It’s Q&A Friday!
Written by George Economou
It’s Back! Here’s your chance to post your health, fitness and lifestyle related questions and get a coach’s response within (about) an hour. Ground rules:
-Q&A period goes from 8am to 4pm
-Keep the questions clean…and we’ll keep the responses professional
-One question at a time, maybe two if they are related
-If we’re not satisfied with the information we are able to provide to you, we will research the topic further and write a blog post on the subject
Fire away! We look forward to your questions and hope to see many of you tonight at 7:00pm for Nutrition 201.
**Do you subscribe to the Invictus Fitness YouTube Channel? If not, do it now! Just click here and hit “subscribe.” There are some great videos on there from last weekend’s Olympic weightlifting competition, and we will be adding exercise videos and resources frequently over the next couple of months. Please check it out.**
I am a loyal invictus follower in Phoenix and I love your programming. Question: someone asked me what I thought about taking suppliments. Assuming a clean paleo diet, what additional supplements would you suggest (fish oil, protien, etc)?
Josh, you’re up early!
I love this question! Someone asked nearly the same question a couple of weeks ago in the gym and I had some fun with them. There’s went something like this, ” So I’m going strict Paleo, what supplements should I take.” My response, “That’s easy, just take whatever supplements paleo man would have had available.”
But seriously, we live in modern times, and even with a paleo lifestyle we may not be getting everything we need for our lifestyles. Aside from the fish oil, the other biggie would be some kind of multi-vitamin. I’m a big fan of these and recommend that if you’re going to do it, do it right: a multi from an organic, whole-food source. This helps make up for the poor soil quality of today’s agriculture, and that we eat many of our veggies out of their natural season, so their nutrient quality is lower than what it could be.
Other supplement recommendations would vary from person to person, gender, age, activity level, training goals…that sort of thing. To give you an idea, I’m male, 30 y/o, fairly active and training hard five days a week. On top of my varied 90% paleo diet, fish oil, and multi, I also take some post workout recovery in the form of a high carb, moderate protein recovery drink (a blend I put together at proteinfactory.com). The recovery drink IS NOT paleo, but for the sake of athletic performance I include it in the diet.
Hope that answers your question. Other questions will have to wait until 8am PST!
Josh,
Assuming your diet is clean, a good quality fish oil would be the first supplement I would recommend adding into your diet. I recommend going back and reading my post on determining fish oil dosage here: http://www.crossfitinvictus.com/blog/2010/04/11/monday-april-12-2010/. If you are following our regular group programming posted on the blog, I would recommend a high-quality protein powder for the post-workout window. Personally, I use the post-workout formula by SFH (http://strongerfasterhealthier.com/). From there, it really depends on what your training goals are and what fits into your budget.
Will Invictus be hosting sectional workouts? If so, any chance that an upcoming blog post could discuss the details of this?
Chris,
CJ is the best person to answer this question. I know many of our members have expressed an interest in sectionals, but I don’t know if we’ve picked a best method for executing sectionals. Are you a member here?
Chris,
We will be hosting Sectionals workouts. Keep your eye on the blog for more details regarding this.
If you are not an Invictus member, but looking for a home to perform your Sectionals workout, we’d be happy to host you. We will make registration for that available in a couple of weeks.
awesome, CJ…thanks
This might be a little off topic of health and lifestyle questions, but I was wondering what’s the possibility of maybe starting a referral program at Invictus? Say I get 3 people to join and get them to sign up for a 3 month membership I get a discount on my membership for that month?
Awesome recommendation Josh. No promises, but we’ll look into it.
What are the anatomical signals you coaches look for during bench press that tell you that an athlete’s grip is too wide or too narrow?
For interval work (rowing or running) at distances < 400m, how are rest periods calculated? And on a related point, if 8x Tabata is good, when does the number of intervals become counter-productive?
Courtland,
Rest periods in intervals for less than 400m running or rowing all depend on the specific area you are training. I coach runners and when I want to build strength I will use less of a rest period than I would if i were working on pure speed in which I would use a longer rest period. If I am trying to build lactic acid tolerance then that would be less rest between the intervals as well. Hope that might give you a little insight to interval training.
Just to show you how the workouts have mimicked what track/swim/cycling coaches have been doing for years. Milers rarely will do repeat miles in practice. They will do distances less than race distance and do many intervals with varied rest periods. Then when they perform the actual task (run the mile) they are better able to. Now in the programing as far as I see it, this have been done with the Do X amount of sets of Cleans/Pull ups/ Box jumps followed by a 90-180 sec recovery period. Then when the athlete goes to perform a longer workout of similar exercises they are better able to handle the intensity for longer.
Sorry for the long post. Just thought that this might she some light. Then again CJ might think I am way off base?
courtland,
Anatomical cues that I’m looking for are this: If I’m spotting you and arms look like the outside lines of a “W”, then you may be too wide. If they look like the outside lines of the letter “M” (which apparently in this script are straight up and down, but I think of them more pointing like this “/”), then you may be too narrow. That’s for a conventional bench press…I look for forearms to be straight underneath the bar.
As for interval work, POS is a wealth of info (thanks coach). When running/rowing under 400m, your actual work time is somewhere over a minute but under two minutes (ideally). The energy systems working there are fast glycolysis and oxidative, and depending on what you’re training for speed, endurance, speed endurance, etc. the rest period would vary for speed maybe 1:3 or 1:4 (work:rest).
As for the tabata question it all comes down to the training effect you’re trying to achieve. If you want someone to be able to maintain their performance consistently for a given set of intervals, then as they start dropping off you start to lose your training value. For example, let’s say we’re training now, not testing, and I want you to practice consistent sets of 30 x KB swings…6 sets of 30 x KB Swings Rest 90s between sets. the goal is to get you to perform those 30 KB swings consistently across the board. If you get the first 4 sets consistently at 40s but then the 5th set takes you 60s, we’ve reached a critical drop off. It could be that we shift the training to something else, or maybe have you gut it out…depends on what you’re training for and the effect we want that day.
cool?
Courtland,
For a standard bench press, I’m looking for the forearm to be as close to vertical as possible in the frontal plane when the barbell touches your chest. There will be more variation in the sagittal plane in regards to angle of the forearm due to anthropometric differences between athletes, postural deviations, technique, and skill level. In order to move the most weight, we want the straightest bar path possible. If your grip is off, you’ll waste energy lifting in an efficient bar path or worse, you’ll miss the lift.
Hi guys,
To what extent is 100% compliance important to the paleo diet? Will doing 1 or 2 paleo meals per day still get you some of the good results or do you lose benefit by not going all-in?
Thanks
Good question Drew. It reminds me a bit of the conversation between POS and Courtland last week as to “minimum requirements.” I believe POS, who is a high school math teacher, loves the kids that want to know the minimum requirements for passing a class.
Nonetheless, I get the sentiment and understand the question – is something better than nothing? Yes, some compliance is better than no compliance.
That said, a large part of the magic of Paleo nutrition is that it removes inflammatory foods from a typical diet. The removal of inflammatory foods, like grains and dairy, can have wide-reaching effects on an individuals health both “under the hood” and on the outside. We have a ton of really cool blood panel results and photos showing this to be true. When your compliance with Paleo nutrition is sporadic, you will continue to experience the inflammatory response caused by non-Paleo foods. Your body will never fully recover and you will never feel the full benefits of how your body SHOULD feel – as opposed to how it has been conditioned to feel while dealing with some form of chronic, low-grade inflammation. The effect is that you will not see the same benefits as someone who has completely eliminated these foods from their diet. If you eliminate these foods entirely for a longer period of time, your body will have time to recover and you will notice the difference to a MUCH greater extent.
In sum, do the best you can . . . but strive for full compliance for at least 5 consecutive weeks. See how you feel after that, but my guess is that you will want to stay pretty diligent with it once you have felt the benefits of a clean diet.
Courtland,
I don’t need to add much that hasn’t already been said, but my answer to your interval work question would be “it depends.” That’s my answer for about 95% of training-related questions. Questions about training protocols can only be answered with knowledge of the training goal. There are no absolutes (no matter what some fitness “professionals” will tell you). A knowledgeable coach will vary the work/rest ratios based on the desired training effect. POS supplied a few examples of that, and we could probably spend the rest of the evening coming up with other examples based on the training goal.
Good questions, thank you!
hopefully i can articulate this well enough…say you are close to 100% paleo and therefore off the “insulin roller coaster” that is the standard american diet, what would be possible downsides to eating only when hungry (for me this would usually mean skipping breakfast and not eating until around 10 or 11 each day)?
another way to ask it is how strict should one be about when one eats?
thank you!
Jonathon, that’s a fairly interesting predicament. Only eating when hungry is a decent enough guide, but not being hungry in the morning could mean something else is going on. It would be interesting to see some blood panels or get a hormonal profile in that case and see WHY you’re not hungry in the morning. Could be nothing, could be something…probably worth looking into.
Something else to watch out for if only eating when hungry is over-consuming during a feed. You don’t want to slam so much in you that your body basically shuts down just so you can digest, or that it crashes after a big insulin spike (back on the coaster).