August 2017

Proper nutrition is essential to the overall success of athletes at any level. No matter the sport, all of the activity is fueled by what the athlete consumes throughout the day, pre-performance, and post-performance. It’s one thing to be prepared by spending many hours practicing drills, skills, technique, and conditioning, but performance will be lacking if there are deficiencies in our young athletes’ daily food and fluid intake.   I’ll be honest, when I look back at some of my favorite things to eat when I was a youth athlete, I can tell you with certainty that I had a sugar-heavy breakfast, sugar-heavy snacks, with just an “okay” lunch and dinner. That continued all the way through high school because, well, I just didn’t know any better, and neither did my parents. But, two things that did become staples for me were peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and a huge glass of milk. Interestingly enough, those two things would end up helping me significantly as I matured as a high school athlete. The truth is, for our young athletes to be high-powered performers, we need to make sure they put high-octane fuel in the tank. This is food that our bodies can easily recognize and break down into usable fuel for speed, strength, endurance, and power. It all starts with understanding some basic things about the calories we should be consuming. Calories are our energy source which are made up of three macronutrients: Protein, Carbohydrates, and Fats. Each one of these come in many different forms, both good and bad, but distinguishing between what’s optimal takes a bit of work. Kids will only learn what they are taught, and that starts with the adults in their lives. For this particular blog post I will focus on protein, the supplements protein powder & creatine, and hydration.  In the next series on nutrition for youth athletes, I will tackle carbohydrates and fats. Protein Protein is essential for growth and repair; it is the building block and foundation for new muscle tissue during recovery. I don’t want to get overly scientific, but when protein is digested it is broken down into amino acids which are carried into the muscle tissue to repair the damage from excess exertion from activities. This is where lean muscle growth comes from. Not having enough protein does cause the body to take longer to recover. It also puts limits on strength and power development. Protein also has a thermic effect on the body, nearly twice as much as carbohydrates and fat, which means that it increases our metabolism. With a higher metabolism, the body will burn more body fat during the course of a day. The biggest challenge is making sure a young athlete consumes enough protein throughout each day.  Creating an optimal dietary pattern requires that each meal is balanced with protein, carbs, and fats.   THIS IS HOW A MEAL PLATE SHOULD LOOK:   Dr. Chris Mohr, Phd RD, the consulting Sports Nutritionist for the Cincinnati Bengals and Director of Sports Nutrition for the International Youth Conditioning Association, explains that youth athletes typically don’t obtain sufficient protein intake until the end of the day at dinner. “The typical meal plan for middle school and high school athletes starts with a bagel or bowl of sugary cereal for breakfast, a sandwich with a bag of chips and soda or sugary drink for lunch, candy bar for mid-afternoon snack, and a good amount of whatever they can get their hands on for dinner.” However, unlike carbohydrates and fats, protein does not store in our system for later energy usage. This is why protein should be consumed with every meal. In fact, the RDA recommendation for the average adult is 0.8-grams of protein for every pound of bodyweight. That increases depending on the activity level of each person. Endurance athletes, the recommendation increases to 1.2-1.4g/lb., and strength athletes is a touch higher at 1.4-1.8g/lb.  Our youth athletes can safely consume between 0.8-1.0 grams of protein for every pound of body weight each day. So assuming you have a 120 lb. child, they should have up to 120 grams of protein per day. But how do we make that happen? What does this look like? The typical profile of protein consists of 7-grams for every 1 oz. of meat. With that in mind, someone that has 3-ounces of chicken breast will have consumed 21-grams of protein. The optimal amount for protein usage is between 20-30g in a meal. Why? Because the body has a hard time utilizing protein for repair and recovery after 30-grams. This is called protein synthesis. So assuming you have a 120 lb. child, they should be having 4 meals a day with 20-30 grams of protein in each meal. As an example, here are some easy ways to find 20-30g of protein.   For a high school athlete, it’s a breakfast consisting of 2 eggs & 3 egg whites, or 1-cup of cottage cheese or Greek yogurt. As you can see, it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. Another easy way to measure this for animal protein is to make a fist and have a serving size that matches the size of your hand.   Alternative Protein Options & Creatine As a coach, I always encourage whole food options for the primary source of calories consumed daily. Our bodies operate and recover best when we consume all-natural earth grown nutrition. This means lean meats, fruits & vegetable, nuts, seeds, and high-quality dairy. One cloudy area is the use of supplementation among youth athletes, especially protein supplements.  Enticed by the promise of “hope in a can,” teenagers tend to overuse the products, assuming that if one scoop is good, then four to five would be even better.  It’s important to know the following: Protein supplements provide NO added benefit over regular diet Federal regulations do not require that protein drinks and other dietary supplements be tested before they are sold to ensure that they’re safe, effective, and

We attended a great event last weekend (that we HIGHLY recommend!) aimed at coaching healthy athletes, both physically and mentally, organized by the CHLA Sports Medicine Program, LA Galaxy Foundation and the Positive Coaching Alliance. It aims to give youth sports parents practical tips and tools to help guide children in learning the life lessons that sports provide. If you’re interested in learning more, they are having a *free* event at Palisades Rec Center next Friday, August 25! 7-9pm. They’ll be covering the best ways to set your child up for success on and off the field, character development, how to set goals for your child, and the rise of youth sports specialization related to overuse injuries and concussions. Contact Bill Maniscalco for more information! 310-454-1412  / bill.maniscalco@lacity.org, or check out their website, www.positivecoach.org

THE SLEEP CURE  (Original article by Alice Park, in TIME Health Feb 16, 2017)   The evidence linking quality rest to good health and longevity has never been more convincing, especially as it relates to aging, processing emotions, mental health, and disease prevention. Scientists are learning that shortchanging sleep can compromise nearly every major body system, from the brain to the heart to the immune system, making our inability–or unwillingness–to sleep enough one of the unhealthiest things we can do. Studies of people whose sleep sessions are irregular or shorter than seven hours show they are at higher risk of developing diseases that can lead to early death, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Poor sleep may have detrimental effects on the brain as well, increasing the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, as well as mood disorders like depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety. And like smoking, a terrible diet and not exercising enough, poor sleep is now linked to an overall increased risk of premature death. “I used to suggest that sleep is the third pillar of good health, along with diet and exercise,” says Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “But I don’t agree with that anymore. Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body for health.” Despite the mounting evidence of its benefits, Americans are sleeping about two hours less each night than they did a century ago, and while life expectancy has been inching upward over the past century thanks to advances in medicine and technology, those gains could start to sag under the weight of our collective sleeplessness. Many people still dismiss sleep as something they can occasionally (or even regularly) skimp on. Perhaps that’s because until very recently, scientists couldn’t even agree on the evolutionary reason why animals need to sleep in the first place. But now they know that what happens during sleep, particularly in the brain, is critical to human well-being–not to mention a long life. Spending a good third of the day oblivious to the world around you and, by extension, incapable of protecting yourself doesn’t seem like a smart way for a species to stay alive. And yet every animal does it, leading scientists to accept that sleep must be nonnegotiable for some reason–and that we must need a certain amount of it to survive. Following a rigorous, milestone study in 2002 of more than 1 million healthy men and women by the American Cancer Society, experts found that people who slept seven hours per night were most likely to still be alive at the end of the study’s six years, compared with people who got either six hours or less, or eight hours or more, of sleep each night. To this day, seven hours is typically the amount that doctors and public-health groups recommend for the average adult. Another even longer study, which followed more than 21,000 twins in Finland, found that people who were regularly sleeping less than seven hours daily were 21% to 26% more likely to die of any cause during the study’s 22-year period than those who slept more than eight hours. So clearly sleep has some real biological benefit. Could it just be that the brain and body need downtime to recuperate after the activity of the day? That was the most popular explanation for decades, until an inquisitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester decided to look for the answer inside the brain itself. When she did, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard uncovered what many scientists now agree is sleep’s primary evolutionary function: to clean out the brain, quite literally, of accumulating debris. In 2014, Nedergaard first revealed that while the body appears to rest during sleep, a whole lot is happening inside the brain. Neurons pulse with electrical signals that wash over the brain in a rhythmic flow. The brain runs checks on itself to ensure that the balance of hormones, enzymes and proteins isn’t too far off-kilter. All the while, brain cells contract, opening up the spaces between them so that fluid can wash out the toxic detritus that can cause all kinds of problems if it builds up. “It’s like a dishwasher that keeps flushing through to wash the dirt away,” Nedergaard says. Without that nightly wash cycle, dangerous toxins can damage healthy cells and interfere with their ability to communicate with one another. In the short term, that can impede memory formation and the ability to coherently compose our thoughts and regulate our emotions. Over time, the consequences can be more dire. Lack of sleep can lead to faster aging of brain cells, contributing to diseases like Alzheimer’s, which is now the cause of death for 1 in 3 seniors. “Sleep is not just a passive state but a fairly active state on the molecular level,” says Dr. Allan Pack, director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. “During the day, the brain is using energy resources to fire neurons. At night, a switch turns on so the sleeping brain can take advantage of the metabolic downtime to do some cleaning up.” The idea that sleep is a time of important biological activity, rather than a period when the body checks out, is transforming how doctors think about another important factor in longevity: mental health. Scientists have long known that sleep is important for memory. But it turns out that during sleep, especially the cycles of deep dream sleep, the brain doesn’t just revisit the events of a day in a more organized way. It also works on processing the emotions attached to these recollections. When a memory is filed away during sleep, it’s also stripped of some of the powerful feelings–like fear, grief, anger or joy–that might have clouded the experiences in the heat of the moment. It wouldn’t be healthy, or efficient, to remember every event or experience in its

Based on the McKenzie Method of Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT), the Elevate team shares three easy ways to stop your neck or back pain by reversing your rounded sitting posture and improving your spinal health. The McKenzie Method (MDT) most commonly uses repeated motions to assess spine pain, develop a treatment, and reduce the likelihood of re-injury.  MDT is heavily researched, and studies show that for low back or neck pain, receiving MDT within the first 14 days following injury can help resolve symptoms in the first 3 to 5 treatments, and greatly reduce the need for more expensive and invasive treatments, and diagnostic imaging such as X-ray and MRI. TRY THIS: Repeat these 3 exercises for 10 reps, 2x per day Seated Cervical Retraction (Chin Tuck):  – Make sure you sit in an upright seated posture. – Keep your chin level and look straight ahead as you slowly move your head backwards as far as you can manage, aligning your ears over your shoulders. – Place your hand on your chin and gently push the head further backward. Repeated Thoracic Extension:  – Find a seat with a low and rigid back (or use a foam roller!) – Sit all the way back in your seat with your feet flat on the floor. – Reach hands behind your head and extend upper back, using the backrest as a fulcrum. Repeated Lumbar Extension (Press Up): -Begin flat on your stomach on the floor with your hands under shoulders. Keeping your hips on the ground, lift your chest up trying to straighten your elbows (trying to go further each time). *Keep glutes and abs RELAXED during each set! As a general rule, the closer towards the center of your neck or back the pain travels, the better (even if it is more intense), and the further away from the middle of your spine (i.e., glutes, leg, shoulder), the worse. *Avoid pain with the exercises. Reps and frequency are given as a general recommendation. In the clinic, actual exercise dosages are patient-dependent based on your PT’s assessment and mechanical diagnosis. Contact us for a full evaluation and individualized care for your neck or back pain.