How to Choose the Best Protein Bar

Thanks to the fun group of friends that joined us in the park this morn­ing! We had a nice break from the rain, but made up for it with sweat. We hope you enjoyed the work­out as much as we did… and we hope to see you out in the park with us next month! Sign up today →

Excerpted from Active​.com

We spend more than $1.5 bil­lion each year on food bars—carbohydrate, pro­tein, meal-replacement, even gender-specific. Is the dough being spent a huge waste, or worse, cre­at­ing huge waists?

We found a guide on Active​.com that out­lines dif­fer­ent bar types and how they can help, or hurt, you. Today we will focus on Recov­ery (pro­tein) bars.

Recov­ery Bar (AKA Protein)

THE BASICS: High in muscle-building pro­tein, these bars are mar­keted as much to the Gold’s Gym bench-pressing crowd as to pedal-pushing cyclists look­ing for post ride and post-training recovery.

PURPOSE: Helps usher carbs back into your mus­cles after a hard work­out, and pro­vides amino acids to rebuild your mus­cles. These sup­ple­ments work quickly so your body begins recov­ery immediately.

LOOK FOR: Qual­ity pro­tein in the form of whey, milk and soy. There is much debate over which is best, but many bars con­tain a blend, which may help deliver the ben­e­fits of each.

WATCH OUT FOR: Too many calories—some con­tain as many as 500. These bars are essen­tially a small meal—one can have as much pro­tein as 3 ounces of chicken and as many carbs as a cup of brown rice.

Tune in next week when we review Meal Replace­ment Bars!

PRICEMM

BY KATHLEEN

“PRICEMM” Catchy, isn’t it? PRICEMM is the mnemonic device to remem­ber how to treat a mild sports injury. A mild sports injury may involve pain, swelling, lim­ited range of motion, and/or loss of strength.

Pro­tec­tion: This means stop­ping the activ­ity to pre­vent fur­ther injury. Pain is the body’s way of say­ing some­thing is wrong.

Rest: After an acute injury, use of the injured body part should be lim­ited for 24 hours. Rest­ing the injured body part will decrease fur­ther tis­sue damage.

Ice: Crushed ice should be applied directly to the injured body part imme­di­ately after the injury occurs. Ice should be applied for 20 min­utes every one to four hours. Crushed ice with a small amount of water in a zip top bag or bag of frozen peas or corn can be applied directly to the skin. These are pre­ferred over com­mer­cial gel packs, which can get much colder. If a gel pack is used, place a cloth or towel between the pack and skin to avoid frost­bite. Do not apply heat with the first 72 hours of a sports injury.

Com­pres­sion: Direct pres­sure, through the use of wraps or braces, can limit swelling. Check with your health­care provider for the appro­pri­ate method for your injury.

Ele­va­tion: Rais­ing the injured body part above the heart helps drain extra fluid away from the injury site.

Motion: After 24 hours, you can begin mild range of motion exer­cise, but this should be done with­out plac­ing weight on the injury and in such a way not to cause severe pain.

Med­i­cine: Check with your health­care provider to see if med­i­cine is appro­pri­ate for you and your injury.

Source: Children’s Health­care of Atlanta Sport Med­i­cine Pro­gram. For more infor­ma­tion on the pro­gram, visit www​.choa​.org/​s​p​o​r​t​s​med

You Did It!

You sur­vived a hell­ish 5-day week! Nasty humid­ity, high temps, bru­tal work­outs, and not a sin­gle rest day. What will we think of next?

How are you feel­ing? Will you be back for more next week?

Get some rest this week­end, eat well, drink lots of water, and we’ll see you all on Monday.

For­ever yours,

The train­ers

French Fries = Bad
Yogurt = Good

BY MARY ELLEN

A recent New York Times arti­cle high­lights the find­ings of a study con­ducted by some Nerds (note the cap­i­tal “N”) at Har­vard who ana­lyzed the fac­tors that influ­ence weight gain among well-educated men and women who were healthy and not obese at the start of the study. Here are a few of the highlights:

• “This study shows that con­ven­tional wis­dom — to eat every­thing in mod­er­a­tion, eat fewer calo­ries and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach … What you eat makes quite a dif­fer­ence. Just count­ing calo­ries won’t mat­ter much unless you look at the kinds of calo­ries you’re eating.”
• The aver­age par­tic­i­pant gained 3.35 pounds every four years, for a total weight gain of 16.8 pounds in 20 years.
• The foods that resulted in weight loss or no gain when con­sumed in greater amounts dur­ing the study: fruits, veg­eta­bles and whole grains. Com­pared with those who gained the most weight, par­tic­i­pants in the Nurses’ Health Study who lost weight con­sumed 3.1 more serv­ings of veg­eta­bles each day.
• The foods that con­tributed to the great­est weight gain were not sur­pris­ing. French fries led the list: Increased con­sump­tion of this food alone was linked to an aver­age weight gain of 3.4 pounds in each four-year period.
• That yogurt, among all foods, was most strongly linked to weight loss was the study’s most sur­pris­ing dietary finding.
• Metab­o­lism takes a hit from refined car­bo­hy­drates — sug­ars and starches stripped of their fiber, like white flour.

There’s much more cov­ered in the arti­cle and the full report, includ­ing things like peanut but­ter (good!), sleep (get enough, but not too much), alco­hol (glass of wine is ok), and smok­ing (bad!).

Train Like the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

Read this arti­cle to under­stand the inspi­ra­tion behind today’s workout…

FROM STACK, pub­lished March 2005

For nearly a quarter-century, the U.S. Women’s National Soc­cer Team has been “the” team to beat, set­ting the bar for soc­cer excel­lence by win­ning numer­ous World Cup Cham­pi­onships and Olympic gold medals.

Now, with retir­ing soc­cer leg­ends Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy pass­ing the torch to young up-and-comers like Cat Red­dick and Abby Wambach, the future of U.S. women’s soc­cer is as bright as ever.

In addi­tion to the depar­ture of sev­eral mar­quee play­ers, head coach April Hein­richs recently resigned from her post. A major fig­ure in U.S. women’s soc­cer, Hein­richs will be greatly missed.

As a player, Hein­richs was instru­men­tal in the U.S. team’s vic­tory at the firstever Women’s World Cup in 1991. And as a coach she engi­neered the team’s gold medal per­for­mance at the 2004 Olympics. In one way or another, she has con­tributed to nearly every U.S. women’s team vic­tory over the past 15 years.

“I absolutely believe that con­di­tion­ing had a lot to do with our suc­cess in our final game in the Olympics,” Hein­richs says. “We had the old­est team in the Olympics. We had to play six games. Only one other team had to play six games. All the other teams played any­where from three to five games. So we played more games than any other team, and also played two over­time games.”

Sim­ply put, the dri­ving force behind Hein­richs’ great suc­cess is hard work.

“Our play­ers are on the field three to four hours a day, five to six days a week,” Hein­richs explains. While on the field, the team works on improv­ing fun­da­men­tals, skills and con­di­tion­ing, some­thing Hein­richs con­sid­ers a major fac­tor in their Gold Medal performance.

While the national team also takes part in some strength train­ing (pri­mar­ily upper body work and main­te­nance work with the legs), the spe­cial type of con­di­tion­ing that gets the team in peak shape can be described as “inter­val training.”

Accord­ing to Hein­richs, a six-to 10-week pro­gram fea­tur­ing a series of 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 mile inter­vals is ideal for that type of train­ing. Here’s a basic inter­val train­ing plan, rec­om­mended by Hein­richs, which you can follow.

• For the first two to three weeks use a 1/4 mile dis­tance. Then, for the next two to three weeks, use a 1/2 mile dis­tance and finally, for the last two to three weeks, a 3/4 mile distance.
• Per­form three to six rep­e­ti­tions at each dis­tance per inter­val train­ing ses­sion, and com­plete two to three ses­sions per week.
• Start by run­ning the des­ig­nated dis­tance as fast as you can. Record the time of the run, and divide the time by .8 and .9. The result is the Pace Time Range in which you must com­plete each inter­val run, so that you train at a pace that is 80 to 90 per­cent of your top speed for the distance.
• Fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of each inter­val run, rest for one to one and one-half times your actual run time. For exam­ple, if you run a 1/4 mile at top speed in 90 sec­onds, the time in which you must com­plete each 1/4 mile inter­val train­ing run is between 90/0.9 and 90/0.8 or 100–112.5 sec­onds. If you com­plete your first 1/4 mile run in 105 sec­onds, your rest time should be between 1 x 105 and 1.5 x 105 or 105–157.5 seconds.
• The same sequence as the exam­ple above should be used for each of the var­i­ous distances.

The over­all suc­cess of inter­val train­ing, accord­ing to Hein­richs, also depends on when dur­ing the sea­son you do the training.

“You don’t do inter­val train­ing at the start of your sea­son, you do it later,” she says. The rea­son? An ath­lete needs to build a strong aer­o­bic base before the sea­son, and before begin­ning an inter­val train­ing program.

You can build your aer­o­bic base through car­dio­vas­cu­lar train­ing in which an ele­vated heart rate is sus­tained for 20–30 min­utes. Exer­cises like jog­ging or rid­ing a sta­tion­ary bike for 20–30 min­utes are great exam­ples of car­dio­vas­cu­lar training.

“With that [aer­o­bic] base in place, then you start to do more of an inter­val train­ing period,” Hein­richs says.

Hein­richs also believes in the impor­tance of an ath­lete improv­ing upon his or her own abil­i­ties. The pace time of a team­mate should not be used as your base­line. It is impor­tant for you to set your own base­lines, and work to improve on pre­vi­ous performances.

“The best advice for any­one is to estab­lish your own base­line, and raise your own stan­dard every time,” she says.

Who is April Hein­richs?
An accom­plished player in her own right, Hein­richs was a key player on the 1991 World Cup Cham­pi­onship Team, and was the first woman to be inducted into the Soc­cer Hall of Fame. Set­ting the stan­dard at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina for future female stars like Mia Hamm and Cat Red­dick, Hein­richs was a three-time All-American, won three national cham­pi­onships dur­ing her col­lege career and was the first female soc­cer player to have her jer­sey retired. Now, with the com­ple­tion of her final sea­son as the head coach of the U.S. National Women’s Soc­cer Team, she has left a last­ing mark on U.S. women’s soccer.