Posts Tagged supplements

Stuff to Read: 10/20/2011

Posted by Kyle in Links on October 21, 2011

Just got back from wonderful Cleveland, Ohio on a family vacation, so here’s a simple update to give you something to read over the weekend:

flexibility, javelin, mobility, shoulder strength, stuff to read, supplements, trevor bauer

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Supplements for Baseball: Part Two

Posted by Kyle in Training on August 26, 2010

I talked a little bit about supplements for baseball in a previous thread on this blog. In that post, I said:

Supplements that I recommend are almost always going to fit the following categories:
Are demonstrably better than consuming the source material (typically food)
Are cost-effective and affordable for the average person
Have a decent amount of scientific backing to them

The products I recommended were:

All of those supplements are still plenty fine and worthy of addition to your diet! Here’s just a few more that can help you along the way:

Vitamin D

Check out this great article by Chris Shugart on Vitamin D over at T-Nation – titled “D is for Doping.” In it, Shugart says that Vitamin D has positive effects on longevity, performance, and looking good naked. Sounds like an easy sell to me!

Here’s the excerpt on performance:

Studies on Vitamin D, sunlight, and performance go back for decades. Russian studies in the 1930′s showed that 100M dash times improved in irradiated athletes vs. non-irradiated athletes undergoing the same training (7.4% improvement vs. 1.4%).
German studies in the 1940′s showed that irradiation lead to a 13% improvement in performance on the bike ergometer vs. no improvement in the control group.
In the 1950′s researchers saw a “convincing effect” on athletic performance after treating athletes at the Sports College of Cologne. Findings were so convincing that they notified the Olympic Committee.
At one point, even school children were irradiated and given large doses of Vitamin D in 1952 Germany. Treated children showed dramatic increases in overall fitness and cardiovascular performance. UV radiation was also shown to improve reaction times by 17% in a 1956 study.
In the 1960s, a group of American college women were treated with a single dose of ultraviolet irradiation. The results: improvements in strength, speed, and endurance.
Other studies showed “distinct seasonal variation” in the trainability of musculature. Basically, athletes performed better and got stronger in the late summer due to their greater exposure to the sun and subsequent Vitamin D production.
Vitamin D has also been shown to act directly on muscle to increase protein synthesis. Deficient subjects administered Vitamin D showed improvement in muscle protein anabolism and an increase in muscle mass.
Improvements in neuromuscular functioning have also been seen. People with higher levels of Vitamin D generally have better reaction time and balance.

Even more good news: Vitamin D is extremely cheap. You can find it for about 4 cents per softgel from Amazon.com. We recommend Carlson’s Vitamin D softgels – 360 gels of 2000 IU will only run you about $15 and will ship free if you order just $25 worth of products.

Vitamin D Softgels

Whey Protein – Revisited!

I know, I already talked about whey protein in my previous post. I’m including it now because I found a brand and style of whey protein that tastes really good without sacrificing nutritional quality or breaking the bank.

Syntha-6 Whey Protein

Syntha-6 Chocolate Peanut Butter protein mix is great. I mix it with milk in a shaker bottle 3-4 times/day for my protein supplementation, and it works out really well. The instructions say that water works too, but I haven’t had much luck – it tastes terrible to me.

supplements

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Basic Supplements for Baseball

Posted by Kyle in Training on October 13, 2009

There’s a lot of information out there regarding both legal and illegal supplements for sports-related performance. Today, we’ll focus on legal supplements that can make a solid impact on your performance on the diamond and in the weight room. Supplements that I recommend are almost always going to fit the following categories:

Are demonstrably better than consuming the source material (typically food)
Are cost-effective and affordable for the average person
Have a decent amount of scientific backing to them

Believe it or not, this eliminates about 95% of the products on the market. I’ll now take a quick aside to mention that you should never purchase a “NO Explode” type supplement that claim to increase nitric oxide levels in the body or provide a major “pump.” I won’t even link to various products, because I don’t want you to accidentally purchase them after reading their snake oil-like claims.

Nitric Oxide “boosters” or energy-type drinks that fall into this category are pushed hard by GNC employees who have no idea what proper nutrition or supplementation is for the average person, much less an athlete looking for an edge.

Eric Cressey said it best in Maximum Strength:

“…natural arginine levels far exceed anything you can take in pill form (without GI distress) to stimulate NO production… these supplements are marketed with claims that they increase muscle size and strength… there is absolutely no scientific basis for these claims. In fact, arginine supplementation has been shown to mute the growth hormone response to resistance training, so it can actually limit mass and strength gains than to augment them.”

Don’t buy them. Period. I hope that’s clear enough.

Supplements that are Worth Checking Out

Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine monohydrate is a very cheap and effective supplement to help increase general strength and explosive power. It is a cell volumizer that will make your muscles retain more water and has been shown to increase one-rep max (1RM) performance compared to placebo, in addition to other physical exercise benefits. Taking creatine monohydrate will lead to short-term scale weight gain, but this should be ignored as it represents greater water retention and not fat gain. (Source: Journal of Athletic Training)

There are other creatine-based products on the market, such as creatine ethyl ester (CEE). CEE was once thought to be superior to creatine monohydrate, but as Mike Spillane, M.S. Ed noted in his research paper…

This study examined how a seven week supplementation regimen with CEE affected body composition, muscle mass and performance, whole body creatine retention, as well physiological and molecular adaptations, associated with creatine uptake in nonresistance-trained males following a resistance-training program. Results demonstrated that CEE did not show any additional benefit to increases in muscle strength/performance or a significant increase in total muscle creatine when compared to creatine monohydrate or placebo.

(Source: The Effects of Creatine Ethyl Ester Supplementation Combined with Resistance Training on Body Composition, Muscle Mass and Performance, and Intramuscular Creatine Uptake in Males)

As such, I recommend a cheap source of creatine monohydrate, such as this 1200g tub of Optimum Nutrition creatine monohydrate for $25.99 + shipping. Don’t worry about a “loading phase,” either – take 3-5g/day with water. If you can be bothered to do it, take half in the morning and half at night, though it really doesn’t matter.

For those counting, if you took 5g/day after purchasing this tub, you’d have a 240 day supply. Assuming you paid $30 including shipping for this tub, it would cost you 12.5 cents/day to supplement creatine.