WHAT I'M READING

I just started a new textbook called "The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition."  This is a text written by the guys at Precision Nutrition.  It's approximately a 450 page text, and it is definitely not a quick read, so I think as part of my studying I will make each chapter into a blog post (not a bad way to review the material, eh?).  There are two "units" of the textbook.  Unit 1 covers Nutritional Science (starting at the atomic level) and Unit 2 covers the Art of Nutrition Coaching.

I read two chapters yesterday and filled out the accompanying workbook (basically some review questions to make sure you understand the material in each chapter).

Chapter 0 - What is Good Nutrition?

The best way to achieve any goal is simply to identify the limiting factors (in other words, what is stopping you from reaching that goal?) and remove them.  From a health perspective, there are essentially three types of limiting factors:

1. Genetics
2. Physical Activity
3. Nutrition

Although genes play a role in every single function that occurs in the human body, it is unlikely that someone's genetics are their true limiting factor.  Everyone has the ability to improve in some meaningful way, but perhaps not everyone can be an Olympic-level athlete.  That leaves us with just physical activity and nutrition.

Exercise is a crucial component of health and longevity.  Regular movement or activity of any kind is essential for maintaining movement quality throughout one's lifetime (think "use it or lose it").

Nutrition, however, is the most important aspect of one's health, and it is almost always the biggest limiting factor that prevents someone from reaching their health-related goals.  So what is good nutrition?

Good nutrition must meet four criteria:

1. it must property control energy balance
2. it must provide nutrient density
3. it must achieve health, performance, and body composition goals
4. it must be honest and outcome-based

Now to cover each of those four in a little more detail...

Energy balance is simply the relationship between all sources of energy intake and energy output.  Someone can be in a state of energy balance, positive energy balance, or negative energy balance.  There are also many ways of achieving energy balance.  One can increase energy outputs to match a high level of energy inputs.  One could also decrease energy inputs to match a low level of energy outputs.  Also, any combination of those could also work.

So should someone be in balance or in a positive or negative energy state?  As with most questions, the answer is "it depends".  There are positives and negatives to each scenario, and also whatever the "correct" answer for someone may be today will likely not be the case at some point in the future.  Both positive and negative energy balance affect everything from metabolism to hormonal balance and mood.

A negative energy balance will lead to weight loss, but either a sustained or intense negative energy balance will also result in your body going into starvation mode.  All non-survival functions will begin to slow down or shut down altogether (metabolic function, brain function, and reproductive function to name a few).

A positive energy balance will lead to weight gain (not necessarily bad if the weight is lean body mass), and it can also lead to poor health and cellular fitness.  Plaques can build up in arteries, blood pressure and cholesterol can increase, and insulin resistance can result.  Also, risk for certain cancers is correlated with weight gain (or being overweight).

Nutrient density is just the ratio of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc.) to calories in a food.  A food with high nutrient density contains a large amount of key nutrients per 100 calories of food.  Calorie density, on the other hand, is simply the ratio of calories to the actual weight of the food.  Unless someone is purposely trying to gain weight (a young, undersized athlete or someone just wanting to pack on muscle for aesthetic purposes, etc.), the best combination of nutrient and calorie density for improving health would be a diet high in nutrient dense-foods and low in calorie-dense foods.  The benefits of this combination or the following:  easily controlled calorie intake (it is difficult to overeat broccoli!), longer periods of satiation, higher total essential nutrient intake, and more essential nutrients per volume of food.

Good nutrition is more than just weight loss or weight gain (which are just transient indicators of energy balance).  Good nutrition must be a long-term set of habits that include goals related to health, performance, and body composition.  To use an extreme example, someone who was solely interested in weight loss could get liposuction.  In the short term, it would definitely result in a loss of body mass.  However, it would do nothing for that person's health (think blood pressure, cholesterol, insulin sensitivity, etc.) or performance (performance doesn't have to be a sport, it could simply be moving around easily without pain).

Finally, good nutrition requires one to be honest with themselves and use outcome-based decision making.  If someone says "I followed the plan exactly, but I still didn't lose the weight" then it is likely that one of two things is happening:  they didn't really follow the plan, or the plan sucks.  If someone consistently does the right things, results must follow.  Cause and effect.  So if the results aren't coming, it's time to evaluate both the plan and the compliance with said plan.

My next blog will cover Chapter 1 - Cell Structure and Function.  I'll try to strictly limit it to how nutrition impacts cellular structure and function.

MIKE TYSON AND ZION NATIONAL PARK

Q:  What do Mike Tyson and Zion National Park have in common?

A:  I saw both of them last weekend!!

First I'll cover Zion National Park...

I wrote the first installment of destination training about 2 1/2 months ago (HERE), and Lauren and I just got back Sunday night from the second episode!  This time we were in Utah (Springdale and St. George) trekking through Zion National Park!

On Thursday morning we drove to Springdale, UT, which is where the entrance to Zion is located, and we hiked for about 5 hours!  We went up to Angel's Landing, which was absolutely incredible!  Once you got near the top, the path was only 3-4 feet wide with shear drops on either side...kinda freaky, but badass for sure.

ANGEL'S LANDING

The second morning we woke up early and set out on a longer hike with greater elevation gain called Observation Point.  The morning started off pretty chilly (mid-50's) and we were in the shade for the first 2 hours!  Once we climbed high enough, and as the morning got older, we started to feel the sun.  It warmed up to a very nice mid-70's temperature and it was incredible.  Total distance round-trip was 8 miles, total hiking time was 6 hours, and total elevation gain was over 2,100 feet!  The peak featured some spectacular views as well!

OBSERVATION POINT

Finally, to cap off a great weekend, guess who we saw in the Las Vegas airport while waiting for our return flight home...

MIKE TYSON!!

I took that picture of him, and I was actually next in line to get my picture taken with him, but his entourage told him it was time to move on.  DAMN!  I actually thought about getting some video of him knocking me out...that would have gone viral in under 30 seconds!!

In honor of Iron Mike, here are a few of my favorite quotes.  Enjoy!

"Everyone has a gameplan until they get punched in the face."

"My main objective is to be professional but to kill him."

"He called me a rapist and a recluse.  I'm not a recluse."

FAMILY FUN AT THE TRACK

Yeah you read that right, today is Sunday, and for fun Lauren and I went up to the track to spend some quality time together (and by "quality time" I mean we busted our asses running 800m intervals).

After a thorough warm-up including foam rolling, stretching, and mobility drills for the hips, we headed up to the track.  We spent about 15 minutes on the agility ladder performing various drills to get the blood flowing and to prepare for the more strenuous work we were about to do.

The workout for today was 4 x 800m.  We ran them separately, so while I was running Lauren was resting and vice versa.  Since our times were comparable, our work:rest ratio was right at 1:1 (I'll detail the times below, but is was basically 2:30 of work followed by 2:30 of rest).

Here were our times:

DREW

Sprint #1 - 2:25

Sprint #2 - 2:32

Sprint #3 - 2:34

Sprint #4 - 2:33

I was going to punish myself with some burpees if my 4th sprint wasn't faster than my 3rd...I barely made it!!

LAUREN

Sprint #1 - 2:29

Sprint #2 - 2:34

Sprint #3 - 2:33

Sprint #4 - 2:33

Lauren managed to improve her time from #2 to #3 and then maintained it for #4, so she was exempt from burpee punishment as well.

It was a solid workout, we were both completely spent by the end of it (there was a terrible head-wind on the home-stretch that really made us push), and it was sunny and not too hot (about 85 degrees).

CERTIFIED STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING SPECIALIST

I am officially a member of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and a true, card-carrying Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS), although my card hasn’t arrived in the mail yet!

The CSCS is universally considered the gold standard in the industry.

I took the test about a week and a half ago (May 7^th), and I just got the results back this past Friday (May 14^th) while Lauren and I were on our vacation in Utah (hiking and mountain biking).

So obviously I passed since I mentioned that I’m officially a member now, but I didn’t just pass…I got a 90% and I finished the 4 ½ hour test in approximately 1 ½ hours!  That’s not to say it was easy, but rather that I studied my ass off and I was very well prepared.  For the last 8 weeks I was up at 5:00 am (including Saturdays and occasionally Sundays) to study for about an hour and a half before I had to leave for work (but after enjoying a delicious mushroom and broccoli omelet with some coffee and a grapefruit).  That’s considerably more than I studied for any one thing in college despite the fact that I was a double-major in Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Rice!

Anyway, back to the CSCS…

Taken straight from the website:

Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialists (CSCSs) are professionals who apply scientific knowledge to train athletes for the primary goal of improving athletic performance. They conduct sport-specific testing sessions, design and implement safe and effective strength training and conditioning programs and provide guidance regarding nutrition and injury prevention. Recognizing that their area of expertise is separate and distinct, CSCSs consult with and refer athletes to other professionals when appropriate.

What I really liked about this designation and the studying that was required was that the foundation was based on anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, and biomechanics.  It obviously includes detailed sections for exercise prescription, but even those sections are scientifically-backed as opposed to just throwing out blanket statements for a general population.  Further, the CSCS is sport- and athlete-specific.  It is not geared towards the typical personal training client.

More about my CSCS in a future post!  Just one piece of the puzzle that is life!

5 WAYS TO BE INVINCIBLE

The folks at Precision Nutrition put together another great article that touches on nutrition and related topics, but it’s actually more about human nature!  Very interesting stuff!

5 Ways to Be Invincible

Here’s the opening line, and needless to say it hooked me:

Do you think the following habits would enhance your chances of living a long, healthy and productive life?

• Exercising for 2 ½ hours each week
• Maintaining a healthy body weight (BMI under 25)
• Eating at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables each day
• Not smoking

So it seems pretty clear that the answer is a resounding “YES” right?  Well, according to one study sample that is presented in the article, only 3% of Americans engage in all of these behaviors!  That is embarrassingly low.

A few more interesting statistics from the article:

• 50% of Americans will die of either cardiovascular disease or cancer!  Check out some of these diagrams that detail the contribution of environment and lifestyle on cancer:
• 49% of Americans take prescription drugs (I’d love to know if this statistic is actually 49% of American adults or just Americans.  If it is the latter, imagine how high the percentage of American adults who are on prescription drugs would be once you remove children and adolescents!) 
• The cost (both direct and indirect) of cardiovascular disease in 2008 was estimated to be $475 billion.

Now, for the conclusion of the article, several of the experts on staff at Precision Nutrition answered the following question:

If you could only choose 5 top strategies to prevent disease and enhance wellness, what would those be?

Of course most of them mentioned the importance of eating plenty of vegetables and getting adequate exercise, but quite a few of the responses included some of the lifestyle habits that we don’t often think about such as sleep, stress management, socializing, and accountability.  Coincidentally I blogged about each of these in a previous post HERE.

SLEEP – Sleep and rest help keep a clear and focused mind, as well as allowing for better control over our hormonal physiology.

STRESS – Excessive stress can hinder every component of our lives, and most stress is either imaginary or self-imposed.  Purge stressors.

SOCIALIZING – Basically, 100% of the longest-lived societies on the planet have strong social networks…why try to reinvent the wheel?

ACCOUNTABILITY – A lack of success is very rarely a case of “I tried, but it didn’t work.”  More likely it is something along the lines of “I didn’t make the necessary changes to achieve my goals.”

WEIGHING THE EVIDENCE ON EXERCISE

The New York Times just ran an article titled Weighing the Evidence on Exercise in which it discusses the effects that exercise has on bodyweight.  All in all, I thought it was a really good article.  The author presents the latest evidence from the scientific community, but excludes the sensationalism and personal anecdotes that were littered throughout that terrible article from TIME Magazine titled Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin (don’t forget about my blog post about that article HERE).

A couple of my favorite parts:

“Exercise burns calories, no one doubts that, and so it should, in theory, produce weight loss, a fact that has prompted countless people to undertake exercise programs to shed pounds. Without significantly changing their diets, few succeed.”

“…a growing body of science suggests that exercise does have an important role in weight loss. That role, however, is different from what many people expect and probably wish.  The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state.” [emphasis mine]

“In a study published late last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Harvard University looked at the weight-change histories of more than 34,000 participants in a women’s health study. The women began the study middle-aged (at an average of about 54 years) and were followed for 13 years. During that time, the women gained, on average, six pounds. Some packed on considerably more. But a small subset gained far less, coming close to maintaining the body size with which they started the study. Those were the women who reported exercising almost every day for an hour or so.” [emphasis mine]

“…if you can somehow pry off the pounds, exercise may be the most important element in keeping the weight off.”

I really liked the fact that the author simply presented the evidence as is and lets the reader decide how (if at all) to apply it to their own lifestyle.  Providing a blanket exercise or diet prescription to a large population will never work because those two concepts are highly variable among individuals.

The truth is there are no universal truths.

This article was from the PHYS ED section of the NY Times Health Blogs.  I have only glanced at the article archives, but it appears to be a pretty solid source.  Here are a few others that caught my eye:

Risks for Youths Who Eat What They Watch

How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young

ACTIVE RELEASE TECHNIQUES

One of my main goals following hip surgery was to restore movement and mobility of my hip, but not just to the level that it was at previously…I wanted to exceed my previous levels!  Proper movement doesn’t just feel better, it actually results in improved training, increased resistance to injury, and improved restoration and recovery from training (not to mention the obvious longevity benefits).

My surgery cleared up the movement limitation related to my bone structure, now I have to deal with the limitation related to my soft tissue structure (muscle, fascia, tendons, etc.).

This is where Active Release Techniques (ART) come into play!

Taken straight from the website, ART is a “soft tissue system of movement based massage technique that treats problems with muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia and nerves.”  Muscles and other soft tissues can develop tough, dense scar tissue in areas as a result of acute conditions (pulls, tears, collisions), accumulation of small tears (micro-trauma), and from a lack of oxygen (hypoxia).  This scar tissue restricts tissues that need to be able to move freely and as a result muscles can become shorter and weaker, tension on tendons can cause inflammation, and nerves can become trapped.

So, I found an ART provider right by my office and made an appointment to get checked out.  This guy performed a very thorough battery of tests to assess my movement quality and to determine areas where I may have issues.  Not surprisingly, my hamstrings were tight, my hip flexors and hip rotators were tight, my pelvis was in poor alignment (anterior tilt) and my mobility was pretty bad as a result.  I do sit at a desk all day, which pretty much explains every one of those conditions!  Although I do foam rolling (a form of soft tissue work) and mobility almost every day, that only takes about 15 minutes.  Conversely, I am sitting down at my desk every weekday from about 8:00 am to 6:00 pm (10 hours), plus roughly an hour roundtrip commute…11 hours everyday in the seated position.  This is a big problem!!  I can do all the soft tissue work in the world and this ART practitioner can work his magic on my affected areas, but if I keep up the same behavior that caused the problems in the first place, none of it will matter!

Back to my ART session….  As part of the assessment, I had to lie on my back while he pushed my knee towards my chest (the other leg remained flat).  It didn’t come very close to my chest, and he said it was due to my anterior pelvic tilt (top of my pelvis was tilted forward as a result of excessively tight hip flexors).  With my pelvis in that position, my hip will essentially hit a “road block” before it can be flexed fully.  To treat this, he put manual pressure on my hip flexors while my hip and knee were in the flexed position.  I then performed a series of contract-relax motions (while he resisted my movement so my leg wasn’t actually going anywhere) and after each contract sequence he would push my knee further towards my chest.  After just 3 attempts, my knee was able to move all the way up to my chest with ease!!  I was in uncharted territory!!

There were several other tests that I initially failed and then magically passed after just a few minutes of soft tissue manipulation.  Now don’t get me wrong, the changes he was able to make are not permanent.  In fact, if I don’t work hard to maintain this soft tissue quality and movement it will all have been for naught.  After all, I will create soft tissue “damage” every time I train, but now it will be up to me to manage this damage as well as I possibly can.

There was also one of those “it’s a small world” moments at my first appointment.  As soon as I walked in, he introduced himself to me and said “you look familiar.”  I figured he was just trying to be personable, so I responded “well maybe, but this is my first time in this gym.”  He then asked me if I train in jiu jitsu over at Carlos Machado’s, and I said F*CK YEAH I DO!  This guy is actually a purple belt under Carlos Machado!!

As if this situation couldn’t get any better, this guy offices in the Telos Fitness Center, which is a bad-ass gym, and they just happen to have 2,500 sf of jiu jitsu mats down in the basement of the facility!  I had two appointments with this guy last week for ART, and after the second appointment we went downstairs and rolled (that’s jiu jitsu for “practiced”) for an hour.  Since he’s a purple belt, he could toss me around quite a bit (he’s also pretty big…about my height but about 225 lbs compared to my 195 lbs), but he also taught me quite a few things.  We’re going to try to get some weekly rolling in!