Have a piece of pie, Monday will be here soon enough
22 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Relax a little: The holiday is upon us and I get correspondence from folks fretting over the fact that they might binge a bit on Thursday. I say train hard and eat strict in anticipation of the holiday and get back into the saddle next week. John McCallum used to call this softening up for gains and there is great wisdom in this approach. I once knew a bodybuilder who packed sport nutrition bars, cans of tuna and a portable microwave on a trip to Paris so he wouldnt be tempted by the food while there. What a missed culinary opportunity. I also knew a Pro Bodybuilder, who shall remain nameless, who proudly told me in a Muscle & Fitness interview a decade back, how he used to pack his own food in Tupperware containers when he went home for Thanksgiving. He would refer to himself in the third person (Just like Jimmy in the Seinfeld episode. Jimmy thinks Elaine is smoking hot) and his conversation with me went roughly as follows, Tommy tells mom and dad and the relatives, Tommy needs his own food; Tommy dont eat no turkey or mash potatoes; thatll make Tommy fat so Tommy packed a half dozen skinless chicken breasts, mounds of steamed broccoli and rice and would eat this gruel at the table while everyone else was in the festive spirit. Tommys gonna win the Olympia and its only nine months away so Tommy cant be doing anything that would derail Tommys vision quest. I kid you notof course he never came close to winning the Olympia. I always envisioned some wonderful, all-American family, dressed for church, gathered around a terrific spread of delicious home-cooked food, grandma in her apron, the men in ties and jackets, kids at the little card table and this steroid freak in baggie workout pants, a skin tight tank top (despite it being 30-degrees out) wearing a do-rag and having a stack of Tupperware piled up next to his seat at the table with nothing to talk about other than himself and his career. In an interesting side note, Tommy (not his real name) eventually had to have a liver transplant at age 35 to save his life. Tommy pumped so much steroidal poison through his body that he melted his guts. Now Tommy weighs 100-pound less, uses a wheelchair and likely sits quietly at that same table dressed like everyone else. Relax and enjoy the food, the drink, the company and the holiday vibe Monday will be here soon enough.
Workout/post workout nutrition: worth the effort?
There is a rock solid consensus among the iron elite that a physiological window of opportunity opens with the onset of an intense weight training session and closes about an hour after the cessation of the session. If nutrients (generally speaking calories: specifically amino acid subcomponents of protein, glycogen-replenishing carbohydrates) are consumed when the window of opportunity is open, nutrients are assimilated up to 300% faster and more efficiently than normal. Provide traumatized muscle tissue exactly what is required to stimulate healing and growth and workout results are enhanced. Thats a pretty sensational thing when you think about it: by simply eating or drinking correctly within the requisite timeframe results from the workout are amplified; superior to results from the identical workout without the nutrients. Of course it only works if the workout is of sufficient intensity and the nutrients are the proper ones and ingested within the designated timeframe. Unless the workout is intense enough to trigger hypertrophy the whole effort is in vain. To put a finer point on it: if the nutrients are in liquid form, the time needed for the digestive process is reduced and vital nutrients reach their ultimate destination faster. While a chicken breast and serving of brown rice will provide exactly the nutrients required, care must be taken not to ingest these foods near the end of the windows openness as this does not take into account the time needed to digest and distribute the emulsified foods to traumatized muscle tissue. I personally prefer a combination of whey protein (Parrillo Optimized Whey) and maltodextrin carbohydrate powder. A double serving of whey provides me 70 grams of high BV protein and five ounces of maltodextrin powder provides 100-grams of glycogen-replenishing carbohydrate almost instantaneously. The digestive lead-time is negligible and this power-laden potion tastes good. I like to consume this mixture about 2/3rds of the way through the workout. I have a problem with energy nosedives towards the end of a serious workout and find that by drinking my smartbomb mixture while training my performance appreciably improves. I place my dry powders in a half-quart Tupperware container and throw it into my gym bag. When Im ready to activate the powders I walk to the water fountain, unscrew the top, add water, replace the top, shake the tar out of the container and drink the sucker. The taste and potency of modern supplements have come light-years since their introduction back in the sixties. Back in the bad old days, supplement makers would load up protein powder with sugar in order hide the god-awful taste. The protein potency was diluted and weak. Nowadays market-force competition and labeling transparency has resulted in a generation of products that stack up well against the protein benchmark: egg whites. They have also found ways to engineer taste without resorting to sugar. I unreservedly recommend any hardcore purposefully primitive weight train consume a protein/carbohydrate powder shake as the workout winds down. Feel free to eat a regular food meal instead. The post-workout meal should contain a lean protein source and a quality carb source. Portion size will depend on the size of the individual. I tend to err towards more nutrients, not less. If you eat a regular food meal, take into account digestive lead-time.
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