NEW BOOK

We have a new ebook soon hitting the net: Nutrition The Easy Way A Primer For Combat Sports.

Here's a brief excerpt.


 CHAPTER  4                                  THE TQC FACTOR


TQC has to do with the timing, quantity and composition of the foods (macro and micro) one eats, all important factors when outlining weight-making plans for elite athletes. There are three actual tiers here: before, during and after workouts when you want lipid lysis and lipid oxidation highest while trying to manipulate fat storage during the day. Your nutritional plan should consider the daily training load accordingly.

For this reason fat-burning work like running should be done if possible early in the day before breakfast after your overnight fast. Both the pace and duration should be moderate. Recall that eating stimulates insulin production to balance blood sugar, but insulin also suppresses lipolysis, the breakdown of fat. So if your goal is to burn fat and build lean muscle mass, eating before you run is working against yourself. In fact, research shows that fat breakdown was reduced by nearly 30% for 8 hours during recovery if carbs are eaten before rather than after exercise.

That brings up another point, what researchers call substrate utilization, meaning what fuel source, carbs, fat, etc., provides the necessary energy for a certain level of exercise intensity. Research shows that once intensities reach greater than 65% of one's VO2 max, carbs are the body's fuel of choice. More important the longer exercise at moderate levels goes on free fatty acids from the breakdown of fat (lipolysis) not carbs become the fuel of choice.

This same principle doesn't necessarily apply to your other more intense, sport-specific training like sparring, high intensity (HIIT) or pad work. Here you will definitely need some fuel on board in the form of good low glycemic carbs preferably consumed a few hours before the workout. Note that your training and nutritional goals are to maximize fat loss during exercise and recovery while minimizing fat storage daily. In so doing you're manipulating work loads and food intake.

So you have to keep in mind that these levels of intensity will most likely ramp up protein oxidation causing possible loss of lean muscle mass, not something you want when you're seeking to generate power and explosiveness. Remember: power=(force x time). So your elite athletes will need much more protein than what is usually suggested and not all of your protein will come from food. You will need some supplementation, best in the form of protein shakes with both whey and casein. Casein is a slower acting protein and has a less insulin-producing effect thereby cutting down insulin's suppressive action on lipolysis or fat loss.

How much protein? Well, the vague answer is it's athlete dependent. What 's worked best for us to help maintain muscle mass and offset daily dietary deficits is 2-2.5g/kg of body mass. A 70kg man weighs 140lbs, so 70 x 2g = 140g and 70 x 2.5 = 175g. For the detractors, most of whom have never trained anyone, who might claim this is too much, remember these are elite athletes, not desk jockeys, who frequently train three times per day. To put it mildly they're tearing down some muscle--i.e.--protein. That muscle has to be rebuilt.

 We also use another formula. Say your athlete begins camp at 150 lbs and make-weight contract is 135. We invert these numbers usually starting off giving the athlete 135g of protein/day and increasing it to150g/day the closer we get to the weigh-in, perhaps adjusting it somewhat during the taper down period when we begin cutting workload. Much has been discussed and written about the importance of recovery. Proper rest is only one element of recovery. A lot of athletes, trainers and coaches don't  understand that nutrition is recovery; that after a hard workout it's the first step and it begins way before bedtime and sleep.

One of the first macro elements to get cut is carbohydrates. As previously noted one of the important roles of insulin, especially in the presence of carbs, is to decrease lipolysis; in other words, slow the process of breaking down fat, just the opposite of your intended goal of decreasing body fat and building more lean muscle mass. There is plenty of evidence in the literature showing that hard training in the presence of reduced carbohydrates actually accelerates fat loss by enhancing the oxidative power of skeletal muscle, ironically the exact opposite of conventional wisdom that one needs a high carb-diet to support intense daily workouts. So don't be too afraid to ramp up the protein to somewhat compensate for those reduced carbs. Those hard-working muscles will love you for it.

Fruits, Veggies, Beans and Water

A lot of us forget to drink enough water, stay hydrated, especially during hot summer months.

Probably nowhere is this more important than with athletes who perform in weight-making sports.

Rehydrating after long, strenuous workouts is vital. It's also necessary for good health.  Deydration affects many vital organs from the brain to the kidneys to the muscles, not to mention the all-important circulating blood volume.

Relying on thirst to keep you chugging away those pints of water won't do it. The thirst mechhanism in your body is a notorious unreliable indicator. It actually turns off well before one is completely rehydrated. Besides, forcing down much of that water gets boring.

So here's a tip.  Ramp up your intake of "solid water" sources, fruits and vegtables and beans. That's right, fruits and veggies contain lots of water. Yes, beans! They have a surpringly high water content.

These sources of water also have high fiber content which aids in losing weight and giving you that full feeling.

Choice Versus Chance

Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out that life is about choice not chance.

Most people mistakenly believe that they eat with their mouths. True, that's where the food goes into, that big round opening on the front of their faces.

But they really eat with their minds. The decision what to eat is made there, in the mind, long before any food passes their lips. It's called choices, hotdogs and soda versus vegetables and fresh fruits; steamed versus deep fried; natural versus processed.

So the next time you feel hungry, take a chance and make a better choice. Twenty years from now your body might thank you.
rle

Having Trouble

If you're having trouble getting your athletes (fighters) to eat correctly, take a gander at their background. Where did they grow up, inner city or what?

Now days it doesn't much matter, but it could help. Most have been raised on fast food; it's just a fact of life. If you have an inkling of what good,wholesome,healthy food is, try a week long fast-food binge and get back to me.

If words like ugg!, awful, nasty come to mind, you know what I'm talking about. Forget streamed brown rice,egg whites or oatmeal with coconut milk and walnuts. That's your concept as a coach or trainer of healthy eating, not theirs.

Forget all that babble about water-retaining electrolytes. Most of these kids come from S&S Land, sodium and sugar.

Concepts are often like political parties: never the two shall meet. That fast food is big-time tasty and normal to them, probably makes you want to gag. Ever notice those big paper plates you see at parties and picnics,how they're separated into three sections,one large and two smaller ones?

Well, that's how you should have your charges view their daily nutrition plan--25% protein, 25% fruits and veggies and 50% carbohydrates. For the purists out there who are saying: "What about fats?" What about them?

It's a simple plan to help begin closing the gap between two comcepts about healthy nutrition--yours and theirs.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are you wating for? Next time you want to make a point or share some ballpark breakdown about macro-nutrient proportions, grab yourself one of those paper plates.

rle

Aging

What's your definition of aging? Here's ours: loss of flexibility, physical and mental.

Flexibilty has to do with mobility. Yes, there is such a thing as mental mobility, think problem-solving.

What's one of the first things they do after you have surgery? Get you up and make you move around. It's been repeated that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. There are, to be sure, other certainties in life and here's one: We get less flexible with time.

Yea, we know it's a bummer.........especially if you're an athelete. Loss of flexibility leads to stiffness, decreased mobility and injuries, a vicious circle if there ever was one.

So here's our prescription whether you're a fighter or whatever. Too many go into the gym and just pound away. Flexibility for the most part is ignored or at best a distant orphan. So take some time to think and work ankles, hips, knees, shoulder and thoracic spine areas with specific exercises. Think range of motion here, not power.

Muscles are not alone when it comes to the use-it-or-lose-it adage. And neither is conditioning. So why would joints be any different?
rle

SIS

The modern world is awash in acronyms.

Scratch any card-carrying bureaucrat and you'll find an acronym. Scratch a psychologist or psychiarist and you'll get a whole pasel of them. In fact, if you go to acronyms.com you'll discover there are 862,000-plus acronyms, initialisms, alphabetisms and other abbreviations. You'll also find 249 for SIS alone, from Snickering in Silence to Springtime in Sweden.

In our case SIS stands for short, intense and sweet, as in the results you'll get from following short, intense training, the kind that pretty much sums up our philosophy: Don't waste time; put in the work and get your butt out of the gym.
rle

A Little Philosophy

In an earlier post we noted we're different.

We're different in many ways, our approach to strength and conditioning and in our approach to nutrition, just to name two.

We don't make better weight lifters; we make better athletes, in this case fighters. We're not interested so much in how little you can lift at the beginning versus how much you can hoist at the end of camp. Not that this isn't useful information; it can be.

We're not number chasers. We're interested in flexibility, explosiveness.
Sure, we promote power, strength and muscle endurance. Any self-respecting S&C coach does. Conditioning is paramount in our view. A well conditioned fighter will train well. He or she will fight better and have more confidence. And that's a huge difference.
rle

Pre-event Meals

The standard is to load up your athlete (especially in weight-making sports like boxing,wrestling and MMA) with carbohydrates--usually some kind of pasta smothered in tomato sauce.

Timing of meals is another issue since nerves can play an important role, often slowing down or impairning digestion.

We like to do things a bit differently, not, however, just for the sake of being different. Timing should be 3 to 4 hours before the event. We prefer black beans and brown rice with a dollop of extra-virgin olive oil. Some grilled fish or chicken and a small serving of veggies can be added. The emphasis here should be on small.

Remember, food in the stomach pulls blood from the muscles to aid in digestion, not a good thing for muscles that will soon be demanding an increase of blood to perform well.

Breakfast on the day of the event also presents some interesting choices. Oatmeal is a good staple, but for those who dislike the stuff we prefer baked beans and scrambled eggs on a piece of whole wheat toast with some fruit, mellon, apples, berries or orange juice. No bananas.

For a quick pre-event drink, we eschew all those expensive, over-rated sports drinks,including the less expensives ones like Gator and Powerade. We prefer sipping a small 6 oz. glass of choclate skim milk 45 minutes before showtime. The athlete doesn't have to consume the entire amount to get the maximum benefits. Reseach in fact shows that just swirling the drink around in the mouth for several seconds and spitting it out provides the same effect as actually drinking the contents.

Truth, as they say, can be stranger than fiction; and this is one of those times. The recommended swirling time is 5 seconds, but we've found that there's no magic in the number five, just long enough for the brain-mouth connection to kick in. So 5 to 10 seconds max should suffice.

Researchers tended to use a carbohydrate load with the commonly used sugar in the supplement business, maltodextrin. We use non-fat chocolate milk. We told you we're different.
rle

Water for your horses

Drink an 8 ounce glass of water a day before each meal to cut down your hunger pangs. It'll also rev up your metabolic horses to help you lose weight.

Quercetin

Quercetin is a flavonoid found in a variety of foods from green and black tea to red onions, red grapes and numerous berries to cayenne pepper. It reportedly has numerous medicinal properties one of which is to fight viral infections as in colds or the upper respiratory tract.

Some Breakfast Tips

When you're trying to cut weight, but still need energy for your workout, eat most of your carbs early. Limit your carb intake after six in the evening.

Training Table Rule

There is an old saying: You can't outperform your self-image. Nor can you--and this is one of the most  important nutrition points of all--out train a bad diet. The earlier you learn this, the easier the task.

Cattle Cocaine

Not too long ago a popular television ad for a fast food establishment featured the slogan: "Where's the beef?"

Well, today you might want to add another word to that catchy, little ditty: Where's the beef from? If the answer comes back Mexico or China, you may want to opt for fish or chicken, not beef or pork.

Since June of this year after several players on Mexico's national soccer team tested positive for a steroid, clenbuterol, Mexican officials have struggled with tracking down ranchers who supposedly spike livestock feed to make their cattle more attractive come market time.

Steers usually yield about 55% meat. On clenbuterol that yield jumps to around 62-65%. Cattle on the steroid for a month or two, according to some sources, can pack on 100 pounds or more of beef in each steer. If you can hear an old fashion cash register ringing somewhere in the background, you're getting the picture.

Problem here is one man's cash is another's poison, in more ways than one. Innocent people can get caught up like those soccer players who were later exonerated. Other unsuspecting, innocent souls just get sick from eating the contaminated beef, many winding up in the hospital.

Last June at the Under-17 World Cup in Mexico four more urine samples tested positive for traces of clenbuterol, alerting the Federation International Football Association, soccer's worldwide governing body, to test all 208 urine samples taken at the games. Earlier this year Germany's anti-doping organization warned athletes to avoid eating beef in Mexico because of the positive-doping risks. Clenbuterol in on the the banned list of the International Olympic Committee.

Roughly 54%, 109, of those samples showed traces of the banned substance. That turned out to be at least one member on 19 of the 24 teams competing. The FIFA later inspected meat samples from team hotels and found 30% contaminated with the steroid. Most countries ban the use of clenbuterol in farming. The U.S. and Europe prohibit using clenbuterol in food-producing animals.

In the jargon of pharmacology, clenbuterol is a beta2 sympathomimetic, a vasodilator, causing the blood vessels in the lungs to expand, increasing oxygen transportation, one of its performance-enhancing properties. Similar to adrenalin, only longer lasting, it's a powerful thermogenic used to burn fat. As one internet site that apparently sells the steroid puts it: "Clenbuterol is the most popular fat burning pill that is widely circulated in the world of bodybuilding, athletics and Hollywood."

In Mexico nearly all of those tested had levels lower than that banned by the authorities, so none of the players was suspended. Mexican law passed in 2007 carries a possible 7-year jail term for anyone lacing cattle with the banned substance. But this was not the first time clenbuterol reared its tainted presence in sports. In 2010,  a three-time Tour de France winner from Spain, though later re-instated, tested postive for the drug. Also in 2010 a Chinese cyclist tested positive as did a minor league baseball player in the St. Louis Cardinal's organization who received a 50-game suspension.

In 2007 a former New York Mets clubhouse employee pleaded guilty to distributing illegal substances, one of which was clenbuterol, to numerous major league baseball players. He was fined and sentenced to five years probation and later wrote a book about his dealings. From cycling to baseball, from swimming to track, clenbuterol has a track record and not all the particpants appear to be innocent victims.

Mexican famers familar with the situation, according to one wire service report, refer to the powdery substance as "cattle cocaine" or "miracle salts." Many manufactured drugs are converted from insoluble into soluble salt forms known as hydrochloric salts. Salts are water soluble, making these drugs easier to assimilate and find their way into the blood stream. Hydrochloric salts are usually referred to by using the name of the base substance and adding on hydrocloride or HCL. The body routinely absorbs an HCL in 15-30 minutes.

The salt form of cocaine is known as cocaine HCL. The salt form of Lidocaine, an anesthetic used to numb wounds, as Lidocaine HCL. Adrenalin used by cutmen to stop bleeing in boxing is officially called adrenalin or epinephrine HCL. Clenbuterol is commonly sold in its hydrocloride salt form, Clenbuterol hydrochloride. So considering the amount of lean meat these doped-up cattle can add in such a short time, the term "miracle salts" isn't far fetched.

Outbreaks of people who got ill from ingesting the contaminated meat are not new either. There have been several in Mexico and China among other places. In 2006 hundreds people in Shanghai became ill after eating pork spiked with clenbuterol. In early 2009 another tainted-pork outbreak occurred in the province of Guangdong and earlier this year China's Ministry of Agriculture launched a crackdown on illegal additives to pig feed after a subsidiary of Shuanghui Group, China's largest meat producer, was implicated in using clenbuterol-laced pork in its meat products.

Mexico has a similar story. News reports state cases of the steroid showing up in beef have happened in 10 of the country's 31 states. Though the Mexican government has tried to play down the outbreaks, saying sickness from eating tainted beef used to be worse; one out of every eight jobs in Mexico depends on tourism, so they may be saying much less than they're willing to admit.

Symptoms include increased heart rate, palpitations, nasuea, vomiting, headache, increased blood pressure, hand tremors, insomnia and, in some cases, heart attack. Among athletes, clen, as it's known on the street, is more popular with females because it doesn't have many androgenic side effects like deepending the voice, thickening the skin or the facial hair associated with anabolic steroids. It comes in two forms, pill and syrup. In the early 1990s the FDA got wind of clenbuterol being used to pump up show animals. Because of its strong bronchodilator properties, the FDA did approve a syrup for veterinary use to treat asthma in horses.
t.m. hatter

Sleep Matters

Not too many lay people would make the connection between sleep and nutrition. But there is one. And apparently it's fairly significant.

Researchers have found a link between certain hormones and not only what you eat but how much. Limiting subjects to just four hours of sleep for two straight nights, scientists at the University of Chicago say, affected their levels of leptin, a hormone that signals the brain that you are full, decreasing it nearly 18%.

Another hormone, ghrelin, which increases one's urge for so-called comfort foods, increased 28%, according to these researchers. And that's not all. Lack of sleep can spike cortisol levels pushing your hunger button, making your appetite surge.

So trying to get by, as many of us do, on less than 8 hours sleep, especially if you're training hard and trying to lose or make weight, is a recipe for failure. Sleep matters and it matters more than most think, once again proving how connected most things are.

In our piece on cognitive recovery we mentioned the importance of sleep. Sleep is mysterious, to be sure, apparently more beneficial than just recharging the mind, but with yet much to learn about its mysteries. A July, 2011 study in the journal Sleep discussed the impact on athletic performance extended sleep had in college basketball players.

Conducted at the Stanford University Sleep Disorder Clinic and Research Laboratory, Palo, Alto, California, college basketball players extended their usual 7-hours of sleep per night to a minimum of 10 hours with an objective mean total sleep time of 8.5 hours. The study involved 11 members of Stanford's varsity team and  covered two full seasons.

The results surprised researchers. Workout sprint times improved by nearly a second, their shooting accuracy by 9% on free throws and three-pointers. Similar improvements were noted in reaction time, fatigue and mood. One researcher summed up the study, saying: "an athlete's nightly sleep requirement should be considered integral to attaining peak performance."

Another study on the impact of sleep deprivation or poor sleep habits appeared in the journal of the American Medical Association just one month earlier, June, 2011: "Sleep Loss Dramatically Lowers Testoserone in Healthy Young Males."

It's been known for some time that after the age of about 30 testosterone levels decline at the rate of 1-2% per year. Besides sexual performance, testosterone plays an important role in building strength, muscle mass and bone density. Low levels also have been linked to poor concentration and fatigue.

According to the researchers, 15% of the adult working population in America gets by on 5 hours or less sleep a night, the same parameter used for the young men in the study. Healthy young men were defined here as slim with normal medical histories and an average age of 24. Testosterone was monitored through out the study. The lowest levels were recorded between 2 and 10 pm on their sleep-deprived days. Bottom line, the study concluded sleeping habits "can reduce testosterone levels in healthy young men to that seen in people 10-15 years older."

In our blurb on cognitive recovery we stated our bias that there are no over-trained athletes, only under-rested or under-recovered ones. An important aside is this: Many of the recommendations we hear about almost daily touting healthy living habits, whether its food or water or rest, center on average people. Hard training amateur and professional athletes are hardly average. Their needs are different, just as the needs in the pediatric and geriatric sets are different.

And this applies to not only the above but also to supplements like vitamins and minerals, proteins and carbohydrates. Fail to add them to your regimen at the peril of your own performance.

Here are a few tips from the Stanford sleep study.

*Prioritize sleep as part of your regular training regimen
*Extend nightly sleep for several weeks to reduce your sleep debt before competition.
*Maintain a low sleep debt by obtaining a sufficient amount of sleep (7 to 9 hours for adults and 9 or more for teens and young adults).
*Keep a regular sleep-wake schedule, going to bed and waking up at the same times every day.
*Take brief 20-30 minute naps to obtain additional sleep during the day, especially if drowsy.
j.z. plato

Greens

A stalk of celery has about 6 calories. Someone once joked that you burn up more than that just chewing and digesting the stuff.

Though not exactly true that should tell you something about green veggies in particular and veggies in general. Most are loaded with vitamins, minerals, fiber and lots of water but very few calories.

Spinach is an excellent example, especially the fresh leafy kind. Spinach is loaded with vitamins A,C,K and B9 (folate or folic acid), minerals, calcium, magnesium, fiber (about 3 grams of useable carbs and 3 grams of fiber per one cup chopped and cooked) and beta-carotene.

And that ain't all folks. It's easy to prepare. Just heat up some olive oil in a no-stick skillet, mix in some crushed garlic and pepper, stir a few times and in a couple of minutes it's yummy time. It's also an excellent addition to your omelets. Or if you're too lazy to cook, use it to whip up a quick salad or garnish your sandwiches.

By the way, one cup of chopped celery equals 1.5 grams of useable carbs and 1.5 grams of fiber.
j.z. plato

Thomas Jefferson & Burger King

Thomas Jefferson, some of you may remember him; he was one of the founding fathers of this nation, once said: "I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

Now a lot of us can equate work with, say, the gym, all the sweat and pain and fatigue. But what about the training table and what we eat? Call it clean eating or eating clean.

It doesn't take much effort or sweat the next time you get hungry to jump into the car, whip over to Burger King drive through and order a Whopper. By the way, it's been reported that one Whopper, not those you toss on the cheese or whatever extras you like, contains 35 to 37 tablespoons of fat. And it's a fairly sure bet most of that fat is the unhealthy kind, just the kind you don't want.

So imagine what it would be like the next time you rolled up to the takeout window at BK and instead of a burger they handed you a sack with a tablespoon, some napkins and a plastic bowl full of fat. Now it's safe to say old Thomas never saw a car let along guide one through a fast food drive-in joint.

The point is: It takes some work and effort to eat clean. For one month just give it half the effort most of us put in at the gym and see how much luck you have at achieving your goal.
t.m.hatter

Recovery

There is a lot of discussion about recovery in athletes these days. It's really a big subject, so we'll be brief and only touch on a bit of it. Before we begin, however, here's our bias and it's hardly an attempt to be semantically cute: There are no over-trained athletes, only under-rested ones, as in under-recovered.

The first thing you need to know there are many different forms of recovery. Physical is only one. Another form found in the literature is called cognitive recovery. Webster's defines cognition as "the mental state or faculty of knowing."

Cognitive recovery means a period of adjustment or rest is needed before one leaps from one stressful situation to what quite possibly could turn into another without a period of relaxing separation in between. I wish I had known that before I met my old girl friend. Man, talk about stressors. In the literature this period is known as deactivation. Look, they had to call it something. What this means is we need a time that prevents one stressful situation, say, hard training, from spilling over into another like job, family, future competition or any of the other myraid things that could upset the athlete.

A basic example is a quaterback in football who throws an interception and then spends all his time on the sidelines brooding about it and it affects his performance in the rest of the game. Self-doubt and self-blame can come into play here, feeding on themselves, possibly setting up fears about future performance. Not healthy.

When something unfavorable happens, you can analyze it, figure out what went wrong and work to fix it or you can choose to degrade yourself and, for that matter, any others around you. It's called blame. Blame and growth on the Richter Scale of emotions are diametric opposites.

Athletes spend gobs of time around their coaches and trainers, training hard, being pushed to improve, to get better. It hardly take a leap of the imagination to see that coaches and trainers on a subconscious level can become associated with stressful situations. Think Pavlov here.

In this case the coaches and trainers can become the stressors. So deactivation means a period of separation, a time when the athlete can start another activity. According to the literature, this can be a social activity or something private like watching a movie. Other suggestions include reading or listening to music. The take away message in all of this is the time needs to be spent where the athlete experiences no connection with the stressors, allowing recovery to begin.

Sleep is an important part of cognitive recovery. In our next post, Sleep Matters, we'll talk a bit about one of life's more mysterious states.
j.z. plato

Blissful Water

                                                   Ignorance is bliss.
                                                        Thomas Gray*

Boxing for reasons of its own still has one foot stuck in the old millennium and the other just barely over the border into the new one when it comes to nutrition, strength and conditioning training, to name a few.

Old time boxers in the 30s, 40s and 50s did a lot of rowing, an exercise that uses multiple joints like the ankles, knees, hips, lower back, elbows and shoulders--a classic push-pull movement. Old timers used medicine balls and wall pulleys. They did tons of full body sit-ups and leg raises, great exercises for the hip flexors and the hips, the largest and strongest joints in the body and two important muscles and joints for boxing or MMA and most other sports.

In short, they did somethings right and they got more than a few things wrong like resisting resistance training and giving water a bad name. This is hardly a slam at the old timers.They didn't know then what we know now. And what we know now shouldn't be wasted or held hostage to outdated techniques or beliefs.

Two-thirds of the earth is water. Over 60% of your body is water. By some estimates 70-80% of the brain is water. Lungs are 86% water. Liver 85%, kidneys 83%, blood 80% and sweat 95%. As babies we are all about 75-80% water. Muscle is 70-75% and fat 10-15%. Even our bones are 12-15% water. What this means is if you pulled all of the water out of the body, you'd be left with a pile of tangible, dry substance on the floor not more than a few inches high.

Here are some comparisons. Cucumbers are 90% water, apples and potatoes 85%, bananas 75%. An elephant is 60% water, about the same amount in adult human males. That should tell you something about the importance of water in our lives. But here's another way of looking at the importance of water. It takes 3 gallons of water to grow enough lettuce to produce one serving; 13 gallons to grow one medium-sized orange; 40 gallons to grow enough cantaloupe for one serving; 80 gallons to produce enough almonds for a one ounce serving and 629 gallons to produce one egg.

Bottom line, unless you can't swim, water is your friend, not your enemy, especially if you're trying to lose or make weight. Water does not put weight on you. Nothing could be further from the physiological truth. Here are just a few reasons. Water suppresses appetite. It reduces sodium and helps maintain muscle tone. Water helps eliminate toxins and waste, especially those that build-up after intense exercise. Water helps metabolize fat. The kidneys need water to help rid the body of toxins. The liver is known as the body's "chemical factory." It detoxifies waste and metabolizes fat, among many other things. It can't do it's job properly without help from the kidneys.

Webster's defines a solvent as "a substance, usually a liquid, capable of dissolving another substance." Water acts as an important solvent for waste products such as carbon dioxide, CO2, urea and electrolytes like sodium, potassium and calcium. Every time you exhale you rid your body of a waste product, CO2, and there's some water in each exhaled breath. Water dissolves more compounds than any other liquid.

The prefix hdro means water as in fire hydrant. Hydrolysis is an important chemical process that goes on in the body everyday. Sugar, sucrose, gets hydrolyzed into two other forms of sugar, fructose and glucose, which the body uses for energy. Water has a high heat capacity, meaning it helps control temperature, absorbing or releasing more heat than many other substances for every one degree increase or decrease in temperature.

The human body has 10 trillion cells, 200 different types. Every cell, from the simplest to the most complicated, is mostly water. The protein and carbohydrates we eat are metabolized and transported by water in the bloodstream, a good thing. Water plays an important role transporting waste out of the body, another good thing. Overweight people have on average less water than thin people. The average person needs to replace about 2.4 liters of water per day. It gets replaced by the food we eat and the water we drink.

Earlier this year I had the good fortune to attend a national amateur boxing event in the Midwest. One evening in the workout room at the hotel where most of the participants were staying, I overheard a coach, after putting his young 10 or 12 year old charge through a strenuous treadmill routine in a room where the temperature had been cranked up to well over 90 degrees, telling him not to shower or drink any water the rest of the night because the all-important weigh-in was at 8 o'clock sharp the next morning.

Bad advice like that could in certain circles be viewed as gross negligence. The coach, grossly overweight, in his early 30s, looked as if he hadn't worked out in years. Implied in the parental consent form is the belief that trainers and coaches know what they're doing. Withholding water from hard training athletes, amateur or professional, is a no-no.

Boxing already has enough problems. The MMA people continue to make significant inroads in popularity. Like it or not, there are just so many sports dollars to go around. Bad matchmaking, poor judging, insincere hype, controversial endings, overcharging and underpaying are just a few of the knocks boxing as a sport faces.

As one now retired strength and conditioning and nutrition coach to several well-known pro fighters recently put it: "Boxing people know a lot about boxing, but don't know as much about the human body as they think they do."

Water is the basic substance of life. It's time people connected with the sport get informed. Despite Gray's above-quoted saying, this is one example where ignorance isn't bliss.


*The above quote first appeared in a poem by Gray in 1742
t.m. hatter

Likeable

You might want to spruce up you personality a bit the next time you're in pain before you head off to see your friendly health care provider.

In the October, 2011 issue of Pain, reserachers at Ghent University, Belgium, reveal the results of a study that shows less likeable patients who claim to have severe pain are perceived by health care workers to have less pain. Patients who come off as negative or disliked were viewed as not only having less pain but elicited less sympathy from those assigned to care for them.

Bottom line, as one of the researchers conlcuded: "Our results suggest that pain of disliked patients who express high pain is taken by others less seriously. This could imply less helping behavior by others as well as poorer health outcomes."

That we even needed a study to find this out is in itself revealing, but as they say: Whatever!
t.m. hatter

Sponges For Dinner

Here's a little test for you. Oxygen Radical Absorbent Capacity, hold the tip of your tongue and say that three times as fast as you can.

Also known as ORAC, you're probably wondering what the heck it is. Simply put, it's a sponge, a nutritional sponge to be exact.

Healthy foods like certain fruits and veggies contain phenolic acids, also called polyphenols, which help scavenger toxic waste products like free radicals that build up during intense exercise. The whole process is scientifically known as oxidation, and these polyphenols as anti-oxidants. More on that later.

Tip: generally, the deeper the pigment of the fruit or veggie, the higher the ORAC scores. Fruits typically have higher scores than veggies. These free radicals are a by-product of normal living and can cause or speed up lots of unwanted things like inflammation, aging, etc. Some scientists believe they're linked to heart disease and cancer.

The US Department of Agriculture has tested numerous fruits and veggies and listed their ORAC content, kind of like the calorie count you see on food labels. The difference here is the higher the score, the healthier the fruit or veggie. Berries, for example, are noted for their high ORAC content. Three and a half ounces of fresh strawberries, about one cup, has nearly 1,200 units of ORAC; a cup of raw spinach around 1,500 and one banana about 220. To promote good health, the USDA recommends one should consume between 3,000 and 5,000 ORACs a day.

That amount might be fine for the average person, but what about hard training amateur and professional athletes? We'll have more on ORAC with a chart and suggestions later.  

For now, however, the next time you go grocery shopping be sure you pick up a few sponges.
j.z. plato