Everybody knows that the first rule of a post-training shake is that it has to be fast. You must drink it as soon as you are done or you won’t get jacked. You must drink the fastest protein on earth with only the fastest carbs, no fiber or fat allowed! This usually entails people drinking whey protein, either in the form of isolates or hydrolysates, because concentrates are just too darn slow. The carbs are usually from maltodextrin or dextrose, and maybe even that fancy new waxy maize starch. Anything with fiber , fat or fructose is terrible and will decrease absorption time. Right? We know all of this because that is what we have always been told. No one denies that this is effective, as it has worked for millions of people, but does effective equal optimal? What are we actually trying to accomplish with this shake?
Cressey Performance has recently gotten some love on NESN for the way it trains baseball players of all levels. I personally worked with 4 of the 5 guys interviewed in both of these videos, so it is pretty cool to see.
The first video is a look at Kevin Youkilis’ training at CP, which is pretty sweet.
The second video is a look at CP and the training of some of its minor league players. Makes me miss it a little bit.
Training for power is imperative as we age. In fact it is the first thing we lose as we get older. However there is a bright side. This is a quality that can be retained from proper training, and being to maintain it or at least drastically slow down its loss our quality of life would improve drastically.
(this is a 68 year old CP client whom I had the privilege of training many times)
Lets back up for a second though and actually define power. Power is Force x Velocity.
In terms of exercise the force is your strength, so strength training will most definitely help you to maintain your power output. However people not only lose their strength, or ability to produce force, they lose their ability to produce this force with any type of explosiveness, or velocity.
While looking over an online client’s food log recently, I came across a mention of a homemade vegetable dip (he wasn’t a fan of hummus). I asked for the recipe, it was his wife’s by the way, and he was gracious enough to send it to me. I must say, it looks delish!
Another big plus for those of you who may lack serious kitchen skills, it is as simple as it gets. Without further ado, here is the Fage Vegetable Dip.
First, I want to remind everyone that today is the final day of the introductory sale price for Lean Hybrid Muscle Reloaded. I have only done 1 session so far, but it is a killer! I have heard some more really great things about the program from Tony and EC as well, as they are a little farther along in it than I am.
If building a leaner, more functional and athletic physique is your goal, then this would be an absolutely fantastic resource for you. It balances strength, hypertrophy, power and conditioning, and allows you to tweak the parameters to emphasize one of those elements over the others, without neglecting any of them.
Plus, you risk absolutely nothing. If you’re not thrilled, simply return it within 30 days and Mike & Elliott will refund every penny – no questions asked! The sale expires at midnight tonight, so don’t wait!
Secondly, as some of you may know I am a big fan of youbars.com. This is a website where you can design your own protein bars, and the ingredients are real food, not loads of sugar alcohols, maltodextrins or artificial sweeteners. Instead you get things like peanut butter, almond butter, raisins, coconut, cacao, chia, flax, whey protein and so much more.
For those of you who own the Show and Go Nutrition Guidethere is a bar I designed that I put in the Recommended Recipes section. It is awesome. I highly recommend these bars, and now to sweeten the deal even more, if you type in the coupon code “bspbars” you get 10% off!
Pretty sweet huh? Well that’s it for today guys, two cool announcements, so check them both out!
I am very pleased to announce the newly available BSP Training & Nutrition Newsletter!
To sign up simply fill in the info on your right, and you will have immediate access to some cool stuff. I plan on this newsletter functioning as my RSS feed, as at the end of each week I will provide a small recap and link to each blog post so you can catch up on anything that you may have missed. This will also allow me to see which content and blog posts people read the most, and the least, allowing me to greatly improve what I write and cater the content better to you guys!
It will also provide exclusive content and cool new updates that may not appear on the blog itself. In addition by signing up I will send you my 20-page report “The Truth About Saturated Fat & Cholesterol.” In this report I really dig into the data and showcase how off-base the mainstream recommendations truly are.
All of that combined will clearly make you so much more awesome, how could you not sign up! This is a completely FREE service, and you can unsubscribe at any time if you wish (though who would want to?), so feel free.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email. Enjoy!
I hope you guys enjoyed my little talk about reclaiming some of my youth yesterday. Not that I am old, but there is definitely a difference between being 22 and playing rugby everyday, whether it be practice or games, and being 26 with a baby on the way and a whole lot more responsibility!
Between life, work, school and my thesis work there is definitely a lot less time for me to train these days, and taking the time to write my own programs is pretty much not going to happen. Plus I will just modify it by week 2 anyway! While I don’t train quite like I did in college, I am definitely a much smarter and more efficient lifter, and I get in high quality sessions in about 45 minutes. I don’t mess around!
However it is absolutely awesome when I get to utilize a program written by some strength coaches that I trust. Obviously I have done many a program by EC and Tony, including Maximum Strength and Show and Go, and it is incredibly refreshing to do a program written by someone else. It keeps the training much more interesting and varied, and forces you to do some things that you might not program for yourself.
Another perfect example of this is Mike Westerdal and Elliot Hulse’s Lean Hybrid Muscle Reloaded. I have had a chance to look over an advance copy from them, and I liked it so much that I am going to put it to the test starting today! I like being an able to go to the gym and not have to think “what I am going to do today?”, but instead think “I am going to dominate what I am doing today!”
For those of you who don’t know Mike and Elliot, they are guys who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. While many people in this industry are like real estate professors giving you advice when they don’t actually own any real estate, Mike and Elliot actually train people for a living.
Mike has competition bests of a 640 squat, 630 bench and a 600 deadlift at 242lbs, and has worked with thousands of clients. Elliot is a professional strongman, and runs his own gym in Florida. These are guys who have put their theories to the test.
I will admit that the program is a little higher volume than I am used to, but I think this will actually be a nice change of pace from the brief and intense sessions I generally program for myself. New stimuli will lead to new growth and results.
I also think that one of the best parts of this entire program are the video demonstrations of every single exercise you are asked to do. While I certainly know my way around the gym, there are a few new ones that even I had to check out, and they do an excellent job with the video content.
They also provide a quality nutrition component to coincide with the training programs, including some meal plans to simplify the process for you. In the end I would highly recommend this program to anyone looking to change their body composition, improve their health and increase their performance. In addition they are offering a great introductory sale price from today through this Friday at midnight, so check it out.
When most people think of improving their flexibility, they immediately think of stretching. Static stretching to be even more specific. Secondarily, they might think of something like yoga, often touted as the best way to improve your flexibility.
When people think of weight training and flexibility, they often think of lifting weights as causing you to get all muscley and “tight”. This absurb and incorrect notion has been perpetuated by the mass media and people following poorly designed training programs full of poor exercise selections and partial ranges of motion.
However, many of us strength coaches have often advocated that when done appropriately and with a full range of motion, resistance training will improve your flexibility and mobility, as we have seen it time and time again. Well, research is finally coming around to investigate this issue, and what do you think they are finding?
“The results suggest that carefully constructed, full-range resistance training regimens can improve flexibility as well as—or perhaps better than—typical static stretching regimens,” said James R. Whitehead, Ed.D., FACSM, presenting author of the study.
The results showed no statistically significant advantage of stretching over resistance training. Resistance training, in fact, produced greater improvements in flexibility in some cases, while also improving strength.”
In addition to this study, there has also been some recent research showing that static stretching mainly increases our tolerance to the stretch, without actually lengthening the sarcomeres or increasing dynamic range of motion.
I am not saying that there isn’t a time and a place for static stretching, but let’s just keep it in mind as one tool in our tool box for improving flexibility and mobility, not as a panacea for those parameters.
While I tend to do most of my blogging about nutrition, I did spend almost 3 years as a strength coach working with and learning from Eric Cressey and Tony Gentilcore. I like to think I know a thing or two about training, even though I don’t write about it as much on here.
(obligatory video of me sorta-dominating 615)
Due to this background, I know a good training product when I see one. Conversely I know a crappy one when I see that too, and when I was at CP we got sent crappy ones all the time from people just trying to make a quick buck!
There are a ton of programs and products out there that can help you get lean, or get jacked, or get strong, but these programs often lack a lot of essential components to a thorough and complete training program. This often leads to poor tissue quality, poor movement patterns and generally a poor long-term prognosis in terms of training.
Unfortunately there are probably more poor articles and products on training than there are good ones, so when those rare good ones do come around (like AMD 2.0 or Show and Go), I like to let people know about them. These are training programs that I believe are not only effective, but are smart and safe.
They take into account soft-tissue considerations, proper warm-ups, exercise selection, exercise execution and more. In a nutshell they incorporate all of the things I talked about in Eating and Training for Health, Body Composition and Performance. While individual programs and products may emphasize one of these components more than others, it is not to the exclusion of the others.
This all leads me to the upcoming release of Lean Hybrid Muscle Reloaded from strength coaches Elliot Hulse and Mike Westerdal. While not officially being released until next week, they have provided a kick-ass and free report called The Muscle Shifting Doctrine that outlines some smart and straight-forward ideas on building a strong and lean body.
This is merely a taste of what the product offers, and I assure you it is of very high-quality, from two guys who actually train people for a living (you would be surprised at how many products are released from people who don’t actually train anybody)! So if you are interested, check it out!
Many of you have probably heard the phrase “When you all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This is often used in reference to orthopedic surgeons. When people with knee or other joint problems seek them out for counsel on their pain, more often than not, they get surgery as the answer. Makes sense, surgery is what surgeons do, even if it is not the best course of action.
Recent research actually found even more damning evidence against orthopedic surgeons – If you see an orthopedic surgeon who also owns (or co-owns) a surgical facility, you are even more likely to get surgery. Awesome. While orthopedic surgeons most definitely have their place, see a good physical therapist first. They will let you know if physical therapy alone can solve the issue, or if surgery is the next step. Its worth a shot. Surgery should be the worst-case scenario, not the immediate solution.
In other interesting news, among the growing amount of research done on green tea it was found that EGCG, green tea’s major antioxidant, can actually raise your VO2 max. Your VO2 max essentially tells us how well your body uses oxygen – ie your cardiovascular fitness. We aren’t talking hugely dramatic increases (about 4%), but since we already know that green tea improves endothelial function and increases blood flow, it makes perfect sense. The study used EGCG pills, which were equivalent to about 3 cups of green (or white) tea per day.
On top of that a diet rich in flavanols (of which EGCG is one) found in tea, wine and dark chocolate improved blood vessel dilation up to 47%. This separate research only makes the above study make even more sense, and lend further credence to the idea that what you eat is just as important as how much.
Lastly a recent 12 week study looked at Norwegian cross-country skiers. They had half of them lift weight and do cardio, and compared them to the other half who did cardio only. Unsurprising to those who actually lift weights, but probably very surprising to those who want to believe that cardio is god, the group who lifted and did cardio were able to perform at a higher level for a longer period of time than the cardio-only group. Just one more reason to do cardio, and lift weights for your best performance.
Posted on February 28th, 2011 by Brian St. Pierre
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