Performance Nutrition: Orange Vanilla Mango Shake

Whew, it is HOT outside! A few weeks ago my hamstring started cramping during a run and I realized I needed to be more on it with regards to my hydration and electrolytes if I wanted to have productive training sessions in this ridiculous heat and humidity.

So, I came up with this shake to help myself hydrate and start recovering as soon as possible after runs. This shake is a great option for about an hour before or immediately after any intense training session. It is refreshing, delicious, and an easy way to hydrate before or after exercise while giving your muscles the nutrients they need.

Orange Vanilla Mango Shake

8-12 oz water

1-1.5 cups frozen mango chunks

1 scoop vanilla protein powder (whey)

1 scoop orange electrolyte powder

1-2 scoops BeetElite (optional add-in before intense aerobic training, WODs, or team sports with lots of running)

Toss all the ingredients into a blender. Blend well and enjoy!

This shake is legit tasty. I am a big fat of BeetElite and that’s why the picture is of a light pink shake. Beets boost stamina for endurance and high intensity training.

Based on my estimates, the shake has the following macronutrient profile: 25g protein - 25-35g carb - 0-1g fat

Breathing Basics: Switching Sympathetic to Parasympathetic

Breathing drills have become an important foundation to each and everyone of my training sessions and it is something that, while complex on the surface, can be implemented in very simple ways that come with huge payoff.

If you want to get a primer in breathing drills, please check out my post from a few years back to get a foundational understanding of WHY they can be an important part of any training session: BREATHING DRILLS

In the past, I really only used one breathing drill per session, today it is up to a minimum of three. I like using a 3-drill circuit as the first thing the athlete does in their session for dual purpose of reaching the autonomic nervous system and targeting the respiratory muscles for warm-up purposes.

When using these drills in this way, paying attention to the way the athlete is breathing is very important. In this case the correct way would be to get as much air in as you can through your nose, hold it for a moment, and then exhale through the mouth. 

Perhaps this runner could benefit from a pre-session breathing circuit to help optimize airflow and prevent excessive exhaustion?

Outside of this there are body positions that are more optimal to do this in than others, however this may be more useful when we are trying to reset positions than anything else. In truth, it really does not matter the position in which you are breathing, the most important thing is that we are breathing deeply. 

The main goal of this type of breathing drill is to take us or our athletes from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. This would mean switching your brain away from the daily stresses that all people deal with (from their boss, family, relationships, etc.) to focusing on the practice/training session in which they are about to engage. It helps the mind separate from the noise that doesn't help while you’re training, practicing, or competing. 

The other purpose that the breathing serves is to get the airflow to go through the body in a way that is extremely helpful for learning how to properly brace and support the spine. This is a safety enhancement, first and foremost, and a performance enhancement second. We want the body to be able to brace against and resist force, while we also want it to be able to produce force. Both of these are optimized with proper breathing. 

Bracing and resisting against forces protects us from injury, while producing force is what aids our performance. Breathing drills are the easiest way to start to teach an athlete’s body how to do those things. The key is making sure that the airflow is going deep down into your belly and expanding into your lower back and into the sides of your waist. 

With this style of breathing we are also activating all of the important muscles in the trunk that are involved in bracing. Activating these muscles help realign the bony structures in our body to aid in stability and bracing.  For example, many people tend to have an anterior pelvic tilt. If you think about your hips as a bucket of water, if you dip it forward, that would be an anterior pelvic tilt, and the water is now spilling out a little bit. Breathing drills help us pull those hips back into neutral and teach the muscles what that feels like to be neutral and braced in that position. Another good example of this would be rib position. 

Another common positional fault would be an overextended position in the ribs, which carries over to both injury risk and performance. This is another common postural fault that increases injury risk and can decrease performance just through an ineffective improper rib position. If someone is standing and they seem to be sticking their chest out, they are probably overextended. They're not just standing straight up, they're going beyond that. The telltale sign for this is we see the ribs sticking out. There are simple breathing drills that work to tuck those ribs back in and teach them where they should be. We need to get them to have a closer relationship with the diaphragm, which is extremely important from a positional standpoint. 

Nothing fancy here. Just deep breaths.

We went pretty into the weeds here but the most important thing to take away is if you come into the gym a little stressed out, just take some time and do a breathing drill. For example, eight deep breaths as a minimum. You can do those seated, close your eyes or don't close them, just make sure that air goes in through your nose and out through your mouth, traveling deep deep down into your belly. Doing this alone will really help you feel more calm and ready to get into your training session or whatever it is that you're trying to transition into.

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Bowler Squat for First Step Speed?

The Bowler Squat is an exercise you generally see in a physical therapy setting and is used as a basic way to teach multi-planar single-leg stability.

We’ve used these at SAPT for quite awhile as a regression for athletes who are struggling with single leg balance to the point that they can’t execute a single-leg hop with a balanced landing. But who are more advanced than limiting exercises to side-lying clam level.

This is an athlete who has excellent lateral hip strength and can demonstrate a safe, controlled landing. For athletes who aren’t able to display control, we look to regress, often with the Bowler Squat.

If you take a look at the pictures above you will see both a knee cave and a large hip drop in the example of the Bowler Squat illustration. Most importantly, you will see the same hip drop translate over to running stride - this is a giant red flag signifying weak lateral hip musculature on the support leg (the leg opposite of the dropped hip) and a VERY REAL risk of injury (groin, ankle, knee, hip, etc.).

The Standard Bowler Squat is a great way to work on multi-planar single-leg stability.

Beyond using the Bowler Squat as a way to teach stability and balance, I also like to use the Bowler Squat as a part of my dynamic warm-up with elite athletes as a way to prime/activate their core muscle function. We’ll do several variations of them: straight forward Bowlers with a lateral knee touch, eyes closed, or as part of a single leg balance sequence (again I use a few variations of these).

This is an advanced variation of the Standard Bowler Squat. It can be used as a challenging addition the warm-up for high level athletes.

The 1-Leg Balance Progression is a great warm-up sequence for runners that challenges balance.

Up until recently, that’s about as far as I had ever taken the Bowler Squat both in theory and practice. But, Tim DiFrancesco (formerly the head strength coach for the Los Angeles Lakers) posted about the Bowler Squat being a great exercise for first step speed development. I had never thought of the dutiful Bowler Squat in such grand terms! It gave me an opportunity to reframe the exercise as I watched some of the athletes I work with play their sport of basketball. To be clear, I am taking this post further than what Tim’s initial post suggested, so these are my own conclusions based off of a simple thought he posed.

I didn’t have to look long or hard to find the Bowler Squat in action and came up with an almost endless list of ways the Bowler Squat can be woven into performance exercises.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve started experimenting by using certain variants of this with athletes who are already and must continue to perform plyometric movements, but who struggle with stability, control, and tension.

With only a couple weeks to consider and experiment with a mental reframing of the Bowler Squat as possible driver for first step speed, I would hesitate to assign it too great of importance.

I really like the balance challenge and how it naturally forces an athlete to focus and tighten up with a few reps prior to a jump, but the real workhorses behind first step speed continue to be the Bulgarian Split Squat and all it’s variants as my number one choice - with all other lunge, squat, and deadlift variations following closely behind.

Ensuring an athlete has the ABILITY to execute a perfect Bowler should be a prerequisite to any single-leg plyometric activity. But, being as strong as possible is always the foundation for durable, resilient, and effective performance.

If you are a coach and have any experience utilizing these types of combos, I’d love to hear what you use and how you feel about the results.

Priority #1: Breathing

If you were to say to me in 2006, Hey Sarah! Guess what?!? In 10-years you will be laying the foundation for high performance by pounding the crap out of breathing drills. I would have believed you***. It's pretty obvious, when you think about it, but the evidence for it's true importance has only been surfacing over the past couple of years. 

This is an insanely complex topic that can literally have an effect on the obvious: your ability to recover effectively between bouts of intense exercise allllll the way to the obscure and surprising: regaining normal range of motion about joints that have been previously all kinds of locked up.

So, here ya go. My long-winded explanation of why you or your child may be doing do many drills to re-pattern their breathing. The concept of training breathing patterns now forms the foundation for all SAPT athletes.

Below I've organized a loose hierarchy of what proper breathing actually accomplishes for us humans:

Life Support

Like everything else in the body we adjust to sub-optimal patterns and just assume everything is A-OK (ex: somehow staying alive when only eating frankenfoods). In this case, I'm referring to our bodies amazing ability to be totally out-of-whack and yet not collapse in on itself, biomechanically speaking.

But, as professionals in the industry of human performance, we know that those common mal-alignments in the body ultimately stem from poor pelvic balance and that is in fact causing the postural asymmetries.

What causes the problem with the pelvis in the first place? Traditionally, we’ve chalked it up to an increasingly sedentary environment - too much sitting, not enough moving. Even for children. In fact this problem first develops in children, all children.

So, let’s take it deeper. There is actually something else going on besides our chair bound, screen driven environment. It just so happens that if you look very deep, like inside your body, you will discover that the muscle responsible for respiration, the diaphragm, is actually itself asymmetrical! In fact, the thorax is packed with asymmetrical situations: the heart sets on one side, the liver on the other to adjust the diaphragm is divided into two domes (on the right and left sides) one dome is smaller and weaker than the other. This sets off a precipitation of events. All of which ultimately influence our athletic performance, efficiency, injury patterns and more.

Posture

Okay, let’s break this down. It’s important, so try to stay with me… I’m also working hard to keep up with myself. All kinds of important parts of the body attach and interact with the diaphragm. Since, by our bodies’s design, one side of the diaphragm is stronger than the other that means that certain compensatory patterns always develop. Always. If you are a human you have this pattern. 

The diaphragm is stronger on the right side, this ultimately means that we favor (and overwork) the right side of the body. While the left side becomes weakened and inefficient. 

From here we can see the commonplace asymmetries develop: one shoulder higher than the other, the rib cage set at predictable angles from right to left and front to back, the pelvis rotated predictably.

Injury Potential

Alright, we’re getting back on solid footing. The by-design asymmetry of our diaphragm causes the postural asymmetries that cause, over time, injury. 

How many times has a well meaning coach had an athlete statically stretch chronically tight hamstrings? Do they ever regain the proper ROM? Nope. But, those tight hamstrings are actually indicative of a risk for injury that points to pelvic misalignment and, you guessed it, points then towards diaphragm and thorax corrections that MUST occur before high performance can ever be achieved.

How many times has a pitching coach focused their injury prevention program to address only the throwing side? Good gracious that’s just layering on the problems.

Sub-Optimal Performance: Layers of dysfunction

Let’s continue to talk about the pitching coach who runs a one sided arm care program. Hey, it kind of makes sense. You throw with one arm, why wouldn’t focus on strengthening the musculature on just that side? 

Because you frack up the entirety of the athlete, that’s why.

Never, ever layer strength on top of dysfunction. The potential for injury skyrockets (that’s my opinion) and it becomes very difficult to make the foundational corrections (to backtrack). 

The result? The athlete has now gotten “stronger” and tighter and more imbalanced in the pursuit of performance. 

What should the approach have been? Fix the imbalances first, prioritize this as essential to performance, then and only then, begin to strengthen.

Recovery during repeated efforts

When respiration isn’t occurring efficiently, an athlete’s ability to recover between bouts of training (or plays in a game) will be suboptimal. Potentially leading to injury, compromised decision making (think ability to read a developing play), lost points, or a Loss.

Gait

We’ve established that the diaphragm will cause poor pelvic balance. But what does that mean for gait? 

“Walking and breathing are the foundations of movement and prerequisites for efficient, forceful, non-compensatory squatting, lunging, running, sprinting, leaping, hopping, or jumping ONLY WHEN three influential inputs are engaged: proprioception, referencing, and grounding.” PRI 

Pulled muscles, ligament tears, rolled ankles can all be traced back to a pelvis, and thus, breathing problem.

That tilted and rotated pelvis can be a real problem!

How many great (or on their way to great) athletic careers have been stopped in their tracks by an injury?

How to fix: Zone of Apposition

Moving forward with the understanding that breathing really is the key to life, we have to ask: how do you fix this?

There is something called the Zone of Apposition (ZOA) and this is the area where the diaphragm and ribcage over lap each other. We want to maximize this overlap through proper ribcage positioning.

Here’s the good news: train the ribcage to be in the proper position and now those imbalances start to clear up:

• Better ROM at all joints
• Better recovery for bouts of work
• Less compensatory patterns throughout the body

Now we can work on performance

How SAPT uses/integrates breathing drills to achieve performance improvements:

1. Ground based - 90/90, etc
2. Against gravity —> Static
3. Against gravity —> dynamic & sub-max
4. Against gravity —> dynamic & max

What the athlete gets in return:

• Better movement patterns (without forcing it)
• Fewer injuries
• Better recovery (between intense bouts and sessions)
• More bulletproof and awesome

With regards to training the ZOA, it's not a matter of if it needs to be trained, rather the important aspect is for the coach to assess and determine what level the athlete needs to be placed at to get started and progressed forward.

***I'm sorry, I lied - in 2006, I was 25 - knew virtually nothing - and it was hard to tell me anything unless it was about box squats, deadlifts, or the bench press. 

What's the Deal with Probiotics?

Bacteria, Bacteria Everywhere!

"Probiotics" is a current health buzzword. Probiotics specifically encompasses the bacteria found in our guts. Broken down to it's etymological components, pro- meaning "in favor of" and bios- meaning "life." So, probiotics are "life-favoring." That's pleasant, isn't it?

But what exactly are the little buggers? Why would you want to ingest billions of little bacteria? Is there any validity to taking probiotics or is just another fad?

Let's look at some stats and facts.

1. Scientists estimate that the amount of bacteria living in and on our bodies is roughly 10x the number of cells that compose our bodies. And if we're composed of billions of cells... well, that's a lot of bacteria.

2. The good guys in our gut perform a number of vital functions for us including:

• helping digest food ( you thought you did it all on your own didn't you?)
• enhance digestion and nutrient absorption
• synthesize vitamins B and K (both of which are involved in countless metabolic processes)
• enhance gastrointestinal motility  and function ( keeping everything moving, if you know what I mean)
• obstruct bad bacteria and other pathogen's growth
• produce coagulation and growth factors
• help regulates intestinal and mucus secretion and utilization
• Gut bacteria is also heavily involved in immune system function.

What can disrupt their cozy intestinal environment?

• Medications- particularly antibiotics (which will kill off the good and bad guys)
• Stress (lots of it)- stress hormones may encourage bad bacteria growth
• Crappy diet- one bereft of whole foods and laden with processed junk
• Poor gut motility- meaning stuff just sits around, a product of not enough fiber.

Symptoms such as abdominal pain, gas, bloating, diarrhea, reflux, allergies, and nausea are indicators that something might be wrong internally. Ingesting probiotics help nourish and replenish our infinitesimal friends and can relieve those symptoms (more on that later).

Given how involved our microscopic friends are to our overall health and function, we would do well to keep them happy and robust. For example, research found probiotics to help restore the protective lining of the intestines (which may help reduce symptoms of IBS and IBD). So, probiotics are not just a fad. 

It's also easy to see how having a happy gut leads to better performance- be it athletic or otherwise. 

Where to Find Probiotics

Typically, fermentation provides a home for all these little guys so food sources such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, and tempe contain probiotics.  (Just make sure the yogurt label says “contains live cultures”  or “active cultures” for maximal benefit.) The current recommendation for healthy individuals is to eat 2-3 servings of fermented food per day. 

But if that's not feasible, for whatever reason, supplements are perfectly ok too (as long as it's from a reputable company). Most supplements contain bacteria from two families: lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. For example, bifidobacterium bifidum (Bb-02). The first name is the genus, the second is the species, and the parenthetical are the strain of that particular species.

A reasonable starting dose is 3-5 billion-- yes, billions of those little guys. 

On a personal note- since I'm undergoing treatment for Lyme disease and the primary modality is antibiotics, my doctor has me taking a plethora of probiotics to attenuate any negative effects in my gut. The same should apply for anyone taking a course (or two) of antibiotics. Those meds don't distinguish between the good and bad guys; taking probiotics will help replenish the lost bacteria.

Here is a list of reputable brands of probiotics to try.

Designing Practical Warm-ups for the Overhead Athlete

To give a brief recap, if you missed Stevo's post on Friday: August is dedicated to training means, modes, and methods for overhead athletes (these are sports like baseball, softball, volleyball, swimming, and javelin). 

The pre-practice and pre-competition warm-up is extremely important for any athlete, but to an even greater degree for those athletes who need to give special consideration to the shoulder complex. As a strength coach, I've given numerous warm-up protocols to numerous athletes over the years and while, in a pinch, I could easily produce one that would be well-balanced and comprehensive, I've always preferred to plan my warm-ups in advance.

Preplanning ensures that every muscle, joint, angle, whatever has been taken into consideration and a decision has been made about how to address it for that day (or not). The important thing here being that you must give yourself the chance to make a decision about something ahead of time vs. simply overlooking the area.

Most coaches plan warm-ups on the fly, but like most things at SAPT, we tend not to do what "most" do... that's usually the easy way... and we know the right way! Thus, why we're the premier strength and performance training facility in the Fairfax, Tysons, McLean, Vienna areas.

Getting back to the practical warm-up: Over my time working with college athletes, I ended up developing an ever-evolving template of warm-ups that I would rotate and match to the first 15- to 30-minutes of the practice plan. For example, if the start of practice was going to be ripe with sprinting, the I would choose the plan to match. On the other hand, if practice was starting with quite a bit of hitting (volleyball) where I knew the shoulder needed to be totally warm and ready, then that would inform my warm-up choice.

http://youtu.be/IfJi8KLhtlg

This video is just showing the team warming up... keep that in mind while you watch the power + the height the guys are getting on the ball off one bounce. What's the warm-up look like before this part of the warm-up??? I bet it's a pretty good one.

Anything is an option: body resistance only, bands, medicine balls, actual sporting equipment (i.e. a baseball), weights, etc... Shoot, you can even use a sled/Prowler to do a fantastic total body warm-up that fully addresses the shoulders.

So, when planning a warm-up (or your own set of templated warm-ups) make sure you are addressing all the primary movers and in all directions - planes of motion - plus weaving in extra prehab that may not occur in the weight room and copious amounts of shoulder friendly mobilizations, stabilizations, and drills.