Issue 44

Do you have questions about exercise or nutrition? Let grrlAthlete help you find the answer you’ve been looking for. Feel free contact us at grrl@grrlAthlete.com (or just hit reply to one of our newsletters), if we don’t have the answer, we’ll find someone who does.

Content

·        How to Build a Great Body & Eat Great Food

·        Sport-Specific Training for Female Athletes

·        The Ultimate Weight Loss Package

1 – Build a Great Body & Eat Great Food

If you’ve tried every fat-loss diet, then you’re probably very, very frustrated with the promises that these programs make. And like most women, you wish for a simple program that told you how to lose fat in simple, easy-to-follow steps. We’re going to give you some tips today on how to do just that, but first, here’s a startling top-secret admission!

Nutrition is even more important than exercise when it comes to losing fat. And as hard as it is for us, a group of fat loss workout experts to admit it, even our workout strategies might not help you lose fat if you aren’t following a proper fat loss nutrition plan.

Eating properly has the greatest impact on fat loss, bar none. You have to have a nutrition plan, so spend a couple hours on your day off preparing as much food and as many meals as you can for the upcoming week.

But everyone knows that it is incredibly hard to make nutrition changes. So we want you to start making small, but consistent changes starting today. After all, you’ll have a better chance of success if your goal is to eat more 2 more servings of vegetables today, rather than to eat perfect for the rest of the month.

To help you, we’ve broken down how to make some simple nutrition changes. For the first step, we recommend that you put aside an hour or two to plan your
meals for next week. Take an extended trip to the grocery store with a set list of foods, including fruits and vegetables. It’s important to get a variety of foods in your diet (see how to get your 5-9 below). Then come home and do some washing, chopping, cutting, cooking, and freezing. Yes, Tupperware will come in handy.

How to Get Your 5 to 9 Every Day

You should get at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. In a perfect world, you’d get far more than that.

According to the American Diabetes Association, fruits and vegetables provide nutrients that “help lower risks of certain cancers, heart disease, and other health problems”. In fact, we believe that a high consumption of fruits and vegetables also helps clients lose fat.

Now, 5 servings might sound like a lot, especially when we suggest all 5 servings be whole food, and not from juices. But we want you to get the benefits of the fiber, not just the nutrients. Here’s a sample plan to get 3 vegetables and 2 fruits per day (and this only represents your minimum intake).

Breakfast: 1 apple (1-2 servings)

At work mid-morning: 1 grapefruit (1-2 servings)

Lunch: A vegetable salad with actual vegetables, not just some bad lettuce and carrot shreds. You should get some spinach, tomatoes, and peppers cut up in the salad. Make this at home for convenience. And you know what, throwing in some orange or strawberry slices to a nice chicken breast, cashew, and spinach salad really adds some desired sweetness. (4 servings)

Mid-afternoon: Carrot sticks & pepper slices (2 servings)

Dinner: 1 cup of broccoli and/or asparagus (1-2 servings)

Dessert: Blueberries (1 serving)

There…now you’ve eaten up to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables. You’ll have reduced your appetite and had more energy as well. All you need is a little prep work. Now for those with some goals of even more advanced, delicious, nutritious and healthy eating, here’s a great new resource we want to share with you.

We want to change the notion that “delicious” and “healthy” are two words that can’t be used to describe the same meal. If you are one of those people that think that eating healthy means losing taste, then we promise you that your opinion is going to change once you get a look at the new cookbook called Gourmet Nutrition.

In this book full of recipes and nutrition tips, world-famous nutrition expert John Berardi, Ph.D., and John Williams, Ph.D., bring you a nutrition book that you’ll use every day for years, rather than one that will end up collecting dust in your garage. Their book is full of honest, no-nonsense nutrition advice for people committed to getting the body they want, athletes looking to achieve peak performance, and everyone looking to improve their health through nutrition.

"Being that I'm an active graduate student on-the-run, having a cookbook that offers time-friendly, nutritionally-superior recipes is imperative for success with my academics and my athletic goals. Thank you for creating such a wonderful resource! I'm looking forward to savoring those Apple Cobbler Protein Bars after my next work-out (they're on page 171, and look so good... everyone HAS TO try them!).

Cassandra E. Forsythe, MSc, PhD candidate in Nutrition

Gourmet Nutrition includes:

·        Recipes to keep your taste buds alive and your body looking great

·        Cooking tips so you can save time while impressing others with your culinary skills

·        Nutrition strategies so you can build the body you want and keep it for life

It also teaches you:

·        What exactly you need in your kitchen, and what you must not have, if you're to succeed -- from foods, appliances and utensils, right down to the spices.

·        A 6 step system for building your kitchen anew – even if it’s in need of the most dramatic of overhauls!

·        100 perfect meals, quick and easy meals as well as 5-star, impress-your-friends meals. How about healthy Chicago deep dish pizza or striped bass with artichokes and asparagus?

·        Meal categorization according to the best time of day to eat the meals. How about a post workout shake, followed an hour later by our healthy Hawaiian pizza. Then, later in the evening, sit down for our pecan-crusted salmon.

·        17 food preparation tips, making you a culinary dynamo in no time. No more fingertips in your vegetable medley!

·        25 food facts and strategies, tips that help you make sense of the nutritional recommendations you read about often (from us, even) but don’t quite understand fully

·        The absolute best fruits, the best vegetables, the best grains, the best times to eat, and more!

Simply put, everyone should have this e-book. And the authors have completely removed the risk to you by giving you a 100% Money-Back Guarantee.

Gourmet Nutrition is both a cookbook and a full-blown optimal eating manual. Click here to order. 

2 – Sport-Specific Training for Female Athletes: Part 2

By: Craig Ballantyne, M.Sc., CSCS, Training Director for grrlAthlete.com

It isn’t spring yet, but the pre-season is just around the corner. Coaches are preparing for the first practice sessions and setting up the schedules, and athletes should be focused on sport-specific preparation through the use of Athletic Movement Training, speed training, and agility training.

In Issue #41, I outlined how we begin our training sessions. Since the athletes are often arriving from a sedentary environment, we spend a significant amount of time preparing them for the demanding sports training in the session. So far, our session outline looks like this:

Athletic Movement Training Warm-up (5-10 minutes)

Dynamic Flexibility (10 minutes)

Core & Muscle Activation (5 minutes)

Amazingly, the above training volume and techniques are an effective workout for young athletes, particularly young female athletes. Simple Athletic Movement Training and Dynamic Flexibility work will make weak, beginner athletes stronger, faster, and more powerful. It’s important to recognize this, and to avoid (at all costs) having an athlete train with extreme methods and volume. Think about the child’s future, not just the upcoming season.

For a scary look overtraining in young athletes, visit this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/sports/othersports/22overuse.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=1b1e19bce373a4d7&hp&ex=1109134800&partner=homepage

So be conservative, and when the athlete is ready for advanced training, you can implement some of the following techniques (when appropriate for the individual).

Power Development, Force Absorption/Deceleration, & Jump Training (5-15 minutes)

After the body is prepared for explosive training, we focus on force absorption (i.e. landing jumps) and rate of force development (power development and explosive jump training). This doesn’t mean we go right to advanced plyometric training.

For beginner athletes and many female athletes in general, we need to first focus on force absorption. In simpler terms, female athletes need to learn how to use their muscles and land properly. Some female athletes land in a rigid, upright body posture without bending their knees. Improper landing, such as straight legs or buckled knees, is associated with ACL injuries.

We teach the athletes to bend the knees and drop the hips when landing, to load the muscles, rather than the joints. We do single vertical jumps with a focus on sticking the landing, and we do some reps where we step off benches and land and stick and absorb the force. For young female athletes, this force absorption/deceleration training will make them stronger, and the training phase may last a relatively long time.

With advanced athletes, we still don’t use an excessive amount of traditional plyometric training (like you might find in some commercial jump training programs). This is particularly true when we are training jumping athletes, such as basketball and volleyball players.

Most of young basketball players love to play their game, even outside of organized time, and end up playing everyday. Therefore, they are already engaged in high-intensity jump training outside of our training sessions. So we are quite conservative with the actual amount of plyometrics that we do (if any, when appropriate).

It is important to note that athletes can still see great improvements in jump height without excessive plyometrics. The other components of the training program (Strength, force absorption, dynamic flexibility, etc.) will help immensely. We believe the majority of the benefits are coming from strengthening the posterior chain muscle groups (see the bodyweight strength training section below).

The duration of this training method varies between sessions, depending on the training emphasis of the day and cycle, as well as the athlete’s performance level.

Speed Training & Speed Technique (5-20 minutes)

Despite being incredibly sport-skilled players, most young athletes need to improve their athletic skills, such as their movement technique and efficiency. This is true particularly for running efficiency. However the amount of work ands methods used will depend on the sport. For example, we will not spend as much time on linear speed drills or running mechanics with hockey players, but soccer players will focus on this area.

For linear speed athletes, instruction will focus on teaching them to drive their arms back, rather than across their bodies. Even though most sports involve only short sprints, we work on sprint technique and we focus on accelerations and movement transition (from lateral to linear, etc.).

The exact training methods require a much longer and more in-depth article that we will bring to you in the future.

The duration of this training method varies between sessions, depending on the training emphasis of the day and cycle, as well as the athlete’s performance level.

Agility Training & Movement Technique (10 minutes)

This is an area of training where we are starting to see significant changes to the traditional pre-set agility drills. In beginner athletes, conservative drills, basic movement training (i.e. lateral movements) and traditional strength exercises will be sufficient for improving their agility. Simply put, they will be better able to stop, cut, and change direction by getting stronger and by practicing efficient movement skills.

Deceleration is a key component to agility training, as well as to force production. Deceleration can be incorporated into agility drills by focusing on what Peter Twist calls “braking”. For a great video on Deceleration training, we recommend the Parisi School’s video available from www.parisischool.com. Again, this topic needs an entire article for itself.

For advanced athletes, you might want to go beyond traditional agility training (like box runs). For example, we've progressed from basic “set” (“closed”) agility drills to CHAOS training. CHAOS training is the training method created by Jim Liston and Robert Dos Remedios of Southern California. We do a lot of mirror drills with one player trying to elude another. Each drill is short in duration (almost always less than 10 seconds). For more on CHAOS Training read Issue #.

The duration of this training method varies between sessions, depending on the training emphasis of the day and cycle, as well as the athlete’s performance level.

Bodyweight Strength (10 minutes)

If you don’t have access to a weight room, you can still make significant increases in strength, especially for young female athletes. We use a wide range of single-leg bodyweight exercises for advanced training (lunges, step-ups, and squats) and some stability ball exercises (see grrlAthlete.com Issue #40 for examples).

We focus on training the glutes and hamstrings (the posterior chain). By training the hamstrings, you can significantly reduce ACL injuries and hamstring tears.

When training as a team, we have the athletes do the training together to increase team cohesiveness. Each player counts the reps together when possible, thus promoting team building and draws an increased effort from the players. But those are just my observations.

Core Endurance (5 minutes)

We finish each session with a little more time on core endurance. For example, we might hold abdominal bridges and side bridges for single reps of 10, 30, 60 seconds or more (depending on the athlete’s ability and their areas of weakness).

For advanced athletes and advanced conditioning, we combine some conditioning intervals with core endurance. Dr. Stuart McGill has pointed out that taller athletes often incur low-back problems because the athlete can't maintain spine stability while breathing heavily due to heavy exertion. So we do a little bit of conditioning to get the athletes breathing heavy and then do some core endurance.

Please note that all components of this routine are completed in a conservative manner and are based on individual abilities and assessments.

We implement a lot of informal feedback systems between athletes and coaches. For example, I try and talk to each athlete prior to training about injuries, fatigue, and their training and competition schedules. We also perform testing several times each year to gauge the effectiveness and appropriateness of the training program.

To learn more about training female athletes, we recommend our book, The Secrets of Female Strength & Conditioning.

3 – The Ultimate Fat Loss Package for Women

What is one nutritional secret of all lean, athletic women? They eat several small meals each day.

Okay, so this isn’t really a secret to anyone that has read about fat loss, but a new study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that eating 6 times per day was associated with eating fewer calories per day, lowering cholesterol levels, and lowering post-meal insulin levels.

Combine an increased meal frequency with an increased protein and fiber intake, and you’ll see your body composition improve rapidly. We cover how to make these changes in our new weight loss e-book, The Simple Way to Lose Weight.

Our new e-book, The Simple Way to Lose Weight is the perfect entry level fat loss product and will take you step-by-step and day-by-day through the early stages of weight loss and lifestyle change.

If losing fat is your goal for 2005, then you’ll love my comprehensive day-by-day guideline to finally achieve weight loss success. We’ve literally put together an 84-day plan for you to follow, telling you precisely what action to take each day to get you closer to your goal.

The contents of the book include:

·        Lifestyle Review

·        Self-Contract

·        33 Simple Lifestyle Tips to Lose Fat

·        Eat This, Not That

·        FAQ & Simple Answers

·        Goal Setting

·        Workout Instructions

·        Beginner Workouts

·        Intermediate Workouts

·        Advanced Workouts

·        84-Day Guide

·        Exercise Descriptions

·        Exercise Photos so that you’ll know exactly how to do the workouts!

“Congratulations on your new E-book, The Simple Way to Lose Weight! I think you have put together an amazing guide for anyone looking for a healthy way to get in shape and lose body fat. I really enjoyed the easy to follow format, especially the "33 Simple Tips" and the "Eat This Not That" sections. It is obvious that you have tons of practical experience in all of the sections of the book. The information is realistic, current and I am sure will provide your readers with the results they are looking for. Good work, I look forward to reading your E-book success stories!”
--
Dr. Stacy Irvine
B.Sc. Kin, M. Sc., D.C., C.S.C.S.
Doctor of Chiropractic
www.totum.ca

The Simple Way to Lose Weight is only available as an electronic e-book (you’ll have to print it out at home or at work), but that’s the only way I could keep the price so low. Please let me know if you have any other questions about the book or ordering information. This one is going to help thousands of women finally reach their fat loss goals!

To order The Simple Way to Lose Weight, click on this link: www.simple-fat-loss.com

P.S.

You can also upgrade and take advantage of the Ultimate Weight Loss package for women. This includes a copy of The Simple Way and ShapeShift (our advanced female fat loss book). Purchase ShapeShift at the normal price you’ll also receive a free electronic copy The Simple Way to Lose Weight. So we’ll send you both books by email and ship you a hardcopy of ShapeShift at no extra cost. 

Click here to order ShapeShift and get the Ultimate Weight Loss Package for Women.