My days are busy and I work full time, nearly everyday.   In order to fit in my training schedule, which is normally 2 to 3 hours 5 days a week, I train in the basement of the thrift shop where I work.  This is a recent training session focusing on 1 minute endurance sets.

• minute 1-90 pushups
  
• minute 2-80
• minute 3-80
• minute 4-76
• minute 5-80
• minute 6-80
• minute 7-84
• minute 8-80
• minute 9-90 (70 in 40 seconds)
  
• minute 10-90 (70 in 40 seconds)
• minute 11-95 (80 in 44 s econds)
• minute 12-70

• pull ups 360
• inclined push ups 180(sets of 30)
• back hand push ups (4 sets of 20) 50 straight

Prior to my training I will eat at least 3 hours prior to training two cups of brown rice, two sirloin patties, and steak and squash, half gallon of water with 2 Maxodin.  Then 1 hour prior to training I will take 3 servings of GSH Ignite and ensure I drink lots of water.

When you eat carbohydrates with a low glycemic index your body stores the carbs as glycogen in the liver and muscle, and as glucose in the blood. Once stored, your body has a glycogen reserve of roughly 1,800 to 2,000 calories. This is enough to sustain you through 90 to 120 minutes of exercise. Failing to build this critical reserve of stored carbohydrates pre-workout can have significant effects on your performance.

Building Stores of Glycogen

To maximize your workout, it’s important to replenish your glycogen levels (stored carbohydrates) at least two or three hours before starting a moderate or intense work-out routine. Proper timing is required for a simple reason. Your body needs time to digest and store the food as energy.

Hours before exercising, begin storing up glycogen and glucose by eating a meal rich in polysaccharides. Otherwise known as complex carbohydrates, polysaccharides are starchy sugars contained in foods such as breads, pasta, rice and potatoes. Eating a combination of these foods pre-workout will give your body and brain adequate reserves to perform well for up to two hours. After the first 90 to 120 minutes of your workout, you’ll need to replenish your stores by consuming additional carbohydrates while exercising. Eating properly before, during and after your workout can have a dramatic effect on your athletic performance.

Before the workout, avoid simple sugars including monosaccharides and disaccharides. These are best for a quick boost of energy but don’t have the staying power of the complex carbohydrates. Simple sugars, including most fruits, are best following a work-out rather than before. Eating properly before a long workout can also help to stabilize the nausea that can occur with marathons, for example, and prevent low blood sugar which can cause fatigue and light-headedness.

Eating the Right Carbohydrates Pre-Workout

Properly fueling your body with carbohydrates before a workout gives you up to two hours of stored energy in the form of glycogen. If you’re engaging in an activity less than moderate exercise for a minimum of ninety minutes at a time, high glycemic index carbohydrates aren’t especially relevant. Your goal should be to consume enough complex carbohydrates ahead of time to give your body the proper fuel necessary.

Finding the right complex carbohydrates to eat before a workout is as simple as opening the panty door, but determining how much to eat and when is a bit more complicated.

A moderately active person should be consuming 3 grams of carbohydrates for every pound of body weight per day. This is true if you’re training for 1 hour per day. If you’re exercising for 2 hours daily, you need 4 grams of carbohydrates per day. However, you don’t want to consume your full daily amount of carbs before exercising.

Instead, plan to eat between .45 and 1 gram of carbohydrates per pound of body weight at least 2 hours before training. Ideally, you should be eating these carbs 3 to 5 hours to give your body time to digest the meal and store the energy properly. The carbohydrates consumed pre-workout are part of your daily total.

For example, a 150 pound athlete should consume 68-150 grams of complex carbohydrates at least two hours before exercising. This translates to 2-4 cups of brown rice or beans.

Benefits of Pre-Workout Carbohydrates

Outside of your daily workout regime, fueling your body with the proper amounts of complex carbohydrates has additional long-term benefits. The brain is fueled almost entirely with glucose derived from the carbohydrates in your diet. Keeping a reserve of glucose and glycogen fuels the brain as well as the body.

Foods with a low glycemic index (GI) may also help lower the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Eating vegetables, whole grains and rice provides the necessary energy for your body, but also lowers your risk of diseases such as diabetes, controls your appetite more effectively and helps you avoid adding body fat.

Copyright 2010 Life Health Secrets

Your body needs good quality fuel to run at its best. For athletes this means not only pure, healthy foods but also high quality supplements – you want the stuff that burns clean and that is sustainable in the long run, not the stuff that’s going to mess with your metabolism and leave you feeling burnt out six months down the road.

There’s a pretty strong consensus on the diet front – eat lean, hormone-free proteins, complex carbohydrates, omega-3 type fats and stay away from anything processed, packaged or that comes out of a deep fryer. Navigating the supplement industry is a little murkier though, and the purpose of this article is to break down what every athlete who’s looking to enhance their performance naturally should take, and why.

But first, as a caveat, let me acknowledge that different athletes have different goals and needs and so, while I’ve tried to tailor this to adults following a serious training program, you should always consult your doctor to make sure these things are right for you, and the information in this article shouldn’t be construed as taking the place of a doctor’s advice.

1. A High Quality Protein Supplement

Physically active people need more protein. Protein helps build muscle, so getting enough is critical for the serious athlete. In theory you can get it all through your diet; in practice it’s much easier to down a shake. But take too much and you can stress your liver and kidneys, especially if the protein source has a low Net Nitrogen Utilization (NNU) value. Protein 2.0 is a class of proteins called ‘bioactive’ protein – it gives you more bang for your buck because it not only helps you build muscle, it also offers active peptides that bolster your immune system and promote a healthy inflammatory response.

Tara-Hurdles-Competition

2. Anti-Oxidants

When you exercise, you breathe harder. This means you’re taking in more oxygen. Great, except that oxygen produces free radicals in your body that damage your cells and DNA. So antioxidants are critical to any athlete’s training regimen, because the harder you train, the harder your cells are going to get pummeled with free radicals.

Sure you can get anti-oxidants from some foods, but my money’s on glutathione, which is like the Great White shark of anti-oxidants – hundreds of times stronger than anything found in fruits or vegetables. Your body manufactures it internally, but production declines from as early as age twenty on. Unfortunately, a glutathione supplement is useless (it just gets digested). Fortunately, supplements that provide the precursors for your body to rev up its own natural glutathione production are effective. As an added bonus, when you increase glutathione production, you increase ATP – cellular energy, so not only do you fight free radicals, you also get more energy.

3. Immune Enhancement

Train hard and your immune system crashes. “High intensity exercise impairs immune function for up to several hours post-exercise.” (Nieman DC. Is infection risk linked to exercise workload? Med Sci Sports Exerc 32: S406 –S411, 2000.). This means that you’re open to illness and infection – and being sick isn’t good for business. A mean flu can have you knocked on your ass for weeks. Better just to strengthen your immune system. Echinacea? Meh. Vitamin C? If you must. But, as I mentioned above, if you take a bioactive protein, you’re going to boost your immune system as a side benefit – and save money by not having to buy an extra product.

4. Adrenal Support

Your adrenals sit on top of your kidneys and regulate stress, including that handy fight-or-flight response that kicks in right before and during an event. You know, it’s that adrenaline cold sweat that makes you feel like you could wrestle a cougar (which is probably what that short burst of energy was originally intended for). Modern times haven’t been so kind to our adrenals though, and daily life stress (think traffic jams, your boss, bills, etc…) combined with workout stress spells adrenal burnout. If your adrenals aren’t at their best, neither are you, and your performance will suffer. So if you’re training or doing extreme sports, an adrenal supplement could be what you need.

5. Memory, Focus, Concentration

Sports and training aren’t just about strength – they’re also about focus, concentration, and reaction time. So taking something for your brain is a good idea. Fish with a low mercury content and high fat content is optimal because it contains lots of DHA, but it not always available and hard to take with you when traveling. Other promising memory and focus supplements are Gotu Kola, DMAE and CDP Choline.

While I’m not a professional athlete, I take my training and my body’s long-term health seriously. I’m not planning on making it to the Olympics, but I do want to be in great shape well into my retirement years.

Here’s what I take:

1-2 scoops Protein Extreme Energy in the morning before breakfast (for protein and immune system)

2 Maxodin with breakfast (for concentration, memory, focus)

1-2 scoops GSH-Ignite before work-outs (for free radical protection)

In some cases I will take 1 scoop of Protein Extreme Energy for post work out muscle support and recovery

2 Adrenal ReBoot with dinner (for adrenal support)

Copyright 2010 Life Health Secrets

WHAT TYPE OF CARBOHYDRATES ARE BEST?

Okay, but what type of carbs should the athlete be eating? The reason carbs have a bad reputation is because there are lots of low-quality sources out there, in the form of junk foods and other convenience foods that don’t offer any real nutrition – people fill up on them and pack on the pounds, but are still starving for nutrients. Over consumption of simple sugars (mono and disaccharides), like those found in candy and soda, has also been linked to the onset of type 2 diabetes and obesity. These types of carbs have a high glycemic index, which means they cause your blood sugar to rise rapidly and then eventually crash. The exception to the rule is the simple sugar found in fruits. Because fruits contain fiber, vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants and other goodies, they generally prevent the sugars from being absorbed so rapidly in your system, so you don’t get that crash.

Aside from fruits, the other type of carbs you want in your diet are complex carbohydrates. Most complex carbs, or polysaccharides, have a lower glycemic index and so take longer to be broken down in the body, offering sustained energy over a longer time period without causing you to crash. They also provide your body with vital nutrients that tend to be more absorbable than the kind you get from vitamin supplements.

While it’s true there are a few exceptions – for example, white rice and potatoes both have an extremely high glycemic index – in general it’s better not to stress the details too much; glycemic index is only a small part of the story. For example, fructose (as in high fructose corn syrup) and ice cream both have a low glycemic index, and neither is exactly renowned for its health benefits. As long as it’s a healthy meal, our internal body chemistry usually balances things out. White rice eaten with beans, for example will have a lower glycemic index than white rice alone. Fats also lower glycemic index. The main point is to consume whole foods prepared in a healthy manner.

In general, complex carbohydrates should be part of your meals at least 3-5 hours before training or an event. Because they release their energy more slowly and evenly in the body, this ensures that you’ll have the energy you need to perform, and that you won’t be in the process of digesting at game-time. Great sources of complex carbs include brown rice, spelt or kamut bread, lentils, beans, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, brown rice pasta, quinoa, and more.

When Does The Glycemic Index Matter?

If you are training less than 90 to 120 minutes at a moderate level of intensity, high glycemic indexed carbs are noted not to help your body’s energy needs.

If you’re an endurance athlete, then glycemic index matters. High Glycemic carbs are recommended to athletes during prolonged exercise that require quick access to the glucose. Endurance athletes typically need to replenish their carbohydrate levels once they’ve moved beyond the 90 to 120 minute mark. If you’re an endurance athlete, you should be reloading your carbs every 15 to 30 minutes from the time of starting your activity as your core glycogen stores will deplete within 90 to 120 minutes depending on the level of intensity.

What’s the optimal carbohydrate to use? While athletes typically use sports drinks and gels, these sorts of products can have adverse affects on your body in the long term, and have been shown to damage athletes’ teeth. However, they’re currently the best products we’ve got, and are reasonably effective.

SUMMARY: POINTS TO REMEMBER

• Eat 60% carbohydrates at every meal, along with 20% protein and 20% healthy fat.

• Eat complex carbs at least 3-5 hours before training or competition.

• If you are training past 90-120 minutes, then you will need to reload using a source of high glycemic carbohydrates every 15-30 minutes once you have begun your activity.   It is suggested that you will need to replenish ½ gram of carbs every ½ hour.

• It takes 20 hours to replenish your body’s glycogen from carbohydrates after daily training.

• Calculate your daily carbohydrate needs (see above for chart and formula).

• Carbohydrates come from grains, legumes, fruits and starchy vegetables.

• Great sources include brown rice, spelt or kamut bread, lentils, beans, cauliflower, sweet potatoes, brown rice pasta, quinoa, and pretty much any fruit.

Copyright 2010 Life Health Secrets

Carbs are stored as glycogen in the liver and muscle, and in the blood as glucose. Glycogen stores provide about 1,800 to 2,000 calories worth of energy, or enough fuel for approximately 90 to 120 minutes of continuous vigorous activity. If you don’t replenish your supply of carbs pre and post workout, then your body can’t replenish its own supply of glycogen. This means that the fuel you need isn’t there when your body needs it, and performance suffers. Also, your brain is fueled by glucose, which comes from breaking down carbohydrates. Considering your entire body depends on your brain for coordination, you want to keep it running well.

Are you getting enough carbs?

Making sure you have enough carbs isn’t just about eating a bowl of pasta the night before the big game. As an athlete, your daily diet should consist of 60% carbohydrates (the other 40% is divided equally between protein and fat, but we’ll get to that later) in order to ensure that you consistently have enough glycogen stored for training. If your glycogen stores are depleted, then you’ll have less energy, and your training won’t be as productive, so don’t skimp on the carbs. How much you need depends on your body weight, level of activity, and whether you’re male or female.

Here’s a quick formula for approximately how much you should be getting daily:

Your body weight in kilograms x carbs in grams per kg of bodyweight (see chart below)

= your daily carbohydrate needs

Daily carbs in grams per kg of bodyweight            Training Level

3g                                                                                      no training

4-5g                                                                                  3-5 hrs/wk of moderate exercise

5-7g                                                                                  6-10hr/wk training

7-9g                                                                                  10-15hrs/wk training

more than 10g                                                               15+hrs week

The first number corresponds to females, the second to males, though you can adjust it to what feels right for you.

So, for example, a male weighing 177lb or 80.29kg (to convert to kg, multiply by 0.4536) who trains 6-10 hours a week will require

80.29 x 7  = 562.03 grams of carbohydrates per day, maximum

A female weighing 135lbs, or 61.234 kg, who trains 3-5 hours a week will require

61.234 x 4 = 244.94 grams of carbohydrates per day, minimum

To give you a rough idea of what this translates into, 1 cup of pasta translates into 40g of carbohydrates, 1 cup of brown rice 45g, 1 cup of pinto beans, 44g.

To continue to Part II:  Part II Carbohydrates: The Body’s Core Fuel For Energy

Copyright 2010 EliteSportsandFitness.com

Building Strength & Explosive are Critical to Peak Athletic Performance

Compare two athletes of the exact same body size and build, who have followed the same training regimen – they don’t necessarily have the same power, speed or explosive capacity. Why? Once athletes attain a certain level of strength and stamina, the difference in their capabilities comes down to their bodies’ bio-electric current flow. The stronger the current flow, the stronger the body, and the more explosive power and strength you have access to.

Bio-electric current, also known as cellular zeta-potential, is the movement of electrons through your cells and consequently, through your body. The moving electron is literally the catalyst for the chemistry of life – a body completely stripped of moving electrons is a dead body. Current is especially important to athletes because it feeds the nerves which then feed the muscles. More current = more explosive power, when all else is equal. However, the rigorous training athletes undergo tends to deplete current, and if they allow a deficit to build over time, eventually their bodies become depleted and their explosive power diminishes. The younger athletes with the stronger current win because they haven’t yet exhausted their systems.

A strong electron transfer system, along with an abundant supply of electron donors, is important to the athlete because it strengthens cellular respiration and cellular charge (membrane potential) – both of which are essential to explosive power and strength.

First, let’s look at why cellular respiration is important. Just like you have the lungs, you have 60-100 trillion small lungs in your body – your cells. If those cells are ‘breathing’ at their optimum capacity, then they can increase ATP production, providing you with more energy for explosive power, to move your muscles. The best way to increase cellular respiration? By increasing current, or the supply and transfer of electrons.

If you’ve taken the time to do a bit of research, then you know there’s a dilemma all athletes face when they’re training: the harder you work out and the more ATP you produce, the more electron-robbing free radicals your body produces, and the faster your cells and DNA become damaged by oxidative stress. Taking a supplement like creatine to increase cellular respiration just makes the problem worse – your body ramps up ATP production without any means of defending its cells against the increased free radical load. Not only does a high free radical load decrease your performance in the medium and long term, it also leads to premature aging.

This is why glutathione supplementation is so important. Glutathione solves the athlete’s dilemma by allowing cellular respiration to increase while protecting cells against free radicals. Glutathione is one of your body’s most powerful electron donors –so powerful, in fact, that we literally can’t survive without it. That’s why our bodies produce it internally. However, as we get older, from as early as 20 years old, our internal glutathione levels begin to drop by as much as 35%. That means that your body slows ATP production as well, to protect against increased free radicals. Remember, ATP is the energy your muscles need for power and explosive strength. By dealing with the free radicals from within the cell, glutathione permits ATP to increase naturally. Greater cellular respiration = more explosive power and maximum strength for athletes.

So is the answer just to take a glutathione supplement? Not so fast. Remember, there are two aspects to the body’s bio-electrical current: cellular respiration and cellular charge (the sodium potassium pump). Cell charge is the second element you need for explosive power and strength. When cellular charge is low, metabolic waste accumulates and cellular respiration is impeded. If this isn’t dealt with, then the cell’s osmotic pressure become so weak that it can no longer expel its own waste and old body fluids, and edema or water retention occurs. The cell has trouble pulling in nutrients and becomes congested. If you don’t increase cell charge, then glutathione supplementation is ineffective, or minimally effective at best, because the cell can’t even pull in the nutrients it needs to function. By strengthening cellular charge, metabolic wastes are efficiently removed and cellular respiration can increase.

So how can an athlete increase current, and by extension increase both cellular respiration and charge?

GSH-Ignite was formulated specifically to address these issues. By providing the body with an ample supply of bio-recognizable electrons, and using proprietary means to transfer and move those electrons throughout the body, GSH-Ignite allows athletes to achieve greater levels of explosive power and strength than they could through training alone. GSH-Ignite strengthens the body’s current and promotes healthy glutathione levels while also increasing cellular charge. The effect? Maximum strength and more explosive power.

Copyright 2010 Elite Sports and Fitness.com

To make the record official, Shaun will repeat his performance next month while being filmed from both front and side angles. To best his own recent performance, he’s now training with seventy-five pounds stuffed into his book bag, so that “a forty pound weight will feel like nothing in comparison.”

I train hard, and the LifeHealthSecrets supplements have helped a lot. They keep me relaxed, in the zone and sharp. I get a better rest at night, and I’m a lot stronger than before. I felt stronger after only the 3rd day on the supplements. My stamina has increased. Before taking the products, I was managing only 10 reps per set, with a total of 80 push-ups. Now I’m averaging 20 to 25 reps of front pull-ups per set, with a total count of 300. Now I can also do more one-armed pushups, averaging 10 one-arm pushups in a set, for a total of 70. Prior, it was 7 per set, with a total of 49. I’ve also gone from doing 2,015 pushups in an hour to 2,080, and this is increasing all the time, getting closer to the 3,800 I need to beat the world record.

I’m diagnosed as an insomniac and I find it hard to sleep without taking something. The doctors told me it’s stress. I live a stressful life, I worry about a lot of things. It’s just me and my mom, and I help my mother pay the bills, so I’m always worried about that. I live in a bad neighborhood, so I’m always worried about getting attacked or something crazy happening to me. Since I’ve been on this plan, taking Maxodin, Adrenal Re-Boot, the Protein Extreme Energy and GSH Ignite, I’m sleeping a lot better and feel much more awake when I’m awake, not groggy at all, which I used to feel a lot. I’ve also noticed that since I’ve been on these products, I’m not as angry as I usually am. I’ve very hot blooded, I have a bad temper, and I’ve noticed that things don’t bother me as much as they used to, I’m not stressing over things. I’m more focused on the things I need to be focused on. Now I feel more mentally alert, focused, and with a sense of calmness that I didn’t have before.

Shaun McDaniel

Age 24

Queens, New York

It’s an unusual goal for a kid born and raised in South Jamaica, Queens – a rough neighborhood famous for gang violence and producing rap artists like 50 Cent. “If you’re not a successful individual coming out of that neighborhood, it’s not a big deal to anybody,” says Shaun, now twenty four years old. “No one’s expecting much from you. I’ve seen a lot of friends get destroyed by the neighborhood that I live in, and I don’t want to be just another statistic. I’ve lived my entire life going against what everyone said I couldn’t do.”

Like many inner city youths, Shaun was raised poor and fatherless. He was a lanky, skinny kid, and was often beat up by the local gangs and picked on at school for liking punk rock music and skateboarding. As financial conditions deteriorated at home, he took a job at a young age to help his mother pay the bills. Over time he began to feel depressed by his situation and decided he needed to change something in his life. That’s when he began to do push-ups and sit-ups, taking legendary NFL player and bodyweight trainer Hershel Walker as his inspiration.

Then, a dare from one of his friends led him to try to do 1,000 push-ups. He did it in 5 hours. The next time, he did it in 1 hour. After seeing a few videos of world record holder and ‘Iron Man’ Paddy Doyle, he began to take his training seriously. “I want people to remember my name for doing something good in the world,” says Shaun. This August, Shaun will attempt to do over 1,000 push-ups on his fists in less than eighteen minutes. If he succeeds, he will have beaten the world record currently held by Canadian Doug Pruden, who, in 2003 did 1,000 push-ups in 18 minutes and 13 seconds.

It’s a tough goal to achieve alone. Shaun is without a trainer, and has little time to speak of outside of work. Still, this hasn’t deterred him from staying focused and disciplined. “If you had told me 3-4 months ago that I was going to be doing 2,080 push-ups an hour, I would have laughed at you,” he says. “I didn’t believe my body was capable of doing that. But I’m doing it, and I’m doing it out of my job. I’ve taken the past 3 months to sculpt myself, mentally and physically. That means any Joe blow who wants to be in shape, if they just put their mind to it, they can do whatever they want.”

Copyright 2010 EliteSportsandFitness