EXCITING RESEARCH SHOWS A BREAKTHROUGH IN METABOLITE SHIFTS LENDING TO INCREASED FREE FATTY ACIDS AS FUEL SOURCE ALONG WITH A POTENTIAL GLYCOGEN SPARING EFFECT!
The research, conducted by the renowned Human Performance Laboratory at Appalachian State University, validates what ASEA drinkers all around the world already know: ASEA has profound positive benefits to the body. In fact, the research findings were so profound that even the scientists doing the research were astonished by the results. I’ve been using ASEA in my training and racing for the last two years and have noticed substantial benefits. The primary one being a bolstered immune system that has allowed me to only ‘get sick’ once over the last two years! Not counting my recent three week viral infection that occurred when I decided to “pack light” and reduce my ASEA usage right before my first big race of this year. Not smart. I got sick. The positive side of it is that this reinforced to me the importance of the product in my daily routine. The other ‘performance’ benefit I’ve noticed in my training is increased endurance and ability to train at a higher output compared to heart rate (a way to gauge the effect of ones effort on the body). I wasn’t sure what was accounting for this performance benefit, but I have suspected that improving my metabolic utilization of fat for fuel (thus sparing glycogen) was a possibility. This new research now proves that my own reported benefits are in fact occurring and that it is due to improved fat utilization! That is BIG news as improving and endurance athletes ability to utilize fats for fuel is objective number one in training. ASEA actually provides a similar benefit that is found from miles and miles of aerobic training! Pretty rad.
Learn about the amazing findings of this new research and hear directly from the scientists who were a part of it in the new film “ASEA Frontiers: Metabolites.”
We have some great NEW (or returning) services to offer our coached athletes, Team Adrenalin members, and anyone else looking for some training assistance in 2012. The fantastic EPC Training Lab is just about finished and ready for it’s grand opening in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more specific info and images of the LAB in a future post. Until then, here is what we have lined up for training service offerings…
Lactate Threshold Testing
Being able to accurately identify your training zones is a necessity to effective endurance sport training. Estimating your zones can get you started, but defining them through laboratory testing will ensure you are not wasting any time or energy at the wrong effort level. Training just a few heartbeats, watts, or seconds per mile harder than necessary can compromise your ability to recover and ultimately lead to fatigue and overtraining. Through testing your blood lactate levels at increasingly higher work rates (either on a Computrainer® or treadmill) we can pin point exactly where your transition from aerobic training to anaerobic training occurs, and subsequently identify your training zones. By testing periodically throughout your training season you can also note your progress in the terms of more power on the bike and faster paces on the run for the same effort.
Bike Testing = $100
Run Testing = $100
Swim Lessons
Swimming is often the hardest thing to learn when taking on a triathlon. That’s because swimming is much more than simply building aerobic fitness, as is much the case for the cycling and run segments. Swimming is much more about technique and being able to reduce your drag in the water and create a strong and effective pull. The best way to accomplish this is through one-on-one coaching with video review so you can see where you need to focus your attention to make improvements. Swimming in an Endless Pool® with mirrors allowing you to see yourself swimming in real time, along with video analysis, and a coach to help you identify your trouble spots is invaluable! After the sessions you will be armed with a better understanding of what you need to do, and the drills you can practice on your own between sessions to make the progress you have always wanted in the water. Training sessions are 30 minutes long and will save your video files in an online library you can store and access them on your own at home. READ MORE
Here is a good article I found on Triathlete.com regarding your end-of-season nutrition adaptation. The gist of the idea is to go ahead and “indulge” in some “bad foods” that you have been avoiding during race season, but only for a week or two max. Then get back to eating well again as you get back to training regularly. Be sure to drop your overall calories (mostly from carbs) to match you reduction in training volume and training intensity. Keeping the calories down during the off-season will help keep the pounds off over the winter so you can get back to your racing weight (or finally get there) in time for next year’s racing season. You can find the article online HERE, or just read it below.
Written by: Matt Fitzgerald
It’s mid-October, and most North American triathletes have now completed their last triathlon of 2011. In most cases that means they’re taking a short break from training and then going into “maintenance-training mode” through the holidays.
Every triathlete knows that training and diet go hand in hand. When you’re training hard for races, you need to maintain a diet that optimally supports performance and recovery. But what should happen to your diet at the present time of year? How should your eating habits change to match up with changes in your training?
Logically, food intake should decrease as training does. Otherwise fat gain is the inevitable result. But human beings are not completely logical. We’re also emotional creatures, and many triathletes feel an emotional desire to reward themselves after completing a season of discipline and restraint by allowing themselves to indulge in some fattening treat foods—fried foods, beer, desserts, whatever your special craving may be.
I believe that a brief, post-season food reward period is a perfectly acceptable practice to engage in. We tend to define health too narrowly—too physically. Sometimes a thing that is unhealthy for your body can be healthy for your mind and spirit, and sometimes what’s healthy for the mind and spirit can trump what’s unhealthy for the body. Cutting yourself some slack with your diet for a week or two after you’ve completed your last race of the year could be the very thing that enables you to stay disciplined in your eating habits for the rest of the year.
They key word is “brief,” however. Your season of feasting and bacchanal should last no longer than your break from training. If you let your bike sit idle, your running shoes lie empty, and your pool pass go unused for two weeks, then eat and drink whatever you want for two weeks and no longer.
If you tend to struggle with your weight, you might want to consider doing even less than that. Research has demonstrated that those individuals who maintain significant weight loss most successfully are those who maintain the most consistent eating habits year-round. For some people who struggle with their weight, a “just this once” period of pigging out around the holidays is all too similar to a smoker’s “just this once” cigarette to celebrate a year without smoking.
Okay, so what happens after the off-season break, when you move into maintenance-level training—consistent but much less intensive than the workload you bear at the height of the summer race season?
Two main things. First, your carbohydrate intake should decrease. Carbohydrate is fuel and nothing else. It is not used structurally in the body. Therefore the amount of carbohydrate you need each day is tied directly to your activity level. As your training load goes up, so should you carbohydrate intake. And as your training workload comes down in the off-season, so should your carb consumption. If you’re training four hours a week or less, don’t eat more than 2.75 grams of carbs per pound of body weight daily. If you’re training five to six hours a week, allow yourself 2.75 to 3.25 g/lb. And if you train seven to 10 hours a week even in the off-season, aim for 3.25 to 3.75 grams per pound.
The other thing about your diet that needs to change in the off-season is your total calorie consumption. Unless you actually want to get fat, your daily calorie intake must decrease by an amount roughly matching the reduction in the number of calories you burn daily through training. Fortunately, your lowering of carbohydrate intake can pretty much take care of that. For example, if your training load drops from 10 hours per week to five, and you lower your carb intake from 3.75 g/lb daily to 2.75 g/lb, then you’ve just lowered your total daily energy intake by 600 calories (assuming you weigh 150 lbs and assuming your diet remains otherwise unchanged).
You may be able to trust your appetite to help with this adjustment. Typically, appetite increases and decreases appropriately with training load, so that you will naturally find yourself eating less in the off-season. But not everyone can trust his or her appetite all the time. So you might want to conduct what I call a calorie audit at the start of the off-season—that is, sit down and use online resources such as calorieking.com to calculate how many calories you burn each day so you can set a calorie intake target that prevents weight gain and doesn’t put you in a hole when it’s time to start training for the 2012 season, which will be here before you know it.
Matt Fitzgerald is the author of Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen & The Greatest Race Ever Run (VeloPress 2011) and a Coach and Training Intelligence Specialist for PEAR Sports. Find out more at mattfizgerald.org.
Endurance athletes put a large emphasis on their training programs, their equipment and their nutrition to assure they reach their goals. First Endurance consults with hundreds of these athletes primarily on nutrition and how to best fuel your body for long distance racing. Through these consultations with beginners, veterans, elite amateurs and professionals it is quite clear that carbohydrates and how they should be used is vastly misunderstood.
Much of what is misunderstood is likely driven by the media’s generalization of nutrition topics. Often you hear “eating too much sugar makes you fat and is bad for you.” Furthermore clinical data performed on the general population is often extrapolated to endurance trained athletes, who do not fit this category. This has lead to some misunderstanding and misconceptions about carbohydrates. Below are the four most common.
#1 Misconception: Sugars are high glycemic* so they give a sugar high then crash.
Great call tonight with Robert Kunz of First Endurance on the benefits of Multi-V and Pre-Race. I learned some things myself about Pre-Race that I am excited to put into use in my own training this spring. Listen to the call for yourself below.
Look for more conference calls in the near future from other product manufacturers, training discussions, and athlete interviews!
The final in a series of three calls with Robert Kunz of First Endurance is this Wednesday the 16th at 7:00 pm MST. The topic of the final call is Micro-Nutrients and their roll in performance. The Multi-V supplement will be discusses in addition to the Pre-Race supplement. After the discussion, the call will be opened up to callers for questions on sports nutrition and help you develop your own nutrition strategies. Good info to be had, don’t miss it.
February 16th- Micro-nutrients and Performance
All calls will be held at 7:00 PM MST on the following conference call line:
Last Wednesday we had our second installment of discussions with Robert Kunz of 1st Endurance. The topic was” Recovery & Stress Management.”. 1st Endurance has two products that really address these subjects, Ultragen and Optygen and Optygen HP. By clicking the link below you can listen to the call and learn a lot about what YOU need for recovery and balancing stress as well as about the two products FE offers that make big differences in these two areas of endurance training and racing. There is a 30 minute discussion followed by another 30 minutes of specific questions from listeners. Great Stuff!
