Raw Strength

Here’s part 2 of the ‘Eating For Winners’ Series of articles. Part One is Here. WHY YOU NEED TO EAT DURING COMPETITION During any high-intensity exercise your body is going to need a lot of energy, the reason athletes get fatigued, cramp up and injured during the later stages of competition is because they just run out of ENERGY! High intensity exercise includes weight lifting, rugby, football, tennis and any sport that requires repeated, intense activity for upwards of 60mins. The energy source used is called GLYCOGEN, and it is derived from all the carbohydrate (carbs) you should’ve eaten if you’ve read Part One! The benefits of ingesting carbohydrate during exercise include: You can play at a HIGHER intensity for LONGER when you eat or drink carbs DURING your performance. Your skill performance is going to be helped as you can last LONGER before exhaustion. You will immediately use what you ingest for energy, saving your body’s stores of glycogen, so you will perform BETTER ...

Here is something you’ll undoubtedly hear all the time……."If you aren’t eating correctly, there’s no point in training!” Now whilst I’m not quite inclined to agree with this it does carry some merit, especially if we look at the benefits of correct nutrition, PRE, DURING and POST exercise. The benefits of eating in the right ways include: 1) Greater fat loss 3) Greater mental clarity 4) Greater physical performance 2) Greater rate of recovery (Think muscle growth!)   WHY YOU NEED TO EAT BEFORE COMPETING For athletes competing in the mornings, the PRE-COMPETITION meal takes on a greater significance. The overnight fast whilst asleep has depleted a lot of your stored carbs. You gotta break the FAST, refuel the body with CARBS and RE-HYDRATE  the body. It takes 3-4 hours to digest, absorb and most importantly, STORE energy in your muscles.   Stick to eating carbs and lean protein BECAUSE: 1) Carbs digest and absorb into the body faster than anything else 2) ...

So you wanna be a rower? Ask yourself the following questions: 1) Are you doing HEAVY strength work using basic exercises?  e.g. squat, deadlifts, pull-ups 2) Are you doing sport specific conditioning? AKA do you get in the boat often enough?! 3) Are you complementing your HEAVY strength training with assistance exercises for the correct movements? You MUST be answering all 3 of the above questions with a resounding YES in order to succeed in rowing. Not to mention other questions on diet, recovery, sleep, tactics, teamwork. But as I’m going to assume that you are constantly rowing throughout each week lets just look at how to get as strong as a VIKING!   THE MOVEMENT Simply; the rower is constantly pushing with the legs and pulling with the upper body. So all of your training MUST centre around standing up with and pulling heavy weights. THE BASICS FOR STRENGTH To intensely stimulate the correct muscles in a similar movement pattern your basic strength training m...