Welcome to the Pacific Elite Fitness newsletter!
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Click here to visit the brand new supplements page at Pacific Elite Fitness and use the special newsletter discount code: IMPAX08 for FREE shipping on any order.
Featured Link: The Pacific Elite Fitness laboratory and medical affiliate in Spokane, Washington: Champions Sports Medicine.
Registered for Ironman? Ironman Coeur D' Alene Critical Speed Camp will feature Ben Greenfield as a guest coach and will run May 10-May 14, 2008 in Coeur D' Alene Idaho. Click here for more information.
Check out Ben Greenfield's Triathlon Adventure blog, featuring the twins, triathlon, and hilly bike climbs! Leave a comment or simply peruse Ben's musings.
Unbreakable optics? Ben Greenfield's tn sunglasses now available from Pacific Elite Fitness. Click here for more information.
Featured Triathlete Product
CordygenVO2 from Millenium Sports Technology contains cordyceps, jiaogulan extract, rhodiola and a unique blend of electrolytes. Ben Greenfield takes 3 capsules prior to endurance sports. Check it out here!
Ben Greenfield's 2008 multi-sport race season sponsors:
Blue Seventy wetsuits - Ben Greenfield's official wetsuit sponsor for the 2008 race season!
Did you know that Ben Greenfield's coached triathletes receive the following perks?
- 8% discount on Ergomo power meters
- 25% discount on tn sunglasses
- 35% discount from Millennium Sport Technologies
- 28% discount from Impax
- 40% discount from nuun
- 20% discount from PowerTap
- 15% discount from Hammer Nutrition
Click here to view triathlon coaching options and get started as early as this weekend!
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Feature Articles in this newsletter:
- Hot Off the Press: Research Notes for Triathletes
Before delving into this week's notable notes for multi-sport athletes, remind yourself to surf the left side bar of this newsletter for some fantastic deals and very special announcements.
As a triathlete, every tick of a second counts. The dozens of ticks from an aero helmet, the handful of ticks from a tight jersey, and even the occasional tick from a smoothly shaved leg.
Here are some other tips from the latest research by the National Strength and Conditioning Association that will not only get you ticks, but also avoid injury and maximize your training! As a coach, I utilize as much of the latest research as possible with my athletes, so let me pass some of these goodies on to you:
- High Intensity Intervals: It turns out that high intensity intervals improve aerobic power more than moderate intensity aerobic training. Picture this scenario: you have only 1 single hour to devote to a bike ride. You can either ride at a moderate pace (say a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1-10) for 1 hour OR you can perform a 30 second 100% power effort every 5 minutes for 1 hour, with simple easy riding between each very hard effort. Research from Norway found that training adaptations such as changes in stroke volume, blood volume, maximal aerobic power (VO2max) and economy actually improved by the latter option.
- Daily Heart Rate Variability: I have yet to get my hands on the actual article, but have read reviews and currently am waiting for my copy of this article to arrive. The gist of the research is that tracking changes in your daily heart rate (by measuring your resting heart rate in the morning) is a very accurate method of determining what type of training you should be doing. Daily manipulation of workouts based on morning resting heart rate variability would involve taking your morning resting heart rate, and if noting a significant rise (typically 4-6 beats above normal), refraining from any anaerobic intensity efforts on that day, substituting lighter aerobic work instead. Just remember to make sure you're in the same resting state each time you take the heart rate.
- Female Endurance Athletes Have Nutritional Issues: Research from the Medical College of Wisconsin found that 33% of female athletes don't take enough calcium. 65% eat far too few calories. 47% don't eat enough fat. Since one of my primary roles is counseling endurance athletes on nutrition, I can attest to these facts and frequently witness the "starve and train" mentality in both male and female athletes. Find out how many calories you need! One simple resting and exercise metabolic rate test will tell you immediately what you must do to maintain energy balance. Regarding calcium: In a recent conversation with Steve Born from Hammer Nutrition, I learned that chelated calcium is the supplement of choice for female athletes, and is produced by two different companies: Solaray and Nutricology. Chelated calcium is absorbed much more completely than non-chelated.
- Finally, a training tip from the NSCA Journal: one of the best exercises for core endurance, especially for swimming and the aero position in cycling is the "3 Point Plank": Start in a front plank position, and, rotating the hips as little as possible, reach forward diagonally with your right arm. Return the right arm, then reach with the left arm. To increase difficulity, when you reach with your right arm, try to lift your left leg from the ground, and vice versa. This, and all the other top exercises for endurance athletes can be found in my immediately downloadable e-book: "Top 12 Resistance Training Routines for Triathletes". It's a little $5 manual I wrote to help my athletes with weight training, and an easy-to-understand but comprehensive way to increase total body endurance and decrease injury.
That's all for now! Remember to train smart, and be sure to ask me if you have questions about training, coaching, nutrition, or any other aspect of the multi-sport lifestyle.
Ben Greenfield
MS, C-ISSN, CSCS, NSCA-PT
5 Reasons To Take Dietary Supplements
So if you eat your fruits and vegetables, expose yourself to adequate sunlight, get plenty of sleep, and stay well hydrated, your body shouldn't really need a supplemental source of vitamins and minerals, right? Wrong. Here are 5 powerful reasons that you need to take a multi-vitamin, no matter how healthy your lifestyle may be.
1. Nutrient depletion in the soil. Modern farming techniques utilize fertilizers that actually deplete the soil of essential nutrients. Agriculture relies on the elements in the soil for absorption of proper amounts of minerals, and when this process is interrupted, the plant does not contain essential minerals and cannot form essential vitamins. And if the plant doesn't have it then you're not going to get it from eating the plant!
2. Your ability to absorb nutrients from food actually decreases as you age. So while growing children should absolutely be taking a multivitamin to support healthy tissue and bone formation, supplementation becomes equally important for the older population. Sure, you could just eat more food, but this introduces a problem with caloric balance. Beware that many medications also interfere with proper nutrient absorption.
3. Commercial harvesting, shipping processes, long term food storage, processing, and addition of preservatives degrades the nutrient content of food. Therefore, unless you're eating a very fresh plant, it is a far different species at consumption than it was when initially harvested. In addition, compounds added to the food during many of these processes, such as MSG, saccharine, nutrasweet, splenda, colorings, and flavors will increase your body's need for nutrients to deal with these damaging synthetic derivatives.
4. Pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals found in the modern food supply are combined with chemicals in water, environmental contamination from elements such as degraded plastic, air pollution from carbon monoxide, lead and mercury. These synergestic elements vastly increase our need for extra vitamins, minerals, and nutrients to combat formation of free radicals and the attack upon our metabolism and immune system.
5. Exercise increases nutrient needs. Are you an athlete or frequent exerciser? The vast amount of extra oxygen and energy used by active individuals will necessitate nutrient consumption that far exceeds the typical RDA of the average population. Consuming just the stated RDA can actually limit your athletic performance.
So what are you waiting for? Get your hands on a multi-vitamin and high quality dietary supplement today. Pacific Elite Fitness features the exact products that I personally take every morning. Click here to visit the brand new supplements page at Pacific Elite Fitness and use the special newsletter discount code: IMPAX08 for FREE shipping on any order of these exact supplements. ***If you don't feel a difference within 7 days, I will return your vitamins for a full refund, no questions asked.***
Until next time, train and eat smart,
Ben Greenfield
Energy.
Your body is always expending it. It doesn’t matter whether you are sleeping, performing a push-up, sitting at your desk, walking the dog or eating popcorn. Somehow, your body must muster enough energy, through one process or another, to sustain life and the activities of daily living.
Some energy requiring processes are automatic. Your heart must beat. Your eyes must twitch. Your lung muscles must contract and relax. Your liver must process organic compounds. Your kidneys must filter your blood. While you have no direct control over these processes, there are dietary and lifestyle modifications you can make that affect how much energy your body “automatically” burns.
There are also voluntary energy requiring processes. You must fire the muscles in your legs to sit in your desk chair, move your fingers to clip the leash on the dog, and contract your gripping muscles to grab a handful of popcorn. Each of these actions require energy.
All this energy is measured in tiny units called calories, and metabolism is defined as the caloric sum of all these chemical processes, whether automatic or voluntary, that must take place in order for the energy forming process to occur.
Metabolism.
Technically, it is divided into four components: resting metabolic rate (RMR), thermal effect of feeding (TEF), thermal effect of activity (TEA), and adaptive thermogenesis (AT).
Resting metabolic rate, the RMR, accounts for the largest portion of your metabolism, up to 75% of your total daily energy expenditure. It includes all those automatic processes your body must sustain in order to live: action of your digestive system, cardiovascular system, and hormonal system, maintenance of proper body temperature, preservation of sensitive electrical gradients in your cells, and conductance of electrical transmissions through your nervous system.
Without your RMR, you would cease to exist. However, in the presence of certain crucial factors outlined in this book, your RMR can be slightly enhanced in a way that not only maintains normal function, but pushes the rate just slightly higher!
The TEF is the caloric sum of all the energetic processes required to digest, absorb, transport, metabolize, and store your meal. Believe it or not, this can account for up to 10% of your energy expenditure. Portions of this book explain how the content and chemical structure of the foods you eat can increase or decrease the TEF.
The TEA, is the easiest metabolic component to modify, and accounts for up to 30% of the total daily energy expenditure, depending on your level of physical activity.
If you’re already physically active, you’ve taken a step in the right direction to increasing your TEA. But the 100 tips in this book take you light years forward by supplying you with the specific knowledge of exactly which activities to perform, for how long, and with what intensity to drive your TEA through the roof.
The final component of metabolism, the AT, is your body’s reaction”system. Basically, the metabolism will make sensitive rate alterations in response to changes in the external or internal environment, such as physical or mental stress, hot and cold temperatures, and hormone levels. There are certain strategies outlined in this book that throw environmental “curveballs “at the AT, always forcing the body to react and maintain a sensitively high metabolism.
It is possible to have an energy surplus. There is a law in physics called the Law of Conservation of Energy, which says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy can only change form. Therefore, unused energetic compounds found in food are either extracted as waste products or stored for future use, usually as fat. To avoid this energy storage, the metabolic strategy outlined in this book is two-fold: practice dietary methods that eliminate the energy surplus and follow specific lifestyle guidelines that maximize energy expenditure.
Food.
Energy comes from food. But complex actions must take place inside your body for turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberries to become the energy for talking, standing, sitting, walking and breathing. Your body must break the food into smaller and smaller pieces, then absorb these small pieces, and move them through the membrane of a tiny cell to be broken into even smaller pieces. These smallest pieces then enter into a miniscule cellular component called the mitochondria. The mitochondria is the cell’s powerhouse, and it is here that the electrical power of oxygen is harnessed to finally break that last tiny molecule of food and release energy!
Thousands of crucial steps lead to this eventual release of energy from food, and most of these steps require energy themselves. This energy is derived from calories, nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the food that you’ve previously consumed, which is combined with the oxygen that you breathe. Any shortage of the necessary components will result in a shortage of energy.
Therefore, inadequate oxygen or inadequate food results in inadequate energy. And inadequate energy results in a slow metabolism. This book not only tells you how to ensure adequate nutrients from you dietary intake, but also how to achieve adequate oxygen balance in your internal and external environments.
Barriers.
In the energy creation process, there are certain barriers to overcome. Take free radicals, for example.
The more energy you require and produce, the more oxygen you must utilize. Occasionally, the oxygen can mutate and escape from the cell in the form of a “free radical”. Also called oxidants, these renegade oxygen molecules combine with a host of other molecules in the body, and can interrupt the many different processes in your body these other molecules with which these molecules are associated.
Because they can interact with so many different molecules, free radicals can wreak serious havoc by altering DNA, destroying sensitive protective barriers around the cell, and changing the fragile biochemical structures of proteins and fats. These disruptions and alterations of sensitive cellular processes can sabotage energy production. Even a small amount of damage to the cell’s outside receptors and protective wall, or membrane, can severely alter the movement of compounds in and out of the cell, eventually killing the cell itself.
Fortunately, such challenges can be conquered with many of the simple dietary and lifestyle modifications you’ll learn about in this book.
Another serious barrier to boosting your metabolism is blood sugar stabilization.
After consumption of a carbohydrate-rich meal, your digestive system breaks down the carbs into tiny glucose molecules. Once these molecules enter the bloodstream, they trigger the release of insulin by an organ called the pancreas. Insulin ensures that the glucose is delivered to necessary tissues for energy, but when these energy stores are full, any excess glucose still in the bloodstream or digestive tract is easily converted to fat.
Unfortunately, most of us walk around with chronically elevated insulin levels because of excess energy consumption, especially in the form of simple sugars. Constant exposure to high amounts of insulin results in a condition called “Metabolic Syndrome”, which is characterized by high levels of circulating fats in the bloodstream, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, uncontrollable appetite cravings, obesity, increased diabetes risk, and most important to the vicious cycle, decreased sensitivity to insulin. Decreased sensitivity to insulin simply means that the cells become so accustomed to high blood insulin levels that they grow non-responsive to insulin, which only causes more insulin to be released!
You’ll find many strategies in this book that are directly focused on improving your sensitivity to insulin and stabilizing your blood sugar levels, thus avoiding this metabolic roller coaster ride.
The Solution.
I've provided you with the key to unlocking your energy levels and making your metabolism burn like a wildfire!
If you follow 10 of the tips in "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism", you’ll double your energy levels. If you follow 20 tips, you’ll see fat literally melt from your waistline. If you follow 50 tips, you’ll wonder why you avoided this incredible effect for so many years.
But if you read "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism" cover-to-cover and integrate each of the 100 tips into your daily lifestyle, you’ll find that the metabolic secrets give you far more than simply a high burning metabolism. Your entire quality of life will peak at levels you never thought imaginable. Enjoy the feeling. Click here to download the book to your computer immediately.
Ben Greenfield
NSCA-CPT, CSCS, MS, C-ISSN
P.S. I’ve also scattered several “Metabotips” throughout "100 Ways to Boost Your Metabolism". These tips, tricks, and secrets are amazing weight loss tools!
