WHAT CARBS SHOULD YOU PERSONALLY EAT?

Important Fact - Carbs are NOT the enemy, calories are.

That being said, different types of carbs you consume can have different effects on you personally so it's worth taking notes of what effects they are if you'd like to optimise your energy levels at specific times.

A nice by-product of that is tat choosing the right carbs for you can also decrease overeating and this weight loss as well.

Win x 2.

While 1 person may pile on weight eating rice, another can barely maintain weight with it - and the same for almost any food you can think up.

Culturally, some populations have eaten specific foods for their entire existence and have biologically progressed to be able to handle these types of foods over thousands of years.

Introduce them to newer food/carb types that their bodies aren't great at processing and the story can be very different.

Finding out your blood sugar response to various carb sources can help you greatly in determining what exactly happens when you eat.

Food is highly addictive and we are biased towards foods thus we can rationalise with ourselves on what foods are good for us or not, but a blood sugar tester gives you the absolute truth.

If you register a high blood sugar reading then you might hit the dreaded carb coma where you wanna take a nap but you'll also feel hungry again pretty soon after which will break whatever weight loss or maintenance aspirations you have right in it's tracks.

There are no good carbs or bad carbs - it all depends on the person eating them and we're not sure yet why this is but there's a feeling it's got a lot to do with our individual genetics  and how they work with our gut bacteria.

Blood sugar levels are measured in millimoles of glucose per litre (mmol/l) and our levels fluctuate throughout the day, with a normal reading being between 4.4 - 6.4 mmol/l.

If you go the tester route (a quick online search found them for $40 at Chemist Warehouse) then eat different carb sources each morning for breakfast and see how they test.

You can have a drink with breakfast as well but keep it the same each morning you test so there''s no interference with the carb food source.

If you go without the tester then simply note how you feel in the 20 - 60mins after that meal in regards to energy and satiety and also note how long after it you start to feel hungry again and then analyse the results of each carb source where you'll find some maintain satiety right up until lunchtime while others barely make it through your commute to work.

Also be aware that energy levels and blood sugar readings may not match up perfectly where something might provide you with long lasting energy but it also spikes a high blood sugar level and doesn't fill you up for very long.

As we all pile into chocolate this weekend (I have a giant bunny in the fridge from my son as we speak), give this a little trial and see what you find yourself doing.

TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 4/4

BODY COMPOSITION

We all have different body shapes, which leads to different body fat storage patterns but females take this to a different level than men.


Body Composition is critical to elite performance but is too often overlooked at the local/amateur level but you’ll see the players with better body composition will generally be the fittest and most injury resilient players.


Here some points on getting that elite body for sport, specific to women:

• Blood sugar imbalances can increase testosterone which can make it impossible to lose fat

• Adrenal and gut dysfunction will affect blood sugar levels

• The rate of fat or weight loss for females will be slower than men simply because women have less overall mass so it’s easier to lose 10kgs off 100kgs then 5kgs of 50kgs.

• Females tend to lose body fat from top to bottom

• Women have less vascularisation in the lower body as less blood vessels + lower fat stores = harder to mobilize fatty acids

• Females need more training volume and thus energy expenditure because of higher relative body fat levels to lose fat

• Women can’t restrict calories as much as men as they still need a minimum amount of calories so again women need to look at energy expenditure for the most part.

• Respond better to low carb nutritional strategies then men which is great for keeping insulin and blood sugar levels down, but women can also be more sensitive to low carb as their body's are programmed to maintain body fat for reproduction.

These aren’t knocks but rather points to consider when developing a training program for the female athlete.

TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 3/4

PSYCHOLOGY


As a personal trainer I have trained females for over 10 years and I probably like to train dedicated females the best as their potential for improvement and growth is off the scale!


Over my years of personal training, this is what I have found and see if any of these ring a bell:

- Females require more intensity with their training because as alluded to earlier they are already blessed with pretty good natural endurance

- Females love, love, love positive enforcement

- Women athletes require a lot of stability based work at the “core” to learn how to safely control the high forces that go their bodies during footy training and games

- Females almost always underestimate their strength and where it can get to

- Females might not do much free weight training simply because they just might not know how to

- Women athletes will tend to not increase training load until instructed to do so

- Females often train “too fast” so will need rest periods reinforced constantly

- More is not better, better is better

- Females don’t sweat as much

- Females will be more successful with multiple rep personal bests rather single rep (do 3 rep max over 1 rep max)

TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 2/4

BUILT FOR ENDURANCE


Females, although not as strong in a relative sense compared to men, do have something up on blokes and that’s endurance. 

Women have a far higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibres which provides them with far greater relative endurance then men.


Female advantages leading to greater relative endurance includes:

• They have a higher % of bodyfat meaning they can power their cells for longer from reserves without the need for replenishment, enabling them to go harder for longer before blowing up

• Because their power output is lower compared to males it means they don’t hit glycolytic pathways (hit the wall) as easy or as often as men. This also means they can burn more fat for fuel during activity and they can also prolong the time it takes to hit your anaerobic threshold (hit the wall again)

• Females will recover far better from high intensity exercise then men again because extremely high power outputs cannot be reached in most cases, so recover occurs quicker

• Female muscles can contain as much force as men but because their muscle mass is far lower, the actual output is lower

• Females can perform more reps of a given % of load then men so where a bloke might get 5 reps at 85% of max load, females might get 7 – 8 reps

• The one disadvantage that females have is that up to 80% of females can have clinical anemia which means you have less iron and thus oxygen in your blood, which can affect mood and energy output.

TRAINING THE FEMALE ATHLETE PART 1/4

A little side gig I run along with my PT biz is my long running blog aimed at male and female local and amateur football players and providing a much needed training and coaching resource for mostly under-resourced football clubs/players.

As part of that I have done a fair bit in the female football space for the last 3 or so years and this is information is from a post I developed from my experience in training females as well as specific research I've done over the years.

Even if you're not a footballer, or even a competitive athlete, if you're simply performing training of any sort then this is still need-to-know stuff.

This will be a 4 part series so you'll get 2 posts this week and 2 posts next week just to break this monster post up a bit so here we go.

A NEEDS ANALYSIS OF THE FEMALE ATHLETE


Women athletes have a specific set of requirements that need to be addressed.


At the very top of the list is the need to PERFECT deceleration mechanics, and I mean PERFECT them so you don’t even need to think about them.


Deceleration mechanics refers to slowing down and stopping or changing direction.


It’s no secret that female athletes can be up to 5 x more likely to tear an anterior cruciate ligament in the knee then a male for a variety of reasons including:

• Having a narrower space in the knee for the ACL to pass through

• The actual ACL is smaller and thus weaker in women

• Females have a wider hips resulting in an acute Q angle which is the angle from the most lateral part of your hip to the your lateral knee which presents as knock knees which in turn exasperates internal rotation (knee falling inwards) upon landing or changing direction, putting a huge amount of sorts of pressure on the knee joint itself

• Women tend to have more flexibility to their connective tissue and their muscle tissue is also more elastic than males which can lead to excessive movement and thus a slower contraction time, leaving you vulnerable during high velocity movements

• General weaker muscles of the body are the glutes, hamstrings and upper back and obviously this gets worse with females as they are naturally relatively weaker than men as far as physical strength is concerned. During AFL footy, acceleration and deceleration is a primary function of the glutes, hamstrings and quads. Non-surprisingly women are quad dominant in most cases too so again, females are vulnerable if the correct strength training hasn’t been performed.

• In a single menstrual cycle there are times when a females connective is strong and also times when it is extremely weak so training loads need to correlate with your cycle.

• Poor landing, deceleration an change of direction mechanics

• A runner’s build for a female is small breasts and a small waist so if you’re not gifted in those stakes then maybe try alternate forms of conditioning to ease impact and joint stress at various times of your training

Part 2 will look at the female physiology.

SLEEP...AGAIN

I know I posted about sleep last week but I'm at it again as I'm not quite sure you really got the message!

Here are some points neuroscientist Russell Foster:

 – Those who regularly have less then 7 hours of sleep per night are more likely to develop mood/mental health problems

- By depriving your brain of sleep, you impair essential processes in the brain and reduce overall cognition

- What happens to the brain when we sleep defines how effective we’ll be when we're awake

- You lay down memories, consolidate information gathered from the previous day and the brain also comes up with solutions to complex problems

- A tired brain remembers negative experiences and negative facts and forgets the positive experiences

- Tired brains also see the world a very different way

- Beta-amyloid, a pre cursor to dementia/alzhiemers, is partially cleared while we sleep

- Growth/repair happens at night

- Short term sleep loss effects include being more impulsive, lacking empathy, not being able to lay down memory, can’t problem solve and will see a decrease in cognitive function as well as a loss of humor

- Long term effects include long term stress, increased cortisol, suppressed immune system leading to infection, cancer, coronary heart disease, metabolic abnormalities, type 2 diabetes and getting hooked on stimulants to stay energised

- You’ll release more gherlin which is a hunger hormone, leading to the ingestion of more carbs/sugars which can lead to weight gain

- You can be more vulnerable to mental health problems ranging from depression to bipolar and schizophrenia

- The best indicator of a slide into depression is a change in the pattern of sleep beforehand

- If you have a bad experience then don’t go to bed for 6 – 8 hours so that it doesn’t instill itself in your memories too much

SLEEP...I WON'T TELL YOU AGAIN!!

I'm always harping on about sleep and for good reason - it's when our body regenerates.

And with the busy culture we keep forcing ourselves to live in, there's a thought process that sleep is time we could be doing something wrong.

Outrageous I tell you! 

This piece on sleep is taken from an article by Dr. Matthew Walker.

- There is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non-REM sleep

- There are 4 stages of non-REM sleep and it's in stages 3 and 4 where body replenishment takes place

- These are also the stages of sleep that 1 half of your brain will resist going into when sleeping in foreign environments (hotel room, camping etc)

- We are a dark deprived society and this lack of darkness is destroying our quality of sleep

- Incandescent light bulbs suppress melatonin and phone/computer screens suppress it even further

- 1 hour of phone use will decrease melatonin production by about 3 hours

- You're peak melatonin levels will also be about 50% less than they should be

Midnight should actually be the middle of your sleep night

- The shorter your sleep on average the shorter your life span

- 1 week of 6 hours of sleep per night results in 711 genes being distorted in their actoivity

- Half of those genes saw an increase in activity but they were the one's related to tumors, chronic inflammation, stress and cardiovascular disease

- The "good half of your genes that are being suppressed are those are related to immune response and than you can become immune deficient

- Resident doctors working 30 hours shifts are 460% more likely to make a diagnostic error in the intensive care unit relative to 16 hour shifts

- If your surgeon has had 6 hours of sleep or less then they have a 170% increased risk of major error so ask them how much sleep they've had

- 1 in 5 resident doctors will make an error due to lack of sleep and 1 in 20 will kill a patient due to a fatigues related error

Surely that will make you prioritise sleep now?