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March 28, 2021

Does Fish Oil Supplementation Impact Recovery?

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 7:29 am

Fish oil supplementation has gained a lot of attention for its health benefits. Specifically, supplementation of omega 3 fatty acids has demonstrated positive effects on blood pressure, triglycerides, and heart rate.1

Additionally, they’ve been shown to improve arterial dilation, possess antiarrhythmic and anti-inflammatory properties. All of these have been shown to have protective effects against cardiovascular disease development.1

But less is known about the role of fish oil supplementation in recovery from resistance training.

A 2020 paper2 by VanDusseldorp et al. set out to examine the effects of fish oil supplementation on various markers of recovery following a strenuous bout of eccentric exercise.2

A 2020 paper3 by Heileson et al. found that the minimum effective dose for fish oil supplementation to elicit a positive response on recovery was 2 g supplemented for at least four weeks.3 However, research has been conflicting regarding what the appropriate dosing should be.

Therefore, the previously mentioned paper by VanDusseldorp and colleagues where they set dosages to 2 g, 4 g, and 6 g between groups and examined the effects of a seven-week fish oil supplementation protocol. This paper was on a well-controlled study:2

“Utilizing a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind experimental design; participants were randomly assigned to consume 2- (2 G), 4- (4 G), or 6- (6 G) g/da of either FO or placebo (PL) supplementation for ~7.5 weeks (8 participants per group (4 males and 4 females per group); a 6-week run-in the supplementation period, 1-week involving familiarization testing at the beginning of the week and experimental testing at the end of the week, and three days of recovery testing). Muscle soreness, venous blood (for the assessment of creatine kinase (CK) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), and indices of muscle function were collected before eccentric exercise, as well as immediately post 1-, 2-, 4-, 24-, 48-, and 72-h (H) post-exercise. Participants continued to supplement until they completed the 72H time-point.”2

  1. Participants completed eccentric squats on a Smith machine at a tempo of 4-0-1 for ten sets of eight reps using 70% of their 1 RM and taking three minutes to rest between sets.
  2. Additionally, participants were made to complete five sets of twenty bodyweight split jump squats.
  3. The primary metrics used to evaluate muscle damage and recovery were blood biomarkers, perceived soreness, vertical jump, agility test, forty-yard sprint, and maximum voluntary isometric contraction.

Researchers observed 6 g of fish oil supplementation had a beneficial effect on perceived muscle soreness.

Whereby participants reported lower soreness scores across all time points of measurement. The 6 g group also decreased the recovery time of vertical jump performance. In some cases, it also resulted in better blood values when monitoring indirect markers of muscle damage compared to the other controls.

So, what does this mean practically? Although the researchers found a beneficial effect on recovery when supplementing 6 g/day of fish oils, the effect’s magnitude was still relatively small. Therefore, a costs benefit analysis should be the basis for deciding whether to utilize this strategy.

I typically don’t recommend many supplements to individuals.

However, from a health perspective, I think fish oil supplementation is generally beneficial. So if you decide to take it for that reason, you may also experience some minor benefits of enhanced recovery.

Finally, if you want a comprehensive analysis of primary recovery strategies and how to utilize them for better results effectively, I have covered it on Kabuki Strength.4

References

1. “Effects of B vitamins and omega 3 fatty acids on cardiovascular diseases: a randomized placebo controlled trial.” BMJ. 2010;341:c6273. Accessed March 17, 2021.

2. Trisha A. VanDusseldorp, Kurt A. Escobar, Kelly E. Johnson, Matthew T. Stratton, Terence Moriarty, Chad M. Kerksick, Gerald T. Mangine, Alyssa J. Holmes, Matthew Lee, Marvin R. Endito, and Christine M. Mermier, “Impact of Varying Dosages of Fish Oil on Recovery and Soreness Following Eccentric Exercise.” Nutrients, U.S. National Library of Medicine, NIH. Published online 2020 Jul 27. Accessed Mar 16, 2021.

3. Heileson JL, Funderburk LK. “The effect of fish oil supplementation on the promotion and preservation of lean body mass, strength, and recovery from physiological stress in young, healthy adults: a systematic review.” Nutr Rev. 2020 Dec 1;78(12):1001-1014.

4. Daniel Debrocke, “Optimize Your Recovery For Maximum Strength.” Online Kabuki Strength, Accessed March 16, 2021.

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February 13, 2021

The Role of Micronutrients in Body Recomposition

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 10:10 pm

When it comes to talking about food and dieting in fitness circles, one of the terms you keep hearing over and over is macronutrients. Its lesser discussed counterpart, micronutrients, are the topic for today.

While often disregarded in the fitness industry, micronutrients are essential for optimal body function and reaching your fitness goals—namely, the purpose of body recomposition.

So if you’re looking to step up your game, expand your knowledge, and improve your health, micronutrients are where you need to start. 

The Difference Between Macro and Micronutrients

Starting with the basics, the difference between macro and micronutrients is in the name—large and small nutrients. This doesn’t refer to their physical size but rather the quantity required in a healthy diet to perform bodily functions.

Macronutrients include the three staples which make up the bulk of your calories:

  1. Protein
  2. Carbohydrates 
  3. Fat

Within the three macronutrients, you have micronutrients.

Micronutrients refer to the vitamins and minerals consumed in smaller amounts and are mostly found within the larger macronutrient group.

For example, avocados are also a fat within the macronutrient grouping and contain the following micronutrients:

However, some micronutrients aren’t found in macronutrients.

For example, vitamin D is created directly from sun exposure. When the UVB rays hit the cholesterol in the skin cells, vitamin D synthesis occurs.

But as a general statement, micronutrients are predominantly found within the three main macronutrients of food.

Essential Vitamins

Daily body functions require an array of different vitamins, and each has a unique role and function.

There are 13 essential vitamins, meaning that they are essential for your body to work optimally. You may experience adverse side effects without them, ranging from dry hair, acne, increased fat storage, and more unfavorable side effects.

Vitamins are in two main categories:

  1. Fat-soluble
  2. Water-soluble 

There are four fat-soluble vitamins: A, D, E, and K.

They are easily absorbed when consumed with fat because they are stored in adipose tissue.

Water-soluble vitamins are the remaining nine vitamins that are not stored in the body, consequently highlighting the need to maintain a healthy, vitamin-rich diet for maximum function and performance.

Some of the functions of vitamins include:

The Role of Minerals

Minerals also help your body to function.

Some examples of minerals are calcium, magnesium, and potassium. Minerals play an essential role in bone health, growth, regulating fluids in the body, heart health, transmitting nerve impulses, and are precursors to many hormones.

For example, as shown in a 2014 study, the mineral iodine is found in the thyroid hormone, which plays a role in metabolism.

Eat the Rainbow

As briefly touched on, we predominately find micronutrients within carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

Each whole food that is not processed is likely to contain several different vitamins and minerals. Often, these micronutrients cause the food to have a specific color, known as phytonutrients.

Phytonutrients are found in plant foods and correlate with particular vitamins and minerals, which is why people often tell you to eat the rainbow, with each color providing a unique vitamin and mineral density.

Here are some example sources of micronutrients:

  • Calcium: Milk, yogurt, spinach, kale, sardines

  • Vitamin B12: Beef, chicken, fish, cheese, eggs

  • Potassium: Bananas, spinach, potatoes

  • Vitamin C: Oranges, lemons, strawberries, broccoli

  • Vitamin E: Vegetable oils like sunflower, nuts, seeds, spinach, broccoli

  • Vitamin K: Kale, spinach, brussels sprouts, broccoli, fish, beef

As you can see, whole foods and plant foods are rich in micronutrients. If you’re wondering whether you lack any micronutrients, the best advice is to adopt a plant-based, whole food diet that includes foods of different colors that have been processed the least.

This is of the utmost importance if your goal is body recomposition.

Lose Body Fat and Gain Muscle Mass

Body recomposition is a term used in the fitness industry to describe the process of losing body fat and gaining muscle mass.

The way you do this is by:

  • Increasing your energy expenditure
  • Hitting effective and efficient workouts
  • Implementing progressive overload to strategically increase your strength, build muscle, and ultimately boost your metabolic rate.
  • Simultaneously, calories will need to be closely monitored. Eating around maintenance is most often recommended to lose excess body fat.

So how does this link to micronutrients? It comes down to the magic word: optimization.

Optimize Body Recomposition

If you want your body to work as efficiently as possible, you need to be providing it with the tools to do so. As much as trainers would like to believe it’s as simple as calories in versus calories out, there is so much more to it than that.

For example, 100 calories of ice cream are not the same as 100 calories of kale. 

Within a calorie, you have different macro and micronutrient offerings. If you are deficient in any vitamins, you’re not going to optimize your fat loss or muscle gain efforts. You could be preventing yourself from achieving any progress.

For example, vitamin D deficiency is associated with fat storage.

A study that examined low vitamin D levels in a group of women found that those with the lowest levels gained more weight throughout the study, despite not changing their diets. 

Another example of this is B vitamins, which are essential for metabolic function.

If you’re deficient or insufficient in any of the B vitamins, your body is going to be in fat storage mode.

This is because B vitamins’ primary function is to metabolize macronutrients. If you don’t have enough circulating in your blood, you will be storing the calories instead of burning them. A study found that vitamin B supplementation was able to reduce body weight by increasing metabolism.

When it comes to building muscle, if you’re deficient in any nutrients, you will also face similar problems.

Vitamin E is an antioxidant that fights free radical damage and helps to flush out metabolic waste.

During exercise, you create oxidative stress. If you don’t have enough circulating vitamin E, you’re going to experience intensified Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), poor recovery, and stunted muscle protein synthesis. Not ideal. A study published in The International Journal of Preventive Medicine found that vitamin E supplementation improved recovery by reducing muscle damage markers.

If you’re busy counting your macros without much thought for your micros, you need to reprioritize.

Without micronutrients, your body will not perform optimally, you’ll experience adverse side effects, and your fitness goals will move further out of reach.

Adopting a diet rich in whole plant foods with various colors will provide you with most of your micronutrient needs.

Source

January 19, 2021

Understanding Maximum Heart Rate

Filed under: Fitness,Weight Loss — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 7:54 pm

The modern fitness era has brought a host of wearable technologies that can track extraordinary amounts of biological and physiological data. Perhaps the most commonly measured variable we see today is one’s heart rate.

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This is certainly nothing new, as brands like Polar and Garmin have been around for decades providing wearable chest straps and watches for their users. We have always taken two fingers to locate our carotid (our neck) or radial (our wrist) pulses with ease.  

Today, nearly everybody wears some Apple watch or Fitbit around their wrist to track changes in their pulse whether they are working out, sitting at their desk, or just asleep.

Heart Rate Affects Health and Performance

Understanding one’s heart rate can be rather useful, both from a health and performance standpoint.

  • Resting heart rate can provide medical professionals insight into one’s health status for age and gender.
  • In contrast, increases or decreases in exercise response provide fitness professionals feedback on one’s general fitness levels.
  • Furthermore, we can use heart rate to set training zones and prescribe programs for increased aerobic fitness.
  • Perhaps the most difficult part of the entire equation is understanding the maximum heart rate (MHR).

Even when wearing technology, MHR must often be manually entered to set proper training zones moving forward. It will track your heart rate and tell you if you’ve established a new MHR through training. 

But it is extremely strenuous to train at or near MHR, and you can never be sure that the numbers provided aren’t some anomaly.

Source:  The Redline: Getting Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable

Find Your Maximum Heart Rate?

The most commonly used method to determine MHR is by taking 220 and subtracting your age.

If you are 40 years old, then your estimated MHR would theoretically be 180 bpm.

Although some technologies are implementing more advanced methods for determining this variable, many still rely on this simple equation to predict.

While it is useful in the sense that it provides a quick and no-cost method to predict MHR, it does have some issues.

It does not account for one’s:

People often get frustrated with this estimate because it does not align with their training or expectations of how their bodies should be responding when exercising.

Still, in reality, they should use it as a guiding compass. It is not the end all be all. In fact, there are other ways to estimate MHR. 

Measuring Tools for  MHR 

The most accurate way to determine MHR is through a VO2 peak treadmill test, but unfortunately, it is rather time-consuming, and not everybody has access to that technology.

Fortunately, some other methods and equations appear more accurate than 220 minus age for the MHR estimate.

A 2012 research study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research1 compared the relative accuracy of three equations against a VO2 peak treadmill test in overweight or obese adults, including three equations:

  1. 220 – age 
  2. 208 – 0.7 x age 
  3. 200 – 0.48 x age 

The researchers found that the 220 – age equation overestimated MHR by an average of 5 bpm, while the 200 – 0.48 x age equation estimated MHR within 2 bpm, and the 208 – 0.7 x age equation proved most accurate.

We must understand that although the research I’ve discussed used a relatively large sample size (n = 132), it is only one study and did not look at athletic populations, therefore it is still difficult to say which equation is the best one of all.

There are methods to determine training heart rate (THR), such as the Karvonen method, and we know that a VO2 treadmill test will provide us with the best results of all, but we must accept the fact again that these are all estimates.

MHR and Response to Physical Training 

My suggestion to anybody struggling to nail down their MHR truly is to use multiple methods and monitor your training results.

One formula may prove to be more accurate than another in your case, but how you respond to training will give you the greatest insights into your aerobic capacity and unique heart rate.

Lastly, if you are still truly interested in being as accurate as possible, research nearby exercise physiology laboratories and see if you can schedule an appointment to do a treadmill test.

It could be worth the investment.

References

1. Franckowiak, Shawn C., Dobrosielski, Devon A., Reilley, Suzanne M., Walston, Jeremy D., Andersen, Ross E., “Maximal heart rate prediction in adults that are overweight or obese,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research: May 2011, Volume 25, Issue 5, p1407-1412.

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