The Paleo Diet for Athletes (23 page)

The key to avoiding the overtraining consequences of dehydration is quite simple: Drink according to your thirst. If thirsty, drink. When no longer thirsty, don’t drink. It’s pretty simple. There is no reason for elaborate drinking schedules or daily water volume goals. Thirst does indeed work. For example, a study of 14 elite Kenyan runners whose water losses and rehydration were tracked for 5 days supports this notion. No instruction was given on how much to drink. During training they drank nothing and typically lost 2.7 percent of body weight daily. On average they took in 4 quarts (3.8 liters) of fluids daily based entirely on thirst. No changes were reported in daily hydration status, body weights, or responses to training over the course of 5 days.

It’s not unusual for athletes to take in excessive amounts of water the day before a race to prevent hydration on race day. There is no reason for this. Your body does not store water like a camel’s does. If you drink an excessive amount, meaning more than necessary to quench thirst, you
will soon urinate to remove the excess. And by drinking excessively you temporarily dilute electrolyte stores. So there is nothing to be gained by drinking copious amounts of fluids the day before or the morning of a race. Here again, thirst is the key. Pay attention to your body.

How about the oft-repeated stipulation that none of the water you take in can come from caffeinated beverages, as they cause a net loss of body fluid? Research contradicts this oft-repeated belief. Athletes do not appear to lose any more body stores of water following caffeine ingestion in the hours preceding exercise than those who did not use a caffeinated drink. And also be aware that fluid comes not just from drinking but also from the food you eat.

Much of the research seems to support the notion that a yellow urine color is a good indicator of significant dehydration, but not all of the research is in agreement. More research is needed in this area. While having yellow urine may indicate some level of dehydration, such a color by itself is not proof of dehydration. Metabolites, the end products of metabolism such as urea, are often expelled in the urine and provide color even though you are well hydrated. The same goes for B vitamin supplements. They will provide a bright yellow color to your urine. The best indicator of dehydration is thirst. It works. Just pay attention.

MICRONUTRIENTS AND OVERTRAINING

Many studies have reported that athletes make poor dietary choices, contributing to low vitamin and mineral status that is compounded by normal losses during periods of increased training. For example, a study of Dutch elite athletes showed that the female swimmers had an inadequate iron intake, while cyclists were not getting enough vitamins B
₁
and B
₆
. Similar research on women runners has shown repeatedly that due to restriction of calories, extremely high carbohydrate intake, or vegetarian eating patterns, these athletes are often low in iron, zinc, magnesium, and calcium. Among both male and female runners, dietary zinc and iron have been shown to be
low. Inadequate iron intake has also been confirmed for a group of cross-country skiers; 50 percent of Nordic women skiers in a Winter Olympics had prelatent iron deficiency, and 7 percent were anemic. In a study of 1,300 German athletes in various sports, 21 percent had low levels of serum magnesium, and 14 percent lacked iron. There is little doubt that many athletes do not meet their nutritional needs when it comes to micronutrients. Such deficiencies may well contribute to the onset of overtraining.

An athlete who is deficient in vitamins A, B
₆
, C, or E is at high risk for a weakened immune system and illness related to overreaching. In the same manner, deficiencies of the minerals zinc, magnesium, copper, and iron may also result in impaired immunity. All of this once again underscores the importance of eating a diet that is rich in micronutrients once you are into Stage V of recovery. Macronutrients are no longer the issue.

The most micronutrient-dense foods are vegetables and meats, including fish and poultry. However, eating a lot of cereal grains negates the benefits because these foods contain high amounts of phytates, which decrease the body’s absorption of minerals such as iron and zinc.

Just as eating an inadequate diet can set you up for overtraining, relying on supplements instead of nutrient-dense foods to provide vitamins and minerals can also be detrimental. For example, excessive amounts of vitamin A, vitamin E, and zinc have been shown to weaken the immune system, thus contributing to overtraining symptoms. An excessive intake of iron promotes bacterial growth and can induce a zinc deficiency. The best way to ensure a balanced diet is to eat plenty of vegetables, fruits, and meats—not to take pills or eat lab-designed food products marketed to athletes. Science has yet to catch up with Mother Nature when it comes to producing nutritious food.

OVERTRAINING PREVENTION AND TREATMENT

There are no preliminary symptoms to warn you when you have gone too far with an imbalance between stress and rest. The progression from
a normal and recurring state of overreaching to full-blown overtraining is so gradual that you won’t recognize the impending doom. By the time you realize that you’ve pushed too hard, it’s too late, and your only recourse is loss of fitness by greatly reducing or even eliminating the training stress.

If you are overreached, as indicated by an unusually high level of fatigue and suspect overtraining, take 3 to 5 days of complete rest, and then do a short, low-intensity workout. If you feel normal, you were only in an advanced stage of overreaching and are free to gradually return to regular training (but do so cautiously). But if after several exercise-free days the test workout feels like a wearisome burden, you are probably overtrained or are sick and should see your doctor. Take another 3 to 5 days of complete rest before retesting your status as before. Continue this pattern until exercise becomes fun again, which may take weeks or even months. Throughout the process, be sure to eat a nutritious diet made up primarily of fruits, vegetables, and meats, including fish and poultry.

It is far better to prevent overtraining in the first place than to deal with it after the fact, especially when you consider that it can take weeks if not months to recover. So what must you do to avoid it?

At its essence, overtraining results from training mistakes, and two are particularly common. The first is an imbalance between stress and rest, which usually occurs when the athlete suddenly increases the training workload in either volume or intensity—or both. The second scenario involves cutting back on recovery by substituting more challenging workouts for easy ones. Athletes have even been known to do both: suddenly increase the workload and eliminate rest and recovery days. In either situation the increased stress at first will result in improving fitness but also in a lot of fatigue. A few days of such increased stress may actually be beneficial. It’s when the pattern continues for several days or weeks, depending on the work capacity of the individual, that it becomes problematic. Given the work ethic, the motivation, and, in some serious endurance athletes, the obsession, such an extended period of high stress probably seems like a sure route to success. It is not; it is a sure route to failure.

The best way to avoid this pitfall is to follow a long-term, periodized training plan that schedules weekly rest and recovery days, monthly rest and recovery weeks, and annual rest and recovery months. This plan should also provide for a gradual progression in the training workload and fit your unique characteristics, including sport experience, age, susceptibility to illness and injury, and goals.

Nutrition often plays a role in the onset of overtraining. Even a suitably aggressive training regimen that leads to an acceptable level of overreaching may be undermined by a diet that does not encourage quick recovery. In our experience, such a diet is usually lacking in total calories, protein, or micronutrients. This is all too common for the serious endurance athlete who concentrates on sugar and starch, eats a vegetarian diet, or is concerned about body weight and so reduces calories despite a high workload. Any one of these scenarios will diminish recovery in what might be an otherwise appropriate training program.

PART III

O
UR
S
TONE
A
GE
L
EGACY

CHAPTER 8

W
HY
E
AT LIKE A
C
AVEMAN?

MAKING SENSE OUT OF NUTRITIONAL CHAOS

As an athlete, you probably are aware that even small variations in your performance can significantly alter how well you place in any given race. However, you may never have considered how huge this effect can be.

Consider a 1 to 2 percent difference in your time for a 10,000-meter race. At first it sounds fairly insignificant. Whether you run 1 to 2 percent faster or slower in a 10-K race is immaterial, right? Wrong! At the US Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2011, just 14.96 seconds (a mere 0.87 percent difference) separated the top 10 finishers in the men’s 10-K final. Even more telling were the top three finishers’ times. The winner, Galen Rupp, beat the second-place finisher, Matt Tegenkamp, by 1.8 seconds—in relative terms, a minuscule 0.10 percent difference in performance. The third-place finisher, Scott Bauhs, was 2.34 seconds behind the winner—only 0.14 percent slower than the winning time. These numbers graphically illustrate how very small differences in performance can have an enormous impact on how well you place. But more important, they emphasize how crucial it is for you to optimize every factor that can possibly influence your race-day performance.

Your basic training foundation (intensity, frequency, and duration of exercise) clearly is of utmost importance in shaping how well you will perform. Over the long haul, how well and how fast you can recover
from each and every workout will determine how hard you can train over the course of an entire season. Also, there is little doubt that staying healthy and free from injury and illness are essential in permitting you to train at higher intensities for longer periods, which in turn will benefit your race performance.

Now, let’s go back to that crucial 1 to 2 percent difference in performance and have a look at Rupp’s top three race times for the 10-K during the 2010-2011 seasons. The slowest of those (27:26.84) is 2.42 percent slower than his top time (26:48.00), whereas his second-best finish (27:10.74) is 1.41 percent slower than the top time, which set the American record for the 10-K. You can see that not only do small performance differences emerge among athletes, but they also appear within individuals. Given similar wind, weather, and altitude conditions, why might your performance vary by 1 to 2 percent? What factors might be responsible for these tiny but important performance differences? How about your muscle glycogen stores—might they be involved? Does the ability of your muscles to overcome fatigue from a previous race or workout play a role? What’s the effect of a slight upper respiratory illness or lingering tendinitis? How about your ability to maintain quality workouts between races? Without a doubt, any or all of these issues have the potential to influence your race-day performance by 1 to 2 percent—or even more.

Nutritionists, exercise physiologists, and physicians alike agree that athletic performance can go to hell in a handbasket very rapidly from a faulty diet. However, they have dogmatically argued for decades that a “balanced” diet is all that’s needed to maximize athletic performance, provided an optimal training schedule is followed. But what exactly is a “balanced diet”? More precisely, what is the starting point for any athletic diet? Is it the same diet that optimizes your health and well-being? And what is the best diet to optimize immune function and prevent colds and upper respiratory illnesses or to speed recovery from—or even prevent—muscle strains or injuries? All of those questions raise a much larger and all-encompassing question, one that, when answered correctly, provides
us with an elegant, grand organizing template that allows us to make sense out of all this nutritional and dietary confusion and chaos.

Nutrition is every bit as contentious as politics and religion. It seems like everybody’s got an opinion about proper diet, including health agencies, the government, leading scientists, diet doctors, and popular nutritionists. From the consumer perspective, the study of nutrition appears jumbled and chaotic. One day you hear one thing; the next, the exact opposite. Margarine is good for your health; margarine contains trans fatty acids. Eggs increase your blood cholesterol; eggs don’t increase your cholesterol levels. Fiber prevents colon cancer; fiber doesn’t prevent colon cancer. Pizza is a healthful food; pizza is junk food.

The USDA MyPlate poster, espousing healthful eating, is found in almost every elementary school and hospital lunchroom in the country. Yet an article in the prestigious
Scientific American
magazine, written by scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health, loudly condemned the MyPlate dietary recommendations. A decade ago, almost 30 million Americans were following Dr. Atkins’s advice to eat more fat, butter, and cheese to lose weight. In utter contrast, Dean Ornish, MD, and T. Colin Campbell tell us fat and meat cause cancer, heart disease, and obesity and that we would all be a lot healthier if we were strict vegetarians. Who’s right and who’s wrong? How in the world can anyone make any sense out of this apparent disarray of conflicting facts, opinions, and ideas?

In mature and well-developed scientific disciplines, universal paradigms guide researchers to fruitful end points as they design their experiments and hypotheses. For instance, in cosmology (the study of the universe), the guiding paradigm is the big bang theory that the universe began with an enormous explosion and has been expanding ever since. In geology, the continental drift model established that all of the current continents at one time formed a continuous landmass that eventually drifted apart to form the present-day continents. These central concepts serve as orientation points for all other inquiry within each discipline. Scientists do not know everything about the nature of
the universe, but it is unquestionable that it has been and is expanding. This central knowledge then serves as a template that allows scientists to make much more accurate and informed hypotheses about factors yet to be discovered.