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Tissue and Joint Repair—Enough to Make You “GAG”
Tissue and joint repair is an important topic for many people, especially athletes. Supplements such as glucosamine, chondroitin, MSM, and other products are often taken when there is joint pain or degeneration, in hopes that a cure can be found in a bottle. Sometimes these substances work and sometimes they don’t. Some research says they
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A Paleo Diet for Athletes for Superior Performance
Paleo diets for athletes have become increasingly popular over recent years. For athletes, a paleo diet can provide optimal use of the fatty acid metabolic pathways. As your body becomes more and more accustomed to a reduced carbohydrate intake, intramuscular triglyceride stores increase, along with increased efficiency of stored fat breakdown. Liver, blood, and muscle
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Vegan Athletes
So you wanna be a vegan athlete. What the hell is wrong with you? Settle down vegans, I’m only kidding (well, partially). I know how easy it is to rile you guys up. It may be the protein deficiency and blood sugar instability that sets you off so easily. Okay, kidding aside, I’m not a
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You Move as Well as You Eat: The Link Between Food and Gait
Moving and Beyond: You Move as Well as You Eat Good form requires the right kind of fuel. Simply look at the triathlete finishing an Ironman race or a runner finishing a marathon. Often they are bent over, twisted, and shuffling. Their gait has been broken. Their body has been broken. You’d be surprised at how
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Everything in Moderation?
Moderate Your Holiday Moderation With the holidays, Halloween through Easter is a long time to play the moderation card and slack off on diet, exercise, and your (hopefully) healthy lifestyle. It’s actually the time when your diet should be the most healthy and “clean,” as cold temperatures, travel, and holiday stress are enough to take
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Sugarcoating Your Performance
Welcome to Part V of the Sock Doc Essential Guide to Carbohydrates. In Part IV, I discussed the hot topic of ketosis in athletes. Parts I–III discussed the many roles, both positive and negative, of carbohydrates in an athlete’s diet. The gist of the story is that you want to be using fat for fuel
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Ketogenic Diet for Athletes
Here in Part IV of the Sock Doc Essential Guide to Carbohydrates, I’m going to discuss the hot topic of a ketogenic diet for athletes. Ketosis is a metabolic state where the liver takes fat and proteins and produces molecules called ketone bodies to use for energy. Ketosis allows a starving person to survive for
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Train Hard, Race Fast: Carbohydrates for Training and Recovery
Welcome to Part III of the Sock Doc Essential Guide to Carbohydrates, where I discuss carbohydrates for training and recovery (and racing too!). I discussed the chemistry behind how your body uses sugar and fat for fuel in Part I. Part II dealt with how to condition your body to run more efficiently by becoming
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Condition Your Body to Burn Fat
Conditioning your body to burn fat involves more than just training properly. Fat metabolism relies on a low-stress lifestyle and a diet that promotes fat for fuel. I won’t go into proper training here—that’s been done over at the Sock Doc Training Principles and other areas on this site. I could also talk at great
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Carbohydrates: Evil or Essential?
Any athlete concerned about performance has questioned, if not thoroughly investigated, whether they should eat more or fewer carbs to improve their fitness. Actually, with the current trend toward low-carb diets and a paleo lifestyle, and considering the world pandemic of obesity, you may be a conscientious carb-counter. This topic is much more involved than
Athlete Diet Tips & Dietary Health Info
These articles discuss various athlete diet tips, athletic health and fitness, and dietary supplements. Learn about dietary influence on the health and fitness of an athlete. A healthy athlete diet is imperative in order for an athlete to develop and maintain a high level of fitness. Many athletes take unnecessary supplements and/or eat foods that are highly processed and loaded with artificial ingredients — all which have an impact on health, fitness, and performance. Eating the right foods and taking the proper nutritional supplements, when necessary, can speed recovery, reduce and eliminate pain, and help an athlete get to the next level of fitness. The athlete diet and nutrition topics here discuss healthy carbohydrate intake, fat burning, supplements, nutrition bars, the vegan athlete diet, the superior paleo diet for athletes, and many other topics.