Kap in researching a previous post you said, My 5 x 5s take roughly 90 minutes, including warm ups, the sprint workouts are about 75 minutes”, what take so long? Could you please break this down, trying to emulate your workouts but not sure what I am missing. Thanks!
Charlie,
This is a solid question. I dig the attention to detail. Much respect.
Our focus at Kaplifestyle is about power production and the development of lean tissue. Neither our 5 x 5 nor our sprint workouts are endurance exercises. Rather, we want to fully recover in order to optimize for explosiveness and speed.
From strength and conditioning coach John Alvino:
How long you should rest in between sprints can have a huge impact on your training results. If you are training for pure speed, you generally want full recovery in between sprints. For the distances discussed above you could easily rest 3-6 minutes in between sprints.
This may not be the ideal formula for fat burning, but I’m in it for the power and the muscle mass. I believe that more lean tissue is better, long term. The longer the sprints and the less recovery built in, the more catabolic the activity may become.
So, when I perform the 5 x 5 or sprints, I recover fully between sets. Here’s a sample breakdown.
15 minute warm up
4 x 40 yards with 4 minutes rest between = roughly 17 minutes
No, it’s not an exact science, but you get the picture. The key word is power. Full recovery leads to full power production. Full power production reminds our bodies to keep the lean tissue we have and to lay down more. Lean tissue equals more power production and the cycle repeats.
Strong mind,
Kap
Let me know what’s on your mind in the comments below.
Every Thursday and Sunday for the last year, I’ve gone through the same sprint workout. This time, I find myself dreading following that routine. A warm-up followed by four 100s, four 60s and four 40s…I can’t do it today. I need something different. From business2community.com: Ask anyone who fell off the bandwagon with their New Year’s fitness resolutions: boring workouts … [Read more…]
I love the dumbbell snatch. It’s one of the exercises I perform simply because enjoy it. I dig the sensation of moving the weight fast and the sting when my feet hit the floor. Lucky for me, the dumbbell snatch translated perfectly to baseball. Picture Andrelton Simmons going from an athletic position to leaping up to, well, snatch a bullet line drive. Notice the … [Read more…]
The bench press is the most essential upper body move for overall strength, power and muscular development. It has also inspired the world’s most ridiculous question: Man, how much can you bench? This query is both embarrassing and meaningful. The amount of weight an athlete can move off of his or her chest translates directly to sport. For non-athletes concerned mostly … [Read more…]
Ensuring you have an appropriate warm up is essential to any successful program. Warm ups prior to exercise are important to prepare your circulatory system and muscles for exertion and reduce the chance of injury. Unfortunately, traditional stretching routines are ineffective. The most potent way to warm up for an athletic activity is by performing the same movements you will … [Read more…]
Something about being outdoors and in the indigenous glow of the sun makes me feel good. I resent the fact that I’m told to cover up or slather on sunscreen before I go sprint or swim or whatever. It doesn’t seem fair or natural to me. How could the sun or the wind or the rain not be good for us human beings who have evolved under our star’s brightest light? Don’t … [Read more…]
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Water is the answer. My son and I start our afternoon grabbing lunch at a restaurant in Malibu; one we’ve never tried. I decide on the salmon over quinoa with a mango salsa. The waiter delivers the dish to our table; it looks fantastic. It tastes as delicious as it looks, and I wipe it out in four bites. In my mind, I feel like it wasn’t enough food, even though there was … [Read more…]
Major league baseball training rooms are a popular spot for guys looking to get their daily drug fix. The drug of choice? Advil. Over the course of 162 games, plus spring training, plus the post season, an inflamed muscle here and there is impossible to avoid.
I have clear recollections of taking 12 Advil a day for weeks at a time. Hundreds of throws, swings of the bat, face first slams into dirt, full speed collisions with the wall – my body hurt so badly that I felt I had no choice. A couple of ibuprofen would take the edge off and let me get out there to do the same thing the next day.
Most people view non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like Advil, Aleve, and aspirin as safe, since they are widely available without a prescription. However, a 2010 study out of Denmark found that usage of these drugs increased the risk of ischemic strokes and myocardial infarction (heart attack.)
When I learned of these risks, I knew I desired the opportunity to stop taking pills of any kind. Towards the end of my career, I discovered the benefits of anti-inflammatory foods, and I was able to stop taking Advil but still keep going onto the field.
When my body is beat up, I saturate my system with the foods below:
Berries
Salmon
Walnuts
Green Tea
Olive Oil
Ginger
Turmeric
Greens and broccoli
All of these foods have strong anti-inflammatory properties, in addition to providing plenty of nutritional benefits. If you’re interested in learning more about specific anti-inflammatory foods, my favorite resource is here.
I try to incorporate all of these items into my diet on a regular basis, but I increase them at the first sign of any stiffness, soreness or pain. Inflammation can be cumulative, so at the first signs, I’m reaching for the kale and cutting out the refined sugars.
From a PubMed article:
Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are a heterogeneous, complex group of compounds that are formed when reducing sugar reacts in a non-enzymatic way with amino acids in proteins and other macromolecules… The deleterious effects of AGEs in different tissues are attributed to their chemical, pro-oxidant, and inflammatory actions… After activation, NF-κB translocates to the nucleus where it will activate the transcription of genes for cytokines, growth factors and adhesive molecules, such as tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα), interleukin 6 (Il-6), well known inflammation promoters, and vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM1). NF-κB activation increases RAGE expression, creating a positive feedback cycle that enhances the production of inflammation promoters.
That’s a lot of words to express something very simple. Sugar = inflammation = pain.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to feel a general sense of well-being when we are navigating our days in pain. Our work hours seem longer, and our time with loved ones is less enjoyable. Incorporating some anti-inflammatory foods into your diet will result in healthier, happier moments and improve your general lifestyle.
It’s Friday. I’m assuming more than a few of you are sitting at work, dreaming of starting the weekend. Although this is a blog devoted to promoting and improving your health and well-being, you know I’m no stranger to indulgences. In fact, I preach it. Depriving yourself consistently is ineffective, so I encourage and support you in your occasional cheat meal (or even day!) once in a blue moon.
In that spirit, I decided to list some of my favorites for the days when you purposefully lose control, go all out and induce a well-deserved food coma.
I present my top five cheat foods:
Maple Bars
I drool with Homer. When I was in 11th grade, I’d ditch school with my best friend, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and eat donuts (Thank you, Blinkie’s Donuts in Woodland Hills) while 1st and 2nd period slowly drifted by for my better-educated classmates. Yes, we were 16. We somehow got away with the behavior, and I fell in love with my favorite high school breakfast.
The sweet, smoky flavor of maple has always been one of my pleasures. Spread an icy, sugary glaze of the stuff over a fried bar of semi-sweet, airy dough and you’ve achieved pure bliss.
Price paid: 490 calories
Cheesecake
I used to be that guy, the one who went for all the crazy cheesecake flavors like Snickers or cookies and cream. If that’s your bag, I can’t argue with you. Now, I just desire plain, with a perfectly baked, crumbly crust, of course. Just do me a favor, and don’t cut me a sliver. If I’m going to indulge, I’m interested in a hunk. Pass the coffee, please.
Price paid: 870 calories for a slice of Oreo Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory
Pizza
The toppings and style are less relevant. Meat lovers, supreme, deep dish, thin crust. It’s meat, cheese and bread, the perfect combo for caloric inhalation. Fine, since you’re holding my feet to the fire, I’ll go deep dish with spicy sausage and pineapple for a little sweet to counter the savory. Two slices? Nope. The whole pie.
Price paid: 1,500 calories for 5 slices at 300 calories a piece. I randomly selected a pizza company, as they vary in “nutritional” content.
Burgers
This is the category in which quality is most important. Top flight grass fed ground beef cooked to less than medium, sharp, pungent blue cheese, crisp salty bacon, creamy, fresh avocado, thick slices of red onion, crunchy cool lettuce, a dense, bready, toasted bun, ketchup, mustard and an ice cold Stella. Nothing further, your honor.
Price paid: 1,300 calories
Gelato
Ahhhh, the complexity of salted caramel gelato. Why does salt compliment caramel so well? Caramel alone is slightly too rich and decadent, but coupled with frozen cream and folding in just the right amount of sea salt makes for a near perfect dessert.
Price paid: 170 calories.
170 calories? That hardly seems like an indulgence at all! Except that is 170 calories for the ridiculous serving size of a ½ cup. That’s two bites. So if we project that out to my serving size of a pint…
Price paid: 680 calories.
Years ago, my brother and I had a full cheat day and ate like this for 12 hours. Go ahead, be a G, and squeeze these all into one full 24 hour cycle. I dare you to become my hero.
If you have strong opinions and share them unapologetically, you should expect to be disliked by a large percentage of the population. Being a leader typically means taking a stand on a position, even in the face of opposition. The best leaders are unquestionably empathetic individuals, ones who seek collaboration and work as a team. At the end of the day, however, they … [Read more…]
With the New Year rapidly approaching, folks are beginning to announce their resolutions. This time has reminded me of how silly I think “diets” are, particularly for athletes. A few days back, I exposed how I like to write about shit nobody cares about when I mused on the health benefits of tamarind paste. Loren commented: I am curious to know your thoughts on Whole 30? … [Read more…]
Striving to avoid slipups isn’t noble. Striving to take bold action, knowing that you’ll inevitably fail and look foolish, is a strong strategy. Recently, an inspiring colleague of mine shared this with me. Life is a maze and we are mice. We have decisions to make at every fork in the road. We will unquestionably take wrong turns, bump up against walls … [Read more…]
Prioritizing effectively is a skill like any other and therefore requires deliberate practice. When we engage in weight training, we deliberately overload our muscles and ask them handle progressively heavier loads. We instantly comprehend that if we were to only train one body part while ignoring the rest, only the area we trained is going to get bigger and stronger. Our … [Read more…]
Chalk talk applies to life, not just sports. We are coming to understand that the mental side of sports is just as (if not more) important than the physical, particularly at the highest level. More accurately, mental strength is the separator when talent is comparable. Sure, basketball players should be knocking out their free throws deliberately and linemen need thousands … [Read more…]
I am constantly toying with ways to improve my focus and attention through nutrition, sleep and exercise.
When I was a child, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. I didn’t like being labeled (I despise labels in general) but I wasn’t alone. I rubbed elbows with 13.5% of boys 3-17 years diagnosed with ADHD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
My early educational career was a grind. By the time I was in 7th grade, I was ditching classes. I had next to no interest in the material and spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy finding ways not to attend. It took every ounce of effort I had to graduate high school while staying eligible to play baseball, even with the relatively low bar of the public Los Angeles Unified School District standards.
As a boy, I was prescribed both Ritalin and Dexedrine, two stimulants used to control the symptoms of ADHD. They definitely boosted my middle school academic prowess, but I strongly disliked the side effects. First, they suppressed my appetite. I was a young athlete desperately attempting to get bigger and stronger; I needed every calorie available. Second, my personality became rather subdued, and I knew even at 11 that it felt unnatural. I stopped swallowing those pills rather quickly.
The struggles didn’t disappear, however. As a Major League Baseball player in my twenties, there were times where my focus would waver on defense. I would have to literally shake myself to come back to the present. I can remember running down a ball hit in the gap in Texas, but I still don’t know how I did it. I was on a completely different planet when it was hit. Then, by some universal stroke of kindness, the rock was in my glove for the third out. I jogged groggily back to the dugout and was greeted with high-fives. None of my teammates were aware of the travels of my spacey brain. Phew.
Now, at 38, I have substantially more interest in my work than I did as a 6th grader, but my focus wavers substantially at times, to the degree that it affects my ability to organize my thoughts. Despite my creativity, the ratio of time spent to my output is not something I’m thrilled with. Do I still have ADD? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t give a shit. The diagnosis doesn’t matter; I only care about my ability to optimize my life for better productivity and sharper communication.
During the middle of my playing career, I decided to go back and see that childhood doctor. He once again prescribed Ritalin. As it did when I was a child, the pills wrecked my appetite and sucked the personality out of me. That experiment didn’t last long, and it was back to the drawing board.
I can now comprehend and articulate what I recognized even back then. The best ways to improve my concentration and focus are alterations to my exercise, nutrition, and breathing routines. This formula sits well with me and jibes with my general approach to health.
If you’ve been following my blog, you know how passionately I feel about personal trial and error. I’m a long way from discovering the optimal program for my brain, but I continue to tinker by throwing all my resources at the wall to see what sticks and what slides down.
My first chuck is always physical activity. After a good workout, I’m almost always clearer upstairs. I often write during or post training. From webmd.com:
When you exercise, your brain releases chemicals called neurotransmitters, including dopamine, which helps with attention and clear thinking. People with ADHD often have less dopamine than usual in their brain.
My dopamine release is just fine, thank you. Kaplifestyle.com is judgment free, webmd.
You know about my take on consuming humanely raised and butchered animal flesh. Who knew the practice led to improved focus? From additudemag.com:
Foods rich in protein — lean beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, beans, nuts, soy, and low-fat dairy products — can have beneficial effects on ADD symptoms. Protein-rich foods are used by the body to make neurotransmitters, the chemicals released by brain cells to communicate with each other.
This is lovely, and I’ve personally experienced boosts in productivity with my experimentation in these arenas. However, my current point of interest is a red dot on the caffeine map.
I believe in most things in moderation. You likely know about my passionate love affair with coffee, but in case you missed this post on caffeine reduction, check it out and rejoin us.
Here’s my dilemma. I’ve found that caffeine in high doses is my most effective focus enhancer. From psychcentral.com:
As it is a stimulant, caffeine has been investigated as a potential treatment for attention deficit disorder. Its use as a therapy is not widespread because it was found in research studies to be less efficient than other stimulants. But experts writing in 2008 suggest the doses were too low to have a consistent effect. They say that if caffeine proves useful, it “would represent a qualitative increment over the traditional repeated use of psychostimulants, which can have severe side effects if repeatedly used in children.”
When I consistently sip black coffee throughout the day, I’m sharper on radio, TV and in my writing. This is both good news and bad news, obviously. I’ve found a stimulant that works for me without the side effects I experience on more traditional prescriptions, but it does come with its own negative factors.
I don’t have the answers to all the questions on this topic, and I may never reach a finish line. I did vow to share my journey with you. Because we’ve established a bond over the course of the last seven months, I’m comfortable coming at you with my tie loosened.
When you find yourself with a cold, don’t avoid the milk. You may have heard the myth that drinking milk will make a cold worse. Our regular readers know we don’t fall for a catchphrase without doing our due diligence. From listverse.com: A lot of people think that drinking milk while you have a cold is a bad idea because it causes more mucous to build up. Actually, milk … [Read more…]
Something about being outdoors and in the indigenous glow of the sun makes me feel good. I resent the fact that I’m told to cover up or slather on sunscreen before I go sprint or swim or whatever. It doesn’t seem fair or natural to me. How could the sun or the wind or the rain not be good for us human beings who have evolved under our star’s brightest light? Don’t … [Read more…]
Inevitably, and with good reason, businesses, sports organizations and families across the country will be looking to Bill, Tom and the Pats for the “tricks” to make their companies and teams stronger. Innumerable stories will be written featuring sound bytes like “culture over strategy” and quotes from guys like Bill who says, “just do your job.” People, and not just from New England, will suggest Bill as the next POTUS.
Unfortunately for all of us, it’s not as simple as pulling out the Pats’ publicly available playbook, applying some buzzwords and poof, we win championships, sell ad space and run our country optimally.
The Pats apply these well documented and evangelized philosophies, of course. And so do countless other organizations. The strong likelihood is that the Pats are more committed to them than the field. They live them 24 hours a day when the lights are off, the stands are empty and all the reporters have put their microphones away. They preach them internally and raise the bar for each other, cursing one another when somebody falls short of living the mantra and loving on one another when they succeed. They pour their hearts out, knowing sometimes they’ll fall just short. When the world is taking shots at them, challenging their integrity, and making fun of them relentlessly, they become more determined. The field vomits from fatigue. The Pats don’t spit venom back; they dig in and support each other with more committed guts and vigor. They do this over the course of days, months, years and, ultimately, decades.
That’s why “just do your job” can be stolen and Bill Belicheck doesn’t give a shit. He knows nobody can do it more consistently and effectively. If anybody else could, there wouldn’t be just one New England Patriots.
If you want to be your strongest, get some sun on your boys. And by boys, I mean your testicles.
Baseball players are continually trying to mine every (legal) advantage they can. Any pro athlete is working to get stronger, faster, more powerful, and they’re looking to their nutrition, supplements, even superstitions to do so.
There’s a running joke in baseball clubhouses about eating bananas.
Player A (eating a banana): Know why I like to eat bananas?
Player B: Why?
Player A: Ever see a weak gorilla?
Maybe it isn’t about the bananas. Rather, perhaps the gorillas have elevated testosterone because they don’t wear clothes. Fine, this may be a stretch, but hear me out.
We’ve often mused on the value of vitamin D and getting it through some carefully calculated exposure to the sun. Even a baseball player, out in the sun daily, is usually mostly covered in long pants, a shirt, a hat and slathered in sunscreen. We get less vitamin D than we think.
There are links between testosterone production and an ample supply of vitamin D.
Although other nutrients are just as important as vitamin D for testosterone production, optimizing vitamin D levels is a first priority because the relationship between this nutrient and T has just been identified.
A study that came out at the end of last year found that men who were deficient in vitamin D (a level below 20 ng/ml) had much lower free T and higher estrogen. Those same men had more body fat, less lean mass, greater chance of depression, higher rates of cardiovascular disease, and poorer fertility than men with higher vitamin D levels. The men with adequate vitamin D (above 30 ng/ml) had the leanest body composition, higher free T, and better overall health.
Okay, so we are fairly confident that a deficiency in vitamin D would be shitty for athletes aiming to be their strongest. However, we might be able to accelerate or amplify the benefit of sun exposure and ultimately vitamin D. How? Through being in the sun in our most natural form, sans clothing. Revealing your balls to nature will be freeing, and it might just help you be your strongest and fastest.
A1939 study exposed men to UV radiation over the course of 5 days. The study noted that it was sufficient to turn the skin red. When the UV radiation was aimed at the chest, testosterone levels increased by 120%. When the genitals were exposed, testosterone increased by more than 200%.
Granted, this was strictly an observational study and conducted nearly 80 years ago. Part of the reason we’re looking at a somewhat antiquated study is because the scientific community could turn their nose up at the idea of exposing our testicles to large amounts of UV radiation. That’s understandable. But what if we eased into it? Maybe we don’t need a 200% increase, but a few minutes spent in the sun the way we evolved to be might make enough of a difference to get that extra inch on your live drives.
