NEWS & EVENTS
  We're approaching that time of year that the average person gains around 10 pounds. In the last week, I've had several conversations with people that say something along the lines of: "Well it's the holidays. I'll start to focus on my nutrition after they're over." I've been there. I get it. But there's a problem. People are making these comments in mid-November. The "holidays" end the first week of January. This means that people are essentially throwing out any semblance of a structured nutrition plan for around 1.5 months! If I told you you could still eat what you want ON the holidays and still stay/get lean, would you be interested? The key is to not give up for the ENTIRE time BETWEEN the holidays. Ideally you wouldn't stuff your face on any day, but there's actually some research to support periodic over-eating to help LOSE fat. Three tips to help you stay lean through the holidays: 1) Don't become a left-over victim. Eat what you want on Thanksgiving, but the day after get right back to structured, healthy eating (nothing will make you fatter faster than eating mashed potatoes and stuffing everyday for a week). 2) Train the day after the holidays! This is huge. With all your energy stores topped off, you're primed for an awesome workout. Take advantage of it! 3) For a lot of people, holidays are a time to relax and spend time with their family. For others, holidays can be pretty chaotic organizing get-togethers and preparing food. Take 20 minutes to do a short, but intense body weight workout in your house, after breakfast, but before the heavy eating. This will prime your body to use the calories for recovery and replenishing energy stores instead of building fat. Your Thanksgiving Fat Loss Training Program! A sample body weight exercise program. Perform these exercises in a circuit 4-5x through. Take about 15s rest between each exercise and a min rest at the end of the circuit. Go "down" under control for each exercise, but always go "up" as quickly as possible. Make sure to maintain perfect form on every rep. 1) Reverse Lunges: 10/side 2) Push-Ups: Failure 3) Glute Bridge Hold: 20s 4) Chin-Up (or Inverted Row): Failure (If you don't have a chin-up bar, do an inverted row using a table) 5) Body Weight Squats: 12 6) Front Plank/Side Plank (each side): 20s each Happy Thanksgiving! -Kevin Neeld
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Dietary protein recommendations range from "more is better" (regarded as the secret to muscle building and sports performance) to "limit to 10-15% of your total calories". Dr. John Berardi, a brilliant nutritionist that has helped countless athletes improve their performance through dietary strategies and thousands of people get in the best shape of their lives, recently put out a great article discussing some of the research that says more than 20-30g of protein per meal doesn't increase muscle protein synthesis (think muscle building). This is one of those articles that EVERYONE should read...including you. You may be surprised by what he says. Click here to find out the truth about protein now! -Kevin Neeld
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Before we hop into today's post, I wanted to wish Eric Tangradi good luck in his first NHL game tonight. He worked exceptionally hard here all summer, and we're all pretty proud of him. Tonight he's starting the game on a line with Sidney Crosby and Chris Kunitz; not bad for a first appearance! Today's nutrition tip comes from Endeavor's good friend Brian St. Pierre: Eat Food as Close to its Natural State as Possible. Eating food that has been produced in a sustainable, animal, plant and environmentally friendly manner will not only have a profound impact on your health, but the health of your food and the health of the planet. Choosing food from local, seasonal and sustainably grown sources, like farmer's markets, ensures that you know exactly where your food is coming from, who is producing that food, and exactly how it is produced. Natural State Conditions: • Eat meat, eggs and dairy from pastured/grass-fed animals. • Eat full fat versions of these foods for the greatest fat profile and absorption of nutrients. • Eat produce from local, seasonal, and sustainably grown sources. Great advice! I've had the good fortune of talking to Brian about nutrition and supplementation on a number of occasions. Brian's responses are best summarized by saying this: You need to eat a high quality diet before you ever consider supplements. You can't out-supplement poor eating. Spend your money on the natural foods described above before you spend a penny on a single supplement. Optimal health and optimal performance go hand in hand. Diet first. Supplements second. -Kevin Neeld
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You may be surprised by how simple these
are. It's not a matter of crack some magic code; it's a matter of taking
care of the things you already know are important. 1) Drink PLENTY of water. Maintaining proper hydration has positive implications on both mental and physical performance. Bluntly, it means you'll be smarter and feel better if you drink enough water. To put this in context, plenty is not 6-8 cups a day. That's BARELY adequate for completely sedentary people on low caloric diets. As a starting point, you should be drinking AT LEAST double that. If you're like most people, you're not even close. It's never too late to start. Increase your water intake significantly. You'll likely be making many more trips to the bathroom than you're used to, but that will cut back within a couple weeks when your body gets used to being fueled properly. 2) Sleep! Everyone's sleep needs are different, but in general, most people should be getting 7-9 hours of QUALITY sleep. As in wake up in a pool of drool sleep. Wake up with no feeling in your arm because you didn't move all night sleep. DEEP, QUALITY sleep. If you get 7 and you consistently wake up feeling tired, you need more sleep to recover from the stresses you're experiencing (through training or other aspects of your life). Remember that this should be consistent from night to night. Your body doesn't adjust well to 5 days of a lack of rest during the week, and then two days of excessive sleep on the weekend. Make it a priority to get a good night's sleep every night. 3) Proper Nutrition. This comes in two parts: General Nutrition, and training-specific nutrition. With regards to general nutrition, it's important that you eat adequate calories from QUALITY sources. This includes as many servings of vegetables as you can tolerate throughout the day, fats from olive oil, nuts, and cold-water fish (e.g. salmon), and carbohydrates from whole grain/high fiber sources. As a reminder, your carbohydrate intake should be determined by your activity level. The more medium-high intensity activity you do, the more carbohydrates you need. Training-specific nutrition is pretty straight forward. Consuming a liquid source of simple carbohydrates and rapidly digesting protein (e.g. whey protein) immediately after your training helps replenish glycogen (read: carbohydrate) stores within the body and stimulate protein synthesis (read: rebuilding). It shouldn't be hard to see why this would be advantageous. There is now research to support consuming these "shakes" immediately before and/or during your training, so the nutrients are readily available as your body begins to break down. Think of it as "on the fly" recovery. Personally, I usually make a half shake and sip it while I train, then make another half shake and drink it immediately after. Following these three simple (well, at least
they're simple conceptually...maybe not so simple to implement) strategies will
help you maximize your rate of recovery, allowing you to get the most out of
your training. Keep training hard. Keep training
smart. -Kevin Neeld, BSc, MS, CSCS, Director of Athletic Development P.S. If you enjoyed this topic today, please feel free to forward this to any of your friends and family that may be interested. If you haven't yet, make sure you sign up for our newsletter. Newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about new programs, specials, scholarships, and other opportunities to maximize their training results.
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Last summer I was fortunate to work alongside Brian St. Pierre. He is a brilliant nutritionist that continues to get phenomenal results with his clients. Brian really knows his stuff when it comes to altering individual diets to help people shed fat, build muscle, recover faster from workouts, and improve their overall health. In today's post, Brian shares with us a nutrition tip that will have a large impact on your health and performance. Brian's Nutrition Tip: "Eat Real Food!" "It may seem trivial or vague, but if you sat back and really took stock of the food in your home, you would probably be shocked to realize just how much of it qualifies as a food product, not actual food. Increasing the amount of real food, defined below, and decreasing the amount of food products you consume is the easiest thing you can do to improve your nutrition and health. It doesn't require counting calories, worrying about nutrient timing, calculating macronutrient percentages, or any of that, and it will have a far greater impact on your health." Real Food Conditions: -If you couldn't hunt, fish, pluck, grow, or ferment/culture the food, you probably shouldn't eat it. -If it wasn't food 100 years ago, it probably isn't food today. -If it comes in a box or a plastic wrapper, it probably isn't food, it is a food product. -If it contains lots of industrial vegetable oil (canola, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, sunflower, etc) and/or added sugar/high fructose corn syrup, it probably isn't food, it is a food product. If your response to this is "I knew that already", you should probably ask yourself "Am I doing this?" Most people know what they should be doing; few are actually doing it. If you know anyone else that you feel would benefit from this information, please pass it on to them. Keep checking back. I will regularly be posting nutrition tips from Brian St. Pierre and will keep posting great training information to help you get better results. -Kevin Neeld P.S. You can learn more about nutrition and supplementation for health and performance by visiting Brian's website.
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