It's Not Just About the Pills- Doctors Learn More About Culinary Medicine
I heard a great story on NPR the other day about doctors attending culinary medicine classes at Tulane. You can hear it HERE.
I have several friends who are/were in med school and they said the amount of information regarding nutrition was abysmal. Granted, med school is like drinking from a firehose: doctors have to absorb and regurgitate an obscene amount of information. This isn't a jab at the smart men and women who apply themselves to the medical field.
The opening line of the story sums it up well:
“When it comes to premature death and disease, what we eat ranks as the single most important factor, according to a study in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Yet few doctors say they feel properly trained to dispense dietary advice. ”
The fault, in my non-med school opinion, lies with the curriculum taught at most (if not all) med schools; particularly, as the NPR story points out, because there is a "tsunami of obesity and diabetes" in which food can be either the medicine or the poison.
As a non-medical professional who works in the health field, my training primarily is in performance and nutrition. I whole-heartedly agree that doctors need more training in those realms. I'm certainly not a silly person who eschews modern medicine, but I do believe if there was more education regarding the impact that diet had on health, we would see a decrease in chronic disease as doctors would feel more comfortable addressing that aspect of patients' lives instead of prescribing medications. I've worked with and helped numerous people feel marvelous just by tweaking their diet. If you haven't read The Ron Reed Project, you should. (Note: the point of the article was to show his fat-loss accomplishment, but his cholesterol went down, his glucose numbers were great, and all the other blood markers that doctors check passed with flying colors.)
I've mentioned it before, my husband and I both have Lyme disease and have been in treatment for nearly a year now. Yes, we're both taking the pertinent medications to support our bodies and fight those pesky bacteria, but do you know what the first thing our doctor did? She looked at our diets, exercise habits, and sleep habits. We both had dietary changes to make to better support our battle-exhausted immune systems (and she commended us on our exercise habits- our profession calls for no less!). While those changes weren't a magic bullet, I do believe that they helped reduce the overall stress load and allow our bodies to fight more efficiently along with the medications.
I think it's fantastic that Drs. Oyola and Maker-Clark are heading up this pilot program; step by step and hopefully we'll see a shift in the medical education community! Next task will be education doctors in the benefits of strength and conditioning...
SAPT Summer Updates!
I hope your Thursday has been as busy as ours! The summer is in full swing here at SAPT and there's no sign of us slowing down anytime soon! Below are some of our highlights thus far.
- We just finished the first week of our new group fitness class, Happy Hour! The class is fast-paced and guaranteed to help you lose fat and work towards that rockin' body you've always wanted! Open to adults of all ability levels, we've structured the class to provide exercise variations for everyone and your first class is FREE! Individualization en masse! George Kalantzis, Cressey Performance's Group Fitness Instructor, just put out a fantastic blog post geared towards creating effective fitness classes. Check it out here.
- I'm not sure if you've heard, but we've infiltrated McLean! We're working out of Cypress Fitness and helping folks just like you get bigger, faster, and stronger! We've already served 26 sessions this week, more than doubling our week 1 numbers at our old Tysons facility. What are YOU waiting for? Book your evaluation today!
- The end of the spring sports season brought great performances out of some SAPT athletes. I've gotta give a huge shout out to Madison Pitcher Brian Eckert for helping his team with the 6A State Title. Also huge props to All-Met and two-time state Player of the Year Mitch Blackstone, as well as golf-standout Shannon Brooks on their amazing seasons! Brian will be pitching at Radford next year, Mitch will be catching at Cornell, and Shannon will be a Lady Volunteer down in Knoxville Tennessee!
- Mark your calendars for our 1st Ever Client Appreciation Barbeque! We'll be grillin' n chillin' at Providence Park Pavilion on July 25th from 1:00PM-5:00PM. We'll be celebrating our amazing clients and our 8 year anniversary at the same time. We'd love for YOU to come! Contact Coach Charlie at Charlie@saptstrength.com for more details!
Narrow-Stance Sumo Deadlift Form
One of the things that I find my distance clients tend to have trouble with is getting their deadlift form down without the help of a coach. Obviously you can never replace the feedback from a live coaching session, but if you stay objective about what you're doing, you can still have a pretty pull. Check out the video below as I delve into what I mainly look for when narrow-stance sumo pulling and common faults that I usually see.
P.S. Sorry for the vertical screen. Blame the camera man.
Decompressive Roll Progressions
Are you or your athletes stuck in a stat of extension in the lumbar spine? Then you may be a good candidate for decompressive roll variations to help allow better core. Check 'em out!
The Valsalva Maneuver and Shearing Forces
Yesterday one of my softball girls was deadlifting. She came up to me mid-session and told me that everything felt fine on the way up, but things were feeling real wonky on the way down.
I walked over to take a look at her form and see what was going on. To the untrained eye, her deadlift was on point. She was pulling sumo-style, with her knees set up right above her ankles. She was taking a deep breathe, bracing, and keeping the bar close to her body on the way up and on the way down. She wasn't squatting the weight and was actually performing a fantastic hip hinge and using her posterior chain to lift the weight. If everything was right, why did it feel so wrong?
This girl was pretty strong. She's been training with us for quite a while and was no stranger to deadlifts, but she was just coming back from her season and hadn't been as consistent with her strength work. With that comes some rustiness. I noticed she was exhaling pretty forcefully at the top of her lift. Essentially, she was losing the brace she was working so hard to attain at the beginning of the lift.
I told her everything looked great, but that she needed to pay attention to her breathing and wait until the weight was safely on the ground before she exhaled. She took the advice to heart, and badda-bing-badda-bang, everything felt good again. The Valsalva Maneuver at it's finest.
The Valsalva Maneuver
The Valsalva Maneuver is a technique that should be employed for most of the compound, multi-joint movements, especially heavy squats and deadlifts. This technique entails filling your lungs with air, which creates a large amount of intra-abdominal pressure, and holding it while performing the lift. It's an incredibly important concept to master and we include bracing drills early on in our clients programs to help teach this. Performed properly, it should also feel like you're constipated and you're trying to push it all out the bottom end. It's always entertaining teaching the valsalva maneuver to a new client after I've had lunch, as it usually includes an unexpected fart or two...
During squats and deadlifts, the force of the weight and gravity is constantly trying to rip you apart. The goal of strength training is to resist these forces and make you a more resilient human being. There are a total of 76 joints in your spine and pelvis, the skeletal core of your body that craves stability if you are to perform optimally, which experience a mix of compressive and shearing forces while under load. These shearing forces were the king of the show in yesterday's deadlift session.
As you can see from the depiction above, shearing forces are forces that act on a joint parallel to the joint surface and attempt to cause the joint to slide out of position. The valsalva maneuver counteracts these shearing forces by exerting pressure on the joints to resist displacement. Our athlete in the above scenario was achieving a nice, tight brace at the beginning of the lift, but was expelling all her air at the top, losing this spinal stability and allowing the shearing forces to take over on the way down. By cuing her to hold her brace, she was able to maintain this intra-abdominal pressure, thus maintaining spinal stability throughout the movement.
Keep this in mind the next time you experience back funkiness while performing your deadlifts. Are you bracing? Are you maintaining that brace throughout the entire movement? As usual, the devil is in the details.
Athlete Spotlight: Amanda The Unassuming Iron Maiden, Round 2
I've written about Amanda before (you can read it here) and her Iron Escapades; I highly recommend reading it so you can absorb a bit of her background. Last post, back in December, chronicled her first powerlifting meet. What that post didn't convey, at least not adequately, was the craziness behind the scene. The meet was enormous, poorly organized, and rife with miscommunication or complete lack thereof. As I mentioned in the first post, Amanda handled it like a champ, but it definitely affected her performance-- not to mention the 2-week sinus infection right before the meet. Nevertheless, she fearlessly powered through and still managed to have a successful meet.
This past Saturday was her second power meet. She. Tore. It. Up.
She came in rarin' to go. She was confident, upbeat, and excited to attack the barbell. Jarrett would say that she had the "optimal arousal level."
Not only did she go 9 for 9 (meaning she hit all of her attempts in all three lifts) but she hit meet PRs for each lift!!
Squat: 148.8 lb
Bench: 93.7 lb
Deadlift: 187.4 lb
THIS is what happens when you train consistently and when you train with intensity. In case you didn't read the first post, Amanda started with us nearly 2 years ago and couldn't do a pushup on the floor, her squat was around 45lbs (with the proper depth and form), and her deadlift was a struggle. Now, that barbell doesn't know what hit it when she's done with it.
Want to know some of the nitty-gritty behind her strength building? Check back on Friday and we'll go over some of the programming techniques that you can test out yourself!
And as a bonus, her wonderful boyfriend Sean (who also competed and dominated) compiled all the lifts in one video if you're interested.
