Month: September 2011

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Antioxidant and Vitamin D Supplements for Athletes

Athletes are always looking for an edge in terms of their performance and dietary supplements have always been part and parcel of that search.  And while most think of me as anti-supplement, that’s incorrect.  I’m anti-bullshit. And most supplements are bullshit.  That said, some are not and today I want to look at two specific supplements: Vitamin D and antioxidants in terms of how they might (or might not) help athletes.  Specifically I will be looking at the following paper on the topic.

Powers S et. al. Antioxidant and Vitamin D supplements for athletes: Sense or nonsense?
J Sports Sci. (2011) 29 Suppl 1:S47-55 

The Reality of Dietary Supplements

As I said above, I often get pegged as being anti-supplement but this is not true.  I’m anti-bullshit.  And having been in this field for over 2 decades, the simple fact is that I’ve seen hundreds of not thousands of products come and go.   … Keep Reading

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Actions Are More Important Than Words

So this is a conceptual follow up to the Because We Let Them series, to address a related but different issue.  It also gives me the opportunity to better explain something that got taken out of context from Part 4.  I’ll address that through a comment that was left on the article.

Perhaps my favorite illustration of the point I want to make today occurs in the movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.  In it, Bruce Lee is going up the stairs and tells his wife Linda “I love you.”  She replies “In all the years we’ve been together, you’ve never said that.” And Bruce replies “But I meant it every day.”  Then he does kung-fu on a wall and dies.

But this really sums up the point I want to make today which is this: actions matter and words don’t.  Well, not usually.  More specifically the words don’t matter when they don’t match the actions.… Keep Reading

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Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 10

Ok, this will be the finish no matter how long it takes; and it will be long but I have to move on to other things.  Coming straight out of Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Ol’ing Part 9, I want to shift gears.  Because most of what I covered over the past two days had mostly to do with why the sport is as small as it is: a lack of facilities, coaching, incentives and, ultimately, interest.

But in that way, OL’ing is not terribly different than a lot of marginalized sports in this country that exist under literally identical conditions of few athletes, no access, etc.  And yet in some we succeed brilliantly; in others we medal sporadically (even one of our rowers won in Beijing and that sport is as niche as it gets).  Clearly if all the problems with OL’ing were related to the issues of the last two days it would cut universally across all niche sports and it does not. … Keep Reading

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Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Ol’ing Part 9

Picking up directly from where I left off yesterday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 8, I want to start by looking at another place OL’ing this country has a huge problem in terms of getting people (especially our large underclass of potentially amazing power athletes) into it.  Again, I’ll point out exceptions and look at proposed solutions and I’m still leaving out two specific names and one specific group as recent developments in the sport that at least have the potential to change things going forwards.  Back into the fray and today and tomorrow will likely be overlong as I try to wrap up once and for all.

A Lack Of Incentives

It’s hard to say what problem to Ol’ing is THE biggest problem but certainly this is one of the biggies, especially given the nature of sport in America, the nature of who enters our sports and the nature of their drives to do so. … Keep Reading

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Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 8

We’re almost done as my goal is to wrap this up by Friday.  Yesterday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 7, I looked at a bunch of factors that took the US from it’s dominant heyday in the 40’s and 50’s to almost rans almost overnight.  Certainly the rise of the Eastern European countries was part of this but it wasn’t all that was going on.

The sport had changed due to a rules change along with the dropping of the press (in 1974) and Americans, still fascinated with maximum strength and muscle size hadn’t changed.  Other changes in the gym culture of the day, the rise of bodybuilding, machine training and other strength sports (powerlifting, strongman) along with the big three starting to throw stupid money at its athletes just further diluted any talent that might have pursued OL’ing.

The sport, never more than a niche to begin with had begun it’s downward spiral. … Keep Reading