Archive for the ‘Nutrition’ Category

Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series of guest blog posts by Simon Wheatcroft, who is training for a 100-mile ultramarathon in June, despite being legally blind for the past 11 years. For more timely updates on his progress, please follow Wheatcroft on Twitter or check out his blog, Adapting to Going Blind.
 

Starting my training for the Cotswold’s 100, I began with a little research.

What was required to run a 100 miles? Apart from the obvious fitness requirements, nutrition kept popping up again and again. I decided to do a little crowdsourcing for information from other ultra-athletes and asked about their nutrition regimen and if anything went wrong with anything they tried. I was hit with a resounding conclusion: Mess up the nutrition and you mess up the run.

When I first started training, a 3- to 4-mile run required nothing more than a little water before and after the run. Now that I essentially run one marathon, two half-marathons and a few other runs of varying distance per week, I need a lot more than just water. In the early days of training, I didn’t take much notice of what I ate while running. If there were a chocolate bar or something similar in the house, I would simply take that and eat throughout the run. This worked until I hit the 15-mile barrier in my runs, but then I found it was time to take nutrition more seriously.

So the research and experimentation officially began, and I slowly put together a training nutrition plan, as well as a race-day plan. After lots of reading and talking to other ultra-runners, I was surprised what many people ate while running: peanut butter and M&Ms. I had assumed people fueled their bodies solely on running gels and water, so it certainly came as a surprise that I could consume things like chocolate and peanut butter while I ran. It almost made running a treat!

However, putting together a nutrition plan didn’t stop at food. The big factor I had previously ignored was electrolytes. Losing too many electrolytes during any race would cause water-retention problems, which would eventually lead to hyponatremia, a condition that could potentially the brain to swell and perhaps lead to a coma or worse. Not wanting to end up in hospital, I decided to supplement my training with electrolyte tablets.

So after all these research and anecdotal advice, what does my eating plan look like now? In an hour, I typically consume the following:

* 1 to 2 Gu Energy Gel
* 1/2 peanut butter sandwich (or peanut M&Ms)
* 1 electrolyte supplement
* 1/2 to 1 liter of water

A far cry from the simpler days of just sipping water.

Eight-time Pro Bowl cornerback Deion Sanders takes his turn at EA's Active NFL Training Camp.

NFL fans finally have a videogame they can use to replicate the movements their favorite NFL players make every Sunday. If used consistently enough, they can sweat just like them, too.

EA Sports’ Active NFL Training Camp, released this week, gives gamers more than 70 strength, agility and reaction drills commonly found in NFL training camps for them to recreate on their Wii. With the consultation of NFL strength and conditioning coaches and EA Sports’ in-house fitness instructor, Active Training Camp’s game producers incorporated football drills to create a fitness-based game.

“What we did was try to instill different team’s philosophies into how they put their training together,” Justin Sheffield, a producer for Active Training Camp, told Wired.com. He said it was critical to balance the input of suggested drills from the coaches. Whereas San Diego Chargers strength and conditioning coach Jeff Hurd advised leg-based and strength-driven drills, Chris Carlisle of the Seattle Seahawks valued ones that emphasize speed and agility.

Gamers can compete head-to-head in multiplayer mode in drills such as QB Window Challenge, which tests throwing accuracy, and Field Goal Challenge. A more organized program exists with the NFL Combine 60-Day Challenge. Per the NFL’s PLAY 60 commitment to youth health and fitness, the in-game challenge lets users work out four days a week for 60 days by participating in drills held at the NFL Combine every February.

Many of the Combine’s drills, including the 40-yard dash, are renowned for their ability to demonstrate NFL players’ athleticism. A prime example is, well, Deion “Prime Time” Sanders. The six-time All-Pro cornerback reportedly clocked in at a blazing-fast 4.21 seconds in his 40-yard time at the 1989 Combine.

Continue Reading “EA Brings NFL Training Camp Into Your Home” »

Fifteen years ago, sport drinks contained two main ingredients to replenish the body after exercise: electrolytes (salts) and carbs (sugar). But today’s thirst quenchers have morphed into concoctions loaded with caffeine and a number of supplements not approved by the FDA.

Now, doctors and researchers are asking some hard questions: Do these reinvented sport drinks improve performance? And more importantly, are they safe to use in the first place?

Lined up on supermarket shelves next to familiar staples such as Gatorade, proximity alone lets buzz rockets like Red Bull and Monster inconspicuously pass as the embodiment of Sport Drinks 2.0. Yet this new breed of “energy drinks” is loaded with sugar (upwards of 60 grams), jacked with caffeine (as much or more than a cup of coffee), and laden with a number of still-unproven products: taurine, guarana and glucuronolactone, among others.

Led by John P. Higgins, a team of researchers from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and the University of Queensland in Australia surveyed scientific papers on sports nutrition from 1976 to 2010 for evidence that the main components of energy drinks aided an athlete during competition. Running down the list of drink ingredients, Higgins and his team exposed the reason each was chosen for the energy brew. Caffeine, for example, has been shown to coax fat to burn more efficiently in the body, thereby leaving glycogen stores — a muscle’s energy reserve — untapped.
Continue Reading “Next-Gen Sports Drinks Come Under Scientific Scrutiny” »

When the Butler University men’s basketball team made its dramatic run through the 2010 NCAA tournament, it had to go through some of the sport’s powerhouse programs: Syracuse, Kansas State and Michigan State.

Finally, a loss to Duke in the national championship game ended Butler’s Cinderella run, but to keen observers of the team, the improbable path to the pinnacle of March Madness was no surprise.

In the second round of the tourney, Butler, the West region’s fifth seed, was favored against another mid-major school, 13th-seeded Murray State. The game was a seesaw, as Butler’s scoring run gave it an 8-point lead with six minutes to play. Still, Murray State fought back and led after an offensive run of their own. In the end, Butler owned the final two and a half minutes of play, outscoring Murray State 7-2 to close out a 54-52 victory.

Butler pulled out three more razor-thin wins — beating Syracuse by 4 points, Kansas State by 7 and Michigan State by 2 — to advance to the national championship game against top-ranked Duke, which only won 61-59 after the Bulldogs missed a 3-pointer at the buzzer that would have sent the state of Indiana into endless delirium.

The leader of Butler’s resurgence is Brad Stevens, the baby-faced 34-year-old coach. He stresses the tenets of conditioning and fitness above all others as the way for a smaller program like his to compete with traditional college basketball powers. As Stevens was preparing for the start of fall practices last week, Wired.com caught up with him by phone to see how the Bulldogs pulled off such a shocking run of success last year, the role fitness and conditioning played, and how his team might shock the hoops world (again).

Wired.com: Is there a “Butler approach” to player fitness and training?

Brad Stevens: I don’t know that we do it any different than most. Our strength coach [Jim Peal] does a wonderful job of tailoring a basketball-specific plan to each player, according to where they are in our strength and conditioning process. After that, we’re making sure we’re supervising them, giving them the right amount of individual attention.

Certainly, I want our guys to be bigger, stronger and faster. Our off-season lifting and conditioning is geared toward being ready to practice on October 15, and improving as a person and a player. Gaining strength, taking care of yourself and prioritizing your growth as a person are important parts of that.

Wired.com: How does the work you’ve done help when you’re up against a larger school with bigger, stronger players?

Stevens: I didn’t think we were any less physical or strong than any of those teams. Certainly we were a little bit smaller height-wise and weight-wise for a few of them. But I thought we had a team with good strength, good athleticism and superb conditioning. And I think it was reflected in the way that we played in the tournament. We never felt at the end of a game that we were winded. We were always getting stronger and playing better.

Wired.com: It seemed that, in those contests, your guys had more in the tank late in games and would dominate as the game clock wound down.

Stevens: I don’t know if that’s a mental resolve, an inner resolve, or if that’s physical conditioning. There was something. They certainly stayed together and played throughout the whole 40 minutes.

We prioritize strength during the season, and we probably back off in the weight room less than others.

Wired.com: How did you get your players to buy in to the idea that they could prepare with this high level of conditioning, that they could do all this work and create a fitness and strength advantage, and that it would pay off in the long run?

Stevens: We always talk about how our players should always be in close-to-your-best shape. As a highly conditioned college athlete, they should never be out of shape, and they need to take that seriously.

In the off-season, when we’re not allowed to monitor things and we’re not allowed to be there, we tell them that they still need to take responsibility for being a student athlete. That means, very seriously, doing [fitness and strength] to the best of their abilities.

We don’t spend a lot time talking about conditioning in the preseason. We don’t spend a lot of time doing conditioning in the preseason. We just spend a lot of time trying to get better.

Continue Reading “Butler’s Hoop Dreams Hang on Fitness, Conditioning” »

At 28 years old and approaching the downside of his career, a rib injury kept American tennis player Mardy Fish out of last year’s US Open. A few weeks after the tournament, nursing two bad knees, he had the left one surgically repaired and realized his chronic pains and slipping world ranking weren’t merely a product of age.

The 6-foot-2 Minnesotan acknowledged what others had already known: “I was just too heavy,” he told Wired.com. “Flat out too heavy.”

So he hired a nutritionist to overhaul his diet. Out were pizza and fries and late-night meals; in was an aggressive calorie-counting regimen that’s allowed Fish to lose 30 pounds in less than a year, dropping his weight from 205 to 175. That decrease has reinvented Fish’s body and reinvigorated his career by ridding him of nagging knee injuries, boosting his endurance, bolstering his confidence, and turning him into a more versatile, effective player.

Fish’s reemergence began this past spring, as his world ranking slipped to No. 108. By then he’d lost 15 pounds and his endurance had grown. “I saw Mardy in Miami in March and I was shocked by how thin and healthy he looked,” says Darren Cahill, formerly the world’s No. 22-ranked player and now a coach and ESPN commentator. “He was able to practice much harder and better.”

But it wasn’t just growing endurance that kept him out on the court longer. His injuries waned because he was putting less stress on his body. “I really got aggressive with my training once I knew I was able to put in the long hours,” Fish says, “and not get injured or have nicks and bruises and things like that that come up when you’re probably not in your best shape.”

Continue Reading “By Losing Weight, Tennis Pro Quickly Gains Ground” »