NOAC Newsletter

Five to Thrive: Five Tips for Nutrition
By Seth Bronheim

1. Eat multiple times per day starting with breakfast. Eating three meals and two snacks per day works well for most individuals because it tends to result in eating every three to four hours. Just think about what happens when you don’t eat for over six hours. Do you get a headache? Do you enjoy your food when you eat, or do you eat quickly because you are so hungry and anxious? Eating multiple times per day controls hunger and keeps you energized, which makes for a very productive day.

2. Eating fruits and vegetables every day is essential for health, weight management, and feeling great. If you’re trying to lose weight, think about this. On average, the calories of one slice of bread equals the calories of two apples. Yet, the two apples will give you more nutrients with fewer calories and more dietary fiber and water to keep you feeling full. The apples are a prime example of the concept of volumetrics. They provide more volume than another food of comparable caloric value (apples have more fiber and water than breads) and therefore fill your stomach up and make your stomach expand, which then tells your brain you’re full.

3. Your body will always compensate. For example, if you skip breakfast one day, you will notice that you get really hungry later in the day. Another example is if you eat too much one day, the next day you’re likely to be less hungry and eat less because your body wants to compensate for the amount you ate the day before. However, many people don’t listen to their body’s signals. This is one of the reasons there is so much “mindless” eating in the United States.

4. Make small goals. By making one small goal, you’ll focus solely on accomplishing just that goal. This will make the process of change simpler and easier. Have you ever encountered a person who is trying to lose weight and attempts to change everything at once to do so? They usually do it for a couple of days but are back soon to their old habits. Keep it simple and make one small change at a time.

5. Stay consistent. If a change in your nutrition habits is your goal, it’s absolutely critical that you be patient and stay the course. If you stay consistent, the new behavior will eventually become permanent. Make your goals long term and realistic. This will take the pressure off because you’ve given yourself ample time to accomplish your goals and make them permanent.

Same Vegetable, Fresh Twist
By Josh Bryant

Bored of the same old food? Here’s a fresh twist on a commonly plain vegetable.

Asparagus is an excellent source of dietary fiber. It’s packed full of niacin, rich in phosphorus and low in sodium. Besides all of this, it’s even low in calories and carbohydrates.

It contains a substantial amount of vitamins including potassium, Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Vitamin K and folic acid. Asparagus has many cardiovascular benefits and is a natural diuretic.

Very few will argue the health benefits of asparagus, but also very few will eat it plain. Here’s a lower-fat alternative to pork bacon wrapped asparagus, or asparagus saturated with butter. Give this recipe a try and you may have a newfound love for asparagus.

Bacon Wrapped Asparagus

Serving Size – two bundles

Ingredients

2 pieces of turkey bacon
4 asparagus spears

Directions

Wrap one piece of bacon around two asparagus spears. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Nutritional Value
Calories: 97
Fat: 5 grams
Carbohydrates: 2 grams
Protein: 11 grams

Why Cardio Alone Doesn't Cut Fat
By Adam Signoretta

I wrote this article in order to educate women and some men who believe that doing cardio and abs will help them shed pounds on their midsection. I also think it will help out trainers who have a hard time getting clients to understand the benefits of lifting moderately heavy weights, which is the best thing for them to do to lose weight.

Everyone knows that cardio is the best thing for you when looking to burn extra calories. Or is it? What most people don’t know is cardio can be the worst thing for cutting fat when it isn’t paired with weight training. If you ask the girl (or even the guy) on the ab machine what she’s trying to do, nine times out of ten she will reply with “lose my stomach fat.” Ten times out of ten, she won’t lose stomach fat. The number one reason for this is that you can’t spot reduce an area. When you lose body fat, the fat will be reduced throughout the body, not just from the area you’re working. If we could lose weight in just one area, don’t you think we’d look a little funny? People would walk around with rock hard abs, saggy glutes, and flabby arms. All beach guys would have fat legs because they only do chest, arms, and abs.

Why Cardio Alone Doesn't Cut Fat (continued)
By Adam Signoretta

The following is a short story between the girl on the ab machine and me. We will call her Jenny Abs. If you dig deeper, you’ll find out that her full name is Jenny Cardio and Abs. I asked Jenny what she did before the ab machine, and she said, “I normally do an hour of cardio on the treadmill or a cardio class.”

My reply was, “Awesome, you must have burned a lot of calories. How is your eating?” She said, “Oh, I ate really good—egg whites in the morning, chicken and a salad for lunch, and dinner was something light. And no carbs after 6:00 pm.” Jenny said that as if she had taught me a lesson.

Seems Jenny has listened to all her uneducated group fitness class groupies. In case you haven’t guessed by now, I had my work cut out for me. I wanted to touch on three main things here, and I wanted to do it delicately without hurting Jenny Cardio and Abs, who is now unable to function because she is carb depleted from over an hour of high intensity cardio.

So I said, “That is stupid and you must be too if you believe that.” Kidding of course. It isn’t her fault that everyone who reads a fitness magazine is a professional now. I asked Jenny if she had a minute because I wanted to help her maximize her gym time and of course her goal of weight loss. Jenny didn’t really want my help because she thought that most trainers were either hitting on her or trying to sell her something. However, she agreed to sit down and have a chat with me.

We sat down and I opened with a bunch of nice complements on her workout routine. I then asked her how long she had been working out for and of she had been making much progress.

She was all smiles and said, “Yeah, I have lost eight pounds so far, and I want to lose another ten, but it’s getting tough to drop. I don’t really know why. I’ve been eating even less and upping my time on the cardio. See, I lost five pounds the first week and three pounds the second week. Now, it’s week seven, and I actually gained a pound. It’s pretty frustrating.”

I cut right to the chase. I’m not one to waste time or sugar coat anything.

“You’re working too hard and burning too many calories. Your body is eating your muscle, which is slowing your metabolism down, and you aren’t strength training.”

Jenny’s mouth opened wide and said “Oh, yes I do strength train. I took that extreme weight training class with Krissy with the amazing body.”

“Ok, cool. That isn’t strength training. That’s basically cardio with weights, and it only adds to your overtraining. Let me explain how the body works. Let’s start with this—your body needs a certain amount of calories throughout the day in order to function, and more importantly for you, to maintain muscle.”

Jenny cut in with, “I don’t care about my muscle. What does that have to do with me losing weight.”

“Jenny, it has everything to do with you losing weight. Your muscle is going to be what regulates your metabolism. Your metabolism is going to be the amount of calories you burn at rest throughout the day. Now this is where muscle comes in. Your muscle determines your metabolism. A pound of muscle can burn anywhere up to 50 calories a day depending on its health. The more muscle you have, the more calories you will burn throughout the day. This is known as your basal metabolic rate, an estimated amount of calories you burn throughout the day. If you don’t take in enough calories throughout the day, your body will have to get the nutrients it needs from somewhere. If you had to choose between eating fat or meat, what would you eat?”
“Umm…meat. Duh!” Jenny replied.

I smiled and said, “That is exactly what your body would do. It would get the nutrients from your muscle, which makes your muscle lose its density and size. Over time, it will disappear and make the scale go down, although that isn’t a good thing. Your metabolism can drop as much as 50 calories for every pound of muscle you lose.”

“Wow, that isn’t good! So what I’ve been doing is wrong?” Jenny asked.

“No, it isn’t wrong. It just isn’t the right way to do it,” I said with a smirk.

Jenny laughed and said, “So what else can I do the right way?”

“How about we talk about meal frequency? You said you eat three meals a day, correct? That is ok if you’re eating the right amount of calories and your metabolism hasn’t been damaged like yours has. The trick to keeping your body burning calories or keeping your metabolism moving is to constantly put food in to be used for fuel for the body. An easy way to understand this is to think of your body as an old furnace that needs wood for fuel. The wood represents the food. To turn on the furnace, you must put wood in it. The wood will burn for a few hours, but in order to keep the furnace on, you must add more wood. The same thing goes for the body. If there isn’t any food to fuel the body, the metabolism slows down. If you are to eat every two and a half to three hours—four being the most—you will keep your metabolism constantly working. Five to six small meals should do the trick.”

Jenny nodded and said, “Ok, do you mind if we go get a shake at the juice bar. It has been six hours since I last ate.”

At that point, I knew I had Jenny’s complete attention. We decided to get a shake. I got mine with a banana in it. She stopped me and yelled, “Are you crazy? It’s after 6:00 pm.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t turn into a pumpkin, and the carbs won’t turn into fat” I responded. “Carbs are good for you, especially after a workout such as yours. You have been in here for over an hour. Any exercise over about 45 minutes can be long enough to completely destroy your carb or glycogen storage. Glycogen is what carbs are stored as in the body. It is stored in muscles and organs. After an intense cardio session, Have you ever noticed that your muscle are flat or you feel thinner? That isn’t just from sweating out fluids. It is also from using your energy storage. This is where the whole low carb diet thing came about.

After one day of cutting out carbs, most people will lose one to two pounds, mostly from water. Not only do you lose weight, but you also feel thinner. That’s because you’re depleting your muscles of glycogen. Carbs will keep your muscles hydrated, making you feel like your muscles are bloated, hence the name carbohydrate. Cutting carbs will decrease your performance physically and mentally. About two-thirds of your carb intake is used for the brain. That is why most people get light-headed until of course they get used to operating on less carbs. You will be able to function but not at your max.

People will tell you that they are carb sensitive, which is bull. They just eat too many carbs and move too little. I say eat carbs and keep your muscles full. It’s what is on top of the muscle that is the problem—fat! The fat stays, and your muscles will constantly inflate and deflate. Most bodybuilders will carb load and deplete all through their training. The reason this works is because normally on low carb days, they take in less calories than they do on high days, which brings us to weight loss 101. If you burn off more calories than you take in, you will lose weight.

Don’t get me wrong—too many carbs are bad, but so is too much of anything. If you were able to have 2000 calories and ate 2500 calories of all protein, you wouldn’t lose weight. The same thing goes if you ate 1800 calories just from cake. You wouldn’t lose weight. Each macronutrient, protein, carb, or fat has its own job. Protein is great because it is the most versatile one. But don’t send a hairstylist to do a make-up artist’s job if you want it done right.”

“This is a lot to take in. How am I supposed to know what to do?” Jenny said.

“That is the tricky part” I said with a sigh. “It is all trial and error. There are many different ways to go about it. For you in particular, I would start by adding a carb in at breakfast and lunch and then two small, healthy snacks in between lunch and dinner.”

“What kind of snacks?”

“ Well, you just had a shake. Those work great. You can do fruit and maybe some almonds.”

“Almonds?? Those are all fat!”

“Some fats are good for you. The body needs fat for certain things, and you shouldn’t deprive your body of it. It is the secondary source of energy and also helps with joint health. There are other things your body uses fat for. But no matter how good it is for you, fat is fat in the end. Too much of any one thing isn’t any good, especially fat. It contains nine calories per gram as opposed to protein and carbs, which both have four calories per gram. That’s why fat should be kept to two servings per day in my opinion. So, yes, almonds. I would have about ten to fifteen as a snack.”

“Ok, got it—some fruit and almonds for a snack” Jenny said firmly.

“No, not together. Separately” I jumped in. “As a general rule of thumb, to help portion meals, I recommend having a small amount of protein with each meal with a serving of carbs or a protein and a serving of fat. It will balance out to about the same amount of calories. If you do a fruit or almonds by itself, that is ok to start. It is a step in the right direction.

Now that you have somewhat of an idea of how to keep your muscle from being used as food for your body, let’s talk about how to increase that muscle mass to make you a calorie burning machine.

Core Competencies
By Carson Boddicker

n 1990, two men coined a term that would later become a standard term for business students and companies attempting to enter the marketplace. What is this term? Core competency. In the business world, a core competency is a specific factor that a business sees as being central to the way it or its employees work. Additionally, for it to be a legitimate core competency in business, it must provide a benefit to the customer, be inimitable, and provide broad sweeping applications to numerous products or markets.

In the world of strength and conditioning, core competency is a specific factor that is central to the way athletes function and are trained. Simply put, these core competencies are to be developed first and foremost in athletes of any discipline before even beginning to look to other movements and training interventions. To be termed core competencies, they must provide benefits to the athlete that few other methods are capable of replicating and also provide benefits for a number of movement dysfunctions. As I see it, there are two core competencies to be addressed with every athlete or client regardless of discipline—breathing and rolling patterns. That’s right, breathing and rolling.

Breathing as a core competency

Breathing is a critical piece of the movement equation and is one that has been almost ignored until recently. Many people simply breathe and call it “good” if they don’t suffocate. Unfortunately, this is far too simplistic because there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to breathe.

The majority of people fall toward the “wrong” way, and incorrect breathing patterns lead to a gamut of movement dysfunctions. Improper breathing can lead to dysfunctions in the TMJ (though some osteopathic physicians see proper breathing as having a mobilizing effect on the skull) all the way down to the hips. In between, breathing plays a powerful role in cervical posture, carpal function, shoulder health (from a joint centration perspective), thoracic spine mobility, and lumbar-pelvic-hip stability via intra-abdominal pressure mechanisms. Better control at the pelvis leads to more favorable mechanics of the joints above and below, making breathing a powerful ally in preventing lower extremity injury. Restoration of proper breathing patterns can reduce tone in the majority of cervical muscles, aid in the reduction of forward head posture, and reduce tone of the hip flexors.

The biochemical effects of hyperventilation have powerful effects on fascial constriction. There are primary and/or accessory muscles in each and every fascial line presented by Thomas Myers. As we understand from the concept of tensegrity, it then stands to reason that breathing limitations alter all fascial lines and ultimately lead to movement dysfunction. One could go as far as to say that due to the relationship between the obliques and intercostals of the lateral line, improper breathing can result in reduced function of the “anterior X” that controls and produces torque, and subsequently, running and walking mechanics can be altered.

Proper breathing certainly provides great benefit to the athlete. It’s inimitable and is of huge benefit to a vast array of movement dysfunctions. Thus, there is little question that breathing must be a core competency. As the great therapist, Karel Lewit, said, “If breathing is not normalized, no other movement pattern can be.”

Rolling as a core competency

Rolling is a concept that is beginning to gain respect in the strength and conditioning world thanks to the great work of Pavel Kolar, Gray Cook, and Craig Liebenson. It isn’t a new concept, and rolling as a therapeutic technique has been utilized for decades by Moshé Feldenkrais, members of the Prague School of Rehabilitation, Margaret Knott, and Dorothy Voss, among others.

The basis of rolling goes back to the developmental sequence during which a baby follows a predictable set of developmental movement parameters as a result of “pre-programmed” neural patterns. After lifting the head, the first step in the sequence is rolling. By allowing appropriate developmental sequencing, the baby goes through postural ontogenesis and develops reflex responses that are useful at later stages of development. Unfortunately, Vojta suggests that up to 30 percent of children never reach full central nervous system maturation, yet go on to develop more complex quadruped or bipedal movement patterns. This altered sequence can contribute to movement dysfunction in many ways. Additionally, Janda and Lewit theorized that it is the body’s response to revert back to an earlier stage of posture or movement patterning in response to trauma or excessive strain. It is here that rolling fits into training all populations.

Rolling allows us to train patterns that already exist in our neural circuitry that may be out of touch. In turn, it allows us to restore appropriate and reflexive motor control. Though muscles aren’t a focus in retraining patterning, rolling requires good function of the deep neck flexors, diaphragm, multifidus muscle, pelvic floor, and abdominal wall according to Kolar. Additionally, some suggest that the psoas and transverse abdominis play a role in providing stability via the inner unit of the core.

Appropriate development of the rolling sequence depends on neurological, energetic, biomechanical, and cognitive functions. In the initial stages, a feedback mechanism is in place as a response to excessive rotational stressors on the spine. This mechanical stress leads to boatloads of afferent information, which leads to long loop reflex activity that stimulates the musculature involved in stabilizing the movement. With repeated exposure, our brain is able to develop an effective feed-forward mechanism by body schema monitoring. It is at this time that the central nervous system is able to identify the body’s relationship relative to its base of support and predict where alterations in the center of mass occur, which ultimately leads to anticipatory muscle response and a better controlled neutral zone. When this portion of development is complete, the body is capable of using eye and tongue movement to create reflexive activation that applies to far more movements than rolling.

With proper development, an athlete stands to gain superior control of segmental translation via feedback mechanisms and the ability to control coupled spinal shear and rotational moments, which are critical for clean gait patterns. Additionally, the establishment of strong ocular and respiratory synkinesis will allow for higher levels of function and development in all body positions. However, perhaps most beneficial is the development of the feed-forward mechanism, which can assist in the prevention of injury as a result of unexpected shifts of the center of mass characteristic of athletic contests.

Due to its ability to stimulate reflexive core activation unlike any other exercise and because it provides benefits to nearly every movement pattern via feedback and feed-forward reflex mediation, rolling is undoubtedly a core competency.

Wrap up

It’s also important to note that simply because you’ve decided you have core competencies doesn’t mean that they are all you’re allowed to focus on until they’re perfect. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as there are many exercises that will make your athletes better breathers and rollers.

Whether you agree or disagree with breathing and rolling as the two core competencies in training matters little. Instead, what matters is that whatever you choose, you have a strong supporting argument. Remember, it must provide global benefits and be difficult to emulate with other exercises. What are your core competencies?