On of my favorite bloggers, Dr, John Briffa, points us to an interesting study of 17 year olds. The study noted a correlation between carbohydrate craving (like the sugar in Gatorade) and lack of energy. There is some evidence linking eating too much bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and sugar to poor quality of sleep.

This brings us to another study at Stanford University linking sleep and athletic performance. Basically the study said if you don’t sleep enough, your performance suffers. Initially I filed the Stanford study in the Duh! folder, but in light of Dr. Briffa’s article linking eating to many carbohydrates and poor quality sleep, I pulled the Stanford study back out.

Here Dr. Briffa explains.

One of the effects of low blood sugar is to cause the body to attempt to top up blood sugar levels internally, through the release of sugar from the liver. To do this, the body can ramp up activity in the so-called ‘sympathetic nervous system’, which plays an integral part in the stress response. The body can also release stress hormones such as adrenaline (epinephrine) that simulate sugar release too.

An activated stress response ain’t so good for sleep. At the very best it will impair the depth of sleep and our ability to feel truly rested. Worse than that, though, is its habit of waking people up at about 3.30 – 4.00 am and then not letting them get back to sleep again until about half an hour before their alarm goes off.

I’ve found in practice that rectifying blood sugar imbalance with a ‘primal’, relatively low-carb diet does wonders for improving energy and mood. And within a couple of weeks, it will have usually sorted out any craving for the carbohydrate-rich foods that usually are the cause of the problem in the first place.

TAKE ACTION! Get sugar out of your life. Stay away from deserts in the dining hall, eliminate soda and sports drinks, skip the cereal at breakfast, leave the sugar out of your coffee, and skip fruit juices. You will be stronger, have more energy and feel more motivated. What’s not to like?

Most DIII women athletes work hard during practice. The Good athletes also spend time in the training room before and after practice taking care of their bodies. The Great athletes also take care of their bodies, minds and spirits off the field so they can practice and play at an extremely high level.

The reason I named this website The Yin Yang University is to highlight the importance of recovery in an athletes life. Most of an athletes life is spent outside the gym and off the field. If you don’t understand how your body recovers and you don’t support your recovery by doing the right things, friction builds physically, mentally and emotionally and at some point during your four years, you blow up. Recovery removes the friction and recharges you between practices, games, and seasons. If you have major points of friction in your life outside of your sport, work to reduce them. Some points of friction are unavoidable, you have no control over them, so you have to work around them and make sure you add in extra recovery.

TAKE ACTION! Start thinking outside the gym so you can play and practice harder inside it. Here are five areas to begin assessing your own recovery.

1. Sleep - It repairs and recharges your body, mind and spirit. If you skip sleep your body cannot build new muscle, your brain cannot assimilate new information and you are much more like to feel the effects of stress and get depressed or anxious.
2. Eat - the right foods are crucial to an athlete. Each athlete has specific needs for her sport and her unique DNA. The right foods help you cool inflammation, build new muscle, repair minor injuries before they become worse, and keep your brain balanced and calm. The wrong foods cause inflammation, raise your heart rate and slow recovery, and can even make you feel crappy!
3. Homework - Obvious, but it’s the real reason you are in college. Do the work before it’s due.
4. Social - Friends can be the wind beneath your wings or a ball and chain around your ankle. That said, choose your friends wisely. Not everyone understands how hard it is to be a DIII athlete. This goes for significant others as well!
5. Family - The old saying goes you can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family. Part of getting away from home and going to college is leaving behind your life as a kid and learning to relate to your family as an adult. Not always easy. If your situation is a particular source of stress and friction, talk to your coach about the situation and pay a visit to one of your college’s counselore. That’s what they are paid for!

This is an inspiring story about women’s sports in South Africa. If you are a DI athlete competing for a scholarship, it’s a sobering thought that somewhere half way across the world, another athlete is working her ass off to get a scholarship too. The DIII athletic experience is a lot less cut throat and keeps a healthy line between school and sports. Read more...

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Kimathi Toboti’s women’s basketball team has been playing catch-up to men’s basketball from the get-go.

As four of Toboti’s players run down a hill near the campus of Cape Peninsula University of Technology — starting their workout even before their allotted gym time begins — the head coach follows behind on the highway, peering through the window of his car.

Cape Town’s famous Table Mountain provides a picturesque backdrop for the athletes, but as clouds roll in, portions of the mountain become almost invisible — a fitting metaphor for women’s sports in South Africa.

“Unlike in the United States, there’s a different mindset here,” Toboti said as his players entered the gym and started dribbling basketballs the length of the court. “The motivation for the players here is quite different.”

With many of Toboti’s players unaware of professional opportunities playing in the WNBA, the U.S. professional league for women, basketball for most here is a means to earn a college scholarship to better their education.

Food can either fuel you up or drag you down. The wrong foods make you feel tired, depressed, mentally weak and rob you of the performance you are trying so hard to increase. What good is spending hundreds of hours in the weight room if that pizza dinner is adding extra inflammation that leads to a weak ACL?

Think outside the gym!

Many athletes have eliminated one or all of these foods and watched their performance break through to new levels.

There are three groups of foods that you should take a look at and try eliminating from your diet to see if they are causing metabolic friction and keeping you from performing and feeling great.

Summer is a great time to experiment and tweak your diet. I don’t recommend making changes during your season unless, you are sick or injured and under supervision of a health care specialist.

OK. Here are the usual suspects.

Sugar - It seems like this one is a no brainer, but many college athletes succumb to the quick burst of energy provided by sugar and fail to account for the long term degradation of their performance. Sugar causes inflammation in the body and sets up your metabolism to burn only sugar. A sugar based metabolism requires constant feeding and sets you up for manic/depressive type energy swings.

Take Action - Skip soda, gatorade, candy, ice cream and sweet cereals for starters. Then start limiting desert to a special treat once a week. Then when you have got control of your sugar, ban it from your diet except for very special occasions. You’ll be surprised how little you miss it once you kick the addiction.

Dairy - milk and milk products have two problems. First is the most obvious, some athletes have some degree of intolerance. Food intolerances cause inflammation which robs your body of recovery. If you cannot recover from workouts, you cannot get stronger, faster or better. The second issue is too much milk and cheese can imbalance the calcium/magnesium balance in your body. This can also cause performance robbing inflammation and if it gets bad enough, muscle cramps and stress fractures.

Take Action - Remove all dairy from your diet for two weeks. See how you feel. If you don’t notice any improvement in your body, mind or spirit, slowly begin re-introducing milk into your diet.

Extra Credit - Raw milk from grass fed cows is a super food. Many people who are dairy intolerant are actually just intolerant of dairy processing. It’s amazing what they do to a glass of milk before you drink it. Many dairy intolerant athletes find they do just fine with the real stuff! I drink raw milk from our cows and love it! See if you can track down a source of raw milk at your local farmer’s market.

Grains - by now you know about gluten intolerance, but there are other problems with grains that can fly under the radar. You may not be officially allergic to gluten, but grains might be blocking absorption of nutrients critical to peak performance.

Take Action - See if grains are holding you back. Eliminate grains from your diet for two weeks. That means bread, pasta, pizza, wraps, cereal, oatmeal. Stick with fruits, veggies, meats and eggs.

For more information check paleo for athletes.

British nutrition expert Dr. Briffa thinks so. I tend to agree. Most athletes don’t need that many carbs in their diet, especially the crap carbs found in dining halls.

Yesterday, I was in the car again and listened to the men’s final featuring Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Djokovic won (impressively). In fact, he’s won 48 out of 49 matches this year, and has risen in the ranks to become the number one player in the World.

How’s he done it? A lot of hard work and self-belief, I should imagine. But he also attributes much of his success to a change in diet in recent months. It turns out that he was diagnosed with sensitivity to gluten (a protein found in grains such as wheat, oats and rye) and has eliminated it from his diet. I read that, as a result, he feels lighter and stronger.

I’m delighted for Novak Djokovic, but not surprised. I’ve seen countless individuals remove gluten-containing foods, and in particular wheat, and feel tonnes better for it. If Djokovic is gluten sensitive, then he will obviously have benefitted from getting this out of his diet. However, let’s not forget that there’s plenty of other things grains don’t have going for them, like being rich in substances called ‘lectins’ that can provoke food sensitivity problems and ‘phytates’ that impair the absorption of nutrients.