Recommended Nutritition Books!

Wow I had no idea the NT scale for exertion was that far out of line, no wonder I've been wanting to eat more than it says in the PWO window!

I really like some the analogies you're putting up Josh.

I definitely like the concept, it's completely logical, and doesn't need to invoke any arcane theory or ingredients to succeed. IMHO NT should form the backbone of one's nutritional planning, over that layer any other ideas about food you might like. If you like poptarts fine, I'm using Vitargo mostly for carb replacement, but honestly where there's a will there's a way.

The big issue with NT is it can turn into a calorie counters nightmare. I'm willing to ball park it after a week of trying to work out calories using the NT interface. Too many inaccuracies for it to be worth using on a daily basis, but once you have the basic idea it's just a routine to follow.

Brand name Vitargo is absolutely unparalleled in my experience. It's way too expensive for me to use regularly, but MAN does it work!

Edit: Thanks for the compliment I hope others find my analogies useful as well!

I'm starting to get it, Josh. Thanks for your patience

I recommend "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price. I am currently about a third of the way through, and it is by far one of the coolest books I have read in a while.

Joshua Naterman said:

Right, and then you're spending 16 hours (assuming leangains style, more if not) in complete starvation. There's a reason why gains are so slow with that. There is also an absortion timeframe issue that tends to be a problem, particularly when your meals have real meat and lots of fat, that gets in the way of maximal protein synthesis.

Meal timing doesn't matter. The "anabolic window" is more in the timeframe of a 24 hr period, not a 2 or 4 hr period. That is, the protein synthesis in your body is elevated for about24 hours after a hard workout session. Eat your macros and kcals and you'll be fine.

Currently I'm bulking on IF (not leangains, I just make sure to ingest enough protein and fat, fill the rest of the kcals out with whatever I want, usually carbs) and it's going pretty well. Upped all my lifts and gained about 4 kgs with not too much fat gain since summer.

Joshua Naterman said:

When you're eating what you need, in real time, and you are chewing real food all day, it gets tiresome. If you don't believe me, go talk to some world class marathoners about how much they have to eat. The very best get tired of eating, because it's all they do outside of training.

Which is why you don't have to eat "real foods" - what is that anyway? Your body doesn't see "Salad, lean beef, banana". It sees only macronutrients. It sees fat, carbs and protein. No matter where you get those macros from, if you get enough (and ample kcal intake), then you're going to be fine and build muscle.

Joshua Naterman said:

Fortunately I'm not in quite that kind of a situation, but I still burn through a lot of energy and when my re-fueling comes from white rice (or god forbid brown rice... so much harder to chew) I have to eat 6-7 cups of rice to get those carbs. That's not counting the ~2 liters of water I need to a) replace what I sweated out and b) give my body the water it needs to absorb this food in a reasonable timeframe. It is much, much, much easier to get MOST of this from pop tarts.

No arguing there, I agree if you're having trouble ingesting the carbs/kcals you need, then icecream/poptarts/chocolate are all splendid options! It's just that I've yet to run into that problem, even eating whole foods such as described in my previous post.

Joshua Naterman said:

2 cups is drops in a bucket. Not even a third of the carbs needed at this time. This is exactly what I am trying to explain to you guys... At this time, it is extremely hard to eat enough carbs and get them to absorb fast enough to do you the most good.

2 cups is about 4 deciliters, which usually comes out to about 175-180 grams of oats, at 52 grams/100 g that's almost 100 g pure carbs. Add in the fruit, which usually comes to about 500 g, and the carbs in the milk and you get a pretty nice chunk of carbs, usually in the 190-200 g area. And again, meal timing as it relates to body composition doesn't matter.

Joshua Naterman said:

I can tell you, from experience, that it is just so much more manageable to get these carbs from a bit of calculated junk (in the referenced immediate PWO timeframe) that it isn't even an option to me. The absorption speed, the ease of actual ingestion, it just creates a completely different feeling. You actually feel like you are being re-inflated, and if you don't keep getting those calories you will feel intense hunger because your body is in overdrive at the moment and requires much more energy than you realize. After a while this dies down.

I agree on ease of ingestion. The thing about immediate PWO timeframe is broscience and not supported by any science I'm aware of. Eat according to IIFYM and count calories and you'll be fine.

Joshua Naterman said:

I don't expect you to understand what I mean, because you have not actually done this yet. I certainly wouldn't understand the importance of what I am suggesting to you all if I hadn't done this myself and seen + felt the results.

Done what, believed the broscience about PWO timings and that? I did that for years, it worked. Now I don't and that works just as well. Don't overcomplicate things that don't need to be complicated.

Joshua Naterman said:

All I can do is try to help you guys get better results, if you don't want the best your body has to offer you then that's fine by me.

I'm just not convinced that nutritiming is the way to get those better results, as there is no science supporting the claim. If what you're doing works for you, then that's splendid, and you should keep doing it. But for me, I just find nutritiming to be unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming. I like consuming big, satisfying meals, not small ones that just leaves me wanting more all the time. I ate like that before and it was torture. Now I eat like a king 2-3 times a day and I love it, and am seeing good results from my training.

Josh,

I hope this is not out of place, but I’ve been curious about the following for a while now:

When calculating calories burned using MET values during a WOD, do you just use an approximate number for the whole workout, or do you actually go through all the different exercises one by one and assign accordingly? I doubt that’s the case, but just wanted to ask. And when you're considering the time, do you include the time you rest between the exercises? Or is it the amount of time you actually do work?

Thanks.

With METs you are just saying "I lifted weights for 45 minutes." That's 6 mets times 45/60 minutes (number of minutes divided by number of minutes in an hour). The final formula would be your BMR X 6 METs X 45/60 = calories you burned.

When you're actually under a bar you are burning well over 18 mets, and in some cases I'm sure it's quite a bit higher, which is why you start sweating so quickly and why you can't just keep it up without taking some serious rest breaks. The typical weightlifting workout is about 75% rest time, which is probably around 2 METs, and that's pretty appropriate. When you average out all the time you end up with that average MET level, which is why it works. That's a good thing, because trying to do all that extra math would simply make this unapproachable for most everyone.

These MET levels were calculated by having people wear portable metabolic computers that analyzed energy expenditure via indirect calorimetry, which is within 5% of direct calorimetry. Good enough to have a solid benchmark. People wore these for all kinds of activities, and that's how we know what the multipliers are! Pretty awesome research.

Is that final equation correct? If a workout takes 60 minutes, and my BMR is 1500, then I would be burning

1500 x 6 x (60/60) =6000 cal?

One formula that came up when I did a search was this:

Calories burned by exercise = (METs x 3.5 x weight in kg) / 200 x duration in minutes

If I use that, then I come up with (6 x 3.5 x 68(kg) / 200) x 60 = 428, which I guess is reasonable. By the way, can I assume what we do here to be comparable to weight lifting in terms of MET value? In the "Compendium of Physical Activities" general gymnastics has a MET value of 4.

Well, first of all 1500 x 6 is NOT 6000

And you have to use your BMR for ONE hour which in your case would be 1500 / 24 = 62.5 kcal.

JN12 said:

Well, first of all 1500 x 6 is NOT 6000

Well, you got me there JN12, :oops: . Thanks for the correction.

Mehment: Use the hourly, as JN pointed out.

Using that formula is pretty accurate, and within the margin of error for the BMR of +/- 5%. That formula typically predicts on the high side, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Use that formula or use your METs x hourly BMR, either way is fine.

Keep in mind that what we are doing here is the strength & conditioning portion of gymnastics training and not general gymnastics.

The WODS are between 6 and 12 METs, with the dynamic leg days typically being the highest. Basic strength days are in the 6-8 range depending on rest time, and the dynamic days are going to be 9-12, depending on rest times.

Thank you Josh.

Not a book, but www.leangains.com offers some of the best nutrition information I have seen. This guy reads a lot of academic journals and pieces information together instead of just saying what he believes with no evidence.