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Your Health
Active Sports Nutrition Guide
Nutrition and supplementation for sports enthusiasts
Your Wealth
Finding Extra Time
Part 1 of our interview with Vince Panella, author of "The
26-Hour Day"
FEATURE
OF THE MONTH
Change for the
better
Get FIT for a
great cause ......
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is
dressed in overalls and looks like work."
-Thomas Alva Edison
Active Sports Nutrition Guide
Nutrition and supplementation for sports enthusiasts
- Carbohydrate stores can be depleted from your body after
exercising for as little as 90 minutes.
- People who exercise for health and fitness need the same
nutrients as competitive athletes.
Sources: Pro Trainer (www.protraineronline.com)
and University Of Illinois (www.urbanext.uiuc.edu.)
Whether you're a professional athlete or a weekend warrior,
when you're serious about sports you also need to be serious about
nutrition. That's because your ability to perform is directly
related to the way you fuel your body. Eating the right foods
helps you establish optimum nerve-muscle reflexes and ensures you
stay physically fit. And if you're tempted to slack off in the
nutrition department, don't. Even a great coach or an expert
training program can't help you if your not giving your body what
it needs. As an athlete, your diet must provide you with over 50
nutrients (and water) in order for you to reach your peak
performance.
So where do you begin? At the table: Eat a variety of foods.
Some foods supply mainly protein, other foods have necessary fat,
and still others primarily supply you with vitamins and minerals.
The key to balancing your diet is to combine different foods to
avoid a nutrient deficiency. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats,
vitamins, minerals and water work together to provide good
nutrition. If you're lacking in even one nutrient it limits your
body's ability to perform to its best ability.
And don't assume that eating healthfully just before your game
will make a difference in your performance if you haven't
practiced general good-eating habits; no pre-game meal can do
that. The purpose of the pre-game meal is to prevent hunger and to
provide the water and additional energy your body needs during
competition. Performance, however, depends largely on the foods
you eat on a regular basis.
Most athletes need to eat about 1800 calories a day to get the
vitamins and minerals they need, but the type of fuel your body
uses is affected by your level of fitness, as well as how hard and
how long you engage in your sports activity. Sprinting, for
example, burns mainly carbohydrates for energy because sprinting
is a short-term, high-intensity activity. For low-intensity sports
(walking, for example), your body uses more fat for energy. In
general, however, most sports activities use a combination of fat
and carbohydrates as energy sources.
The best way to make sure you have plenty of energy is to eat a
variety of nutritious foods that are high in carbohydrates and low
in fat -- grains, vegetables, fruits, beans, lean meats, and
low-fat dairy products. A good dietary rule of thumb for sports
enthusiasts is to get 60 percent of your calories from
carbohydrates (about 10 percent from sugars and the rest from
starches), no more than 30 percent of your calories from fat, and
about 10-15 percent from protein. If strength-training is your
chosen activity, remember that you don't need to increase your
protein intake to gain muscle weight. Muscle-building is best
achieved by training hard and consuming enough calories.
Even the most balanced diet, however, can use a little help.
Most sports nutritionists agree that athletes and highly active
people often don't get all the nutrients they need from diet
alone. That's why it's wise to take a nutritional supplement.
Supplementation isn't intended to replace healthy eating; it is
exactly what it indicates -- a supplement to your daily diet.
What Do You Need?
Athletes and active sports enthusiasts can benefit from the
following:
- A multi-vitamin and mineral supplement with antioxidant
properties
This is important because of the demands placed on your body
-- that's the physical demands of your sport as well as
environmental demands. Air pollution, the increased use of
pesticides, and the leaching of nutrients in over-used soil
all contribute to vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
- Essential fatty acids
Fatty acids such as gamma linoleic acid and omega-3 fatty
acids help maintain cellular structure, improve immune system
functioning, and may even lead to cholesterol reduction.
- Glucosomine
Glucosomine is beneficial for all active people, but it's
especially recommended if you're involved in high-intensity
strength training because of its proven benefits to connective
tissue.
- Co-enzyme Q10
CoQ10 is a powerful antioxidant that also benefits the
cardiovascular system. Whether you're a power-and-strength
athlete or mainly focused on aerobics, CoQ10 will help ensure
that your heart function is top-notch.
- Herbals
Certain natural herbs seem to stimulate muscle growth and help
your body cope with stress. These include Gingko biloba,
Siberian ginseng, and licorice root (not the candy).
- Electrolytes
While not technically a "supplement," sports drinks
that replace electrolytes (usually, sodium and potassium) are
especially helpful during any continuous activity of longer
than two hours. Electrolyte sports drinks aid the fluid
balance in your body, helping you stay properly hydrated,
which, in turn, prevents fatigue and muscle cramps.
*This newsletter is designed for informational or educational
purposes only and has not been evaluated by the FDA. This
information is not intended to be a substitute for professional
medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of
a qualified health professional with any questions you may have
regarding a medical condition or symptom.
Your Wealth
Your Wealth
Finding Extra Time
Part 1 of our interview with Vince Panella, author of "The
26-Hour Day"
Even as a teenager, time-management guru Vince Panella had a
passion for knowing what made people tick. This led him to ask,
"Why do some people seem so in control of their time, while
others seem to waste it?" In this first part of our series of
discussions with Mr. Panella, you'll get his unique take on the
answer to that question.
What is Time Control?
Time Control is a program that brings to life something I call
"success-centered time management," which is a
philosophy that states that the best way for us to gain more
control of our time is not through schedules and organizational
skills (although those can be helpful); it's through our behaviors.
The consistent actions we do on a day-to-day basis determine how
much control we have of our time, and that ultimately determines
our success. That's really the basis of success under time
management.
What is clarity and how can we achieve it?
Clarity is simply developing a strong focus of what you want
your life to be. It's a tool that most people don't use, but it is
basically this: Look at what you would like your life to be in two
or three years. It's different for everyone, but it could be a
future where you're making the income you'd love to have, or
you're enjoying the personal relationships you'd love to have, or
you're having all the things you enjoy.
Mentally go into that future and take notes. Your clarity is
focusing on what you want, but you do so in a balanced manner. In
other words, your clarity helps you look at all the areas of your
life that are important to you, and it gets you right down to what
you want. How many people actually take pen to paper and write
down exactly how they would like their lives to be at a point two
years or three years in the future? Even though it wouldn't take
more than 30 minutes to write out, most people don't do it, yet
clear vision is so powerful.
Once you have the written notes that let you know "Here is
where I want to go," the next step is to take stock of where
you are right now, and decide how you want to proceed. The
exercise itself -- of writing out what you want -- is great, but
it can be a waste of time if you don't use it. So look at your
written notes on a day-to-day basis, or at least five mornings a
week. It takes no more than a few minutes to do that, but it's
powerful because it keeps you focused. You look at your day
planner or your daily schedule and you ask yourself, "Is this
particular item taking me at least one step forward toward my
clear vision of what I want?" And if it is, wonderful; it's a
good thing to do. If it's not, maybe you should reassess how
important that item is.
Is having clarity like setting goals?
Clarity shouldn't be confused with goal-setting. Unlike a goal,
clarity is balanced. Goals are wonderful but they can be dangerous
if they're not done in a balanced way. Let's say you have a goal
to make X amount of dollars as your yearly income. That's great,
but if that particular goal is the only thing you have in front of
you, you might try to achieve it at the expense of something else
-- your health or your family relationships. But if you have
clarity, you'll get yourself tightly focused, not just on making a
certain amount of money, but on how you want your life to be in
the future. Just remember, if you don't write it down, you're
probably not going to make it happen.
The important thing about clarity is that it's not written in
stone. Things happen. Priorities shift. So after a time you may
need to shift your clear vision, and give yourself an up-to-date
version of where you want to be in a couple years.
What is the "continual success improvement
formula"?
Our society today has what I call a "miracle pill
mentality"; that is, we want to take a magic pill that
guarantees us that whatever we want to happen will happen. But
it's not a quick fix that makes us successful. Instead, take any
area of your life -- anything you want to improve or reach toward
or accomplish -- and improve it by a half-percent each day. If you
do that consistently -- not even every day, but consistently; say,
five times a week -- your small successes will compound each other
and in one year you'll have improved by 300 percent. Each little
step adds to the top of the other. So the continual success
improvement formula basically says if you can plan a change and
motivate yourself to do it and keep doing it, you will have
continual success.
Could you explain the chapter in your book titled "Bit
by Bit"?
That has to do with the concept that if you do something
positive with small chunks of time (just five minutes a day), and
you do it consistently -- say, five days a week -- you'll see
improvement. On average, each of us has about 200 five-minute
increments of awake time every day -- that's if we get about
seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. If you wanted to learn a new
language, or improve your relationships, or do better in your job,
all it takes is doing something five minutes a day, five days a
week. That falls back on what we just said about continual
success. You're doing something special for just five minutes, but
you're doing it consistently. And that can do tremendous things
for you.
Imagine if you apply this concept to your relationship with
another person or with your children. What if you took five
minutes a day, five days a week, to do something a little
different -- different than anything you did the day before -- to
bring you closer together? How much deeper would your relationship
be? How much closer would you be with your kids? It doesn't take a
lot of time, but it does take a consistent pace. "Bit by
bit" guarantees positive momentum, and the results are
tremendous.
Read part 2 of our interview with Vince Panella in next week's
newsletter.
"The 26-Hour Day" by Vince Panella is available from http://www.amazon.com.
FEATURE
OF THE MONTH
CHANGE FOR THE BETTER…
Get fit for a great cause & Travel with…
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