Tag: Precision Nutrition

3 Strategies to Maximize Recovery

Today’s “Throwback Thursday” post covers three powerful strategies to maximize recovery. Interestingly, I wrote another post on this exact topic recently that almost identically mirrors my thought process from 2009. In other words, over 4 years after this post was written, what I view as three of the most powerful recovery strategies has not changed at all! You can check out the more recent post here: 3 Powerful Recovery Strategies for Athletes

You may be surprised by how simple these are. It’s not a matter of cracking some magic code; it’s a matter of taking care of the things you already know are important.

1) Drink PLENTY of water. Maintaining proper hydration has positive implications on both mental and physical performance.Bluntly, it means you’ll be smarter and feel better if you drink enough water. Plenty is not 6-8 cups a day. That’s BARELY adequate for completely sedentary people on low caloric diets; you should be drinking AT LEAST double that.If you’re like most people, you’re not even close.It’s never too late to start. Increase your water intake significantly.You’ll likely be making many more trips to the bathroom than you’re used to, but that will cut back within a couple weeks when your body gets used to being fueled properly.

2) Sleep! Everyone’s sleep needs are different, but in general, most people should be getting 7-9 hours of QUALITY sleep.As in wake up in a pool of drool sleep.Wake up with no feeling in your arm because you didn’t move all night sleep.DEEP, QUALITY sleep.If you get 7 and you consistently wake up feeling tired, you need more sleep to recover from the stresses you’re experiencing (through training or other aspects of your life). Remember that this should be consistent from night to night.Your body doesn’t adjust well to 5 days of a lack of rest during the week, and then two days of excessive sleep on the weekend.Make it a priority to get a good night’s sleep every night.

3) Proper Nutrition. This comes in two parts: General Nutrition, and training-specific nutrition.With regards to general nutrition, it’s important that you eat adequate calories from QUALITY sources.This includes as many servings of vegetables as you can tolerate throughout the day, fats from olive oil, nuts, and cold-water fish (e.g. salmon), and carbohydrates from whole grain/high fiber sources.As a reminder, your carbohydrate intake should be determined by your activity level.The more medium-high intensity activity you do, the more carbohydrates you need.Training-specific nutrition is pretty straight forward.Consuming a liquid source of simple carbohydrates and rapidly digesting protein (e.g. whey protein) immediately after your training helps replenish glycogen (read: carbohydrate) stores within the body and stimulate protein synthesis (read: rebuilding).It shouldn’t be hard to see why this would be advantageous.There’s now research to support consuming these “shakes” immediately before and/or during your training, so the nutrients are readily available as your body begins to break down.Think of it as “on the fly” recovery.Personally, I usually make a half shake and sip it while I train, then make another half shake and drink it immediately after. For the complete nutrition guide, check out John Berardi’s Precision Nutrition program.

Following these three simple (well, at least they’re simple conceptually…maybe not so simple to implement) strategies will help you maximize your rate of recovery, allowing you to get the most out of your training.

Keep training SMART!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

Get Ultimate Hockey Training Now!

“…an extremely rare comprehensive look at the present state of ice hockey training.”
“…a must-have for coaches and strength professionals at all levels of hockey.”

Food Freakshow

If you’ve been reading my work for a while you know I’m a big fan of Precision Nutrition. It’s an outstanding, very user-friendly nutrition resource that makes eating better as simple as possible. You may also know that I’m a big fan of Brian St. Pierre’s, who started working for PN relatively recently. Brian and I met while he was still working at Cressey Performance and I was interning there. Brian won me over as my go-to “nutrition guy” almost immediately because he:

Clearly kept up with current research
Could trap bar deadlift 500+ lbs (a nice change of pace from an overwhelmingly endurance-based profession)
Forced me to drink a beer when we went out to celebrate my internship completion

In short, he knows his stuff and he “gets it” in terms of understanding how to work with people and not just following unnecessarily advanced and laborious text book recommendations. In fact, I respect Brian so much I asked him to write the nutrition manual to accompany my book Ultimate Hockey Training. I strongly believe Ultimate Hockey Nutrition is the best hockey nutrition resource available today; it continues to get great feedback.

Yesterday, in the midst of a crazy-productive day for me, I learned that Brian’s presentation from an event at Cressey Performance was recently posted on Precision Nutrition’s website. The presentation, titled “Food Freakshow” discusses the future of our food supply, for better or worse. Some of the topics include:

Putting fish in milk
Cows that produce human breast milk
Dinosaur Burgers
The benefits of eating insects
Why some scientists are weary of the FDA’s support of genetically modified food

Brian’s presentation covers a very controversial topic, and to his credit, he did an outstanding job of highlighting the potential pros and cons of each situation, as well as not confusing his opinion for fact. You can watch the entire presentation (or download the audio files) at the link below. Enjoy!

Watch the presentation here >> Food Freakshow

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

The Essentials of Exercise and Fitness Nutrition

I was digging through some emails that I missed earlier in the week and saw that Dr. John Berardi is offering a FREE 5-day video course on exercise and fitness nutrition. The course will dive into:

How to integrate nutrition in a health, fitness, or athletic environment
How exactly to assess someone’s nutrition needs
How to devise a nutrition plan based on that assessment
What stats to measure and how exactly to measure them
How to optimize a nutrition plan based on those stats

I’ve learned a TON of incredibly valuable nutrition information from Dr. Berardi; he continues to be my “go to resource” for current dietary strategies to help alter body composition and maximize performance and recovery. It’s rare that someone of his caliber will give away such valuable information, so I strongly encourage you to sign up for the free course while it’s still available! Go to the link below for more information.

Click here >> The Essentials of Exercise and Fitness Nutrition

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

Precision Nutrition Certification

Every year I get a handful of emails from colleagues asking about my experience with the Precision Nutrition Certification program. Because I’ve received several of these questions in the last week, I thought it would be an opportune time to re-post a review of my experience with the PN Certification. Check it out at the link below and feel free to post any questions you may have in the comments section. Also, they’re offering a special $200 discount to you since you’re being “referred” by a current PN certified coach, which is a pretty sweet deal. Click here to save $200! Precision Nutrition Certification

Even if you have no interest in the coaching program, I’d recommend heading over to their site and just checking out all their transformations. Berardi has really created an amazing trail of success stories!

Precision Nutrition Certification Review

A couple weeks back I posted something on facebook about taking the Precision Nutrition Certification Exam. Since then, I’ve received a handful of emails from other strength and conditioning professionals on what my thoughts on the cert were. In essence, everyone wants to know:

“Is it worth the money?”

In short, my answer is a resounding YES! In long, I couldn’t say enough good things about the book, educational videos, and accompanying material. In order to successfully provide nutrition coaching to both athlete and non-athlete populations, I felt I’d need:

A detailed description of the underlying physiology that drives nutrition-based adaptations
How different body types are affected by various dietary strategies
What circumstances warrant supplementation, and which supplements Dr. John Berardi and Ryan Andrews (along with the rest of the PN team) have determined are safe and effective
An understanding of all the steps along the dietary strategy continuum from the most basic strategies (e.g. eat more vegetables) to the most complex (e.g extremely low calorie/carbohydrate diets and macronutrient cycling)
Fluid requirements
A multitude of implementation strategies to account for the varying psychologies of clients
The questionnaires, assessments, and tests required to successfully implement nutrition coaching

The Precision Nutrition Certification Program provided all of that and infinitely more. Essentially the program laid out EVERYTHING I would need to know to successfully implement a Nutrition Coaching Program at Endeavor in an admirably clear, step-by-step fashion. The program was clearly laid out with the student in mind. There are plenty of opportunities to reinforce newly acquired knowledge, and it even walks you through the entire coaching process, telling you exactly when you need to schedule each meeting, and what you need to go through in these meetings.

Admittedly, I’ve studied enough about nutrition to know the basics. I imagine most people have. Although I enjoyed the art of implementation that this program discussed regarding these more basic nutritiong concepts, from a “mind-expansion” aspect I was much more interested in some of the advanced strategies. A few of the highlights:

Caloric and macronutrient recommendations based on body weight, body type, body composition, and goals
Caloric and macronutrient cycling strategies
Supplements to facilitate injury healing
How to infer hormonal imbalances from skinfold testing (this was really cool)
How to combat excessive cortisol environments with various supplements

In reality, the majority of this stuff probably applies to bodybuilders and figure competitors more than youth (or even elite) athletes. Simply, because most athletes nutrition is horrendous, these advanced strategies will be lost on them. With that said, it was still interesting to learn about and to keep in mind as a tool to use in the future with the appropriate clientele (e.g. an advanced athlete with specific body composition needs that has demonstrated a relatively profound mastery of basic nutritional concepts).

The Precision Nutrition Certification program isn’t the only one out there, but it’s the one I trust the most. I’ve been following Dr. Berardi’s work for a while now and enjoy his attention to staying current on research, but realistic in implementation. In other words, he understand the psychology behind nutrition as much as the physiology. Importantly, he’s not ANOTHER one of the fat nutritionists that doesn’t practice what they preach.

Look at the guns on this guy!

Dr. Berardi has been successful in implementing diet and supplementation strategies to improve the body composition and performance of a diverse clientele ranging from himself (important), to elite level athletes, to non-athletic populations.

Not interested in Nutrition Coaching?

I know not everyone reading this will be a professional that is interested in offering nutrition coaching. If this is you, Dr. Berardi hasn’t forgotten about you. I’ve always said that his Precision Nutrition book and accompanying Gourmet Nutrition is the best nutrition resource for athletic and non-athletic populations alike. No they are not free. Yes they are worth the money.

I’ve been saying for years now that everyone should own a copy of Precision Nutrition. People usually respond in one of three ways:

Ignore me completely
Immediately buy the book
Mull it over indefinitely, and shoot me an email every time I mention it and ask “Is it REALLY worth it?

To address the latter, yes it REALLY is worth it. It’s worth it for people that want to lose fat; it’s worth it for people that want to gain muscle; it’s worth it for people that are more concerned with athletic performance; it’s worth it for people that are bored with the foods they’re eating; it was worth it for me; it is worth it for you. If you order before October 31st, you can get the entire Precision Nutrition System for $50 off ($97). I’m always amazed at how people can come face-to-face with something that has life-changing potential, but comes with a relatively small initial investment and just write it off as “too expensive”. You CAN and should afford it; you may just need to figure out how. Click the image below for more information on how you can get the PN System for $50 off!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

3 Things Hockey Parents Should Know

At Endeavor Sports Performance, we see hockey players from a wide range of age and ability. We have players as young as 11 competing in Tier II youth programs up through the NHL. We’re very fortunate to have such a diverse population because it allows us to pick up on trends in movement patterns and structural asymmetries that develop over the player’s career. Being able to “look into the future” has really helped us develop better long-term player development training and programs and recommendations for players, parents, and coaches.

On that topic, I asked David Lasnier, who has been my right hand man for the last year and a half, to put together an article on a few things that all hockey parents should know in order to maximize their kids’ development. Check out his response below!

1. First, and most importantly in my opinion, your kid should have fun playing hockey!! I can give all the tips in the world about training, nutrition and injury prevention, but the most important thing parents need to know (and trust me there are wayyy too many that either don’t know it or just don’t care) is the first reason your kids play sports is to have fun. When you start to send them to every hockey clinic, every development camp and every showcase and you do that year-round when your kid is 10-years old, it’s not about fun anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about developing skills and taking the necessary steps to get better at one sport, but there is such a thing as overloading your kids too young. This is the first step toward them dropping out of hockey at a young age because they’re burnt out. Kids are kids; they’re not adults. There is no reason we should ask of them to get too serious too young; it’s true with sports and it’s true with everything else in life.

Another thing that leads me to believe that parents might not prioritize their kids having fun and enjoying the game is the way some of them behave in the stands. I’ve seen it happen too many times; parents yelling at their kids, at the referees or at the other players on the ice. I’m not talking about encouragement, but some parents flip out in the stands and get aggressive to a point it gets completely absurd! I’ve seen this happen in amateur hockey at pretty much every level, including Mites! What kind of message do you think it sends to your kid? There is no way when seeing that that the kid is going to think it’s all fun and he should enjoy himself on the ice. He’s going to get very competitive and play to win, and nothing else will matter. Parents need to understand that hockey, like every other sport, is a game. The first goal at the youth level is to have fun. There is a time to start to get competitive and to specialize in one sport, but anything under 13-years old is way too young.

Sit down.

2. This second point is very closely related to what I mentioned above. Don’t push your kid into specializing too early in one sport. For one, it might contribute to taking the fun out of the practice of their sport. But it also can lead to a lot of issues. Skating on the ice, much like other movement patterns from other sports, causes a certain stress to your body and your joints. It is important at a young age when the body is still in development that we don’t force kids into playing one sport year-round. This can lead to overuse conditions very young (Check out these studies: Sports-Related Injuries in Youth Athletes: Is Overscheduling a Risk Factor? and Early sport specialization: roots, effectiveness, risks.). It’s no coincidence that there are so many sports hernias, groin pulls and hip surgeries nowadays. Early specialization in sport is more common practice than it has ever been before. You impose a lot of stress on your joints from a very young age, you keep the stress accumulating by playing hockey year-round and never give them rest or use any injury prevention modalities to avoid reaching the injury threshold. Again, let kids have fun, play multiple sports in different seasons and don’t make or LET them specialize in one sport before they reach at least 15-years old.

3. The last thing is nutritional habits! We know that nutrition and sports performance are closely related. Whether most parents know that or not, I’m not sure, but I can tell you one thing: I don’t know many kids we train at Endeavor that actually have good nutritional habits. Most of them skip breakfast (and if they don’t they eat pop-tarts), they snack on candy all the time, and they show up to work out without having eaten anything in the previous 5 hours before their session! It’s part of our job as strength and conditioning coaches to educate kids on how to eat well and fuel their body to perform optimally. But in the end, if the parents are not educated themselves, or if they just don’t apply these good habits, we’re fighting a losing battle. We can tell the kids to eat more protein and more vegetables, but if the parents don’t encourage that, it’s just not going to happen. I don’t know of many kids who go food shopping by themselves (or simply have the power to decide what their parents are actually buying at the grocery store). That’s why it’s so important for the parents to be educated on that subject and make sure they give their kids good eating habits like eating a good breakfast every morning, prepare food for the day, have a pre- and a post workout meal/shake, etc.

Precision Nutrition: The best sports nutrition resource available (your kids will love these smoothie recipes)

David continues to be an outstanding resource for me. I appreciate that he and I can work in the same environment, but have different interpretations of what we see. Because he’s from Quebec, he has a slightly different vantage point on the state of youth hockey development and athletic development in general. If you haven’t yet, head over to his site and sign up for his newsletter. It’s free and he puts up some great content every week.

Click here >> David Lasnier Sports Training

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!