Dr. Axe shares about the importance of protein and how it can benefit your physical performance and overall health. Whether you’re a weekend warrior, trying to lose weight, or a regular athlete, protein benefits everyone. Protein is the building block of our cells and muscles. It improves your metabolism, fat-burning potential, and supports your body’s tissues and cells. The average person needs about half their body weight in protein. If you weigh 150 pounds, then you need about 75 grams of protein a day. The best forms of protein you should be consuming are grass-fed beef, organic chicken and turkey, wild caught salmon, grass-fed organic dairy product, quality protein powders, plant-based sources of protein, flax and chia seeds, and other nuts and seeds and beans. 

The biggest benefits of consuming protein include fat-burning, improving muscle recovery, healing cuts and wounds, essential for fighting diabetes and blood sugar, essential for brain function, essential for cholesterol, and high energy levels. When buying protein, making sure it’s from grass-fed, organic, natural sources is vital because it’s important in terms of healing your body.

By Alex Hutchinson

Researchers debate whether sex differences are in the mind or the muscles.

Earlier this year, researchers published a paper analyzing 92,000 marathon performances to determine that women are “better” at pacing themselves—that is, women slowed down by 11.7 percent on average in the second half of their races, while men slowed down by 15.6 percent.

The question is: why? Two of the authors of that paper have recently presented differing views of the source of sex differences in fatigue, competitiveness, and athletic performance. First, evolutionary psychologist Robert Deaner, of Grand Valley State University, who was the first author of the marathon pacing paper, has written an interesting essay for The Conversation, giving an overview his research from the past several years, titled “Distance running is a perfect lab to investigate whether men are more competitive than women.” (Amby Burfoot also wrote about Deaner’s research for Runner’s World a few years ago.)

Deaner’s research follows several different lines of reasoning. For example, as the marathon study showed, women tend to slow less than men, suggesting that men are more likely to undertake a “competitive, risky pace.” Among competitive college runners, even at the highest levels, women report training less and focusing more of their studies. And participation, particularly in settings like masters track where the focus is on competition, skews heavily male.

What causes these differences? One possibility, Deaner notes, is that “the sex difference in competitiveness reflects, at least in part, innate predispositions that evolved in response to the different challenges men and women faced during our evolutionary history.”

But might there be other explanations? At the ACSM conference last week, one of the keynote presentations was on sex differences in fatigue, by Marquette University exercise scientist Sandra Hunter, who also happens to be one of the authors of the marathon pacing paper. Her talk focused on actual physiological differences between men and women. As she pointed out, every cell in your body has a sex, as encoded in your chromosomes, and those differences manifest throughout the body. Men, for example, have more muscle mass, larger hearts, more hemoglobin, and less body fat.

What was surprising to me is the large body of research suggesting that women are usually less fatigable than men, as Hunter documented in a review in Acta Physiologica last year. Ask a group of people to perform a muscle contraction at a given percentage of max, then ask them to repeat it over and over, and it’s men whose force will generally decline first. Of course, men start from a higher initial force, because they’re stronger, so that may have something to do with it.

Interestingly, the differences in fatigability vary depending of the specific demands of the task— for example, Hunter and her colleagues had subjects sustain an elbow-flexor contraction at 20 percent of max for as long as they could while performing a cognitive task. When the task was simple (counting backward in increments of one), men and women were the same; when it was more complicated (counting backward in increments of 13 from a four-digit number), women fatigued more quickly than men.

What’s the conclusion from all this? First, it’s that there are physiological differences in fatigue between men and women. Second, it’s that we’re a long way from understanding these differences. Hunter also points out that the apparent differences could be skewed by the fact there are so many more studies of men than women, just as our perceptions of male-female differences in racing results may be skewed by the low participation numbers in many female age-groups.

Which brings us back to Deaner’s arguments. Are participation rates a consequence of underlying male-female differences in competitiveness, or a confounding factor? At this point, we simply don’t know. I agree with Deaner that distance running offers an interesting lab to study male-female differences, but I think we need to be careful to understand all the different factors that could affect the data.

By Alex Hutchinson

Check out these tips to help you kill the hills.

Australian miler Herb Elliott’s gut-churning sand dune workouts prior to his 1960 Olympic gold helped establish hill training as critical to every serious training plan. But simply sprinting up and down inclines isn’t a winning strategy, as Australian researchers discovered. The experts wired up a group of runners to monitor their speed, oxygen consumption, heart rate, and stride length, then sent them out for a six-mile time trial over a hilly course. This field trial captured how runners varied their pace and effort over real-world, hilly terrain and found that they ascended too fast and took more than a minute to recover. The results revealed valuable lessons.

On the Way Up

The most efficient way to run a flat course is to keep an even pace. On hills, you must maintain an even effort–one that’s equivalent to your effort on flats, and sustainable the whole way up–or risk burning energy that you can’t regain later on. Most of the runners in the study did just that: went too fast on climbs, causing their breathing and heart rate to spike as if they were sprinting.

Once or twice a week, practice running long hills to develop your ability to lock into a sustainable pace. Aim for ascents that take 10 minutes or longer. Mimic the effort you would expend on a flat run, no matter how slow it feels. Monitor it by listening to your breathing; if it gets noticeably heavier, ease up.

Cresting the Top

After reaching the top of a hill, the runners took an average of 78 seconds before they sped up to resume their normal pace. That’s partly because they were going too fast up the hill and partly because the hills broke their stride rhythm by shortening it. It’s human nature to maintain that shorter stride until you’ve recovered, and it takes a conscious effort to snap out of it.

Use “long strides” as a cue to open up your stride and accelerate. To practice making this transition–especially when you’re tired–find a hill that takes about 45 seconds to climb. Run hard to the top, then lengthen your stride and accelerate for 15 seconds to ingrain the quick transition. Jog down for recovery. Repeat six to 10 times.

Coming Down

Some people are better at downhills than others. While all the runners slowed on uphills by a similar amount–an average of 23 percent–they sped up on the way down by five to 25 percent. If you don’t practice, you’ll end up braking on descents simply because you’re not used to the pounding.

Good form is essential to using gravity to your advantage. After a regular run, do four to six relaxed 100-meter strides down a gentle slope; progress over time to a steeper decline. Keep your arms wide and low for balance, shorten your stride, and focus on quick turnover. Monitor your breathing: If it gets quieter and slower, you can push harder without any penalty.

http://www.runnersworld.com/running-tips/power-up-over-and-down-any-incline

“Hey guys, Dr. Axe here, and welcome again to the Chopping Block. Today on
the Chopping Block our special guest is the banana. I will tell you,
surprisingly one of the most common questions I get from people is: Are
bananas good for me?

Now we have heard of some of the great health benefits of bananas, but on
the other end I think a lot of people worry about the sugar content that’s
found in certain fruits like bananas today. I will tell you here, bananas
are teetering on the edge here of the Chopping Block. Let us talk about the
negatives of bananas, and then let us talk about the positives.

The negatives, without a doubt, is that it does contain a large amount of
sugar, and it doesn’t really have much protein or any healthy fat
whatsoever along with it. One medium sized banana has 27 grams of
carbohydrates. Fourteen of those grams are sugar. Then it contains about
one gram of protein and zero grams of fat. So if you’re eating a banana by
itself, there is no doubt it could affect your blood sugar levels in a
small amount. That is really the negative side of bananas is right there
because if you’re a person who is trying to lose weight, if you have
sensitive blood sugar, bananas, in terms of fruit, are higher on the
glycemic index, which means it will typically affect your insulin more or
affect your sugar more compared to most other fruits.

Now let us talk about the positives with the banana. Bananas are one of the
most potassium rich foods in the entire world. One single banana has 500 mg
of potassium. So it is packed with potassium. It has 32 mg of magnesium, so
it’s really loaded with electrolytes. So if you’re an athlete, if you are a
person that works out, this is an amazing food for you because again it can
really help fuel your cells.

Now another thing in defending the banana is that if you’re comparing this
banana even to a bowl of oatmeal, this is still lower on the glycemic index
and has a lower amount of carbohydrates than even healthier grains out
there like rice and quinoa. So again, this really is a better option
compared to any other grains out there in my book. But when you’re
comparing it to other fruits, like berries for instance; berries have more
antioxidants. They’re higher in fiber. Berries definitely have more
benefits as well as a lot of other fruits compared to a banana, but bananas
are still better than grains.

So what do I say about the banana in closing? Well, here’s what I would
say. If you’re a person who is trying to lose weight or has some digestive
issues, I really think if you’re trying to lose weight or have sensitive
blood sugar, I would remove bananas from your diet, but I would still eat
them before any other grains. If you’re an athlete or somebody who is
already pretty lean and healthy and just trying to stay healthy, I think
bananas are still a great option for you.

So when it comes to bananas getting chopped, we’re going to spare the
banana here, and we’re actually going to peel it here instead of chopping
it. I’m actually about to go on a run, so I’m going to eat a little bit of
this banana here, because again it’s still packed with potassium, has a
good amount of fiber, has magnesium, and number one thing that saved that
banana, it is a real food, unprocessed, unhybridized, completely real.
Again, the banana is staying here on the Chopping Block.”