Find Your Alpha

Bringing this back to training and nutrition. As a nutrition coach and we provide you with tools and tactics as well as education on things like food quality, and how to navigate eating out, vacations, and holidays, as well as even how to eat for specific results in performance or specific sports.  Now you take that information and follow it and apply it to your specific set of life circumstances making it work for you.

So when your best friends asks what you are doing and why you are eating better or weighing your food. This is an opportunity for you to find your Alpha and become a leader to them. Continue to grow, and learn from others but in the process identify your influence just as you are being influenced by others.

Find YOUR Alpha and become a force of change.

2.

Let’s Define some terms.

Intermittent: Occurring at irregular intervals; not continuous or steady.

Fasting: Abstain from all or some kinds of food or drink, especially as a religious observance.

Ok now that is out of the way…Intermittent Fasting or IF, is becoming a fad again. Which is sad because IF does have validity if it is applied in the right setting to the right person.  So again everything goes back to application for the individual. (Can’t come up with a template for that!).

IF is typically used by people who want to lose weight.  The most popular way to apply IF is to restrict your eating window by continuing not to eat until after most people would be eating lunch.  This is referred to as the 16/8. Staying fasted daily for 16 hours and then eating in an 8 hour window.

This is intended to limit the amount of food you are eating on a daily basis putting you into a caloric deficit which, will in theory reduce body fat. Where this goes wrong is that just because you are restricting your window to consume food it does NOT mean that you are reducing calories and you could still simply be consuming more food in that short window to compensate.

Here is the issue.  If you are fasting every day for the same length of time daily it is no longer intermittent.  Additionally, depending on the amount of carbohydrate intake you have you may be jacking your blood sugar up and down without any consistency which can lead to issues of feeling extremely fatigued due to the intense fluctuation and long periods of time without any food to time of extreme eating or even over eating.

Here’s the fix! Rather than fasting everyday take 1-2 days per week and go completely fasted from food you have to chew. Some fats and proteins in the form of liquid will curb your hunger and keep things healing. Using collagen and bone broth will help to take the edge off and to promote healing of the gut lining.  This will also help to reset insulin sensitivity as well as reduce the amount of weekly calories you consume which will in turn create a caloric deficit and cause weight loss.

If you have more questions about IF or how to utilize a fast for your nutritional plan please reach out to us we would love to help!!!

3.

olume: The amount of training (sets, reps, total poundage, total time in the gym, ect..).  Volume is accumulated over days which rolls into weeks, then months then years.

Appropriate volume is dependent on so many factors. Here are 3 Big Ones:

  • Training Age: How long you have been training.  An individual has a high training age if they have been in elite level sports through high school and into college and are now participating in a sport like CrossFit.  Conversely a low training age is an individual that has never played sports but is now participating in strength and conditioning as a way to stay or get in shape. The higher the training age the more volume you have built the ability to handle and recover from.
  • Nutrition/Nutrition Optimization:  An example would be if a CrossFit athlete is eating very low carb or keto they will have the capacity for less training volume due to recovery factors.  Conversely it may be possible to increase training volume if the athlete’s nutrition is set to optimize recovery based on specific demands.
  • Lifestyle:  This is HUGE! This is what your stress and schedule look like outside the gym.  Factors that will cause athletes to lower training volume are things like job, shift, children, and basically anything that will increase stress load.  Conversely if you have lower overall stress and optimal sleep patterns as well as overall ability to keep stress levels low.

Training is all about building volume but if it is added too much too fast or add things out of place it 100% will cause damage and result in a training debt.  Here is a prime example of how to cause damage building volume.

Example: An athlete starts CrossFit training and and after 3 months of training decides that they want to compete and immediately adds in 3 additional days of double met con training sessions.

Now this could work but it is a can be a big risk as well. It could also result in over training and under recovering for that individual.  With an athlete of that training age being lower a more appropriate addition of volume would be to add in some basic aerobic work in addition to regular training as well as an increase in some basic structure which will add durability and not to mention calories.

Louie Simmons of famed Westside Barbell has been performing at an elite level in powerlifting for 4 decades.  He discusses his volume now as being higher now than 2 decades previous but with that said it is allocated much differently.

In his younger days the volume of squats, deadlifts, and presses were much higher than today. However, now the overall training time and volume is more but is allocated to things like weighted abdominal work, special accessory work, or other general physical preparedness (GPP) rather than the traditional work of only the sport specific movements of the squat, bench and deadlift.

Training volume can be your best friend or your worst enemy. You need to add it where it needs to be added and often times it is not the super sexy training you want to add but rather specific needs for you personally to make sure you are building towards where you need to go to individually and specifically.

If you need help evaluating your training volume or help in learning how to add volume appropriate to you