Beer a post-workout drink?

by Mike

Caught this in the latest issue of Modern Drunkard:

Juan Antonio Corbalan, a cardiologist who worked formerly with Real Madrid football players and Spain’s national basketball team, said beer has the perfect profile for rehydration after strenuous exercise.

The Daily Mail has some more details regarding the experiment:

[Professor Garzon] believes the carbon dioxide in beer helps quench the thirst more quickly, while beer's carbohydrates replace calories lost during physical exertion.

Based on the studies, the researchers have recommended moderate consumption of beer - 500ml a day for men or 250ml for women - as part of an athlete's diet.

Not only does the post-class trip to the bar make for team-building and camaraderie, but it's appears to be smart training as well.

Review: Evolutionary Fitness

by Mike

www.ArthurDeVany.com

One-Liner

More science than an undergrad course, but simple and easy-to-apply principles make this a superb all-around diet/fitness system. May not be ideal for high-level athletes though.

Overview

The Evolutionary Fitness system encompasses both diet and exercise to work your body in a way that is consistent with it's evolutionary history. Like other Paleo diets, De Vany wants to eliminate modern foods (including grains, beans and dairy) and work out according to how a hunter-gatherer would have worked (short, intense bursts of activity).

The basics of the diet are pretty simple - eat nutritionally dense foods, stay away from grains, sugars and other foods that promote inflammation or have otherwise detrimental effects on the body and try to even out insulin spikes. A big sticking point for a lot of people will be the no supplements (De Vany does take an antioxidant supp).

On the exercise side, things are equally simple: short, intense workouts one to two times per week (both the day of the workout and the exercises in the workout should be randomized to a degree); intense work to limit oxidative stress and promote anabolic hormone release.

Easy enough, right?

In my personal experience, I went from heavy lifting and a diet pretty close to what was in the Grappler's Guide to Nutrition and hit a plateau at 195# (my goal was to get to 205# - I'd never been heavier than 195# in my life). From there, I injured my shoulder, stopped lifting and started eating in an EvFit manner (to be sure, I kept my normal class load at the gym). Within about six weeks, I had dropped about 10#, was noticeably leaner had more energy than before. Though I had stopped lifting, I had instructors notice the difference and ask what sort of lifting program I was working.

These four docs/posts from Art's blog will get you up to speed, after digesting (as it were), you can go through the rest of the Evolutionary Fitness posts for more background.

• The original Evolutionary Fitness essay (pdf file)
  
  
• Chapter One of the book - lays out some guidelines and background (pdf file)
  
  
• Sample workout
  
  
• "The Best Workout"
  

The Good

• Once you understand the basic principles, it really is easy to follow
  
  
• You'll become a much better cook, trying to work with essentially fewer ingredients
  
  
• The workouts are short, challenging and fun, even for people who don't like slinging iron
  
  
• I think this is the most comprehensive and useful diet/workout got all-round health. However, see the last point under "The Bad"
  
  
• Art's OK with drinking beer
  

The Bad

• I'm pretty sure the book is never coming out. Fortunately, aside from more science I don't know what else he's going to put in there.
  
  
• One big turnoff that's going to get to people is the "your body knows what it wants"/"do what you feel is right." This leads to the standard comeback, "if you knew what your body needed, you wouldn't be such a fatass in the first place." I can see this to a degree, but even in a rigidly monitored diet, there's still a lot of trial-and-error, so I'm not sure that there's a problem past a given diet guru's own biases. If keeping a journal helps you, keep a journal. If you don't have the discipline to stick to a diet of any regimentation, keeping a journal or not won't matter.
  
  
• No deadlifts? No bicep curls? No bench press? DeVany uses machines on occasion? Don't worry, it's OK, but these may be reasons for some to pass this workout by.
  
  
• This diet is for optimizing the human body, not sport-specific training. As such, I don't know that it's the best plan for martial artists competing at high (or even intermediate) levels of competition - Grappling/MMA requires you to be in some very strange positions, positions that DeVany wouldn't suggest to anyone (those with a high amount of shear forces on the spine). Neglecting to train those is asking for injury.
  
  Also, the daily, intense practice required, even for just skills training, is phenomenal and a full-time job for many pro fighters. This is vastly different than the "1-2 workouts a week, do something fun in between" that DeVany ultimate proposes.
  
  Then, there's the issue of supplements which are almost necessary to aid in recovery (if nothing else) for most athletes.
  
  That's not even getting into the diet and the difficulty of trying to stuff all those calories and macronutrients into not-six-meals-a-day.
  

Recommendation

Despite falling off of the EvFit way due to laziness, I was really happy with my energy levels and etc. while on it. Art's not a big fan of martial arts (from the perspective of keeping everything in line with what it's supposed to do, not necessarily what you can do with it), or at least considers it suboptimal, the training and diet methodologies make the most sense to me of anything I've read and combined with better results from this, I'm definitely a fan and recommend giving it a try if you're looking for something new. Just be sure to give yourself enough time to make sure you've got it and can gauge the results.

Updated 2/16/08 - totally forgot about the beer thing

What's your week of food look like?

I'd be pretty embarrassed to show mine, but this photoessay from Time shows what different families all around the world eat in a week. In some, the amount of pop is ridiculous. In some, there's a lot of beer, in some...

What's your week of food look like?

Found via Monkeyfilter.

Are frozen veggies better for you than ones from the produce aisle?

Mark Sisson seems to think so.

Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious and in fact are often more fresh than “fresh” produce. That whole “picked at the peak of flavor” marketing yarn is actually true for frozen veggies.

And that stands to reason. Though I'm no food scientists, I do recall reading that flash freezing slows the decay and vitamin loss that occur when a vegetable is picked. Plus, they haven't been sitting in the back of a truck for who knows how long before getting to a warehouse before sitting for a couple more days before getting to the grocery store and sitting on the shelves until you buy them.

Not to mention they're often cheaper, especially if you don't mind a trip to the Aldis. Granted, produce prices are commodity prices and range much more than dry goods, so prices range from $1-$2 per pound cheaper for frozen asparagus to ~$.50 per pound of broccoli (although at the neighborhood store, broccoli always gets mysteriously cheap the day before the next truck comes in...).

Buying frozen also allows you to keep unused portions longer - unless you're an alpha male who likes to mark his territory in the office pisser, there's only so much asparagus you can eat in a week.

I know I've been eating a lot healthier since I've started keeping more frozen veggies on hand. No coming back to the fridge and finding out that your spinach has mysteriously liquified.

Of course, one doesn't have to worry about this if they're diligent about buying and eating their food, but I'm not nearly as strict with my diet as I should be.

Ways to make tuna palatable

Tuna's good for you. It wont' kill you, or give you mercury poisoning. However, I can't stand the taste of seafood and too many college nights of coming home and with nothing else to mix it with (not even mayonnaise for the poor man's tuna salad), i have a hard time eating it. But, dumping it into other things is pretty good, and cheap.

As always, the nutritional profile isn't the best, but coming home after class at 10 or 11, this is easy to make and easy to use to drop off before you go to bed.

I hesitate to call them recipes, since you just toss the tuna into either one of those 8 oz. trays of Trader Joe's Avocado's Number Guacamole (much more cost-effective in terms of how many avocados you get for your $3) or mix it into an omelete with four eggs (I use extra large, just because that's what my grocery store carries cheap). Toss whatever toppings you want on them and you've got a lot of protein coming your way.

Total cost works out to about $3 for the guacamole version and $1.50 for the egg version. I highly recommend not using Aldi tuna, unless you like your tuna inexplicably crunchy.

A PreWorkout Shake

by Mike

The First Aid for Fighters column got me thinking about nutrition, specifically right before a class, especially a class I know is going to be particularly hard, or an early morning class.

When I eat too soon before class, I feel nauseous and usually want to gnarf. I took the old boxing myth that one shouldn't eat meat less than four hours before training to heart and felt much better during and after class. However, you definitely need to eat _something_ otherwise, you won't have any fuel to use, you'll be catabolizing even more muscle and etc.

Mornings are often particularly bad as I'm one of those people who just can't eat within an hour or two of waking up. This gets to be a big problem when you wake up at 8am to leave by 9 for a 10am class. Not eating at all is an especially bad idea if you do something stupid like decide to take five-and-a-half hours of class on the day in question.

I started experimenting with something to drink and came up with the following shake that I liked so much, I drink nearly every morning. It's easily digestible, gives you a great combination of protein, carbs and fats (while being relatively light on the carbs) and even puts some Omega-3s in your belly. The only problem with it may be the dairy, but I'm sure you can substitute some vegan chalk water in its place.

Early Morning PreWorkout Shake.

Ingredients:

In the order they go in the blender:

3/4 cup berries

1 scoop whey protein

2 tbsp flaxseed meal

1 cup milk

Blend, pour in your cup and you're good!

To be sure, I also try to wake myself up with two cups of coffee.

The Nutritional Profile for this shake looks something like:



The nutritional profile is good, but not great. If you're on a strict diet, you've probably got something else you're using, but if you don't care or if you're currently eating Stars and Marshmallows (or nothing at all!), this will be a great improvement.

You could round out the nutrition a little better by dumping some fish oil in there, but I have yet to find a brand that doesn't ruin whatever you put it in and the thought of fish oil burps while grappling...ugh.

It's definitely not De Vany-friendly and probably not something the guys at T-Nation would suggest, but I've been more than happy with it. Between this and the homemade workout drink that Berardi suggests in the Grappler's Guide to Sports Nutrition, those marathon Saturdays go pretty well.

I told a couple people about this and they complained that it would be too expensive.

Breaking it down, it's really not too bad. Some of the individual components (specifically the protein) are expensive to get the bucket, but the total cost of the shake is less than $1.25 for a cup. The secret is to use frozen berries and Flaxseed Meal from Trader Joe's, find a convenience store that uses milk as a loss leader and don't buy your protein from GNC.

It may take your body a while to get used to this, especially if you're not used to taking protein powder, so I'd recommend trying it for a couple days in a row before you try it before class.