Hey Everyone! For today’s Tips for Performance Tuesday I am going to be talking about supplements! Now before you recoil at the word supplement as most usually do let me talk a little bit about them and explain my stance of them (disclaimer: this part is opinion).
In the fitness world there is a broad spectrum of supplementation that athletes experiment with. Some only take one or two, and others have a “stack” of 20 supplements that costs them $300 a month. As with anything in life I believe that where is a happy medium in here and supplementation should vary based on your goals. The very nature of the word supplement implies that it is something in addition to what you consume naturally. Therefore, if you get enough of something in your diet there is no need to supplement it. For most of us who don’t plan on going to the Crossfit Games or playing professional football anytime soon this means that we don’t NEED to go overboard on supplements. I highly recommend talking to a doctor before trying any new or unique supplements. It is also important to note that the supplement industry is NOT regulated by the FDA, therefore the claims that a lot of these companies make are not clinically proven and ingredients are not as tightly controlled as you may think. When it comes to supplements you truly do get what you pay for and it is important to read the label! Some of the most common supplements you hear about people taking are: protein (whey, casein, and collagen), creatine, pre-workout, amino acids, glutamine, multi-vitamins, fish oil, turmeric, and beta-alanine. This list is by no means inclusive, as I said, this can become quite the rabbit hole. Now let’s get to facts. I will briefly cover what some of the most popular of the above actually do, and where to NATURALLY find them. Protein and amino acids: I’m lumping these two together because they both work hand in hand in our bodies. As you may know, in the sense we are talking about, protein is responsible for building and repairing tissue. It does a TON of other things but here we are mainly talking about muscle and join growth/health. Proteins are formed BY amino acids which fall into two categories, essential, and non-essential. Essential amino acids are not made by the body and must be taken in through our diet, non-essentials are made naturally by the body. The common protein supplements you will find are whey, casein, and collagen. Whey protein digests rapidly and is recommended to be taken within an hour of your workout. Casein protein digests very slowly and is commonly taken around bed time to support muscle growth and recovery overnight. Collagen protein is a little different in that it primarily targets your joins, skin, hair, and nails. Collagen has recently become pretty popular as a supplement in people looking to improve their joint health. Amino acid supplements are used by athletes with a high protein diet to increase recovery and muscle growth. When you understand how it works you can basically look at it as a supplement that is supplementing a supplement (say that 5 times fast). Now here’s the good news, you can get enough of ALL of those things in a healthy diet so please don’t fall into the trap of feeling that you need to take any of these to perform well. When getting these things in your diet look for what we call complete proteins, meaning that they contain all the essential (not made by the body) amino acids. These are mostly going to be animal products like meat, dairy, and eggs. Incomplete proteins are mostly going to be plant-based products (this does NOT mean they’re bad it just means you need to find the other amino acids somewhere else). If you’re vegan or vegetarian I have good news! Quinoa, hempseed, and buckwheat are also complete proteins! Talk to a nutrition expert (like Coach Audie or Leslie if you have more questions about this and if you’re eating enough protein). Moving on from protein, let’s talk creatine. Creatine is always a hot button issue in the fitness world and I would like to just give you guys facts about what it does and not cloud this paragraph with opinion or unproven claims. Simply put, creatine is natural substance that is found in your muscle cells. Your body stores is and it can make it from a combination of a couple amino acids, or it can be found in red meat and fish. The primary benefit of creatine (and creatine supplementation) is in a process called ATP recycling. In a VERY simple explanation, when you do anaerobic exercise (not using oxygen) such as heavy lifting, and sprinting your body gets its energy from ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). As your work harder your body strips one of the phosphates off and it becomes ADP, this is what makes you get tired and lose work capacity. Creatine is stored in your body as creatine phosphate so as you create ADP, creatine adds another phosphate, turning it back into ATP and giving you more work capacity. This is a very BASIC understanding of ATP recycling but this is why people supplement creatine (or why you should look for it in your diet. Excessive amounts of creatine tend to draw more water into your muscles (which makes you look bigger) but also means that you need to drink more water to stay properly hydrated. Supplementing with creatine is considered to be “safe” but please talk to your doctor before you start it if you are interested. Also, there are a LOT of horrible creatine products out there. If you want to buy some the ONLY ingredient in it should be creatine monohydrate, if there’s anything else in it don’t buy it. Speaking of terrible products, let’s quickly talk pre-workout. There’s a TON of pre-workouts on the market and most of them are extremely unhealthy. Obviously it’s main purpose is to give you energy to work out. If you want to take it, and a lot of people do, please read the label and look for one’s that aren’t filled with garbage chemical ingredients. My personal favorite is a really cool and hip product called black coffee, but that’s just me. Again, please be careful, every few years there’s a popular pre-workout that gets discovered to have dangerous ingredients or side effects (back to my point about no FDA regulation). To wrap things up, most of you have probably heard of multi-vitamins and fish oil. Multi-vitamins are used to supplement most of the micro-nutrients that we miss in our diet. It can be hard to eat a diet that’s “complete” with all of these such as iron, zinc, vitamin D, etc. and most people don’t disagree that multi-vitamins are a pretty good supplement to take. Again with these, you get what you pay for, and read the label. Fish oil is another one that a lot of people take to supplement their Omega 3’s which are considered to be a healthy fatty acid. Omega 3’s can also be found in flax seed, chia seeds, and walnuts. The purpose of Omega 3’s is supporting your cell structure and providing energy to your brain, heart, lungs, and boosting your immune system. Bottom line, there’s a ton of health benefits associated with omega 3 fatty acids and it’s not a controversial opinion that you should consume enough of them via a healthy diet or supplementation. Another one I’d like to hit quickly is turmeric. Turmeric is a spice (commonly found in curry) that has a lot of anti-inflammatory properties. A quick not, inflammation gets a bad rep but it’s not actually bad for you in the short term. Inflammation is what your body does to help fight disease, and repair injuries. However, chronic inflammation (mostly caused by a bad diet) and turmeric has been shown to reduce chronic inflammation which helps prevent heart disease, and cancer. You can probably recognize a few themes throughout this post and I want to highlight them again. First, we don’t NEED to supplement, we can find all of this stuff in a well-rounded healthy diet (it can however, be really hard and expensive to find all of these different foods and get the right levels of these various things). Next, the supplement industry is NOT regulated by the FDA so PLEASE be smart and talk to experts before you start taking random stuff. Social media is rife with promoting garbage products and people buy them because they see that their favorite athlete is taking them, don’t fall into that trap. And finally, talk to YOUR DOCTOR. I can’t stress this enough. Not all these things are right for everyone and it is important to talk to someone who knows your health history and all of the various other factors in your life. The reason we do Crossfit is to be healthy, look good, and crush everything life throws at us. That’s why I really want to stress the importance of just eating right, drinking water, and sleeping enough. As non-professional athletes we don’t NEED to be taking all these “performance enhancing” supplements if we are following the above guidance. We have a great resource in the gym in that we have a couple awesome nutrition coaches who are certified in this stuff so hit them up if this interests you and I’m sure they would love to get into it! Also, if you’re interested check out the book “SuperLife” by Darin Olien, he talks a lot about this stuff and has some great tips for finding a balanced diet in the world around us. Have a great day everyone!
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