Dukan Diet: better

Showing posts with label better. Show all posts

Sunday, March 8, 2015

How to sleep better

The human body can sleep almost in any position imaginable. Just look around your traveling companions during a long flight to see the amazing variety of postures of sleep!

But you can change the feel of your sleeping posture to be conducive to a deeper sleep and optimize flow easier to breathe through the nose. If your nose is congested, breathing from mouth and snoring are likely to ensue.

Yoga, with an emphasis on body alignment, and use accessories to achieve this alignment, helped me to learn how to establish a new perfect sleeping posture that helped me sleep more soundly ( and silently) through the night.

Three sleeping positions to avoid:

Flat Back Sleepers:The rigid support members in this "like a corpse" as often leads to complaints of low back pain. When the body be fixed for hours with your knees and hips "locked open" the weight of the legs can actually pull the bones of the lower back and muscles out of alignment and putting too much pressure on the lower back vertebrae and discs.

Belly Sleepers:To sleep down your face must turn to one side or the other to breathe. This couple places on the neck, and a lot of pressure on the delicate nerves from the skull upper spine. Belly sleepers can often wake up in a lot of saliva and spastic neck muscles.

Sleep on the side:This is the best choice of the three for the back muscles and bones, but even here, the body weight fall towards the shoulders and neck can be very painful and cause muscle spasms in the upper back, shoulders and neck.

How to sleep better On Your Side

You can create a brand new posture sustained sleep better on your side by changing the sleeping position to side with a few simple household items, and thus prevent the compression of the neck and ensure the ideal symmetry throughout the night for all joints of the body. Wrap a towel (or use a cylindrical pillow buckwheat hull) so that it is about a foot long and 8 or 9 inches in diameter and place it in front of your favorite pillow. This helps keep the bones of the neck of the collapse and bending to the side, giving them the support and maintenance of the long neck all night.

Place two pillows on each side for your arms to embrace as a "hug pillow." This will make you sleep better and it will keep the shoulder joints spacious overnight and prevent the weight of the arm bone to compress the nerves brachial valuable flow under the clavicles.

Place a light blanket or towel between your knees and try to keep it in place throughout the night as you throw side to side. This will keep the hips apart enough to prevent the lower back or hip bone to slip out of alignment. It also prevents bone bruise between his knees.

It may seem like a lot of extra "stuff" in his bed, and you may have to practice for a few weeks until your body adapts to the holding of the hug pillow and blanket hanging your knee, but sleep you will experience is worth the inconvenience of a crowded bed.

When Whey Casein Unite in the Spirit of True Physique Improvements BCAAs Glutamine Better Shut the F Up

Ever wondered, why you hit a plateau, "although" youve started to use this whey protein w/ extra aminos?

I have to admit this is not a new paper and though I have not written about it explicitly, some of you will probably have seen me cite it in previous posts. With some recent rambling about how great BCAAs were and that whey alone could never achieve what its overpriced, but revenue generating parts could do, I just felt inclined to dig into the archives of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research to bring back up one of those excellent randomized controlled, double-blinded long-term resistance training + supplementation studies, you wont find in the supplement write-ups very often, cause they would make most of the "great innovations" look pathetic.

You can learn more about protein intake at the SuppVersity

Are You Protein Wheysting?

Cod protein for recovery

Protein requ. of athletes

High EAA protein for fat loss

Fast vs. slow protein

Too much ado about protein?

In the case of the paper Chad D. Kersick et al. published in the March Edition of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2006. The latter, i.e. the looking pathetic applies to the combination and addition of "extra-anabolic" amino acids in form of BCAAs and glutamine to a simple whey protein supplement.

Table 1: Overview of the resistance training progamm (Kersick. 2006)

And when I am talking about "looking pathetic" I do not refer to the packaging or the powder itself; no, not even to the strength gains, which were more or less identical in all of the 36 resistance-trained males men (mean age 31, 84kg, 17% body fat) who followed the 4-day training protocol you see in Table 1 for 12(!) weeks.

That was a pretty long time, and as you can see in Figure 1, it was long enough to produce significant results. Significant results that tell you that the only addition you want to make to your cheap whey protein is some (not so cheap) micellar casein to achieve what I outlined in Mai 2012 and on countless other occasions, a stable hyper-aminoacidemia (= elevated levels of amino acids in the blood) for several hours (learn more)

As you should be able to see even without scrutinizing the bars in Figure 1, the latter lead to significant increases in lean mass in an already resistant trained group of subjects.

Figure 1: Changes in total body mass, lean mass and fat mass

The addition of 3g of BCAAs and 5g of glutamine, on the other hand, "made" the whey protein as "anabolic" *lol* as the 48g of plain sugar the CHO control group was guzzling their shakes within 2h (ideally immediately after) their workouts.

"Thats not true, cause Ive had great success with bullocks advanced proteins!"

Now, I obviously know already that there are certain people who dont like to hear facts like this. These people who are actually oftentimes only unwilling to admit that they have been screwed who will now probably be freakin out about "what if"s like "What if the casein made them hungry, so that they ate much more" ... I hear ya, folks, but how would that explain that the fat mass of the whey + casein (WC) group increased by 100g, while the guys on the "advanced" formula gained 200 albeit statistically non-sigificant grams?

Table 2: Energy & macro-nutrient intake in the whey + casein (WC), whey + BCAA + glutamin (WBG) and the carbohydrate control (P) group (Kersick. 2006).

Furthermore, the data in Table 2 clearly indicates that the only significant difference in terms of the total energy intake and the macronutrient content of the diets was the intended difference in protein content between the WC & WBG group and the P, i.e. the carbohydrate control group.

Figure 2: Leucine balance as a measure of protein balance after the ingestion of different forms of protein / amino acids (same net nitrogen load; Dangin. 2001; Bilsborough. 2006)

What? But thats impossible, right!? If we do have a closer look at what Dangin et al. found out about the digestion rate of protein as an independent regulating factor of postprandial protein retention (see Figure 2) and assume that the addition of BCAA and glutmine in this study could have had a similar negative effect on the total net protein retention as the free form amino acid supplement, the six young man in Dangins study consumed, it does no longer sound impossible that not a single gram of what were effectively 48g of protein ended up in their biceps, triceps, chest, quads, hams, etc. for which there was no leucine or any other aminos left, when the free form AAs switched their bodies into "protein wasting mode".

Dangins study did after all demonstrate that the same amino acids you will find in casein will induce a negative leucine balance, when they are administered in their isolated (see Figure 2). If you are still not angry that youve been fooled time and again, you probably havent bought any of the pertaining "improved protein" let alone "pro-anabolic free form amino acid supplements" in the past decade - lucky you; and dont tell me you just couldnt afford it ;-)

References:

Bilsborough, Shane, and Neil Mann. "A review of issues of dietary protein intake in humans." International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism 16.2 (2006).
Dangin, Martial, et al. "The digestion rate of protein is an independent regulating factor of postprandial protein retention." American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology And Metabolism 280.2 (2001): E340-E348.
Kerksick, Chad M., et al. "The effects of protein and amino acid supplementation on performance and training adaptations during ten weeks of resistance training." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 20.3 (2006): 643-653.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

How to sleep better

Friday, March 6, 2015

When Whey Casein Unite in the Spirit of True Physique Improvements BCAAs Glutamine Better Shut the F Up