hand in hand in allowing you to achieve your maximum potential in whatever sporting field you choose. When analysing your nutritional intake, the realism of what you can do e.g. food preparation time may be scarce, and so meal preparation can be arduous, should work alongside the flexibility of your working schedule and ability to train beside that.

Planning for your sport

Each sport is unique in its own physical and cognitive demands upon the performer, and so should be treated that way. The nutritional requirements of a sumo wrestler will be somewhat different to that of a sprint cyclist, for a whole manner of reasons. Treating athletes as one and the same in terms of nutritional requirements and intake is illogical, and so you must be realistic in your dietary demands and plan accordingly.

Analysing your programme

As with any aspect of an athlete’s life, there are no quick fixes, no shortcuts. You must be realistic with yourself sooner rather than later, scrutinise and assess what is working and what is not. If it doesn’t work, ditch it and explore other avenues. Too many people I have spoken to continue to use techniques that just don’t work for them, yet they hope for massive changes if they continue. Perseverance is key with all things in life, but if something is not working for you, research other options and avenues to explore

Your nutritional programme should essentially allow you to achieve the physical demands and requirements of your sport, and so enable you to perform optimally. Your programme should always fit into both your short and long term goals.

Consistency

Consistency is very important to make progress. If you cheat a little everyday you will make not be making the progress you hoped for or even no progress at all, but worse than that you will believe that you have tried really hard and done really well. When you make no progress you will become disheartened and will want to give up. Short-term diets and fixes do not work, always think of your long term goals and base your nutrition on the goals you have set for the long and short term future. Having these in the forefront of your mind will allow you to make positive ideas and concise decisions about your progression

Understand why you are doing what you are doing

Doing something without knowing why you are doing it is like following the pied piper. In all aspects of your training you should be inquisitive and ask questions:

• ·      What benefits can I get from this? How will this help my performance
• ·      Has this worked with other athletes?
• ·      Is this relevant to my sport/goals?
• ·      How realistic is this for my current cycle/ phase of training?

By asking these questions you can continually reassess your progress, develop ideas for your continued development and fuel your potential to grow as an athlete

Knowledge is power

When you have the time, read. As much as it may be boring, in the long run it will benefit you one hundred fold. 2If you do not understand what you are doing or why you have been asked to change a habit or behavioural pattern, you are unlikely to succeed. The more you understand about how your body functions, responds to, and recovers from training and playing the better chance you have of making continual progress and avoiding injury. You will gradually see how what you eat affects every facet of your performance in the gym or on the pitch or anywhere else for that matter. The way I keep updated with new dietary discoveries, training methods and developments is through reading

If you follow these fundamentals you will no doubt put yourself in a good stead for developing and making progress in what sport or exercise you do

The right choices in the kitchen make your choices in the gym worthwhile!

This article was expertly written by Morgan Price-King BSc.

10 Things I Know About Protein That You Don't

1. There's No Such Thing as Undenatured Whey Protein

Here's a fact: all whey protein sold in the United States needs to first be pasteurized. Even at the lowest temperature, that means subjecting the whey protein to a level of heat that will cause changes in some of the fractions. This doesn't mean that the protein is useless or won't give you all of the benefits you see touted in advertisements and studies. It just means that undenatured is a meaningless concept when we're talking about whey protein sold legally in the United States. So unless you're clued into the whey protein black market or some whey protein-selling crime syndicate, you're not getting undenatured anything.

  

1.5. If Your Favorite Brand Sells Bioactive Peptides, Find a New Brand

Bioactive whey peptides are protein fractions that cause a measurable biological response in the body. Maybe it's enhancing the immune system or increasing pumps (for teh gainz). Those peptides come from protein. They come from the protein you buy from that same company.

See, every pound of protein might sell for $5 at the manufacturer level, but it also might contain $10 worth of peptides in 1/10th of the weight. So they strip all of those awesome peptides out, thereby losing .50c from the protein itself, but in the process they earn double the money from the sale of the peptides they removed. You get the completely denatured protein (stripped of every biologically active peptide they could mine), and they sell you back the peptides in another product (or in the same product, claiming that they have “added peptides”).

2. Cold Filtered Whey Is Still Heated

“But my whey can't be denatured from heat, it's cold filtered,” I hear someone saying. That's nice. But cold filtered is the actual filtering process that concentrates the whey into the final percentage of protein (typically +80%). The filtering has nothing to do with the fact that most manufacturers who “cold filter” their whey are still flash pasteurizing it at the highest possible temperature beforehand. Why? Because it only takes fifteen seconds to flash pasteurize whey and it takes fifteen minutes to pasteurize it at the lowest heat levels. So you can produce more whey if you only take 1/60th of the time at this stage of processing.

3. GMO/Grass-Fed Laws Are Stricter Overseas

Oh, so your whey comes from New Zealand, and you're bragging about it being non-GMO and free range and all that good stuff? Guess what? All whey from New Zealand is going to be non-GMO and free range. Their laws are far stricter than the ones in the good ol' United States, so it's a bit redundant to talk about how great your New Zealand whey is when every gram of dairy the country produces is just as good. I lived in Auckland, New Zealand, and I've been to the dairy farms, and you're from Maine, so you're probably going to have to take my word on this one.

4. No Studies Ever Compared Grass-Fed Whey to Grain-Fed Dairy

Don't get me wrong, I believe that grass-fed dairy (and beef for that matter) is superior to grain-fed. But there are no direct studies comparing them in athletes or in an exercising population. There is tons of evidence showing grass-fed animals (and their meat products) are healthier, but none on dairy in athletes. It makes a much bigger difference with meat, where the fat content can be radically altered by diet, or even with whole fat milk. But with a good whey protein, we're talking about a gram of fat per serving. So while I still prefer grass-fed (everything), this is based more on inductive reasoning than hard and fast studies that examine these parameters in athletes.

5. A 100% Hydrolyzed Whey Protein Doesn’t Exist

I've seen studies that use thirty to forty percent hydrolyzed whey and spoken to the authors. It's inedible. The reason for this is the fact that breaking down (hydrolyzing) protein is exactly what happens during the digestive process. Protein that has been 100% broken down will not stay together in any form (think about it, what would a slab of steak look like after your stomach has digested 100% of it - now imagine it as a powder). Those “100% Whey Protein Hydrolysate” jugs you see at the local nutrition chain are actually a lot lower. The “100%” claim comes from the fact that the entire jug contains hydrolyzed whey protein (no other types of protein or whey), and that protein itself has been hydrolyzed 2% (or 5% or whatever). So it's all (100%) hydrolyzed - but only by a few percent.

6. Your Amino Acids Probably Come From Dead Kittens

Ok, I'm exaggerating - but not by much. The most popular form of amino acid production is through the chemical synthesis of keratin, which requires far fewer steps (and is therefore less costly) than other methods. Keratin is abundantly supplied in hair, nails, claws, and fur. Short of staking out every hair and nail salon in China (where most aminos are sourced), producers instead make them from animals whose pelts are not good enough to use for clothing. So maybe the pelt was damaged in the slaughter process or some other horrific industrial accident. That pelt is worthless as clothing, but can still be used to synthesize leucine (or whatever). I'd estimate 95% of manufacturers are using this process or a similar one, and I'm really good at estimating horrific, awful, stuff like this.

7. Twenty Grams of High-Quality Protein Is Usually Enough

Selling more protein makes the manufacturer more money, and having a huge protein-grams-per-serving count on the label helps them win fans in the bodybuilding community. But nearly every study that looks at a decent protein source, like egg or whey, usually concludes that the additional stimulation of myotropic (muscle building) or recovery factors isn't greatly enhanced after twenty grams.

8. Worthless Aminos Are Often Substituted for Expensive Proteins

Within the industry this is known as protein spiking. Cheap aminos like glycine are used to pad the protein content of otherwise expensive whey. So if a pound of whey comes in at $6, and a pound of glycine is a $2, maybe two to three grams of the latter are put in the former. Since it's an amino and not a whole protein, it's providing those grams at a much lower cost, and doesn't appear on the label as another protein form, thereby allowing the manufacturer to still (legally) claim “100% whey” or “100% casein.” I know of one brand that uses creatine (technically an amino) to spike their protein, which as a bonus is super-easy to flavor. Their protein is delicious. Now you know why.

  

9. Twenty Grams of Protein Usually Isn’t

Protein bars are notorious for under-dosing protein and overstating the amount on the label. This is a bit of an open secret in the industry, and although powders are better, they're still under-dosed in a lot of cases. Naturally, the yummy carbs are the exact opposite - you'll find far more in the bar than you see on the label.

9.1 Twenty Grams of Protein Usually Isn’t (Part Two)

Hydrolyzed collagen is technically protein. But it doesn't build much muscle, and it has a biological value of virtually nil. I'm talking about the stuff we've been seeing in gels and goops for the past decade (allegedly, there are some recent forms that aren't useless, however it's unlikely that your favorite brand is using them). Gels are obviously the worst offender here, but those little protein shots are pretty bad also.

10. Most Protein Comes From the Same Place(s)

If you were to walk the aisles of your local supplement retailer, you'd see dozens of different brands of protein. But if you were to see the actual manufacturers of the protein itself (the people all of those brands are buying it from), you'd see far fewer companies. There are probably ten major players in the field of powdered protein, and that's being generous. They're not just huge; they own other companies that we think are huge.

Glanbia, for example, produces a lion's share of the dairy products in Ireland. They're a billion-dollar company, they own BSN as well as Optimum Nutrition, and they do contract manufacturing for tons of other companies, both big and small (well, medium). So, when you see Brand X Casein and the store house brand and BSN and ON, all sitting next to each other, there's actually a good chance that the protein in the jugs is identical. And Glanbia is the manufacturer behind the most popular protein brand(s) in the CrossFit world, if we're keeping score at home.

Soy vs Whey Protein

There is so much research and opinion on this one that you will find endless articles for both sides of the argument, if you read enough of them you can form your own opinion, where you will probably get to is that there really isn’t much difference!

Continuing the Soy Vs Whey debate. . .  

Both plant-based soy protein and whey protein from dairy milk have been shown to help build and maintain lean body mass. Although not as rapidly digested and absorbed by the body as whey protein, soy protein does help support lean muscle mass.

 

For many years, a score called Biological Value was used to measure the quality of protein. Whey generally scored much higher than soy because of its unique composition. However, more current research shows a more appropriate measure of the effectiveness of different types of protein in building and maintaining muscle is called the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS).

 

Both soy and whey have a PDCAAS score of 1.0, which is the highest score available, the same as egg whites.

 

Your body needs protein for survival. Amino acids — the building blocks of protein — are necessary for everything from immune function, metabolism and weight management to muscle repair, growth, development and performance. There’s also research that shows protein helps you feel alert, as well as more satiated for a longer period of time.  The common types of protein powders fall into two categories: animal-based protein (casein, whey and egg) and plant-based protein (hemp, rice, pea, sacha inchi, potato, etc.).

 

 

What are the differences between traditional whey protein and plant-based protein?  Whey protein is a by-product of the cheese manufacturing process and is the liquid that is left behind after milk is curdled and strained.   Since whey protein is derived from milk, lactose intolerance is one of the most common side effects from consuming whey protein.  Whey protein is a common allergen and can affect the immune system of individuals who may be allergic to it.  Whey proteins are also notorious for causing bloating which is a symptom of the body’s inability to digest it.  Symptoms related to digestive issues include abdominal pain, gas, bloating and diarrhea.  Whey protein is high in sulphur-based amino acids.  This means that whey protein is acid forming which can cause significant calcium loss and weakening of the bones known as osteoporosis.  Since over-consumption of whey protein leads to increased acidity and lowered pH of the blood, it is believed that this may give rise to various kidney disorders.

 

 

Plant-based protein, on the other hand, is a much easier digestible source of protein for humans without the side effects associated with whey protein. Plant protein is perfectly packaged along with an abundance of phytonutrients, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and fibre —all critical components for optimal health and disease prevention.  Blended plant-based protein provides a full spectrum of amino acids through complementary sources and is alkaline forming in the body.

 

 

This article can be found at Macro Man's Main Blog!

 

9 Ways To Improve Your Diet

Despite what you tell yourself making small tweaks to your diet over the course of a few weeks or months can have a profound effect on how you look and feel.  It isn’t about making one huge change right away.  Although it might help with faster results it is also highly likely you will set yourself up to fail by changing too much at once.  Here are 9 easy tips you can implement to get yourself moving in the right direction and lead a better, healthier lifestyle. #1 Don’t Buy It This is one of the best ways to stay on track and improve your health and overall body. When you do your weekly or bi-weekly grocery shop do not go when you are hungry. Your grocery store is loaded with almost every piece of junk food you can think of and at insanely low prices too; if you’re hungry you are going to find it really difficult not to pick up a shopping cart of chocolate. #2 Don’t Have It In Your House This is similar to the first point.  No matter who you are, if you have bad food in your house you will eat it.  Don’t test your willpower, you will lose.  More often than not you will be perfectly satisfied not eating any of these foods but if they are in the cupboard you will feel them calling.  Give it a try, dump the junk and see if you really want it. #3 Eat More Wholesome Foods I tell my clients to eat more wholesome foods only to be told a few days later they have more energy, feel better and don’t crave sugary foods.  Strange, isn’t it?  Well not really. You have all heard about low blood sugar.  Don’t eat for an extended period of time, you feel light-headed and you say to yourself you must have low blood sugar.  However, if you eat more wholesome foods you provide your body with a sustained release of blood sugar meaning you are getting a steady supply of nutrients throughout the day.  As an example, anybody that needs a mid-morning snack at work isn’t eating wholesome foods.  In essence what has happened is you likely ate a poor breakfast that caused a quick spike and consequently a quick drop in your blood sugars leaving you hungry and fat.  Wholesome foods include; lots of vegetables, beans, lentils, quinoa, nuts, seeds, eggs, meat and fish. #4 Eat More Fats Fats are not your enemy.  People think wrongly about fats.  They are actually an excellent source of nutrients and are essential for a number of functions in your body. Eating more fat will help you to feel fuller for longer, will not spike your blood sugars as much as any of the other rubbish your think is healthy and above all will improve your health and stimulate fat loss. Watch this video for a little on how important fats are. #5 Cut Sugary Carbs This refers back to the previous two points.  Every food you eat is broken down to sugar within your body.  However not all foods are broken down as fast, nor do they cause the same response from insulin within your body .  Carbohydrates cause the biggest spike in blood sugar and poorer sources of carbohydrates cause massive spikes.  When I refer to sugary sources of carbohydrates I refer specifically to chocolate, sweets, ice cream, pasta, white rice, breakfast cereals, milk and energy drinks. #6 Surround Yourself With Others Who Want The Same Thing I was discussing diet with a client of mine this morning.  Firstly, I will say the improvements he has made have been second to none.  It’s incredible what can happen when you are given a better understanding of food.  Anyway, he told me a family member said this weekend he should have a some chocolate, after all it’s only one piece.  Let’s be clear, most of us don’t stop at one piece, it’s all or nothing.  Some of us really do have no ‘off switch’.  The point here is that he was encouraged to make a bad choice because he wasn’t surrounding himself with people with similar interests (he resisted by the way).  Get your family or house mates on board, they will thank you for it and you will thank yourself for it. #7 Let Everyone Know This is important for creating accountability.  If everybody is aware of what your goals are they are likely to call you out if you are eating chocolate.  This may seem contradictory to the previous point but it does help.  My own friends call me out if I try to eat rubbish food because they know of my profession, goals and where I want to be. #8 Use Herbs, Spices and Other Natural Sources of Deliciousness Do you really need ketchup or mayonnaise with your dinner?  All these do are spike your blood sugar and make you sick.  If your taste buds weren’t so blunted by the onslaught of sugar you might actually enjoy the taste of real food.  To spice things up a little add herbs & spices to your meals.  My personal favourites are cumin, turmeric, basil and cinnamon.  For sauces use salsa. guacamole or pesto. #9 Practice Cooking Some people, including myself enjoy eating the same foods over and over again. Simplicity in my opinion is key.  However, not everyone enjoys being mundane especially when it comes to food.  I suggest learning how to cook and trying out lots of different recipes.  Most recipes appear daunting at first but when you try them out once or twice you will see that they are actually really simple. Visit Protein Cookbook for some healthy, protein fuelled desserts!