I'll tell you one of the dirty little secrets of the fitness industry: If you want to attract the top scientists and practitioners to an annual conference focused on the latest exercise and nutrition research, you stage it in a city not known for exercise and nutrition.
That's why the International Society of Sports Nutrition held its 2009 meeting in New Orleans. Find any list of the fattest or least-healthy American cities, and chances are New Orleans is in the mix. Make a list of the most fun cities to hang out in for a couple of days, and my guess is that NOLA is right there as well.
Remember that scene in Crimson Tide where Gene Hackman tells Denzel Washington that their job is to preserve democracy, not practice it? Kind of like that.
In the interest of preserving the flow of scientific information from the experts to the enthusiasts, I spent two long days and mostly sleepless nights eating pig flesh prepared a hundred different ways (cherries stuffed with bacon — I shit you not), drinking local beers and exotic wines, and digesting as much information as I could handle in a state of sleep deprivation.
Amino Acids and Exercise
Jay Hoffman, Ph.D., was only about three-quarters of the way through his lecture on the nuts and bolts of protein supplementation when the moderator told him his time was up. Hoffman invited the moderator to try to remove him from the podium, and to use everyone seated on my side of the lecture room for backup, if he chose.
The person he challenged, attorney and bodybuilder Rick Collins, is not a little guy. But Hoffman, a former pro football player, is a lot not-littler. Fortunately, they were joking around. It was especially fortunate for me, since I would've been second or third in line for neurological remodeling if an actual brawl had broken out.
Besides, given our druthers, I think everyone in the audience would've preferred to hear the rest of Hoffman's presentation. If you're in the business of making athletes bigger and stronger, you need to know what amino acids can and can't do for your clients.
What they can do:
• increase protein synthesis, especially when used in conjunction with strength training (although they also increase protein synthesis, to a lesser extent, in non-lifters)
• reduce rate of protein degradation caused by strength training
• potentially reduce soreness following high-volume training
• preserve strength during extended periods of overreaching — training beyond your body's ability to recover
What they can't do is less well understood, and mostly related to quantity. Sports-nutrition science has "settled" on the idea that strength and power athletes can use a maximum of about 1.6 to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. So for a 200-pound guy, that's between 145 and 165 grams of protein per day, more or less.
There's no harm in having more protein; there's just no convincing data suggesting the extra protein will be used to build bigger muscles. Hoffman, however, added a footnote: Most studies have looked at recreationally trained subjects. What happens when you study competitive strength and power athletes? We have lots of hints that more would indeed be better for these subjects.
But that brings up a footnote to the footnote: Scientists don't have access to elite athletes for the most time-consuming and intrusive types of research, the ones that depend on isolation in metabolic chambers, comprehensive collection of bodily fluids, or the occasional sacrifice of a chunk of flesh for a biopsy.
So they do the best they can with the subjects they have, and those of us trying to apply the data to improve our physiques are left to make educated guesses.
How to Be Fast
If you're an athlete or trainer who works with athletes, you probably know how to make athletes faster. You work on the mechanics of running, improve acceleration off the starting line, and teach the athlete to make better transitions when he has to change directions.
David Sandler, a strength coach based in Las Vegas and science advisor to Jesse James Is a Dead Man and several other TV shows, says those traditional strategies are fine ... if you define speed as the time it takes to cover a specific distance.
The problem is, that's not how speed plays out on the field or on the mat. Game speed is what you can do in less than 0.2 seconds. That's how long it takes you to get beaten on a play.
That's why the athletes Sandler trains work hardest on the first five yards. In a game, the guy who can cover those five yards the fastest will usually come out ahead of his opponent. Sandler puts a secondary emphasis on the next five yards, and a tertiary emphasis on yards 10 to 20. Certainly, a wide receiver in football or midfielder in soccer needs to be fast for more than 10 yards at a time, but the key to beating an opponent is still being faster in those first five yards.
So how do you develop that kind of game-dominating velocity? First, you emphasize speed — moving arms and legs as fast as possible — before mechanics. Working on mechanics first will slow an athlete down, Sandler says.
Second, you have to make a distinction between fatigue and conditioning. You don't want to train for speed while you're fatigued. You need max speed and max effort on every repetition. Put another way, you don't get faster if you're moving slow.
Third, you want to be fast from every possible position. So you don't just work on speed when you're facing your destination with both feet on the ground. Sometimes Sandler has his athletes start from their knees or when lying on the ground.
Finally, you need to minimize body weight. Obviously, body fat will slow you down. But, Sandler asserts, so will nonfunctional muscle mass. Take two identical athletes, strip five pounds off one without changing his body composition and training status, and the lighter athlete will be faster. So you have to balance your need for strength and power with your need for speed.
Creatine
Is there anything creatine can't do? According to Colin Wilborn, Ph.D., an exercise scientist at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, supplementation with creatine has been linked to increased muscle mass and strength, lower body fat, better sprint performance, higher vertical jumps, more power, and more productive workouts.
There's also a hint that it might increase genetic activity at the cellular level.
Is there any way to improve on basic creatine supplements? Wilborn says that using beta-alanine in conjunction with creatine might do the trick. Beta-alanine increases the concentration of carnosine in muscles. Since carnosine is a buffering agent, having more means the muscles are able to perform more work before getting fatigued.
Thus, beta-alanine helps increase muscle mass and strength by allowing you to train longer and harder, as Jeff Stout explained in this TMUSCLE article and this interview.
The Future of the Supplement Industry
When Rick Collins wasn't pretending to threaten Jay Hoffman, he took part in two presentations. The first, with James Villepigue, explained how training and nutrition experts can navigate the book-publishing process. (I gave a similar presentation, covering print and online magazines and other media.)
Collins' second presentation, with his law partner, Alan Feldstein, was titled "Supplements, Science, and the Politics of New Washington." Collins is best known for his work defending steroid cases, but he also works with several supplement companies. As such, he's seen the best and worst.
Some highlights from the lawyers' presentation:
• There are some bad apples in the supplement industry, with offenses ranging from "fairy dusting" products with prescription pharmaceuticals (Viagra, Testosterone, weight-loss drugs) to making false and deliberately misleading claims. Those companies ultimately raise the cost of business for everyone, including the companies that are putting out high-quality products and playing by the rules. They make it easier to bring lawsuits and put pressure on the government to impose more regulations.
• Although supplements are a $25 billion-a-year industry, they're a low priority for the Democratic administration and Congress ... for now. But all it takes is one major scandal to move the industry into the spotlight.
• The key to staying out of the spotlight? Collins and Feldstein say that companies need to do more research before products come to market, and beware of making claims that go beyond the current scientific consensus.
Why Bodybuilders Walk Slow
The last time I went to the ISSN, in 2007, I made the mistake of wandering into some lectures that were way over my head. About halfway through one of them, I turned to Chris Shugart and asked if he had any clue what the speaker had just said. His notebook was as blank as mine. It sounded important, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you why, and neither could Chris.
So this time I kept to what was called the "practical track" — presentations for people who apply the research, rather than those who conduct it. The downside is that I missed out on some potentially scintillating lectures, like "Glycine Propionyl-1-Carnitine and Repeated High-Intensity Exercise" and "Oral Cognizin Citicoline Supplementation Increases Brain Cellular Bioenergetics." My personal rule is that if the title includes two or more words I can't define or pronounce, I have to assume I'm not the target audience.
Not that I came away feeling like I hadn't used my time productively. The presentations I attended were enough to fill my head and notebook with information I can use in my own training.
But my favorite lecture of the conference was the least applicable. It was just fun. Adam Locks, Ph.D., a media-studies professor at the University of Chichester in England, is the last guy in the world you'd pick out of a crowd as a bodybuilding fan, but he's all-in with the freaky.
The title of his presentation — "Flayed Animals in an Abattoir: The Bodybuilder as Body-Garde" — is as odd as his obsession with the cultural significance of bodybuilding. (Not that Locks has just one fixation on cultural weirdness; he recently presented at an international conference titled "Beyond Life: The Undead in Global Cult Media." Bodybuilders and zombies — in a way, it makes sense, doesn't it?)
Although no summary could do justice to Locks' passionate presentation, I came out with this take-home message:
Bodybuilding started in the late 19th century as a rebellion against society's concept of what's normal. It was startlingly representational at a time when abstract art was hitting the mainstream.
For a brief period in the 1980s and early 1990s, the aesthetic of bodybuilding found common cause with mainstream American popular culture. It was a time, Locks says, when hypermasculinity symbolized our country's quest for success. It wasn't just Arnold and Sly; even mainstream stars like Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford hit the weights and put on some camera-friendly contractile tissue.
So what happened? The mainstream didn't give up on bodybuilding, Locks asserts; bodybuilding gave up on the mainstream.
Hard to argue with that.
Wrap-Up
So what did I learn during my two days in New Orleans?
• We have some really, really smart and interesting people doing primary research in exercise and nutrition, and applying that research.
• Creatine with beta-alanine may offer more benefits than either one by itself.
• If you're an athlete who needs to be fast — or a coach of athletes in that category — focus on moving arms and legs as quickly as possible in the first five to 10 yards of movement. Mechanics matter, but you can have the best mechanics in the world and still get beaten by a player who covers the first few yards faster than you.
• There's not much any of us can do to clean up the bad seeds in the supplement industry. All we really have is the power of the plastic. Don't buy products from companies that refuse to back up their claims with basic research.
• Beer connoisseurs don't give Abita Amber, a local brew, the highest marks. One online reviewer called it "light and uninspiring." But I found it inspiring enough for a steamy Monday night in the Big Easy. I can't remember the last time a beer tasted that good.
• If you're ever in New Orleans and happen to dine at Emeril's Delmonico in the Garden District, order the Grand Charcuterie Tasting. It's the most magnificent collection of creatively prepared pig meat you'll ever encounter in this lifetime. Cherries stuffed with bacon — top that, Rachael Ray!
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