Overtraining Syndrome

Overtraining syndrome frequently occurs in athletes who are training for their chosen competition or event and train beyond what their ability to recover is.  They tend to train longer and harder to improve performance, however, performance actually decreases as a result of sleep pattern disruptions, decreased focus and intensity, and other signs of doing too much.  This same phenomenon can happen to you as well.  The common thread here is a lack of adequate rest and recovery.  There needs to be a balance between overload and recovery, the net result being conditioning.

Some of the more common signs of overtraining may include:

compulsive need to exercise, increased incidence of injuries, loss of enthusiasm, moodiness/irritability, decreased intensity, insomnia, sudden drop in performance and tired, drained or lack of energy.

If you suspect you might be overtraining, stop or at least decrease the amount of exercise and allow for adequate rest.  Consider working out with a personal trainer (mesa personal training) to monitor progress and possibly avoid the risk of overtraining.  Make sure to drink plenty of water (fluids) and possibly alter your diet if necessary.  Schedule yourself a sports massage to help recharge those overused muscles.  Most importantly, rest than have fun with your training!

Snowboarding Workout

With the Winter Olympics upon us, you can’t help but get wrapped up in the coverage of all the events.  I, personally, love to watch the snowboarding half-pipe competition.  The USA’s own Gretchen Bleiler uses the BOSU ball in her workouts to strengthen core muscles.  Many of you have had the joy of using the BOSU ball and know how important it is to balance and coordination.  There are very few people in the world who can not use an improvement in balance and coordination.  When you are sweating through your twelve reps of leg-shaking goodness, remember, if it’s good enough for a world class snowboarder, it’s good enough for you.

Celebrity Diet Tricks

1.) Eat Breakfast–It ramps up your metabolism and prevents overeating for the rest of the day.

2.) Cut out white foods–These foods are high in sugar so your body burns this off instead of fat

3.) Focus on watery veggies and fruit like lettuce, celery, cucumber, melons, oranges and grapes–banishes bloating by flushing out your system

4.) Eat Spicy–A Canadian study found that people who consumed hot red pepper ate less food and burned more calories (pepper increased their metabolism)

5.) Snack–Eat 150 calorie snacks every three hours, don’t let your blood sugar drop or you will overeat

6.) Count Backwards 3,2,1– Eat three meals, two snacks and drink a minimum of 1 liter of water per day.  This trick will keep your metabolism up and avoid feeling hungry throughout each day.

Distance Runners

Have a heart (cardiac rehab)

A recent NY times article spoke about the new link that has been made between people who have had heart attacks and the frequency that they partcipate in cardiac rehabilitation.  After a major cardiovascular event, people who partcipated more often in cardiac rehab sessions lived longer and had fewer re-occurences.  What does this mean for those who have not had any sort of heart problems?  It means that exercising frequently, in addition to dietary changes, can lead to a signifcantly lower chance of heart problems.  Not only that, but your quality of life will be much higher.  You will find that you have more energy, and will save money on your health care over the long haul.

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/for-seniors-an-underused-heart-therapy-the-gym/

Vitamin C

Ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C, is a water soluble vitamin with many responsibilities in the human body.  One of those responsibilities is to act like an anti-oxidant which can protect the body against damage caused by free-radicals.  Free radicals are the culprits that contribute to disease processes such as cancer and heart disease.  In the musculoskeletal system, vitamin C acts at the cellular level by contributing hydrogen and oxygen to amino acids so that they may do their part in collagen production.  Collagen is found in the connective tissue of skin, teeth, bones, organs and cartilage.  It is the substance that keeps our skin firm and resilient, thus protecting it from wrinkling.

For the immune system, it helps fight colds and flus, scrapes and bruises, as well as keeping those gums healthy.  Many of our clients at Mesa Personal Training supplement vitamin C not only preventatively, but also to counter the physiological demands placed upon them after their training is completed.  Individuals deficient in vitamin C will often present with swollen gums, wounds that do not heal in a timely manner, easy bruising and in general, sub-optimal immune functioning.  Classic deficiency is related to scurvy, a condition in which the individual has gum disease, pain in the muscles and joints, skin lesions, fatigue and bleeding.  Vitamin C works by stimulating the activity of antibodies and immune system cells.  This is very evident in why some individuals can get over a cold in two days while others it may take seven to eight to restore health.  Vitamin C is easily consumed through oranges, tangerines and grapefruits, while tomatoes, peppers, broccali and even potatoes will provide significant amounts.  For those wishing to protect against disease processes and others who are immunocompromised, a general rule of thumb is to take as many milligrams as possible up to bowel tolerance and then back down by 500 mg.

Born to Run

Adults in our society today sit at a desk for eight hours at a time, just to go home and sit in front of the television for another two to three hours. So on your way home from work today, maybe think, “What are the repurcussions to my sitting all day?”

If you ever need motivation to get up and move I highly recommend ‘Born to Run’ by Christopher McDougall.

Excerpt: ‘Born to Run’

“The human body is not designed for that kind of abuse [running],” Dr. Torg replied.

But why? Antelope don’t get shin splints. Wolves don’t ice-pack their knees. I doubt that 80% of all wild mustangs are annually disabled with impact injuries. It reminded me of a proverb attributed to Roger Bannister, who, while simultaneously studying medicine, working as a clinical researcher and minting pithy parables, became the first man to break the 4-minute mile: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up,” Bannister said. “It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle — when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

So why should every other mammal on the planet be able to depend on its legs except us? Come to think of it, how could a guy like Bannister charge out of the lab every day, pound around a hard cinder track in thin leather slippers, and not only get faster, but never get hurt? How come some of us can be out there running all lion-like and Bannister-ish every morning when the sun comes up, while the rest of us need a fistful of Ibuprofen before we can put our feet on the floor?

But maybe there was a path back in time, a way to flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were. Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top-speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed-all and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle — behold, the Running Man.

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love — everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires” — it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.

Youth Football Clinic

Zenith Football Camps will provide, a non contact, three (3) day camp for high school students entering the 9th grade to the 12th grade. Hosted February 26-28, 2010. Click here for more information on the 2010 High School Z Camp.

Fitness Nerds

Some of you might wonder, what do people who work at the HIT Center do when no one is training?  Nights like tonight can give you an idea.  We test.  We test our maximum treadmill speed (19+ mph for me).  We test our standing broad jump (109 inches for me).  We test our max power on the Wingate (1498 Watts).  Can you beat us?

Protein Intakes

 

Down The Drain

By: Jacob Reynolds

        Many people believe that protein supplementation after a workout will increase their muscle size. Yet, considering the average American diet, most people should have enough protein to promote synthesis of muscle tissue. Many companies want you to believe that a protein shake after a workout is beneficial in retaining the results, but the protein that is not used in resynthesis is simply excreted from the body. For instance, intenseworkout.com states, “Some of the diet basics are eating at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight EVERY DAY whether you worked out that day or not. Protein is the building block of muscle. If you can’t get at least 1 gram of protein per pound every day from real food, then use a whey protein supplement like powder and bars.” Of course their aim it to ultimately sell you these supplements, but they can not show you any proof that this extra protein is actually effective. Another way to put this, according to musclehack.com, is if you weighed 160 pounds you should be shooting for about 160 grams of protein every day while weightlifting. Tarnopolsky stated that 1 g/kg of protein is sufficient to retain muscle mass in men even as while weightlifting 75 minutes a day, for 5 days a week. According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein is .8 grams per kilogram, which results in around 60 grams of protein per day; the numbers that these popular muscle-building websites give you are about twice the RDA value. According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommendations, powerlifters should consume around 1.6 g/kg, while endurance athletes should consume around 1.2 g/kg. This is a much smaller number compared to the 2.75 g/kg suggestion that the websites previously mentioned websites advise bodybuilders to consume. Robert M. Russell M.D. of talktoadoctor.com, says that consuming more than 2 g/kg a day of protein can be a stressful stimulus for the kidneys, and becomes a greater concern as the aging process takes place and organs become less efficient and effective. Going back to the example of the 160 pound person, if they consumed an average American diet of 2,000 calories, they would consume around 75 grams of protein per day, assuming that about 15 percent of the diet was composed of protein. According to the musclehack.com and intenseworkout.com, an additional 80 grams of protein a day, in the form of protein supplementation, would be required to retain muscle mass. If you were to drink “Monster Milk” which contains 40 grams of protein and costs about 4 dollars per bottle, this would get you to the amount of protein that many people would recommend. However protein can not be stored in large quantities in the body, so anything over the recommended daily income will eventually be excreted as waste.  In other words, excessive and expensive protein supplementation oftentimes results in an almost literal flushing of money down the drain.

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