I hope you and your family had a great new year! I'm back from an awesome week working with the US Women's National Hockey Program, and ready to start getting to work in 2012. On that note, there's a lot for you to be excited about this year. If you missed all of the announcement's in last week's newsletter, make sure you check them out at the link below!

• Technical Preparation
• Tactical Preparation
• Mental Preparation
• Strength and Conditioning/Nutrition

Generation UCAN offers a revolutionary sports drink that is taking professional, collegiate and recreational sports by storm, and for good reason. Typical sports drinks provide a simple carbohydrate source (basically energy in the form of a sugar derivative) that causes a fast, relatively large spike in bloog sugar levels. Unfortunately, this energy supply is short-lived, can have a negative rebound effect (lower blood sugar than before the drink), and blunts the body's ability to burn fat in the process.

In contrast, Generation UCAN's products have a time-release effect. This serves to provide an energy supply over a long period of time, avoid the negative effects of a plummet in energy supply, and allow the body to rely on fat as a primary fuel source. It is possible to train the body to rely more heavily on fat for energy (which is in more plentiful supply than carbohydrates and many of the other fuel sources for high intensity activities) by having a well-developed aerobic system. That said, ingesting a sugar supplement (like most sports drinks) will cause a spike in blood sugar, which causes a spike in insulin and consequent blunting of the body's ability to rely on fat for fuel, REGARDLESS of training status. In other words, it is best to attack this issue from a training AND nutrition standpoint to ensure that you can perform at a high level, consistently and without wear.

Notice UCAN's consistent, long-lasting energy supply (red) compared to a typical sports drink's spike and crash (blue)

Note the higher level of fat burning after consuming UCAN (red) compared to a typical sports drink (blue)

In short, Generation UCAN has created a safe, healthy supplement that provides long-lasting energy AND promotes fat burning. It's the perfect solution for all athletes, and even for the "desk jockeys" out there that may need a mid-day energy boost.

1. Click this link: Generation UCAN
2. Click the "UCAN Shop" button on the upper left
3. Click on each of the products you're interested in on the left hand column and add them to your cart
4. On the checkout summary page, enter the coupon code "competehard"

1. It's not the total fish oil that's important; it's the quantity of EPA and DHA (two Omega-3s) that is most important
2. Most fish oil supplements have a serving of 1 g (or 1,000 mg) of total fish oil, and about 300 mg of combined EPA and DHA per serving. This equates to a 30% potency of EPA+DHA to total fish oil (300 mg/1,000 mg)
3. To avoid concerns with mercury toxicity, buy fish oil supplements with AT LEAST a 50% potency. In other words, the combined EPA and DHA should be at least 50% of the total serving of fish oil (e.g. 500+ mg in a 1,000 mg fish oil serving)
4. Shoot for around 2-3g of combined EPA and DHA per day

Every week I get questions at Endeavor or through email about what supplements to take. Usually the question is, "What should I get at GNC?". The truth is, you shouldn't get ANYTHING at GNC. Frankly, all of their products are drastically over-priced, and the commission-driven recent high school graduate meat head playing nutrition expert is laughable and borderline dangerous...but I digress.

As you may know, I’m a huge fan of Brian Tracy. He offers a number of free newsletters through his website, one of which is the “Quote of the Day”. I tend to save the ones I really find inspirational. Below are a few examples:

“The greatest test of courage is to bear defeat without losing heart” - Robert Ingersoll, orator

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” – Robert Heinlein

“Successful people form the habit of doing what failures don’t like to do. They like the results they get by doing what they don’t necessarily enjoy.” – Earl Nightingale, Motivational Speaker

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Accordingly a genius is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.” – Thomas Edison, Inventor

“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” – Ken Blanchard, Writer

and one from Paulo Coelho in his book “The Alchemist”, which was a present from one of our recent Endeavor “Graduates” (thanks Conor!).

“When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret to life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

Sports Nutrition

Just about every athlete that I’ve worked with at Endeavor has asked me some sort of supplement question. Every individual has a different perception of supplements. I’m surprised about some of the stereotypes associated with certain supplements:
“Protein supplements are only for people that want to build muscle or ‘bulk up’”

“Creatine is like steroids” or “You put on all this water weight and you lose all your gains after you stop taking it”

“Supplements are bad for you because they aren’t natural”

I could go on and on. The argument about whether athletes should or shouldn’t take supplements is interesting. On one hand, the optimal way to deliver nutrients to the body is through natural whole foods. With that said, the overwhelming majority of athletes (and people for that matter) don’t eat many natural whole foods and are drastically malnourished. If you aren’t sure about whether you fall into this category or not, test your nutrition IQ by asking yourself these questions?

1. Do you eat AT LEAST 7 servings of fruits and vegetables every day
2. Are you matching your carbohydrate intake to the amount of high intensity activity you do?
3. Are you remotely conscious of how many total calories you take in every day?
4. Do you have a basic idea of what percentage of your calories come from fat, carbohydrates, and protein?
5. Are you familiar with sources of omega-3 rich “healthy” fats?
6. Do you have specific nutritional strategies for pre- and post-workout (or practice/games)?

If you didn’t do so well with answering these questions (lots of “no” responses), you probably have substantial room for improvement in your diet (that’s a good thing). Taking a high performance athlete with terrible eating habits and switching him/her over to a high performance diet will help them perform better and recover more quickly. In most matters of advanced sports nutrition, I defer to my good friend Brian St. Pierre, who will officially be joining the Endeavor Staff as a consultant in the ensuing months. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you check out his website, where he has a lot of great current nutrition information and delicious health-conscious recipes: Brian St. Pierre Training.

Achieving and Maintaining Low Body Fat Levels

One of the key elements of athletic excellence is achieving and maintaining low body fat levels. With few exceptions (e.g. football linemen in some cases), athletes want to keep their body fat levels low so they aren’t lugging around extra weight. An easy way to picture this is to think about sprinting full speed with a weight vest on; then sprinting full speed without it. Naturally you’d feel quicker, more agile, and less tired sprinting without the extra weight. Of course, if you add weight from muscle mass, that’s a different story because that weight is going to help propel you faster and ultimately increases the size of your “engine” and improves your athletic capacity.

Fat Loss Science Made Simple

Whether it’s a training session, practice, or game, many athletes rely on sports drinks like Gatorade/Powerade, which are very high in sugar. These aren’t bad solutions for providing energy to active athletes (although they should be avoided throughout the rest of the day). When you take in a high simple carbohydrate (e.g sugary) product, your insulin levels rise. Insulin can be thought of as a “storage substance” as it shuttles things in the blood (in this case sugar) to the muscle. Unfortunately, when insulin has an inverse relationship to fat burning, meaning when insulin levels are high in the blood (as they are after taking in anything high in simple carbohydrates) your body isn’t able to use fat as a significant fuel source. This is one of the major limitations to sports nutrition recommendations for athletes that need to lose fat or maintain low levels of body fat. They need the energy, but not at the expense of fat loss.

Miracle Carbohydrate?

As I mentioned, sports drinks (especially those combined with a protein source) aren’t a terrible option. For a while, drinks that lead to the aforementioned reaction were the best solution for athletes. The fat loss battle just needs to be fought throughout the rest of the day/diet. A couple months back I had the opportunity to meet Shaun Gagnon, a representative from a new supplement company called Generation UCAN.

Shaun described their new product to me and it really caught my attention. He pointed out that traditional sports drinks:

1. Cause high osmotic stress
2. Spike blood glucose and insulin
3. Result in rebound hypoglycemia (low blood sugar)
4. Potently block fat breakdown and fat burning

In comparison, their product is built around a new “SuperStarch” carbohydrate source that avoids many of these undesirable effects. This SuperStarch slows the release of glucose in the blood which avoids the energy spike and crash that traditional sports drinks can cause. More relevant to the fat loss battle, it also helps mobilize fat for fuel. Studies on SuperStarch have shown that SuperStarch is associated with greater fat breakdown both during exercise and for an extended period of time following exercise during recovery.

Low Carb Diet Friendly?

Hearing about the SuperStarch interested me; reading the scientific findings made me more of a believer; but what really sold me was knowing that SuperStarch receives the support of Dr. Jeff Volek, PhD, RD. Dr. Volek is the co-author of the Atkins Diet and one of the leading low-carbohydrate researchers/supporters in the world. I equate Dr. Volek supporting a carbohydrate supplement with Ghandi supporting a war.

We’ve had Generation UCANs carbohydrate/protein mix for the last few months, but haven’t “released it to the public” yet because we wanted to see if it was really all it was cracked up to be. We weren’t disappointed. Most of our players took one packet of the whey protein and carb blend before they trained and one after. None of our athletes noticed a drop-off in energy delivery compared to more “sugary” sports nutrition options and the effects on body fat have been favorable.

Try It Yourself!

If you are or work with high-level athletes or other athletes that need to be body fat conscious, I highly recommend you look into Generation UCAN. You can find out more information about their products at their site: Generation UCAN. As an extended member of the Endeavor Sports Performance family, I talked to Shaun about hooking you up with a special discount too. If you buy anything, enter the code “ESPTraining” into the Code section on the order summary page.

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld, MS, CSCS
Director of Athletic Development
kneeld@endeavorfit.com
(856) 269-4148

P.S. Call or stop in today for more information or to sign-up for one of our Athletic Development Training Programs, GUARANTEED to get you the results you deserve.