Supplement Strategies

I’ve been asked to blog more about supplements so I’ll start with a post on what I take and why. As many of you know, I’m referred to as Beachbody’s white mouse; meaning everything we make gets tested on me first. But I don’t just test what we make. A lot of what I test ends up on the cutting room (or is it bathroom?) floor.

Over the years I’ve tried hundreds, if not thousands, of supplements. My impression is that supplements are over-hyped and most are a waste of money. There are, however, cornerstones that I use as part of my daily diet and an occasional supplement I find vital for max performance in a given situation. The problem with supplements is that we hype them the same way we do drugs. They are not drugs. The upside to this is that it’s VERY hard to hurt yourself with supplements. The down side is that our expectations tend to be too high.

Supplements are food, or condensed food. Most can be consumed in their natural state and, if we ate well, many would be unnecessary. While this means they tend to be safe it also means we don’t “need” them. However, using proper supplementation strategy can help us live healthier and perform better, especially when we train hard and even more importantly when we’re dieting and exercising.

I break my supplements into basics and situational. Basic supplements are things I take pretty much all the time. Situational are those I use depending on what I’m doing. Let’s look at these first. In the same way that your diet should reflect what you are doing, so should the supplements you take.

For example, two of the most proven supplements in history are creatine monohydrate and 4 parts carb to one part protein recovery formulations. Neither are daily tonics. They are for given situations. Creatine is useful when you’re training hard and trying to build muscle or anaerobic strength. If those are not your goals it’s not only a waste but can interfere with your diet by encouraging your body to retain water to increase cell volume. Recovery formulations are only for when your glycogen stores are extinguished which takes hard exercise or starvation. No one eating well and exercising 30 minutes a day or less would ever need a recovery formulation. In fact, it would be terrible for you. However, when your training hard, eating lean, and using up your body’s limited glycogen stores the stuff is more valuable than gold.

Basics are things you should take everyday, like food. Since it came out Shakeology is on the top of my list. It’s like a healthy insurance policy in a glass.

I begin every morning with three Joint Support Formula capsules, one Core Cal Mag, two Omegas, and an Activit tablet. At night I take another Cal/Mag tablet and a vitamin with my Shake. I look at this group of supplements as part of my diet and nothing more.

Besides situational supplements that I know work I’m often playing my white mouse role by experimenting with something new or different. Currently it’s this protocol, and the jury is still out on what I think of it. My next block of training (experimenting with The Workout From Hell) is going to include something different, which I’ll report on if it’s effective. I’m also playing around with coconut oil and chia seeds. The latter is just a food but hasn’t become a staple yet. I think it will become so. I’m not yet as sure about coconut oil’s status as medium chain triglyceride. As fall rolls around and I begin to care more about my performance I’ll stop experimenting and revert back to proven supplements that work for whatever my goals are.

Cortisol & Your Exercise Program

Since I just finished another pump-inducing WFH workout it seemed like a good time to post on cortisol. Back in the 80s it wasn’t a big topic. Well, it actually was a big topic but marketers had yet to catch wind of it so no one talked about it. But, if you’ll recall the no-fat phase that ran from the late 80s to early 90s, cortisol was a big reason behind what was going on.

First off I should explain what cortisol is. But I’m not going to. Denis Faye of The Real Fitness Nerd has done a perfectly good job in an article archived at Beachbody. Click on this paragraph if you’d like to know more about it and what you can do about it.

Cortisol has various tasks. It's instrumental in controlling blood pressure, and it also supplies emergency energy to the body. It does this by decreasing insulin sensitivity and stimulating something called gluconeogenesis, the creation of new glucose from amino acids. Unfortunately, these amino acids come from the breakdown of body proteins through a process known as catabolism. In other words, during times of stress, cortisol aids in breaking down muscle mass for use as energy.

Most of you have only heard of cortisol due to marketing hype, which Faye also covers,

A few years ago, a wave of supplements hit the market vilifying the stress hormone cortisol, claiming that it caused an accumulation of excess fat. While this "fact" helped companies like CortiSlim® sell plenty "cortisol blockers," there was a tiny problem. It's complete hogwash. So let's set the record straight, shall we?

What I’m going to discuss today, which the article doesn’t go into, is the bird’s eye view of cortisol and how it affects your workouts and your results. I mentioned it in a 80s post because one of the no-fat era’s poster ailments was anorexia. Most of you know what it is, I’m sure, and cortisol is a big part of it because when you don’t eat your body releases excessive cortisol in an emergency response to lack of calories. When this happens regularly you get into a vicious circle of chronic cortisol release, which keeps catabolizing your muscle tissue, not to mention throwing your body’s hormonal cycles off which can lead to major illness over time.

But cortisol issues don’t just happen to anorexics. Everybody beginning a new training program goes through a period where they produce excessive cortisol. One of the things that happens with excess cortisol is released is water retention. When we retain water we feel bloated and this bloated feeling can lead us into another Catch-22 situation where we either stop eating or stop training hard. It’s vital that you do neither.

Cortisol is somewhat of an emergency hormone. You are supposed to get more of it when you’re under stress because it enhances your performance (it’s a banned PED in sports). When you are training you release more in the adaptive phase of a program. As long as you stick to your diet and exercise program (assuming it’s of sound design) your body will adjust. You’ll stop retaining water and your performance will increase as will your results.

What often happens is that we react to this temporary weight gain and exacerbate the problem. Women often mistake this as building muscle mass and quit pushing their weight workouts or quit the program they’re on. This always infuriates men who only wish muscle could be gained in a matter of days! Men, however, especially fit men trying to gain some mass, sabotage their programs by getting scared about losing their ripped abs and stop eating at a time when your body needs more calories than normal.

So I guess the whole point of this post is to tell you to see your program through to its end. By cutting it off early you don’t give it a chance to work as it’s designed. It’s also an excuse to post a pic of some more great 80s fashion.

Life Without A Shirt

“When you haven’t been laid in three months there are more important things than climbing. This spring I'm wearing tank tops to school everyday.” – semi-famous climber to me (loudly) while doing curls and eyeing a hot girl in a gym



My workouts in the WFH aren’t 100% about climbing. I’m also a cyclist and runner and, though injured, I’m not willing to let the muscle groups that support these activities slide much in order to climb harder. I once made this sacrifice. I’ll go into depth on how during the power phase of this program. Today I’m just going to address what I’m doing that doesn’t facilitate my climbing endeavors, mainly because I’ve been asked about leg work during the program.



While they need to be functional, legs are little more than dead weight for a climber. It’s funny that so many climbers are also cyclists because the body type needed for maximum performance in each is 180 degrees opposite. Cyclists have massive strong legs and try and keep their upper body muscle to an absolute minimum. Conversely, climbers build their bodies to resemble apes. Since I want to do both at a reasonably-high level I need to compromise.



My WFH journey mainly started with an injury to my back that didn’t allow me to either run or ride. Now that I can do these a little I’m slowly bringing them back up to speed. Day 2 on the schedule includes legs, which are done at the end of the workouts. And at least two days a week are devoted to some “track” drills for running, usually done as my warm-up for the day’s workout. These are day to day activities. What I do is simply what I can do. Right now it ain’t much.

Because this is climbing-specific journal the details are not important. I just wanted to point out I was doing more exercise than listed. Most of us have some other interests in life. Whether those interests are sports specific, wearing tank tops to school, or looking good naked it’s important to note that this program can still accommodate your interests.



vids: in the 80s, no one exemplified the important aspects beyond the climbing lifestyle like patrick ‘the dream maker’ edlinger. note the subtle differences in the original version and the more straightforward parody. after all, when it comes right down to it, none of us can dispute the importance of german techno music about robots.

Why Short Intense Exercise Is Best

I was asked to critique Dr. Mercola’s critique (like the show we once wanted to do where we came on after Sneak Previews and critiqued Siskel and Ebert’s movie reviews) of a USA Today article on how short, intense exercise is better than long, easy aerobic exercise. We’ll begin right after this word from our sponsors.

Mercola can be sort of fringe in his thinking. I don’t always agree with him as he’s got an even more skeptical view of mainstream nutrition thought than I do. He also spends a lot of time pitching his products but, hey, a guy’s got to make a living. Anyway, he rarely discusses exercise and in this article he goes into quite a bit of depth. Of course, as a nutritionist that is the line he tackles first:

I actually view exercise as a drug with regard to being properly prescribed and having proper dosage, And it's one that you can readily substitute for some of the most common drugs used today for things like diabetes, heart disease and depression. All of these conditions will improve with exercise and with the help of an experienced natural health care clinician.

Nearly one in four people in the US have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes and it is my experience that most of them could be reversed with the appropriate diet and exercise regimen -- exercise being the crucial key.

This article is definitely worth a read and my only critiques are about its hyperbolic nature. The idea that short and intense exercise is better is not new, as he states. Those in the business have always known it. Granted, it isn’t the way mainstream health clubs or the medical community has spun things but, as I’ve stated before, this has a lot to do with liability. Many professionals are afraid to prescribe intense exercise because of lawsuits. It’s much safer to advise walking around the block.

If you look at our Beachbody products we’ve always used intense exercise done in an interval format. This goes back 12 years but we’re playing on principles that have been around all of my life. Sports trainers and coaches have always known (I would submit the Greek’s knew this) that for maximal performance you need to train every energy system and stress the muscle fiber types that are specific for performance. We are pitching HIIT training with the new Turbo Fire program but, remember, our very first products (Great Body Guaranteed) were intense 10-minute workouts.

And the powerful link between diet and exercise he addresses is, indeed, the cornerstone of our company. We don’t just provide exercise programs, diets, or supplements. We sell the entire package. So, again, there is nothing new there from our perspective. I mean, he’s even teaming up with Kathy Smith and she is one of our trainers!

He also fails to mention the importance of not training the same way all the time or how longer more intense exercise can yield even more benefits. There is benefit of training all other systems, and even that walk around the block is not a waste of time. But I’m going to let him slide here because it’s not the article’s premise to discuss all aspects of training. His point is the easy aerobic cardio is not a very efficient way to change your body, which is true.

Where there is some confusion amongst Beachbody-ites is in his dietary guidelines where he recommends not eating, especially sugar, after your workouts. He’s not wrong here because the entire article is addressing 10 minute workouts only. I will, however, take exception with the growth hormone spike window being up to a couple of hour when the research I’ve seen shows this happening within about 20 minutes. But, more importantly, in 10 minutes you cannot extinguish your body’s glycogen stores. When they are exhausted, however, your nutritional needs change and sugar becomes vital because the longer it takes to recharge those stores the more damage is done to your muscle tissue. This is why we recommend Recovery Formula with our longer workouts like P90X and Insanity programs only—and with Turbo Fire in it’s later stages—and not with programs like Ten Minute Trainer. Different situations call for different nutritional strategies. And that’s nothing new for us either.

But do give the article a read. Mercola makes you sign up for a free account and sends you newsletters daily. And while I wouldn’t blindly believe everything he says it’s probably a lot more valuable than watching Fox News. The Straight Dope says two thumbs up for Dr. Mercola's critique of USA Today.

WFH: Beefin’

I know, 15 reps is technically endurance but after three weeks of 30, 15 makes you feel like you’re training for Mr. Olympia. Back in the Shed Days, when Phil and I would venture into our iron phases we’d always have the same reaction: “I forgot how everyone at the gym is trying to gain weight.” As climbers all we ever wanted to do was get lighter. Most of our friends, in fact, thought we were high for going to the gym at all. Hence, weight lifting became known to us as “beefin.”

Climbers can’t afford a lot of beef. Gravity is too forceful. Gaining weight will offset any strength gains you can make so it becomes vital to only allow hypertrophy happen in muscles that you need for climbing. Large muscles may look good on the beach but they are anchors when you’re hanging off of one digit. This is why the Workout From Hell is structured the way it is. Most hypertrophy is gained when you fail between 8 and 12 reps, which is why there’s a phase of 15 and another of 5. We're doing our best to avoid gaining mass.

Some hypertrophy will occur. There is no way around it and, frankly, it can be helpful if done right because your muscles need to function in balance. To accomplish this it’s important to both keep your schedule focused on climbing muscles primarily and to make sure you hit 15 reps. The latter is easier said than done as most of us are conditioned to fail in the 8-12 rep range. Eeking out those last three are vital. You should fail on occasion, of course, but don’t get in the habit of always picking up too much weight and failing early.

Largo said the 15 rep phase is for strength. While technically inaccurate—never tell a strength coach you’re doing 15 reps for strength without expecting to be slapped—you are teaching your muscles that got conditioned to endure 30 reps to re-focus on 15. As your engrams engage you are actually getting stronger. So Largo was correct even though you’re not working on muscle cell motor until recruitment.

My schedule is varies somewhat from the 30 rep phase. My reasons for changing are personal. Yours should be too. So instead of just reading this and following along you should assess your strengths and weaknesses and alter the schedule accordingly.

Warm-up

I couldn’t do even easy yoga for a while but now I can. I do Rodney Yee’s Back Care Yoga as a warm-up. This, of course, is very specific to my situation.

Day 1

I’ve described the new hangboard routine. I climb outside once or twice a week but only on easy routes, 12a and under, and I only do short sessions (up to about 6 pitches).

Front pull-downs get moved to day 2. This is interesting and personal. Using bands for 30 reps my rear delts were taking the brunt of this exercise early on because I was out of balance in this area and, using bands, the elastic force created more need for stabilization. Now they are mainly a lat exercise.

In place of these I’m doing forward bend lateral raises at about 30 degrees and have replaced the standing lateral raises to front raises.

I’ve stopped doing the band overhead tri extensions and replaced them with chair dips.

Day 2

I now do five back exercises. The first is band pull-downs which just aren’t that hard so they are like a transition exercise between the warm-up and the workout. I then add front pull-downs for a fifth exercise.

I then subtract a chest exercise. My chest, while not big, is much bigger than it needs to be for climbing. I consider each movement done here to be fairly climbing specific.

Fingertip push-ups
Dips
Close-grip push-ups.

I’m adding more legs and core as I can. Most notably I’ve begun using the Ab Roller in sets of 15.

Day 3

Same.

pic: kauk and gullich beef it with sly to morph into hollywood-approved climbers.

Viva Espana!

I’ve finally found something to post on the World Cup. Joe Posnanski’s SI piece, called The Glory of Spain, is part II of the psyche series. The article is written from the perspective of an American who was raised on the game, moved on, but motivated by the Spanish side to embrace his roots. I love the Cup. It’s my one television indulgence. Every four years I carve up my schedule to accommodate as many matches as I can. This year I even managed to pick the right team to root for.

To be honest I rooted for the US and Mexico, my home soil, first and foremost. But I held little hope of either winning the Cup. For that honor I wanted to see a side who hadn’t won before. Luckily Spain fit the bill and also happened to be my favorite team to watch. They play amazing and skillful football. Truly the beautiful game. Never mind if you only saw a final marred by fouls and think that’s proper footie. It was the Dutch solution to disrupt an unstoppable force. Posnanski sorts it out.

It was gripping because Spain didn’t win those 1-0 matches with thuggery or by playing everybody back deep or even with stout defense. No, they won matches with their sheer brilliance at keeping possession, passing the ball to each other, showing off their preposterous talents for handling the ball. You couldn’t get the thing away from them. The Spaniards were like pool hustlers running table after table, like Fast Eddie Felson in “The Hustler” who, when told by Minnesota Fats that he needed to quiet down and shoot pool, snapped off: “I am shooting pool, Fats. When I miss, you can shoot.” Yes, that was Spain — when they gave up the ball, you could have it. Only they didn’t give up the ball. Sooner or later, they would wear their opponents down with the sheer skill of their play. And once those opponents were properly worn down, Spain would strike.

Spain plays something called tiki-taka, or touch-touch football. They pass the ball around like a group of kids playing keep away. And they do it with such skill that the best players in the world can’t get it back. Sometimes it looks too cute, like they are more interested in putting on a show than scoring goals. But there’s a method to it. “When we finally did get the ball,” said Germany’s Miroslav Klose, one of the greatest goal scorers in Cup history, “we were too tired to do anything with it.”

“But the more you watched them play,” writes Posnanaski. “The more you realized that they were going for something slightly different from goals. They wanted their opponents hearts. They wanted to break will and spirit and hope. The winning goal, they seemed to understand, would come soon after.”

To be fair, Spain’s streak of 1-0 matches probably wouldn’t have happened with a different draw. En route to the final they came across a Swiss side in the midst of setting the record for most World Cup minutes without giving away a goal, a Portuguese team who had risen to #3 in the FIFA rankings purely by not allowing goals, and overachieving Paraguay who’d yet to give up a goal in the tournament, obviously motivated by one fan’s promise to run naked in the streets if they won.


It wasn’t all about Spain, of course. Great moments happened throughout the three weeks. The US winning its group in the dying seconds, the brilliance of Uruguay’s Diego Forlan, and Ghana’s spirited run getting heartwrenchingly snatched away too early are a few that come to mind. And we mustn’t forget the Dutch, now the best footballing nation to have never won the cup. This looked like their year. After all, they’d taken down Brazil, FIFA’s #1 team who until be baffled by the Orange hadn’t had a close match. But in the end, as Posnanski’s father told him, football is about the touch. And no one can touch a football better than Spain.

Psyche: Kids (For Hassan)

Mammut Pro Team travelled to Rumney in the US state of New Hampshire
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

I’ve got to say the Interweb is pretty cool. I run across a lot of inspiring articles and videos that it wouldn’t have been possible back in the day I was doin’ stuff when we relied on such artifacts as film, slide projectors, and live audiences. Since I feel that psyche is such an integral part of what makes us, well, us, I’m starting a series of motivational pieces from things I find in cyberspace.

Hassan is beginning his Workout From Hell program today so I’m kicking it off with a short Mammut video of some Euro kids who climb harder than almost everyone. I've picked this because Hassan is younger than all of them and just began climbing. Hey, man, this could be you in a few years.

It does make me feel a bit old. Seeing vids like this reminds me that climbing is a game of youth, something I often tend to ignore. More and more it’s trending, like gymnastics, to where its top protagonists are often well under legal drinking age. A cool thing about climbing is that, unlike gymnastics, those of us a bit long in the tooth can enjoy pretty much the same adventures as those at the top of the sport. The holds we use are just bigger. Someday I’m heading back to Rumney and taking the whip at the top of Predator, just like these kids. Hassan, you should join me.