The End Is Nigh

On my last drive home from work, I received the signal that every beach player dreads.  Leaves falling off of trees.  This momentous occasion for most people marks the time for pumpkin flavored everything, the affinity toward hoodies, but for beach players it basically means that summer and the beach season itself is now over.  (Here is Chicago the weather is still insanely nice for some reason, but regardless of that, many players have packed it in looking forward toward indoor season.)

But with the end of one thing comes the beginning of another.  I previously talked about physical preparations you can make in the off season that can pay huge dividends toward next year, but I want to add a few things to that list that you will inevitably procrastinate on.

Vitamin D

This is big one for multiple reasons.  Vitamin D is the number 1 vitamin deficiency in the US.  It is critical in maintaining many bodily functions as well as warding off any potentially serious complications.  Our evolutionary background has allowed us to produce Vitamin D by absorbing the sun's UVB rays (no, there is not any Vitamin D IN sunlight.  Vitamin D gets produced by your skin).  Credit this deficiency to work days that take place during day light hours, and poor diet.

Lucky for you, you know that through sun exposure (i.e. beach volleyball) you can easily obtain 90% of the Vitamin D you need.  The science on how much any individual needs and can absorb is still a bit fuzzy and your weight, genes, and even location on Earth factors into what you need.  A very general rule of thumb says that for every 25 lbs of weight you should be getting 1000 IU of Vitamin D.  So a 150 lb me should be aiming to get 6,000 IU daily (150/25 = 6, 6 x 1000 = 6,000).

Insufficient Vitamin D intake has been linked to seasonal affective disorder aka "winter depression", where a lackadaisical numbness of unmotivated nonchalance underwhelms you.  Winter can be cyclical time for good or bad.  Not getting enough Vitamin D making you less motivated in turn will make you work out less, eat less healthy, and continually compound on itself.  If you start building good habits now, you will be able to get the work out you need, boost your metabolism and endorphin and in turn your mental state.  Keep in mind though that Vitamin D is not a magic pill to cure this disorder.  Sunlight is also a big factor which directly affects your pineal gland or "third eye", whose hormone secretion is directly affected by sunlight exposure.

One thing to be cautious about is that the Vitamin D consumption goes hand in hand with Magnesium consumption.  Vitamin D needs Magnesium to be converted into its active form, so if you are Magnesium deficient (like most people are in the US), taking just Vitamin D will exacerbate this problem, and many people have reported adverse effects when taking Vitamin D.  But don't run out to your nearest drug store and pick up the first bottle of Magnesium you can find.

Magnesium supplementation, can be a bit tricky.  The cheap version, magnesium oxide, is essentially useless to you.  What you need is chelated magnesium so it can be readily absorbed by your body.  In the next blog post I'll talk more about chelates, how they work with magnesium supplements, and how you can work this in with your beach season.

Prime, Perform, Recovery

By now you've probably seen those Gatorade commercials promoting their relatively new G-Series line of products.  Gatorade wanted to expand and find their products in the hands of athletes every step of the way from the pre-game warm up, to the post-game cool down.  And as tempting as "energy gummies" and protein sports drinks were, I've decided to take a different route.  Here is my customized "G-Series", tailored to do everything that Gatorade's line promises to do without excessive sugar levels, or unnecessary additives, preservatives, or food dyes.

Prime:

There are two ways to look at this really.  There is the day before physical activity, and the immediate moments before physical activity.  Surely you know of long distance runners carbo-loading the day before a big race.  Well the same concept applies for beach volleyball, except I usually try to do equal parts complex carbs and veggies.  But this is the less interesting and less relevant version of the 'prime' aspect.

About 3 hours before I anticipate playing, I take two supplements: one 1000 mg fish oil concentrate, and 8-12 mg of astaxanthin (depending on how long I anticipate playing and how hot/strong the UV intensity is that day).  The only reason why I take the fish oil is so that it can compliment the astaxanthin, which it is fat soluble.  Astaxanthin is an uber-potent antioxidant, doubles as an anti-inflammatory, and cherries on top are that it acts as a natural sunscreen that protects you from the inside out (so no need to lace your skin with harmful chemicals), AND it has be shown to improve physical endurance through its antioxidative properties and by increasing your lipid metabolism.  Basically it tells your body to burn the fat you already have stored in your body before burning through the glucose in your muscles.

Finally, I get as much water an electrolytes into my system.  Potassium is rather easy to come by in the form of a banana or orange juice, but I usually take one 400 mg Magnesium pill just before I play.

Perform:

As athletes all we've ever known growing up is Gatorade or Powerade.  We had no reason to think that they weren't good for us because there was no other option to make us doubt, but the time has come that more and more options are making their way into the mainstream, and although I do like to see some healthier options made available like coconut water, I still prefer my own homemade sports drink.

It is always a plus to know all the ingredients that go into what you ingest and where they came from, and so my go-to has been the following.

Per 32 oz.
2-3 green tea bags
1 lemon cut into eighths, or 1 lime and 1/2 lemon cut into eighths
1.5-2 tbls of raw organic honey
a pinch of salt (about 1/8 tsp)

Only brew roughly 26 oz of green tea since you will need room to add the fruits to your container.

When it comes simple sugars, there are 3 main ones that you can and should consume:  fructose, sucrose, and glucose (you could also throw dextrose in the mix too, but it just gets converted into glucose when it enters your body), and all 3 are found in fruits and vegetables, so if you forget to make your own sports drink, be sure to check the ingredients list of whatever you buy and be wary of any sweeteners that aren't the 4 mentioned above.  The only artifical sweetener I approve of is Stevia.

Recovery:

Here comes the fun part.  Even though Gatorade Recovery may bolster 16 g of protien it also contains 40 g of sugar.  Yea, no thanks.  I've never been big on protein shakes, or any of the behemoth size containers of various protein powders.  I'm not saying they don't work, it's just not my cup of tea.

But every week you can find one large of food in my fridge:  quinoa.  As a vegetarian I don't have the luxury of getting a steak burrito at Chipotle and calling it a day.  Although all vegetables have protein in them, most of them are incomplete, but not quinoa.  Toss in some black beans, red peppers, tomatoes, onions and hot sauce and I got everything I need after a long day at the beach.  It is very filling to stave off any crazed runs for junk food, and has plenty of protein (8g per cup).  Add in the black beans and you can take in at least 12 g of protein alone in one serving.

When it comes to recovery, I'm a big advocate of loading up on nutrients to allow your body's natural healing processes to operate at its optimal levels, so  when my body is really hurting there is two things that I gotta have.  Spirulina and chlorella.  I usually take 1.5 tsp in a fruit smoothie, and just take the chlorella in pill form.  They are both complete proteins, and super dense nutritionally, but that isn't why I continue to take them.  These two algae based foods increase your body's nitric oxygen, which in turn help prevent soreness by giving your muscles plenty of oxygen to recover after going through several hours of anaerobic exercise.  There is probably more I could say about them, but I have never been sore the next day after having both, which is key in helping me continue my training an conditioning.

It's a hard knock life: The beach volleyball diet

For the casual fan, beach volleyball is an immensely entertaining fast paced game featuring amazing athletic ability.  To the untrained eye, it may seem like the toughest part of the game is all the physical training that gets put into it to compete at a high level.  And then you get home, starved for anything to fill the bottomless pit that is your stomach.  If you aren't trying to eat everything in site after a long day of playing, then you aren't trying hard enough.

Of all of the tuck jumps, all of the sprints, all of the wall sits, plyos, and crunches, nothing is as tough as maintaining a healthy diet as a beach volleyball player in my opinion.  Beach volleyball offers a perfect storm of conditions that leads to extremely high amounts of calories burned.

1) You have high temperature conditions and direct exposure to the sun.
2) Added resistance, in the form of sand, inhibiting your every move.
3) Short bursts of explosive movements and sprints

Put it all together and you are burning roughly 1000-1200 calories in 2 hours of game play.  For an average day of 6 games at about 20 minutes a game would give you this number if you are in the 150 lb to 170 lb range.  If you weigh more, and play longer, it won't be rare to exceed 2000 or even 3000 calories in one day.  I also bike to and from the beach, a 20 mile total, (with about 15-20 lbs of gear on my back) each time I play, with a round trip time of roughly an hour and a half.  That round trip too burns around 1000 calories. as I usually bike at a feverish pace, not only as a warm up as I go to the beach but also so that I can get ahead of the oblivious motorists and keep them aware to watch for bicyclists like myself.

Here are some of the sources I checked with to estimate how many calorie you burn while playing.
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/calories_burned.asp
http://calories-burned.findthedata.org/q/562/30/How-many-calories-do-you-burn-Volleyball-beach
http://www.healthdiscovery.net/links/calculators/calorie_calculator.htm
http://www.livestrong.com/article/449512-how-many-calories-are-lost-in-volleyball/

At the end of the day my body could be running a tab upwards of 4000 calories burned (it is definitely not out of the ordinary for me to spend 5, 6, or even 7+ hours at the beach, granted that not every minute spent was actually playing.  Some time is spent waiting for the next game, as well as breaks in between).  So when you put it in those terms, eating multiple burritos, boxes of cereal, bags of chips, and tons of fruit juices may seem totally justified, but as my impeccable youth has worn off, I have heeded the advice that has been spat at me for years and years:  You can easily waste all the effort you put into a workout if you don't eat right.

The problem with "eating right" is that the FDA, and the major food corporations (as well as any other major corporation that contributes to the pollution of the environment of the food we eat), are making it increasingly difficult to just grab items off the shelf without having to look multiple times at the nutrition label and ingredients list.  Additives, added "natural" and artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and the ever present risk of GMO's, make a healthy diet look like trying to walk through a mine field with a blindfold on.  So you must do your own research, look up ingredients, ask the Google machine, "what are the benefits of _____", "what are the health risks of _______", "what are healthy alternatives to ________".  As we now live in a world of information, ignorance has increasingly become a choice.

I have finally started (and trust me I'm only at the beginning of this transformation), my new path to an improved diet.  My recommendations for you would be to start small.  Start with the 1 or 2 most unhealthy things you consume off the top of your head without having to do any research.  We all have our vices, and the uber-rich landscape of sugar filled products should give you plenty to pick from whether it be cookies, ice cream, pop (or for those of you who refer to it as "soda"), candy, or "snacky" foods, just cut them out cold turkey.

After that, do your research.  Find the next 1 or 2 worst items in your diet that you probably didn't think were that bad.  A friend recently posted this on facebook, and it is a great read that should not only enlighten but it also gives good recommendations for alternatives.

8 Foods The People Think Are Healthy (But Aren't)

As I like to say in reference to my training, "You gotta break down to build up".  So now that you've cut back, what are you going to replace those foods with?  Believe it or not this is the easy part.  Well, picking what foods to insert into your diet that is.  You already know what you should be eating.  You know that section of the store you've been ignoring, the vegetables?  Yeah, there's your answer.  Becoming a recently converted vegetarian about a year ago, has been a huge boost to my health.  I now look at it not so much as "not eating meat", but simply "eating vegetables".  Between meat and carbs, the average American diet probably only has room for about 5-10% vegetables, but adding this you diet will fuel you body with natural sugars and fiber, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, vitamins and amino acids for recovery, as well as protein.  That's right, there's protein in vegetables, all be it lower amounts that is often "incomplete", but it comes fat and cholesterol free.

Now back to the dilema.  After burning so many calories, how do we even come close to breaking even, or just under without eating junk food?  Well the first few hours after a workout are the most important ones.  This is when you are most vulnerable, on the verge of passing out, willing to fight a small child for an ice cream cone if it were the last one available.  Not only that but I've found in the following article that eating carbs after a workout interferes with you body's ability to burn fat and produce its own natural HGH.

Post-Workout Foods That Promote Slimness

Here is another great share I found on facebook that I'll plan to use to my advantage post workouts and playing, to stave off rabid hunger.

After all hunger is simply the transmission of your brain telling you that you need to eat because the volume within your stomach has been unoccupied for a long time.  Fill it up, and your brain shuts up.

Still we need to keep on muscle while keeping fat to a minimum.  So let me introduce you to your new best friends:  quinoa and chia seeds.  They are similar to rice or other grains but are complete proteins that also expand when ingested.  Couscous also contains protein but isn't complete so you will need to fill in the gaps of the amino acids you are missing, but is an easy to make cheap alternative.

I'm sure that you thought this was going to be just another health rant, but this is really just the beginning of having a well rounded diet to help give you the most bang for your buck when you workout or play.  You still need to get essential fatty acids (or EFA's), drink plenty of water, get lots of magnesium as it helps fuel over 300 bodily processes every day it it becomes depleted as you take in more vitamin D (which you get plenty of from the sun), as well as adequate rest for your tired body.  Once you do this on a consistent basis, only then are you going to start looking like a "freak athlete" on the beach, but this road to greatness is filled with lots of temptation and years of poor eating habits haven't made it any easier.


Final note:  If you ever need help assembling your diet, I highly recommend using this site...

http://nutritiondata.self.com/

It gives you all the info you need with great graphical visualizations to help you comprehend the effectiveness or lack thereof for different foods, and how you can fix that.

Be lazy and feel good about it

In the coming days and weeks I'll be expanding and adding on additional information about training and conditioning tips during pre-season, mid-season, and off-season, as well as other health and nutrition tips to keep your body at the ready.  But there has mostly been a singular mindset toward readying athletes for competition, that being the preparation, drilling and conditioning that takes place just before whatever event it is that you are working toward.  Once the event is over though very little attention is payed toward what should be done.  You are simply on your own, and this is a very dangerous time that could leave your body in "debt" the next time it wants to prepare for the next competition.

You should put as much time and attention into what you do in the immediate 24 hours after exercise whether that be a tournament or training session, from what you eat to how you body reacts and feels.  Unfortunately the latter is something you can only gain from experience, but hopefully you will heed the advice of others and not push your body when it really needs time to recover.

I'll admit that personally I was rather ignorant on this matter, and for a while as a teenager I felt invincible as I was able to endure 3 hour practices one day then go for a 2 mile run the next, but as we know it doesn't last forever.  That soreness that you feel the day after playing is a defense mechanism that was developed over thousands of years to tell you to SLOW THE HELL DOWN!  That pain is your body trying to tell you that if you don't stop staining itself then you are going to feel more pain.  That pain is a not so subtle way to immobilize you while your body repairs the micro-tears in your muscle fibers.

For the longest time and even as I was growing up, I was told that lactic acid build up in the muscle was to blame for the soreness that we experience during and after exercise, but that theory has essentially been discredited.  To learn more about why you need to stop blaming lactic acid (and your coach) click here.  Just  imagine that right before a big tournament you went for a 5k run.  That's basically what you are doing to your body when you don't give it enough time to rest and eat junk food.  You leave yourself in sub-prime condition, not fully able to handle the average workload that you are accustomed to.  So for now on, once you get home and shower off, turn on your favorite TV show or movie and just chill.  Your body will thank you later.