You did it. Most of the year is behind you and only one more thing stands in the way of completing the year, the holiday season. While many view this time as a collection of joyous get-togethers and celebration, others view it as nothing more than the bane of all the progress and discipline they accumulated over the prior 46 weeks of the year.
This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The last six weeks of the year are often a gauntlet of office parties, cookie decorating, extensive travel, shopping excursions, and celebratory get-togethers. Without a plan, these events can really stack up and wreak havoc. Check these tips to keep the holidays happy without sacrificing the essence of the season. Focus on Protein. There are two main benefits to focusing on protein this holiday season. First, it is going to help maintain all the lean mass you worked so hard to cultivate over the past months. It is often hard to be as active in the final stretch of the year and protein is going to help keep that muscle stimulated for good lean mass retention. Second, protein is considered to be the most satiating macronutrient. By piling protein on your plate, you are going to feel full sooner and stay that way. This will help you keep from overeating on all those sweet desserts. Bonus tip: Take this one step further and pregame each party with a protein shake with somewhere between 20 to 40 grams of protein to get a head start on the evening. Watch the Drinks. Calories are hidden everywhere throughout the holidays. It seems like you can’t even breathe without consuming at least one. Drinks can be some of the biggest culprits. When you are not celebrating, lean into the zero-calorie drinks and water. When you are celebrating, be aware of punches and mixers. More often than not, they are nothing more than sugar mixed with more sugar. Make sure to alternate between your beverage of choice and a zero-calorie drink like sparkling water. This will help keep full and hydrated without the extra calories. Slow Down Your Eating. The holidays are the pinnacle of tasty treats. Slow down and enjoy them. Some suggest even going as far as setting your utensils down after every bite and don’t pick them back up until after you swallow. Others say that chewing each bite a total of five to 10 times before swallowing and reaching for the next bite is the secret. While those might be extreme, they are definitely going to make sure that you take time with your meals. One more suggestion is taking a drink of water in between each bite. You get the point. No matter your method, find a way to slow down and enjoy each bite. Savoring your meal is going to give your body time to recognize that you are getting full and help you not want to overindulge in extra helpings because you think you are still hungry. Eat Smaller Portions. Sometimes, after looking over the spread or watching plate after plate of grandma’s deliciousness pass by, temptation weighs too heavy and you break. We have all been there and there is no shame in it. When temptation gets to be too much, there is still a way to survive: portion control. There are two easy tricks here. First, as you load up your plate, make sure that you can still see the plate and not just some little space in the corner. The goal is to see a defined separation between your food. More often than not, we tend to pile up serving after serving of delectables. If you make a conscious effort to actually see the plate that you are eating on, you are going to be helping stave off extra calories. Second is the oldy but goody: no seconds. Commit to what you are going to eat and only eat what you have brought to your seat the first time. I know that pie was good. But you had your taste and you are done. Location, Location, Location. This might sound strange, but where you find yourself during the celebration can play a strategic role in your calorie consumption. Try to stay out of the kitchen and away from the food table. When food is nearby, food is going to be on your mind. And when food is on your mind, you are going to get hungry, even when you’re full. Bonus points if you can keep your hands occupied in your strategic location. By holding a drink and a napkin, you are going to make it even harder to move food towards your mouth. Stay Active. You are already an active person. You have your regiment. So, stick to it. Between the franchise, CrossFit, and privately owned gyms, there are multiple ways to get in a quick lift. Many of them simply just require a drop-in fee and you are ready to go. If the gym is too far out of the way, there are multiple streaming apps that will give you a myriad of workout options. Whatever your choice, keep moving! Bonus point if you can plan your activity around your social gatherings (especially ones that revolve around food and drinks). Even a short five-minute walk after your feast is going to pay dividends. Take Time to Yourself. The holidays are stressful. Running from one party to the next, extensive travel, and trying to visit as many people as possible really can crank up the stress. This gets amplified if you are not able to stick to the routine that you have worked so hard to build. That stress is going to take a toll on your body and your mind if you do not take control of it. And sooner or later it is going to come out for people to see. There is nothing wrong with taking a beat to address the stress of the holidays and re-center yourself. Trust me, people are going to appreciate the calmer, collected you much more than the “I’m barely keeping it together” you. Enjoy Your Time. Remember, the holidays are a time to celebrate the year with friends and family. They are to be filled with laughter and love. Don’t let worrying about every little macro and micro that you put into your body ruin that. You are a hard worker, you already have a strong base of discipline. Cherish these days and know that your hard work and discipline are going to get you back to where you want to be even if you do take a small step out of line.
2 Comments
If you are going to achieve a goal, a plan is a must. Fitness goals are no different. You need a roadmap to get you to where you want to go. Exercises, sets, reps, and intensities are all cornerstones of a solid fitness plan. Without them, you are just aimlessly working out, not training.
But once you start on the plan, you need to be able to gauge how the plan is going. The numbers on the page are simply based on theories and goals. But it is hard to tell if they are truly helping your progress. Are you really in step with what the plan is trying to achieve or are you too far ahead or behind? To make things harder, there are days that aren’t supposed to be taken to the limit. Training isn’t high octane all the time. Sometimes you need to bring it down. Sometimes, workouts fall somewhere in the “moderate” intensity. So, what is moderate? How do you determine if you are in the training sweet spot for those days? Luckily, there is a tool you can use to help gauge how you are doing: Autoregulation. Autoregulation is a concept that takes into account how you are “feeling” about the training session as a whole or the individual exercises. Originally, this concept was developed to look at endurance training and running. The “Broge'' scale was developed as a way for runners to gauge how they were performing during their workouts. This scale is sometimes referred to as “Rate of Perceived Exertion” or “RPE”. It is a scale between six and 20. Interestingly, these numbers correlate closely with heart rate. Resting, or extremely low intensity, heart rate sits pretty close to 60 and caps out about 200 (for the average person). The scale has since been adapted for lifters on a scale of one to ten, Despite this adaptation, it still carries the same name: “RPE”. One, obviously being the easiest of easy and 10 being the absolute limit. As you work harder and harder, whether in intensity or in repetitions, the number climbs up the scale. This scale has evolved one more time to a slightly different concept, “Repetitions in Reserve” or “RIR”. This scale gauges your effort differently than the others. While many of them focus on how hard you think you are working at the current moment, this one looks at how many more repetitions you think you can do. Similar measurement, different angle. As you would expect, there is a relationship between the two lifting scales. As you move up the scale of RPE you should move down the scale of RIR. As a quick reference, if you are working at about an 8 for RPE you should be at about a two on the RIR scale. Nine is a one. Ten is a zero. There is a caveat, though. You have to be 100% honest with yourself. Do not write down an RIR of 2 if you struggled to get your last rep. It will come back to haunt you when you (or your coach) go back to your logbook to progress your workouts. Using RPE and RIR in Your Workout Plan With a grasp of what these tools are, they can now be used to help assess and progress your training. First and foremost, you can track if you are adapting with the program. If you are following a standard program, you are going to notice that workload is gradually increasing. If your adaptations are on pace, you should feel about the same RIR and RPE week after week (at least in the beginning) for the same rep and set scheme. As you start to notice your rating changing and clustering at a new set of numbers (increases in RPE and decreases in RIR), it could indicate you are starting to lose step with the program and might be time to change things up a bit. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world of restless sleep, fluctuating fueling opportunities, and a myriad of other stresses that directly affect our training. When those days are really hitting you, your RPE and RIR are going to fluctuate down a little. On the reverse, there are going to be days that feel extra easy. For whatever reason, the stars align, the iron gods smile down on you and you crush your workout. You gain an extra rep or two in your RIR and your RPE rating drops significantly. In either of these cases, you now have a measure of how the workout plan is going. Once you collect a couple weeks of notes, you can truly see how your adaptation is lining up with the program. If you are consistently marking your RIR as one to zero reps and your RPE as nine and ten, you are probably not adapting in pace with your program. On the other hand, if you are consistently rating your training on the lower ends (RIR three to five and RPE five to seven) you are either not getting the intensity that you need to adapt or you are adapting to the program faster than intended (a luxury most noobies enjoy and veterans dream of). With this information, you can increase the intensity or decrease it as necessary. This will help prevent injury and continue to move you in the direction of your goals more efficiently. Autoregulation can also help you gauge your workouts during individual sessions. When you get about halfway into your sets, take a minute to see how you are feeling. If you are crushing your day, and you know that you are supposed to be working at about an eight but feel that you are closer to a seven, add about 2.5% to 5% to your next set. If you feel like you are getting buried and are working at about a nine or a ten, take it off. Just make notes of any adjustments to the plan. Wrap Up When it comes to training and achieving a goal, the more tools you have at your disposal the better. Reps, sets, and intensities are always going to be the foundation of good training. But nuances like autoregulation are going to be the small details that help guide the plan to realization more efficiently. Add this one small data point, and watch the trajectory of your plan align fully centered on your fitness goals. It should be easy, right? And at the beginning, it is. Progress continues as planned and confidence seems to grow by the day. But there comes a point in every fitness journey where there is a stall. Daily goals that once seemed easily attainable are now getting harder and harder to achieve. Nuances must be realized for further progress to be made.
Luckily, there is a plethora of information out there. But navigating through all of it can be daunting. There are so many concepts! Training programs that require the discipline of a Shaolin monk. Diet plans that are mundane and repetitive. Not to mention, the long list of terms and acronyms that could fill their own dictionary. It is no wonder why so many people are hot and cold when it comes to realizing their health and fitness goals. But there is hope. DNA Training has felt the same frustration. Information that was once easily accessed and understood has turned into a jumbled mess that has led to more failures than successes. This needs to change and it needs to change now. The DNA Training Blog has been created to do just that. This blog will serve as a comprehensive catalog for some of the newer and advanced topics in training and nutrition, like repetitions in reserve and fad diets, while revealing nuances of more basic concepts, like macronutrients and exercise repetition schemes. Each topic will be explored to the fullest, with focused research until the full story is disclosed, without bias. Simple concepts are the most important. Mastery of the basics leads to sound foundations with deeper insight. As such, we are going to start off with some of the most basic of basics, Macronutrient Tracking, a.k.a. Macro Tracking. Macros are the main components of everything that we eat: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Granted, not everything we eat is not always made up of all three. Most times, foods are made up of a main macro and small amounts of the others. Sometimes, foods are lacking one or more of the macronutrients altogether, leaving only one macro to make up that given food. Macros are not to be confused with other nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. These are considered to be “micronutrients'' which play important supporting roles in the many processes that help the body optimally perform. These roles are much different than those of macronutrients. Generally, each macro serves a given purpose. Protein helps build tissues in the body. The other two are more seen as sources of energy. Carbohydrates are a “faster”, more direct source of energy while fats are often viewed as a “slower”, less direct source of energy for the body. Remember, we are focusing on the basics here. With that in mind, each macro is associated with a caloric amount. A gram of fat is nine Calories while protein and carbohydrates are four Calories. Caloric counts help nutrition professionals prescribe different amounts of macros to help individuals reach their fitness and health goals. The body needs a given amount of calories to optimally run and adapt to a given set of goals. This varies depending upon an individual’s body composition, weight, and activity level. Luckily, there are calculations that take these variables into account that are used when finding the appropriate amount of calories. Once a caloric requirement is determined, the nutritionist can then manipulate the macros according to the goals of the individual. An easy example is if the client wants to gain or lose weight. A nutritionist can easily manipulate the caloric intake to be above or below the needed maintenance level in order to achieve the desired outcome. But there is more to it than simply adjusting the total amount of calories up or down. Many of us have fitness goals beyond simply losing and gaining weight. We want to do so while attaining an optimal body composition and achieve other outcomes as well: a faster mile time or a new lifting total. This requires more detailed attention. Protein intake is often manipulated to help individuals achieve their desired fitness outcomes. While the RDA is roughly .8g/kg of body weight/day, this is far too low for an active individual. Iit has been suggested that active individuals may need as much as 2.2g/kg of body weight/day. Dietitians must prescribe an appropriate amount of protein to help support the repair and growth of muscle mass (two of the primary roles of protein) to support the daily activities of the individual. Since protein has a caloric value, this must be taken into consideration when calculating an appropriate caloric intake. Like protein, carbohydrates and fat can also be manipulated to help individuals realize their goals. To do so, daily and physical activities need to be considered. For those who enjoy activities that are higher in intensity (such as team sports, resistance training, or sprinting), carbohydrate is going to be an important fuel source. High-intensity activity requires energy that can be used quickly (the primary role of carbohydrates). Depending on how often these activities are performed, will determine the amount of carbohydrates needed. With carbohydrate prescription comes the addition of more calories. These are only two examples of manipulating macros in order to achieve optimal performance and body composition. The common thread between the two of them is that there is a specific amount of both that needs to be consumed in order to achieve given outcomes. In order to ensure that the right amount of each macro is being consumed, tracking is a definite requirement. Two things are required for the most success. First, be sure that everything that is being consumed is recorded and the more detail the better! (Like, is that 80/20 ground beef or 90/10?) The second is the amount of each food that is being consumed. This is why eating out becomes more difficult. It is often difficult to know exactly how much of each is being consumed. For those who can meal prep, macro tracking can easily be accomplished by weighing each portion of the meal, finding the macro breakdown for that food at that given weight, and recording it. To make things easier, there are multiple apps that help with macro tracking. Simply enter the food that you are eating into the app and all the macros are entered for you. Most of the time, these apps will have cataloged restaurant food as well. But be aware, apps are not without their flaws. Many apps allow for the entering of food (and its given macros) by other users. These are not always accurate. So, fact-checking becomes a pretty important step in the process. It can also be hard to adjust to specific macro breakdowns and some do not allow for daily variance that may be prescribed by a nutritionist. No matter the goal, tracking macros is always going to be a staple. It is one of the primary tools that is going to support both performance, body composition, and wellness goals. Once this technique is mastered, the road to achieving your goals is wide open. |
AuthorVince Kreipke is the blog contributor and scientific advisor for DNA Training & Nutrition. He has an MS in Applied Sports Science and a PhD in Exercise Physiology from Florida State University. ArchivesCategories |