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An Athlete's Legal Aid: Caffeine
Tweet Share on Facebook July 31, 2008 Comment (6)Like most people, I prefer that my day include caffeine—in my case, the equivalent of a few cans of Diet Pepsi. That preference extends to my workout routine: I can't remember the last time I took a run or hit the gym without first taking at least a few swigs of soda to clear my head and jump-start my legs. And when I race, I opt for caffeinated chocolate gels over the nonjuiced variety. I'm not breaking any rules—the World Anti-Doping Agency, the group charged with making Tour de France riders and Olympic athletes pee in cups, took caffeine off the prohibited substance list in 2004. But I've wondered what kind of a boost I'm really getting from caffeine and if it has any downside.
I'm not alone in my habit, for sure, either as an American or an athlete. The average U.S. adult consumes 3 mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight daily (here's a good source for finding out how much caffeine your chosen poison contains), and a recent survey of British athletes showed that 33 percent of track and field athletes and 60 percent of cyclists consumed caffeine for the purpose of boosting performance. Most studies have indeed shown that caffeine enhances performance (by as much as 20 percent), though because the people getting caffeine in a controlled trial can probably feel it, it's possible they may be imagining the athletic boost.
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275 Minutes a Week: Weighing the Need for So Much Exercise
Tweet Share on Facebook July 28, 2008 Comment (14)There's been some discouraging news about the standard prescription for weight loss—diet and exercise—lately. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a study that compared the low-carb, low-fat, and Mediterranean diet, and found that none worked screamingly well. Now comes another study showing that of a group of about 200 women who were given advantages most dieters don't have, like free group meetings, telephone support, and even a home treadmill, only about a quarter were able to keep off 10 percent of their body weight after two years. And those who did keep it off exercised about 275 minutes a week, which translates to 40 minutes every day or 55 minutes five days a week. I talked to study coauthor John Jakicic, from the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, about what the research means for dieters.
For keeping weight off, how important is exercise?
Short term, everyone [in the study] seemed to do well as long as they exercised. To sustain weight loss, exercise becomes more and more important. The best predictor of who kept the weight off was physical activity, but those people were still being pretty vigilant about their diets. -
How Much Should You Worry About Post-Workout Eating?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2008 Comment (4)Olympian Dara Torres recently attributed some of her amazing swimming success to an amino acid supplement that she feels helps her recover better. You may wonder if you need to pay the same attention to what you put in your mouth after a workout. If your exercise routine consists of a 30-minute walk three times a week, just make sure you get some water or other fluid after you work out. But if you're training for a marathon, say, or a century bike ride, or putting in a lot of time at the gym lifting weights, you might want to pay at least some attention to what you eat to get the most out of your workouts. Still, you don't need to buy pricey recovery drinks (which I wrote about last year) or special supplements.
When you work out hard or long enough, you deplete the body's glycogen stores. You may also be breaking down muscle tissue if you're lifting heavy weights or doing an endurance workout that includes running down hills or doing interval training, says Monique Ryan, a nutritionist and author of Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes.
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Wii Sports Beats Sofa But Loses to Real Athletics
Tweet Share on Facebook July 23, 2008 Comment (7)When I wrote earlier this year about how video games might prove to be a good on-ramp to the world of exercise, I couldn't find any studies looking specifically at the Nintendo Wii's games and how they stacked up (from a fitness perspective) against the sports they are based on. That's now changed. The American Council on Exercise has just released a small study suggesting that the Wii Sports games are better than sitting on your butt but not as good as doing the sports themselves.
In descending order of caloric burn, Wii's version of boxing burned an average of 7.2 calories a minute, tennis burned 5.3 calories a minute, baseball about 4.5, bowling about 3.9, and golf about 3.1. (That means 30-minute workouts burn 216, 159, 135, 117, and 93 calories, respectively.) That's less than the real-life activity in all cases; real bowling actually burns about twice as much as the Wii version. And only Wii's version of boxing counted as strenuous enough to meet the ACE's guidelines for endurance-building exercise.
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A Low-Carb Diet Works—If It Suits You
Tweet Share on Facebook July 17, 2008 Comment (4)Picking a diet because it worked for your friend (or a celebrity) always seemed to me like borrowing their clothes: Unless the two of you are built very similarly, it's not going to work out well. So the recognition—in the New England Journal of Medicine, no less!—that individual preferences should be taken into account when planning a weight-loss program is a welcome one. After all, you can lose weight following pretty much every diet on the bookstore shelf. The problem is that unless the diet fits your lifestyle, you're not likely to stick to it for the long term, and the weight will creep back on. "You want a diet you can live with," says Meir Stampfer, senior author of the diet study in the NEJM and associate director of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Channing Laboratory in Boston.
The study, out this week, found that among moderately obese people in Israel, mostly men, the Mediterranean diet (which emphasizes fish, sources of "good" fat like olive oil and nuts, veggies, and whole grains) and the low-carb Atkins diet actually outperformed a low-fat diet (no more than 30 percent of daily calories from fat) at promoting weight loss over a two-year period. And, the three diets produced similar improvements in things like liver function and indicators of cardiovascular health, which have been a concern for the Atkins diet. So all of the eating plans look like viable options from both a weight-loss and health standpoint, the authors say.
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How Athletes Can Breathe a Little Easier About Pollution
Tweet Share on Facebook July 10, 2008 CommentI've got exercise-induced asthma, and I'm sure it's not helping me any that my running workouts are usually during rush hour and take me over the Brooklyn Bridge and its car-choked roadway. Pollution is a concern for all outdoor exercisers, for performance reasons and especially for its negative effects on the heart as well as the lungs.
That's especially true for athletes preparing for the upcoming Olympics, where the Beijing smog is infamous and the stakes are much higher than the personal satisfaction I get from hoofing it across the bridge within one Billy Idol song. (One scientist is even encouraging athletes to wear masks when they're not competing, and the world record holder in the marathon said he won't race in Beijing because of the bad air, heat, and humidity.)
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Aiming for the Olympics, Regardless of Age
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2008 Comment (9)I recently wrote a friend that if I never beat my personal best time in an Ironman triathlon, set in 2005, I'll be fine with it. But after reading in the New York Times Magazine about Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer who this week is competing to go to her fifth Olympic Games, I'm thinking I shouldn't give up on my 36-year-old self quite yet. Torres has a superb chance of making the team and winning a medal in Beijing. And she's not even the oldest athlete at the Olympic swimming trials; Susan von der Lippe is 42. At the track and field trials, pole vaulter Jeff Hartwig has already made the Olympic team, at 40. I called Indiana University kinesiologist Joel Stager, who was quoted in the NYT Magazine article, to chat more about the issue of age and performance. (He knows of which he speaks; the 55-year-old swimmer is the fastest 50- and 100-meter freestyler age 55 to 59 in the United States. With his 100-meter time of about a minute flat, he regularly beats high schoolers.)
What physical changes affect athletic performance as someone ages?
When you compare [older folks] to people who are inactive, they look the same: a gradual loss of muscle mass and a loss of central nervous system activity. But the things we used to think were aging-related may be more related to that lack of activity [that occurs as most of us age]. I don't know that we have the answers to what happens when someone maintains a high level of activity; Dara is running the experiment for us.
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