ROD 112811

ROD

Monday, 28Nov11

 

Funday Monday

40:20 ratio of work/rest with a 30 sec rest between the 4 rounds

• Hanging runners
• Floor DB chest presses
• Dumbell thrusters
• Dumbell rows (alt. between rounds)
• KB deadlift jumps
• Overhead dumbell presses in split stance

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Athlete’s ROD

20 work / 20 work / 20 rest for 8 rounds with a minute rest in between

• Push ups / Mtn Climbers
• Air Squats / Running in place
• Burpees & a half / Tuck jumps

ROD 102211

ROD

Saturday, 22Oct11

 

Team ROD (2 person team)

Each member can split the reps up whichever way they want. One partner may be stronger in burpees, so they may do more or vica versa. Break it up but do it quickly.

 Run 2 miles (8- 400 meter runs)

• 200 Ball Slams
• 150 Wall Ball
• 200 situps
• 150 Burpees

If performed correctly each person should run 1 mile and perform 350 reps for time:

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     Beautiful

   Perplexing

        Couture

 

       Ingenius

ROD 092311

ROD

Friday, 23Sept11

 

Spartan Pre-Race Warm up.

The day before a race you should totally rest. Fill up on good carbs, but if you can’t resist the unrest or your not rrunning the Spartan Race.  Here is a soulution.

As many rounds in 20 mins of…

• 10 Reclines
• 15 Pushups
• 20 Air squats

Let’s do this fast and furious. Then rest all day.

Here at NLP we have been preparing members as well as non-members for the Spartan Race. We just want to take this time and thank all of you for participating in some of our most grueling workouts to date. An extra special thanks will go to those who started preparing with us who are now full fledged members. We will be there at the race, to watch all the NLP’ers place high in the ranks. Good Luck !!!

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ROD 091411

ROD

Wednesday, 14Sept11

 

Dumb Runner

Three rounds for time of:
400-meter run
Dumbbell thruster 25# and up – 21 reps

Post time to comments.

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Cybersex examined by UNB Fredericton student

 

ROD 061711

ROD

Friday, 17Jun11

 

Sweet Friday

5 rounds of 40/20 work/rest ratio w 30 second of rest in between rounds

• KB Rows
• Dumbell push presses
• Goblet squats
• Mountain Climbers
• Sit-up w/ russian twist

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What You Need to Know About Hydration

By: Steve Born
At E-CAPS & Hammer Nutrition, we’re known for offering the most complete and technically advanced line of nutritionals an endurance athlete can buy. But we don’t sell, and probably never will sell, the most important item in your regimen. As you might have guessed, we’re talking about water. It’s the most important substance on earth, 60% of your body weight, and the number
one concern on any athlete’s intake list. For both performance and health, the importance of your water intake exceeds that of your vitamin, calorie, and electrolyte intake. Even though we’re not in the water business we want to make sure you have the right amount on board when you set off on
your distance effort, when you finish, and between efforts during recovery. Thus, we’ve included this section on hydration in this handbook. As you read, you’ll learn how sweat loss affects athletic performance, that too much water is worse than too little, and that you can’t replace all the water you sweat out. Yes, we will get to that key issue: Just how much should I drink? Of all the
many functions water has in human physiology, we’ll focus on just a couple that pertain especially to the endurance athlete, cooling the body and transporting nutrients. Let’s look at the cooling system first.

HOW YOUR COOLING SYSTEM WORKS
When we exercise, we burn molecular fuel, mostly glycogen, but also some protein, fat, and blood glucose from ingested nutrients. The breakdown of these energy providers releases heat that builds up and raises our core temperature. The body must rid it itself of this heat and maintain a core temperature within a few degrees of the well-known 98.60 F (370C). An active person needs a reliable cooling mechanism. Actually, you have several. You lose some heat through your skin. Blood diverts to the capillaries near the skin’s surface, removing heat from the body core. You breathe harder to get more oxygen, expelling heat when you exhale. But by far the most important part of the cooling system, accounting on average for about 75% of all cooling, is your ability to produce and excrete sweat. Sweat, however, glistening on your forearm or soaking your singlet won’t cool you; it must evaporate. Sweat works on a basic physical premise: water evaporation is an endothermic process, requiring energy (heat) to change from liquid to gas. Thus, water molecules in the gas phase have more energy than water molecules in the liquid phase. As water molecules evaporate from your skin, they remove heat energy; the remaining water molecules have less energy, and thus, you feel cooler. Isn’t that cool?

Weather conditions greatly affect sweat production and cooling effectiveness. In cool weather, you get substantial cooling from the heat that escapes directly from your skin. As the temperature increases, you gradually rely more on evaporation. On hot days, with little difference between skin surface and ambient temperatures, your skin surface provides only negligible convective
cooling, and you need to sweat more to maintain a safe internal core temperature. At 950F or above, you lose no heat at all from your skin; you actually start to absorb heat. Evaporative cooling must do all the work. Humidity is the other major factor that affects sweat. On humid days, sweat evaporates more slowly because the atmosphere is already saturated with water vapor, retarding the evaporation rate. The sweat accumulates on your skin and soaks your clothes,
but you don’t get any cooling from it because it’s not going into the vapor phase. Soaking, dripping sweat may give you a psychological boost, but it has no physical efficacy to cool; sweat must evaporate to remove heat. On days when it’s both hot and humid, well, you don’t need to read about what’s going to happen when you exercise in those conditions. You do need to know that under the worst of conditions you can produce up to three liters of sweat in an hour of strenuous exercise, but your body can only absorb about one liter from fluid consumption. Yes, this will cause problems before long, and we will discuss that issue below.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE COOLANT RUNS LOW?
Just like a car, your body must dissipate the excess heat generated from burning fuel. Unlike a car, your body’s coolant isn’t in a sealed internal system; you use it once and then it’s gone and needs to be replaced. But we don’t come with built-in gauges or indicators that tell us just how much coolant we have left in our system. We can’t run a dipstick down our gullet and get a reading that says, “Add a quart.” We do have some physiological signs, but they function at the Warning-Danger! level, too late to maintain optimal performance. For instance, by the time you feel thirsty, you could have a 2% body-weight water loss, already into the impairment zone. The chart below shows what happens to human performance at each percent of weight loss. By weight loss, we mean the
percentage of your body weight at the start of exercise that you have lost via sweat. If you go out for a run at 160 pounds and weigh in 20 miles later at 154, you’ve lost almost 4% of your body weight. That’s too much to maintain your pace to the end, let alone expect to kick.

Symptoms by Percent Body Weight Water Loss:
PERCENT WATER LOST ——— SYMPTOMS
0% — none, optimal performance, normal heat regulation
1% — thirst stimulated, heat regulation during exercise altered, performance declines
2% — further decrease in heat regulation, hinders performance, increased thirst
3% — more of the same(worsening performance)
4% — exercise performance cut by 20 – 30%
5% — headache, irritability, “spaced-out” feeling, fatigue
6% — weakness, severe loss of thermoregulation
7% — collapse likely unless exercise stops
10% — comatose
11% — death likely
[Nutrition for Cyclists, Grandjean & Ruud, Clinics in Sports Med. Vol 13(1);235-246. Jan 1994]

HOW MUCH IS THAT?
As you can see from the chart, sweat loss can easily devolve from an athletic performance issue to an acute medical issue. Clearly, we need to have some quantifiable idea of our intake and output. Let’s start with converting the data on the chart to recognizable amounts. Perhaps you remember the saying, “a pint’s a pound, the world ‘round.” Now that’s a convenient conversion for endurance athletes. Here’s another: one pint = one water bottle. Some bottles hold 20 ounces, but consider a
regular water bottle as a pint (fig.1) [Angela: please insert a picture of the E-Caps water bottles, with the captions 16 oz. and 20 oz.]. Two pints make a quart, which is almost a liter. So when you read “liter,” think two water bottles. Losing one pound of weight means a one-pint loss. One liter (or one quart) is about two pounds.

CAN YOU DRINK ENOUGH?
Needless to say, maintaining optimal fluid intake prior to and during exercise is crucial for both performance and health. However, as is true with calories and electrolytes, you can’t replenish them at the same rate you deplete them; your body simply won’t absorb as fast as it loses. Evaporative cooling depletes fluids and electrolytes faster than the body can replenish them.
Your body will accept and utilize a certain amount from exogenous (outside) sources, and, similar to calories and electrolytes, maintaining fluid intake within a specific range will postpone fatigue and promote peak performance. Research suggests that while electrolyte needs for individual athletes may vary up to 1000% (tenfold), fluid loss remains fairly constant. Also, we can measure fluid loss more easily than electrolyte loss; we don’t need sophisticated lab equipment, just a
scale. Thus, we can come pretty close in calculating fluid loss and replacement. 

 THE NUMBERS
On average, you lose about one liter (about 34 ounces) of fluid per hour of exercise. Extreme heat and humidity can raise that amount to three liters in one hour. A trained athlete will store enough muscle glycogen to provide energy for approximately 90 minutes of aerobic exercise. As your muscles burn glycogen, water is released as a metabolic by-product and excreted as sweat. Researchers found that during a marathon (26.2 miles), runners released an average of two liters of sweat from muscle glycogen stores. This is in addition to sweat from other body liquids.
You can control or lessen these sweat rates by acclimatization and training for the event. Acclimatized athletes can reduce electrolyte and fluid loss up to 50%, but note that those losses cannot be fully replaced during the event. According to nutrition expert Bill Misner, Ph.D., “The endurance exercise outcome is to postpone fatigue, not replace all the fuel, fluids, and electrolytes lost during the event. It can’t be done, though many of us have tried.” In other words, our hydration goal is not to replace water pint-for-pint, but to support natural stores by consuming as much as we can adequately process during exercise. At the most, you can absorb about one liter (about 34 fluid ounces) of water per hour, but only under the most extreme heat and humidity. Most of the time you can only absorb about half that amount, even though it won’t fully replace your loss. Repeated intake of one liter (about 34 fluid ounces) per hour will ultimately do you more harm than good.

CAN YOU DRINK TOO MUCH?
Ironically, while you can’t drink enough to replace all fluid lost, you can drink too much. Researchers have noted the dangers of excess hydration during events lasting over four hours. Dr. T.D. Noakes collected data for 10 years from some 10,000 runners participating in the Comrades Marathon. This 52.4-mile race, held each June (winter) in South Africa, ranks as one of the world’s
premier ultra marathons. Noakes showed that endurance athletes who consumed from 16-24 fluid ounces per hour typically repleted as much fluid as is efficiently possible. He also noted the prevalence of hyponatremia (low blood sodium) during ultramarathons and triathlons in runners who hydrated excessively. This condition can arise from several different physiological
scenarios. For endurance athletes, it usually results from sweat-depleted sodium stores diluted by excess hypotonic (low electrolyte content) fluid intake. When blood sodium concentration becomes too dilute, you can develop severe cardiac symptoms leading to collapse.

PROBLEMS WITH TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE
Moreover, Noakes noted a pattern of hydration problems among race participants. In ultra events, the leaders usually dehydrate, but the mid to back-of-the-pack athletes tend to over hydrate. Both may end up suffering from the same hyponatremic symptoms, the former from too little fluid intake combined with too much sodium loss due to profuse sweating, the latter from too
much fluid intake and relatively less sodium loss. Because most front-runners are extremely competitive, they don’t stop long enough during the race to over hydrate. In addition, it’s highly likely that elite athletes may be fitter and better acclimatized to deal with hot weather conditions. A tendency to linger at aid stations attempting to relieve the symptoms of fatigue or heat by
drinking too much water is a fault found among the majority of the remainder of athletes, those in the middle or back of the pack. Also, these athletes may be novices who have heard the “drink, drink, drink” mantra, but who haven’t enough experience to personally calibrate their personal needs. After the 1985 Comrades race, 17 runners were hospitalized, nine with dilutional
hyponatremia. In the 1987 Comrades Marathon, 24 runners suffered from dilutional hyponatremia. These athletes had seriously overloaded on fluid intake, with the inevitable result of a totally disrupted physiology.

TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES
Hyponatremia usually results from drinking too much, especially when one drinks fluids such as plain water or a sports drink lacking the proper electrolyte profile. Training and fitness levels, weather conditions, and, undoubtedly, biological predisposition also contribute to developing this form of hyponatremia known as “water intoxication.” Sadly, we must note that this condition has lead, directly or in part, to the deaths of three young and otherwise healthy runners in recent major American marathons. It is hard for us to comprehend the grief of the families they left behind. These athletes went out to run a marathon, to achieve a personal victory. Improper hydration took away their day of glory and also their lives. They collapsed and went into an irreversible condition involving uncontrollable brain edema, coma, and death. We report this to help prevent any future such tragedies. Over hydration represents a very serious problem. Unlike dehydration, which will generally only result in painful cramping, possibly a DNF, or at the worst, IV treatment, over hydration can incite a chain of ultimately fatal physiological consequences.

SO HOW MUCH, HOW OFTEN?
The extreme cases cited above happen very rarely. Lesser degrees of impairment occur frequently from excessive fluid intake. We don’t have a chart for over hydration similar to the one for dehydration, giving symptoms for each level of over hydration. Also, you probably don’t carry a scale or have regular access to weigh-ins along your training route. So how do you know when
it’s time to drink? You don’t wait until you’re down a quart. A good hydration regimen starts before you even get moving.  Noakes believes intake of hypotonic fluids of one liter (33 oz)/hr will likely cause water intoxication and dilutional hyponatremia. He suggests that athletes may do better on 500 ml (16 oz)/hr fluid intake for ultra events performed in hot weather conditions.
Other research has suggested that the athlete should drink 14–22 ounces of fluids two hours before exercise and 8 ounces every 20 minutes (24 oz/hr). In other words, start hydrating before you start sweating, drink regularly, and keep your total per hour consumption at about 16-24 ounces, except as noted below. This regimen will adequately hydrate most athletes during running and cycling exercise at any pace. Based on research, along with the thousands of athletes we have monitored, we believe that to avoid dilutional hyponatremia, water intake should not exceed 28 oz/hr. The exceptions are heavier athletes, athletes exercising at extreme levels (prolonged
periods at a high percentage of VO2Max), and athletes competing in severe environmental conditions. When it comes to fluid intake, for most athletes, under most conditions, 16-24 oz/hr will serve you well. That’s about one water bottle per hour as a base, with more only as noted above.

REMEMBER YOUR ELECTROLYTES AND CALORIES!
We noted at the beginning that besides cooling, water also plays an important role in nutrient transport. Water consumption bears directly on electrolyte and caloric uptake. You must consider the electrolyte content of your fluid intake, especially if you exceed about 24 oz/hr. If temperature and humidity rise above 700F and/or 70% humidity, we recommend that you take electrolytes before and during every hour of exercise. For a full discussion of electrolyte needs, see the article “Electrolyte Replenishment”, which appears in “The Endurance Athlete’s Guide To Success”.
In addition, avoid fructose or other simple sugar drinks and gels, especially during the heat—unless you want to deal with a gastric emptying problem, which may result in nausea and other stomach maladies. Compared to complex carbohydrates, drinks or gels that contain simple sugars (typically glucose, fructose, and sucrose) require more fluid and electrolytes for effective
absorption. Because they require more fluid, you get fewer calories per unit of water. You must restrict simple sugar drinks to a 6-8% solution range, which provides inadequate amounts of calories for energy production. You can make a nice drink in a water bottle that will absorb well and provide adequate fluid, but your caloric intake will fall far short of your body’s needs, and
your energy level will suffer. If you make a double or triple-strength batch of a simple sugar drink hoping to obtain adequate amounts of calories, you’ll require additional fluids and electrolytes to efficiently process the sugar. You will need to guess how much extra water and electrolytes your body needs to handle the sugar. If you guess low, your GI tract will take water and electrolytes from other areas. This scenario can result in nauseating results as your body literally dehydrates its working muscles while bloating your belly. Why take chances like that when your performance is on the line? Your wisest choice is to use fuel comprised of complex carbohydrates, such as Hammer Gel and Sustained Energy. Even at an 18-24% concentration, these fuel sources absorb and digest rapidly, do not require excess fluid for transport through the GI system, and provide all the calories your liver can process. For more details on fueling, see the article “Proper Fueling During Endurance Events” in “The Endurance Athlete’s Guide To Success” (available free of charge at www.e-caps.com, see info.

It’s our hope that after reading this material you will have obtained some insight regarding not just the importance of water itself, but also what constitutes proper water consumption during exercise. Dehydration and/or over hydration is a common problem that plagues far too many athletes, some with severe consequences. Armed with the guidelines contained in this article, along with practice and testing in training, your performance and health need not suffer. Instead, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of athletes who continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

ROD 060411

ROD

Saturday, 04Jun11

 

Slappy Saturday

Three Rounds:

Run 100 Meters
15 KB deadlifts
Run 100 Meters
20 Ball slams
Run 100 meters
15 KB swings
Run 100 Meters
20 DB ground-to-overhead 

Post time to comments

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The Dose of Intervention and the Land of Dr. Oz

Today marks my appearance on the Dr. Oz Show, which was, let’s just say, an interesting experience and leave it at that.  It was the show, though, that  (finally) prompted me to address an issue I’ve wanted to address for quite some time.

The Dr. Oz Show is one part health advice and discussion and quite a few parts entertainment, as Oz’s producers kept telling me in the days before we taped the episode.  To make for what they consider good television they played me up as the second coming of Atkins  – a persona that my wife likes to refer to as “meat boy”  — while Oz got to play the role of the harvest king, extolling the healing virtues of fruits, vegetables and whole grains.  This made it more difficult than I would have liked to get across the important messages from my books, but television is television and I certainly knew what they had in store for me.

My message and the message of Why We Get Fat was not that we should all be eating nothing but animal products – and certainly not the unappetizing meat and eggs that Oz’s crew prepared as props  — but that carbohydrate-rich foods are inherently fattening, some more so than others, and that those of us predisposed to put on fat do so because of the carbs in the diet. That’s why I called the book Why We Get Fat rather than some variation on The Miracle 24-Hour (or 14-Day or Three Week or Three month) Diet Cure, which is more the norm for lay books in the nutrition genre.

The idea despite all the controversy is pretty simple. I’m arguing, as others have before me, that the same thing that makes our fat cells fat is what makes us fat — a fat person, after all, is a person with a lot of overstuffed fat cells — and what makes our fat cells fat is fundamentally the hormone insulin. Raise insulin levels and we accumulate more fat in our fat cells. Lower insulin and fat is released from the fat cells and the cells of our lean tissue can burn it for fuel.

There’s nothing particularly controversial about the science involved. If you doubt insulin regulates fat accumulation in fat cells, you can literally look it up in any good biochemistry or endocrinology (the study of hormones and related disorders) textbook – the latest editions, say, of Lehningers Principles of Biochemistry or Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, which are the authoritative texts in their respective fields. Look up the word adipocyte (the technical term for fat cell) and this is what you’ll find:

First Williams (and I’ll translate the technical terminology immediately after):

The activity of LPL within individual tissues is a key factor in partitioning triglycerides among different body tissues. Insulin influences this partitioning through its stimulation of LPL activity in adipose tissue. Insulin also promotes triglyceride storage in adipocytes through other mechanisms, including inhibition of lipolysis, stimulation of adipocyte differentiation and escalation of glucose uptake.

To understand what this means you have to know that LPL is the enzyme (in less technical language, the thing) that works to pull fat from the circulation into whatever cell it happens to be sitting on. If that cell is a muscle cell, the fat is used for fuel. If it’s a fat cell, the fat is stored. Triglycerides are the form that fat is stored in fat cells and transported through the blood stream in lipoproteins. Adipose tissue is fat tissue and adipocyte is the fat cell.

So what Williams says is that fat is stored in different tissues (partitioned) depending on how this enzyme LPL is distributed on the cells of those tissues, and its insulin that to a large extent determines this. Then it adds that  insulin promotes fat storage through other mechanisms as well — it creates new fat cells (stimulation of adipocyte differentiation), and it inhibits the escape of fat from the fat cell and its use for fuel (lipolysis), and it also increases the uptake of blood sugar (glucose) into the fat cell, which might not be relevant but the authors of the textbook don’t apparently know this, and neither did I when I wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Now here’s Lehningers Principles of Biochemistry:

 

High blood glucose elicits the release of insulin, which speeds the uptake of glucose by tissues and favors the storage of fuels as glycogen and triaglycerols, while inhibiting fatty acid mobilization in adipose tissue.

Lehningers uses the other spelling of triglyceride – triaglycerol – to denote the fat in the blood and in our fat cells, and we get high blood glucose by consuming carbohydrate rich foods, which end up as glucose (a carbohydrate) in our blood stream. We also tend to have high blood glucose when we have a condition called insulin resistance, which is the underlying defect in obesity, diabetes and heart disease.  When Lehningers says insulin inhibits fatty acid mobilization that’s pretty much the equivalent of what Williams is saying about insulin inhibiting lipolysis.

The point of both is simple. Insulin puts fat in fat cells. That’s what it does. And our insulin levels, for the most part, are determined by the carb-content of our diet — the quantity and quality of the carbohydrates consumed. (Or if Jenny Brand Miller and her colleagues are right, also by our fat content — the lower the fat in the diet, the higher the insulin and vice verse.) The way to get fat out of fat cells and burn it, which is what we want to do with it, is to lower insulin. This has been known since the early 1960s.

One point I make in Why We Get Fat is that we all respond to this carbohydrate/insulin effect differently. Some of us can eat carbohydrate-rich meals and burn them off effortlessly. We’re the ones (like Oz) who partition the carbs we consume into energy. (This is the fuel gauge metaphor that I use in WWGF and that Oz’s producers reproduced wonderfully on the show.) And some of us partition the carbs we consume into fat for storage, and that partitioning depends on a lot of different enzymatic and hormonal factors — mostly relating to insulin and LPL as Williams Textbook of Endocrinology said).

There are a few obvious dietary means  to reduce the amount of insulin we secrete and ultimately the level of insulin in our circulation day in and day out. One is to eat fewer carbohydrates; one is to improve the quality of the carbs we do eat,  which means eating carbs that are less refined (their glycemic index is low or at least lower) and carbs that come with a lot of fiber attached (green leafy vegetables), and then eating less sugars, by which I mean both sucrose and high fructose corn syrup.

And this brings us to the point of controversy on the show – where Oz and I disagree. (Okay, one of the many points on which we disagree, but the one that needs clarification sooner rather than later). This is also the point that public health authorities, physicians and nutritionists almost religiously refuse to accept or even understand, because one implication of what I’m saying is that the good Dr. Atkins was right all along, and they just can’t get it through their head, as Oz can’t, that a diet of the kind Atkins recommended might be not only healthy but the medically appropriate treatment for the condition – in this case, obesity.

There are a couple of helpful ways to think about the role of carbohydrates in obesity and chronic disease, and one of them (the other I’ll discuss at the end of this post) is that some of us are more  tolerant to the refined and easily digestible carbs and sugars in our diet than others. The more we can tolerate them the less we have to avoid them. Hence, the dose of carb-restriction that’s necessary to be lean and (probably) healthy is a small one. Again here’s how I put this issue of individual variation in WWGF:

 

…Multiple hormones and enzymes affect our fat accumulation, and insulin happens to be the one hormone that we can consciously control through our dietary choices. Minimizing the carbohydrates we consume and eliminating the sugars will lower our insulin levels as low as is safe, but it won’t necessarily undo the effects of other hormones—the restraining effect of estrogen that’s lost as women pass through menopause, for instance, or of testosterone as men age—and it  might not ultimately reverse all the damage done by a lifetime of eating carbohydrate- and sugar-rich foods.

This means that there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for the quantity of carbohydrates we can eat and still lose fat or remain lean. For some, staying lean or getting back to being lean might be a matter of merely avoiding sugars and eating the other carbohydrates in the diet, even the fattening ones, in moderation: pasta dinners once a week, say, instead of every other day. For others, moderation in carbohydrate consumption might not be sufficient, and far stricter adherence is necessary. And for some, weight will be lost only on a diet of virtually zero carbohydrates, and even this may not be sufficient to eliminate all our accumulated fat, or even most of it.

Oz and physicians like him think that there’s so much to be gained by eating whole grains and fruits (we agree on the green vegetables, although I do so less because of any compelling scientific evidence than because my mother insisted they were good for me) that they think this should be recommended to anyone and everyone and a diet that restricts them can’t possibly be healthful.

Oz implies on the show that everyone can benefit sufficiently by improving the quality of the carbs they eat and getting rid of the sugars, that any more significant restriction isn’t necessary. And he thinks any significant amount of carb restriction will cause problems because a) people won’t stay on such a restricted diet; b) they’ll replace these foods in their diet with high fat, high saturated fat meats and eggs and so increase their risk of heart disease (a point I discuss at length in both my books and is obviously critical), and c) they’ll develop diseases like cancer that Oz believes can be prevented by eating fruits and vegetables and maybe even whole grains.

As I point out on the show (or at least  I did when the segment was taped, but it may or may not make it to the air as our taping session ran long), there’s precious little clinical trial evidence to support this last contention, but Oz and authorities like him believe in the healing power of fruits and vegetables, and they’re not all that bothered by the lack of clinical trials to support it.

This is the same take on the problem used by physicians and nutritionists  who recommend low glycemic index diets instead of carbohydrate-restricted diets. They think this is enough to improve the quality of the carbs we consume, and the implicit assumption is that if we cut back on the quantity of carbs to any great extent we’ll either eat too much fat (or too much meat, period) or we won’t stick to the diet and any benefits will be lost.

What I’m arguing is that for many of us who run to fat, cutting down on the refined carbs and starchy carbs (potatoes, for instance) and on the added sugars will help, but it probably won’t help enough. The dose of carb-restriction won’t be sufficient to deal with the problem. We may stay fat. We may even get fatter. A blanket recommendation to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains, as Oz prescribes and now Weight Watchers and the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, ignores this aspect of human variability completely. It assumes that people who are predisposed to fatten can tolerate the same foods and benefit from the same very mild dose of carb-restriction that the naturally lean can.

I don’t think that’s true. It’s that simple. I think that if we’re so predisposed to fatten that we’re already obese, we’re probably among those who have to restrict carbs far more severely – have a much greater dose of the intervention – to get even relatively lean, which means relatively healthy. So for some of us and maybe most of us, even fruit, the nutritionist’s darling of the early 21^st century, can be fattening , and if it’s fattening, it means it’s probably causing far more problems than whatever antioxidants or phtyochemicals it contains may be preventing.  (As even Wikipedia says, as of March 6th 2011 anyway, “While there is abundant scientific and government support for recommending diets rich in fruits and vegetables, there is only limited evidence that health benefits are due to specific phytochemicals.”)

The way I see it, Oz, who’s naturally skinny, can eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains to his hearts content and remain lean. For him, they can be the bulk of his diet and he can tolerate them and burn them off. They give him energy. They don’t make him fat. But most of his audience is not naturally lean, and they probably can’t. I’d argue that many of them have probably been living on diets very similar to the diet Oz is prescribing and it hasn’t helped them or certainly not to any significant degree. I get e-mails all the time now from people who tell me they were getting fatter and fatter on just those “heart healthy” diets.

Assuredly some proportion of the population and so Oz’s audience will lose a little weight eating as Oz recommends and getting rid of the refined grains and sugars in their diet, and they’ll be a little healthier for the effort. Getting rid of the sugars alone might make a significant difference on both counts. But it’s an insufficient dose of the intervention for a serious medical issue that typically requires far more. For those who are obese and want to be anything close to lean and stay that way, they’re likely to be better off getting rid of all the grains and much or most of the fruit, and then eating more of whatever foods they happen to eat or like that provide protein and fat – pulses, for instance, and tofu (a more complicated issue than I have time for here) for the vegetarians and vegans and animal products (meat, fish, fowl and eggs)  for the rest.

This also speaks to a question I’ve been asked numerous times in e-mails from readers. Simply put, what about nuts and what about fruit? And here’s my answer: Nuts are not only Oz’s snack of choice, but the snack of choice of many low-carbers. And nuts and fruit are fine if your body can tolerate them. If you’re still heavier than you’d like, maybe it can’t. It’s a trade-off. If I eat fruit, other than maybe a handful of blueberries a day, I start to gain weight, so I don’t eat it. If I was fatter than I wanted to be — which I’m not — I’d consider giving up both the blueberries and the almonds I eat and see what happens. If it didn’t make any difference, I’d go back to them. If it did, I could decide how much I missed them and whether the trade-off of weight vs. fruits and nuts was worth it. You can look at any number of  the nutrition websites to see which nuts have the lowest carb content and which fruits have the lowest sugar content and glycemic index and use that as a guide. But there’s no website or diet book that will tell you what your body can tolerate.

Finally, here’s the other way to look at carbohydrate-restricted diets, and it speaks to Oz’s belief that saturated fats are the cause of heart disease.  As I explain in WWGF and did so on the Oz show, it’s almost assuredly the case that the same foods that make us fat are the same foods that cause heart disease and diabetes and cancer, etc. — the diseases that associate with obesity. These are the foods that were absent from human diets during the 2.5 million years of evolution leading up to the agricultural era, and so we’re still poorly adapted to dealing with these foods — easily digestible starches, refined carbs and sugars. When we remove these foods from our diets, we get healthier. Insulin levels come down and with them a host of metabolic disturbances normalize.

It was an email from my friend Bob Kaplan a few days before I taped the Oz show that reminded me of how best to phrase this argument.  So I’m going to end with Bob’s e-mail because he said it as well or better than I ever could.

I was just thinking about the “beneficial effects” of a low-carb diet and how it’s essentially a misnomer.

When we eat low-carbohydrate diets, our “good” HDL tends to go up, our LDL becomes larger and fluffier (less atherogenic), our blood pressure goes down, and our triglycerides plummet. Does this mean a low-carbohydrate diet is beneficial to health?

Yes and no. While it appears “beneficial,” for me, it’s more of an indicator of our serum lipids “correcting” to levels that we are supposed to find in a healthy individual. In other words, if we look at a population of people who are chronically over-consuming sugar and refined carbohydrates, their serum lipids are going to be abnormal. When they go on a low-carbohydrate diet, they’re correcting the abnormality and the associated lipids will become more “favorable” (while I would argue that they’re just trending toward a normal, healthy human being) depending on which MD or researcher you ask.

So it is with weight “loss,” water “loss,” lipid and metabolic “benefits” of a low-carbohydrate diet. There is nothing magical about restricting carbohydrates, rather it’s closer to the kind of diet that we’ve been eating and are presumably genetically adapted to eat, and any loss of weight and water, any beneficial effects on serum lipids are just a correction rather than an improvement in health.

Benefits v. Correction:

A restricted-carbohydrate diet doesn’t make you lose weight; it corrects your weight.

A restricted-carbohydrate diet doesn’t make you lose water weight; it corrects your water weight.

A restricted-carbohydrate diet doesn’t improve serum lipids; it corrects serum lipids.

A restricted-carbohydrate diet doesn’t improve health; it corrects unhealthiness.

ROD 050711

ROD

Saturday, 07May11

 

Saturday Switcheroo

5 minutes at each station.

Go heavy, but focus on technique.

15 seconds work/15 seconds rest at each station.  Do five minutes of one movement, rest one minute then go to the next.

• Kettlebell highpulls r/l
• Kettlebell cleans r/l  
• Kettlebell push press r/l 
• Kettlebell front squat r/l  
• Kettlebell one handed swings r/l 

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Lower Your Grains & Lower Your Insulin Levels! A Novel Way To Treat Hypoglycemia.

Hypoglycemia is a common problem. Over the past fifteen years, our dietary establishment has made a virtual industry of extolling the virtues of carbohydrates.

We’re constantly told that carbohydrates are the good guys of nutrition, and that, if we eat large amounts of them, the world should be a better place. In such a world, the experts tell us, there will be no heart disease and no obesity.

Under such guidance, Americans are gobbling breads, cereals, and pastas as if there were no tomorrow, trying desperately to reach that 80 to 85 percent of total calories advocated by the high-carb extremists.

This creates a terrible paradox: people are eating less fat and getting fatter! No medical authority will tell you that excess body fat makes you healthier. There is but one alarming conclusion to reach: a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet may be dangerous to your health.

Overeating carbohydrate foods can prevent a higher percentage of fats from being used for energy, and lead to a decrease in endurance and an increase in fat storage.

Eating fat does not make you fat. It’s your body’s response to excess carbohydrates in your diet that makes you fat. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates, but it can easily convert those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat.

It’s hard to lose weight by simply restricting calories. Eating less and losing excess body fat do not automatically go hand in hand.

Low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diets generate a series of biochemical signals in your body that will take you out of the balance, making it more difficult to access stored body fat for energy. Result: you’ll reach a weight-loss plateau, beyond which you simply can’t lose any more weight.

Diets based on choice restriction and calorie limits usually fail. People on restrictive diets get tired of feeling hungry and deprived. They go off their diets, put the weight back on (primarily as increased body fat), and then feel bad about themselves for not having enough will power, discipline, or motivation.

Weight loss has little to do with willpower. You need information, not will power. If you change what you eat, you don’t have to be overly concerned about how much you eat. Adhering to a diet of low carbohydrate meals, you can eat enough to feel satisfied and still wind up losing fat-without obsessively counting calories or fat grams.

Food Can Be Good or Bad

The ratio of macronutrients protein, carbohydrate, and fat-in the meals you eat is the key to permanent weight loss and optimal health. Unless you understand the rules that control the powerful biochemical responses generated by food, you will never achieve optimal wellness.

Unfortunately, many people don’t really know what a carbohydrate is. Most people will say carbohydrates are sweets and pasta. Ask them what a vegetable or fruit is, and they’ll probably reply that it’s a vegetable or fruit-as if that were a food type all its own, a food type that they can eat in unlimited amounts without gaining weight.

Well, this may come as a surprise, but all of the above-sweets and pasta, vegetables and fruits-are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are merely different forms of simple sugars linked together in polymers-something like edible plastic.

Of course, we all need a certain amount of carbohydrates in our diet. The body requires a continual intake of carbohydrates to feed the brain, which uses glucose (a form of sugar) as its primary energy source.

In fact, the brain is a virtual glucose hog, gobbling more than two thirds of the circulating carbohydrates in the bloodstream while you are at rest. To feed this glucose hog, the body continually takes carbohydrates and converts them to glucose.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Any carbohydrates not immediately used by the body will be stored in the form of glycogen (a long string of glucose molecules linked together).

The body has two storage sites for glycogen: the liver and the muscles. The glycogen stored in the muscles is inaccessible to the brain. Only the glycogen stored in the liver can be broken down and sent back to the bloodstream so as to maintain adequate blood sugar levels for proper brain function.

The liver’s capacity to store carbohydrates in the form of glycogen is very limited and can be easily depleted within ten to twelve hours. So the liver’s glycogen reserves must be maintained on a continual basis. That’s why we eat carbohydrates.

The question no one has bothered to ask until now is this: what happens when you eat too much carbohydrate? Here’s the answer: whether it’s being stored in the liver or the muscles, the total storage capacity of the body for carbohydrate is really quite limited.

If you’re an average person, you can store about three hundred to four hundred grams of carbohydrate in your muscles, but you can’t get at that carbohydrate. In the liver, where carbohydrates are accessible for glucose conversion, you can store only about sixty to ninety grams.

This is equivalent to about two cups of cooked pasta or three typical candy bars, and it represents your total reserve capacity to keep the brain working properly.

Once the glycogen levels are filled in both the liver and the muscles, excess carbohydrates have just one fate: to be converted into fat and stored in the adipose, that is, fatty, tissue.

In a nutshell, even though carbohydrates themselves are fat-free, excess carbohydrates ends up as excess fat. That’s not the worst of it. Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates will generate a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rapid rise, the pancreas secretes the hormone insulin into the bloodstream. Insulin then lowers the levels of blood glucose.

The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that’s stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat.

In other words, when we eat too much carbohydrate, we’re essentially sending a hormonal message, via insulin, to the body (actually, to the adipose cells). The message: “Store fat.”

Hold on; it gets even worse. Not only do increased insulin levels tell the body to store carbohydrates as fat, they also tell it not to release any stored fat. This makes it impossible for you to use your own stored body fat for energy.

So the excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you fat, they make sure you stay fat. It’s a double whammy, and it can be lethal.

Insulin is released by the pancreas after you eat carbohydrates. This causes a rise in blood sugar. Insulin assures your cells receive some blood sugar necessary for life, and increases glycogen storage.

However, it also drives your body to use more carbohydrate, and less fat, as fuel. And, insulin converts almost half of your dietary carbohydrate to fat for storage. If you want to use more fats for energy, the insulin response must be moderated.

Diets high in refined sugars release more insulin thereby allowing less stored fat to be burned. High insulin levels also suppress two important hormones: glucagon and growth hormone. Glucagon promotes the burning of fat and sugar. Growth hormone is used for muscle development and building new muscle mass.

Insulin also causes hunger. As blood sugar increases following a carbohydrate meal, insulin rises with the eventual result of lower blood sugar. This results in hunger, often only a couple of hours (or less) after the meal.

Cravings, usually for sweets, are frequently part of this cycle, leading you to resort to snacking, often on more carbohydrates. Not eating makes you feel ravenous shaky, moody and ready to “crash.” If the problem is chronic, you never get rid of that extra stored fat, and your energy is adversely affected.

Does this sound like you? The best suggestion for anyone wanting to utilize more fats is to moderate the insulin response by limiting (ideally, eliminating) the intake of refined sugars, and keeping all other carbohydrate intake to about 40% of the diet. Generally, non-carbohydrate foods-proteins and fats-don’t produce much insulin.

Insulin responses can vary greatly from person to person. But generally, more refined foods evoke a stronger and/or more rapid insulin reaction. One reason for this is refined carbohydrates lack the natural fiber which helps minimize the carbohydrate/insulin response.

Consumption of natural fiber with carbohydrates can reduce the extreme blood sugar reactions described above. Low-fat diets cause quicker digestion and absorption of carbohydrates in the form of sugar. By adding some fats to the diet, digestion and absorption is slower, and the insulin reaction is moderated.

Recommendations for them include long-term restriction of carbohydrates and an increase in dietary fats. For some of these people, it means lowering carbohydrate intake to below 40%, sometimes even as low as 20%. By moderating carbohydrate intake you can increase your fat burning as an optimal and efficient source of almost unlimited energy.

Perhaps a third to a half or more of our population is unable to process carbohydrates-sugars and starches efficiently. In many people it’s due to genetics, with lifestyle contributing to the condition.

This can be termed insulin resistance or IR. Like many problems, IR is an individual one, affecting different people different ways. You must determine if you are carbohydrate intolerant, and if so, to what degree. Blood tests will only diagnose the problem in the later stages, but the symptoms may have begun years earlier.

As we now know, insulin has many functions. While it can’t get glucose into the cells efficiently when they’re in a state of insulin resistance, insulin still performs its other tasks, including converting carbohydrates to fat and inhibiting stored fat from being burned.

In a normal person, 40% of the carbohydrates eaten is converted to fat. In the IR person, that number may be much higher. Many people with IR have a family history of diabetes.

Don’t think of IR itself as a disease, although left unchecked, it can create problems that lead to disease. It may be quite normal for some humans to be unable to eat large or even moderate amounts of carbohydrates.

As a matter of fact, we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years from the so-called cave man’s diet,” which consisted solely of meat and vegetables.

With the onset of modern civilization about 5,000 years ago, our physiology suddenly was asked to digest and metabolize larger amounts of sugar and starch especially refined sugars. But if we are unable to utilize the amount of carbohydrates we eat, certain symptoms will develop.

Below is a list of some of the most common complaints of people with IR Many symptoms occur immediately following a meal of carbo-hydrates, and others are constant. Keep in mind that these symptoms may also be related to other problems.

1. Fatigue. Whether you call it fatigue or exhaustion, the most common feature of IR is that it wears people out. Some are tired just in the morning or afternoon; others are exhausted all day.

2. Brain fogginess. Sometimes the fatigue of IR is physical, but often it’s mental (as opposed to psychological); the inability to concentrate is the most evident symptom. Loss of creativity, poor memory, failing or poor grades in school often accompany IR, as do various forms of “learning disabilities.”

3. Low blood sugar. Brief, mild periods of low blood sugar are normal during the day, especially if meals are not eaten on a regular schedule. But prolonged periods of this “hypoglycemia,” accompanied by many of the symptoms listed here, especially mental and physical fatigue, are not normal.

Feeling jittery agitated and moody is common in IR, with an almost immediate relief once food is eaten. Dizziness is also common, as is the craving for sweets, chocolate or caffeine.

These bouts occur more frequently before meals or first thing in the morning. The old hypoglycemic diet, still in use today, recommends frequent snacks, and individuals with IR usually know to eat often. However, the hypoglycemic diet contains too much carbohydrate for most IR people.

4. Intestinal bloating. Most intestinal gas is produced from dietary carbohydrates. IR sufferers who eat carbohydrates suffer from gas, lots of it. Antacids or other remedies for symptomatic relief, are not very successful in dealing with the problem.

Sometimes the intestinal distress becomes quite severe, resulting in a diagnosis of “colitis” or “ileitis,” although this is usually not a true disease state. However, IR is often associated with true gastrointestinal disease, which must be differentiated from simple intestinal bloating.

5. Sleepiness. Many people with IR get sleepy immediately after meals containing more than 20% or 30% carbohydrates. This is typically a pasta meal, or even a meat meal which includes bread or potatoes and a sweet dessert.

6. Increased fat storage and weight. For most people, too much weight is too much fat. In males, a large abdomen is the more evident and earliest sign of IR. In females, it’s prominent buttocks, frequently accompanied by “chipmunk cheeks.”

7. Increased triglycerides. High triglycerides in the blood are often seen in overweight persons. But even those who are not too fat may have stores of fat in their arteries as a result of IR.

These triglycerides are the direct result of carbohydrates from the diet being converted by insulin. In my experience, fasting triglyceride levels over 100 may be an indication of a carbohydrate problem, even though 100 is in the so-called “normal” range.

8. Increased blood pressure. It is well known that most people with hypertension have too much insulin and are IR. It is often possible to show a direct relationship between the level of insulin and the level of blood pressure: as insulin levels elevate, so does blood pressure.

9. Depression. Because carbohydrates are a natural “downer,” depressing the brain, it is not uncommon to see many depressed persons also having IR.

Carbohydrates do this by changing the brain chemistry. Carbohydrates increase serotonin, which produces a depressing or sleepy feeling. This is the reason nice hotels place candy on your pillow in the evening; it literally helps you sleep. (Protein, on the other hand, is a brain stimulant, picking you up mentally.

Here’s another example of how trends distort the real picture: many people have been taught that sugar is stimulating. This is a significant consideration for those trying to learn, whether at school, home or work.)

10. Insulin Resistance is also prevalent in persons addicted to alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes or other drugs. Often, the drug is the secondary problem, with IR being the primary one. Treating this primary problem should obviously be a major focus of any therapy.

IR sufferers may have other symptoms as well. However, when a person with this problem finally lowers carbohydrate intake to tolerable levels, many if not most of the other symptoms may disappear.

With the stress of IR eliminated, the body is finally able to correct many of its own problems. It is possible, although unlikely, that so many of these symptoms can be found in someone who tolerates carbohydrates quite well.

RULES OF THE ROAD TO REACH BALANCE

1. Protein. Know how much protein your body needs. Never consume more protein than your body requires. And never consume less. For precise measurements our nurse can determine that for you.

You can also perform the calculations reviewed in The Zone. Generally adult protein requirements range from a low of 35 grams per day or a sedentary 250 pound obese individual to as much as 200 grams per day for a lean heavily exercising 100 pound athlete.

You should have protein at EVERY meal and the total per day should equal your daily requirement. For every three grams of protein at a meal you need to have four grams of carbohydrate and 1.5 grams of fat.

You can multiply protein by 1.25 to obtain the amout of carbohdrate and by 0.5 to obtain the amount of fat. This is a rough estimate and you should not become overwhelmed trying to get this absolutely precise. It is important though to be in the general area.

Corrinne Netzer wrote a book The Complete Book of Food Counts that can help you make this calculation. You might also want to make an appointment with our diet counsellor Anne to help you with this process.

Choose your protein based on those recommended for your blood type. This can be found in Dr. D’Adamo’s book Eat Right For Your Type. If you are seriously ill you should have your blood subtyped so we can provide an even more accurate recommendation for you.

2. Carbohydrate. You should also choose your carbohydrates from Dr. D’Adamo’s book. If you are insulin resistant, (have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood pressure or are overweight) then you need to specifically restrict your carbohydrates based on the Heller’s book The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifespan Program.

Combining all three authors is the most powerful method we know to lower your insulin levels and produce optimum health.

If you find yourself hungry and craving sugar or sweets two to three hours after a meal, you probably consumed too many carbohydrates that last meal. Whenever you have a problem with hunger or carbohydrate cravings, look to your last meal for a clue to the reason why.

No matter how consistently you follow this dietary strategy, you are bound to make mistakes. This is especially true at parties or when traveling. Remember, if you’re only unbalanced for a short period of time, you’re only one meal away from rebalancing. It’s like falling off a bike-you just get back up and continue your journey.

3. Fat. Choose your fats based on Dr. D’Adamo’s recommendations. Most people can tolerate olive oil and it is the oil of choice. It is best purchased in small glass bottles. Fish is a good source of EPA which is beneficial fat that will help balance out your hormone levels and decrease inflammation.

4. Water. Try to drink at least 64 ounces of pure water per day. If you are a heavy caffeine user, gradually reduce caffeine intake to zero whenever possible as the breakdown products of caffeine will tend to increase insulin levels.

5. Exercise. Try to get 30 to 60 minutes of walking in four to five days a week if the weather permits. If you are seriously debilitated you will have to wait until your health improves. As you are healthier and if you are blood type 0 or B you can shift to more aggressive exercises.

ROD 101310

ROD

Wednesday, 13Oct10

 

Push – Pull – Thrust & Run

2 rounds for time:

• 50 Push Presses
• 200m Run
• 50 Sumo Deadlift HighPull (no less than 16 K)
• 200m  Run
• 50 Thrusters
• 200m  Run

200 meter run is from the gym to 115 Industrial and back and all weight used must be heavy. Whatever weight you start with thats the weight you end with…no downgrading. Remember this is a 200m RUN not JOG nor WALK… but RUN.

___________________________________________________________________

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. – Elbert Hubbard

____________________________________________________________________

T h e   P u l l s

Most of you know (or maybe you don’t?) that at Nxt Level we cycle through strength movements from 3 pools. Those categories are: Squat Variants, Upper Body Movements, and Pulls. The squats we use are the back squat, the front squat, and the overhead squat. The upper body movements vary more and have included dips, presses, jerks, bench press, weighted pull-ups, handstands, and handstand push-ups. The pulls are the deadlift, the clean, and the snatch. They refer not to pulling a load with the arms, but rather pulling a weight from the floor using the legs and hips. Let’s look at the pulls.
 
            The deadlift is the slow pull. When executed properly it’s a pure expression of raw strength. Most people will be able to move the most amount of weight in the deadlift when compared to any other lift. When going for a PR this lift can grind on for a few seconds from start to finish. The deadlift seems to make sense to most folks. Once you now what a set back is and how to achieve it, it’s just a matter of standing up with the bar in your hands (a bit more complicated but that’s the main idea). With the fast pulls, the clean and the snatch, things can get a bit trickier. Now you are going to aggressively use your legs and hips to do a job that for most of your life you would have done with your arms, i.e.; get an object to either your shoulders (clean) or overhead (snatch).
 
When first learning the Clean and the Snatch many athletes have a hard time getting over the urge to pull the weight up with the arms. This will always lead to problems with the lift. For one, the bar will tend to get out in front of you leading to a missed lift forward. An early arm pull limits the amount of force you can apply with your far stronger legs and hips, thereby limiting the amount of weight you can pull. Try to envision a pulley system… you’re applying force at one end of a rope and through the pulley the rope lifts an object on the other end of it. To move the object you first take the slack off of the rope (straighten out your elbows and tighten up your torso and hips) and then pull. Viola, the object comes up. What if you don’t take the slack out? The object isn’t going anywhere. What if you used a rubber band instead of a rope? There’d be a lot of slack to take out of that band and you’d have to pull a lot longer and harder to move the object, and if the object were heavy enough it wouldn’t move and eventually the rubber band would snap. This is what it’s like when you bend your elbows early and try to use your arms too much in the pulls. You’re asking the muscles and tendons at the elbow to do work they just can’t do. Either you’ll fail at significant loads or you’ll wind up injured, or both.
 
Let’s think Snatch. Your arms have 4 jobs in the snatch…
 
1. They connect the legs and hips to the bar via the torso
2. After the jump they guide the bar into place on the way up,
3. Once the bar is at max height they help pull you UNDER the bar FAST to receive it while it’s weightless
4. They support the bar overhead in the receiving position.
 
Here are a few things you can be thinking about when snatching during this cycle (see how conveniently that works out?). Pick one or two and focus on them.
-        My legs and hips are going to jump the barbell up, NOT my arms.
-        I will be FAST!
-        Once the bar is at max height my arms will help to pull me UNDER the bar FAST into the bottom of an overhead squat.
-        I will receive the bar as strong as I overhead squatted last cycle.
-        I am an awesome snatching machine and will dazzle family and co-workers with tales of my snatchtastickness.
 
Cheers to the snatch!
___________________

This cycle’s Pull is the Hang Snatch.  Catch the bar as high or low as you need to.  Ideally, the first few exposures are power (caught above parallel) and the latter are squat Snatches (caught below parallel)
Here is a video from Catalyst Athletics of a Hang (Squat) Snatch

Which is your favorite pull?

ROD 100610

ROD

Wednesday, 06Oct10

 

4 rounds of Torture

30 seconds of work with 15 seconds rest:

• Snatches w/ 18lb bar or barbell
• 2 tire jump in & out
• Reclines
• Knees to Elbows
• Lateral handstand walks (3left / 3 right)
• Band sprints
• Band snapdowns
• 12lb Med ball slams

________________________________________________________________

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find “tomorrow” on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday’s defeats, and ignore the problems of tomorrow. ~  Og Mandino

_________________________________________________________________

You’re in good hands at NLP

Thanks Alex

______________________________________________________________________

For those of you who are interested, Jon Hinds, owner of the Monkey Bar Gym, is a leading inventor of exercise equipment i.e. power wheel, strength trainer & nutritionist.  This seminar is on Staten Island.

Lean and Green Warrior – NYC with Jon Hinds

Date: Wed & Fri   10/20 & 22/2010

Time:  6:30 PM – 9:30 PM

Cost: $49.00; We devour pants. When you train like warriors you need to replenish our body. There is no better way to be happy, health, strong and kind to the Earth than to eat the powerful plants, fruit and nuts that the Earth has provided. Let Jon Hinds and Head Trainer Jessica Rucker teach you how to become a warrior through a plant-based diet. Most people think you can’t reach your optimal goals without eating massive amounts of animal protein, Jon will show you that is a 100% myth (just take a look him and his trainers). Save the Earth and save yourself, join the revolution with Jon Hinds. Location: Codella Ju Jitsu Academy 3755 Victory Blvd S.I.N.Y.

ROD 090710

ROD

Tuesday, 07Sept10

 

“Brendan” 

This ROD is named after Brendan Marrocco whose vehicle, while stationed in Baghdad, was hit by an EFP (Explosive Fired Projectile). This resulted in the loss of Brendans limb’s & other life threatening injuries.

Five rounds for time of:
100 meter run 
10 DB Squat clean with press
10 Push-ups 
10 V sit-ups

Use heavy weights in this routine for maximum gains in strength. When performing the squat clean, the squat should be deep in the bucket & finish off with an overhead press.

____________________________________________________________________

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
- Mark Twain

_____________________________________________________________________

 In Memory of 

U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Severin W. Summers III, 43, of Bentonia, Mississippi, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), headquartered at Jackson, Mississippi, died August 2, 2009 in Qole Gerdsar, Afghanistan, after his vehicle was struck by a command wire improvised explosive device. Summers is survived by his wife Tammy Fraser and his daughters Jessica, Shelby & Sarah.

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