CrossFit South Rockland

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Day 23... Paleo diet: Following the origin of nutrition?

By LEIGH ZALESKI
Daily Record/Sunday News
Posted: 05/17/2011 05:23:33 PM EDT

Kim Jeter, who owns Jeter Wellness, makes her signature side salad, fresh tomato, half an avocado, zucchini, olive oil, apple cider vinegar and fresh basil. Jeter follows the paleo diet, a grain-free eating regimen that's high in animal protein and veggies. (DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS - PAUL KUEHNEL)

York, PA - Seth Duncan didn't like the way he felt when he ate grains.

He felt sluggish and always had cravings, even after eating a full meal. He was vegan for about two years, and although he ate enough protein, he said he wasn't getting enough nutrients.

At 5-feet-6-inches tall, Duncan weighed about 128 pounds, but said he had a higher body-fat percentage, about 15 percent.

Monday, May 30, 2011

WOD's



Workout #1
Complete 3 rounds of:
3 jerks
Run 800m or Row 1000


Workout #2
3 rounds for time:
25 jump lunges
20 KBS
Row 15 calories


Workout #3
Squat clean 
3-3-3-3-3


Front squat
2-2-2-2-2



Day 22... Memorial Day

Freedom isn't free

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Day 21... Vexing Rise in Oblique Injuries, and Little Explanation

Vexing Rise in Oblique Injuries, and Little Explanation



Nearly everyone has four of them — broad flat muscles, known as obliques, that attach the rib cage and the pelvis on each side of the body and, until recently, have not really been part of the sports lexicon.
But now they are. The muscles are particularly important to baseball players, who use them to rotate their bodies as hard as possible to throw a ball and swing a bat, and increasingly those muscles are being injured and putting players like Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria on the disabled list.
Why this is happening is not really clear, but happening it is. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ head trainer, Stan Conte, was so intrigued that he stayed up through the night last week going line by line through a list he has assembled of the roughly 7,000 players who have gone on the disabled list since 1991.
“I had to do that because those injuries weren’t always called obliques,” said Conte, who has spent several years trying to build mathematical formulas to predict the physical problems that players may encounter. “Until the late 1990s, they were called rib cage injuries or abdominal injuries or lower chest injuries. As M.R.I. technology got better, the diagnosis became more particular and we began to see them called oblique injuries.”
For continuity, Conte then grouped everything — what used to be called rib cage or abdominal injuries two decades ago but are now called an oblique — under the term “core injuries.”
And what he found was that four players had gone on the D.L. with core, or oblique, injuries at this point a year ago. But in 2011, the total is already 14 — 12 players at the start of the season and 2 more since then. It is a small sample, Conte acknowledged, but he said it was significant nonetheless because the increase was in contrast to the general pattern since 1991.
That pattern, Conte said, showed that the number of oblique injuries had risen slightly in the last two decades. But over the last eight years, Conte said, the number had actually remained flat, leading to an obvious question: Why is there such a big increase this year?
“One theory I have is that players are transferring more quickly from the off-season to spring training games and to more competitive regular-season games, and the muscles aren’t holding up to the increased strain and force the players are putting on them in competition,” Conte said in a telephone interview.
Conte said that for some players, there might be a shorter period of time between when they report to spring training and when they actually start playing exhibition games. In fact, since 1991 a third of all oblique injuries have occurred in April. (Spring training injuries are counted under an April heading because the disabled list is not used before the season starts). The number decreases throughout the season, with just 1 percent of oblique injuries occurring in September.
Yankees center fielder Curtis Granderson was among four Yankees who injured their obliques during spring training this year.
“One of the first questions I was asked was whether I was taking more or less batting practice,” Granderson said. “I felt like I had been doing about the same amount from last year to this year.”
Granderson, who injured his oblique toward the end of spring training but started in center field for the Yankees on opening day, said that a player who might be swinging more might be more likely to injure his oblique.
“But I didn’t feel like anything I was doing was anything drastically different to anything I was doing before,” he said. “I had the same warm-up I was doing before, nothing that gave a sign that hey, it’s a little sore or anything like that. It was literally one swing. It was a funny swing, it was an out-in-front swing where I swung and didn’t square it up.”
Last season, pitchers who injured their obliques and went on the disabled list typically took about 43 days before returning to play compared with 31 days for position players.
Another theory in baseball for the rise of oblique injuries is that players are putting too much emphasis on strengthening their abdominal muscles.
“Personally I don’t think that’s true because I can’t imagine a stronger, more flexible, muscle that has more endurance being a bad thing,” Conte said. He noted that “nobody did these exercises” back in 1991 and that the number of injuries then was similar to the numbers in recent years, although 2011 is clearly different.
Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, who watched one player after another sustain oblique injuries this spring, said the whole thing remained a mystery to him.
“We’ve had two appendectomies, which I wouldn’t have really bet on,” he said referring to Adam Dunn of the Chicago White Sox and Matt Holliday of the St. Louis Cardinals, both of whom underwent that procedure earlier this month.
As for the oblique injuries, Girardi said, “I can’t really tell you why it’s happened.”
“Players are strong now and they take swings,” he said. But why that might lead to more oblique injuries, Girardi was not willing to say. “It used to be the hammy,” he said of the hamstring pulls that once dominated injury discussions. And no one, Girardi said, seemed to know why that was the case, either.

Dan Graziano contributed reporting, and Ben Shpigel contributed reporting from Boston.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Day 20... Why Fast Food Isn't Cheaper Than Healthy Food

Posted: 05/18/11 08:18 AM ET
I get a lot of questions during lectures from people wanting to know how they can eat better when eating healthy is so expensive. They base their questions on claims that unhealthy choices are cheaper. For instance, I saw a recent news story where the reporter walked around Walmart and looked at the value of foods based on the measure of calories per dollar. This is really nothing more than a cute parlor game to say that one dollar will purchase close to 1,000 calories of candy bars but only a single large apple, because it doesn't tell us anything about what we get for our money. Calories are certainly an important part of our diet and weight control, but it is the quality of those calories that matters to our health.
The conclusion often from studies and news reports is that the subsidies on more calorie-dense foods are the culprit Because our government provides funding to farmers growing calorie-dense products like corn (which is processed into sugars) and beef, the typical fast food menu can be advertised as being "cheap, cheap, cheap," and candy bars can be sold for 33 cents each.
This is, however, one of the great myths about healthy eating -- ranking right up there with the fallacy that eating healthy doesn't taste good. I believe it's more economical to cook a fresh, healthy meal than to eat junk food.
The argument I hear most often is that it's cheaper to eat at McDonald's. After going to McDonald's recently and putting together a typical meal for four (mom, dad and two kids), I came up with a total of about $14.00 (I didn't actually buy anything, though). For that money, you get almost nothing of nutritive value, but bland white bread, greasy burgers and fries with a sugary soda.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Day 19... Hate to Stretch? BAM. Not Anymore


Hate to Stretch? BAM. Not Anymore

Updated: Apr 11th 2011 1:04 PM UTC by tmurphy

MobilityWod.com’s fitness star, Kelly Starrett, is on a one-year mission to prove that mobility work is a gateway to high-performance.

Written by: T.J. Murphy

(This story first appeared in the March issue of Competitor Magazine.)

Kelly Starrett’s physical therapy office is not a mauve-carpeted affair, equipped with humming electro-therapy computers and XM radio streaming soft rock through Bose speakers. Instead, his office is a mobile container unit in a parking lot behind a sporting goods store, surrounded by Paleolithic training equipment,like tractor tires, squat racks and beer kegs.

“I like things gritty,” he says.


Kelly Starrett teaching at Crossfit San Francisco

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Day 17... SELF IMPROVEMENT


SELF IMPROVEMENT

The secret to success in CrossFit is not dependent on conditions and objects found external to the body, nor is it dependent on heaven sent DNA. The barbell doesn’t care how bad your lungs hurt and the pull-up bar certainly doesn’t care how fried your forearms are. Likewise, most of us don’t hit the genetic jackpot for athletic ability and are instead left to toil with our mediocre abilities. However, accepting mediocrity without ever having the desire to improve is an admission of laziness and shows apathy for our well-being and health. The rest of this article will be used to delve into the deeper nature of CrossFit and self improvement.
There is only one requirement for being a better CrossFitter and living a healthier life and anyone can meet it: work hard at the things that are important to you. That’s it. There are no tricks and gimmicks and there’s no elixir that’s going to make you breathe fire. Accept that there is no short cut to strength and power, accept that your inflexibility will remain inflexible unless you mobilize, and accept that you won’t ever run 26.22 miles unless you train intelligently.
Once you recognize your weaknesses and deficiencies and the path laid before you, realize you have the power to change if you want it bad enough for yourself. There’s no amount of urging and cheerleading that someone else can do to make you deadlift 500 pounds. Only you 
can prevent forest fires can put the work in on the front end to prepare your body properly (i.e. your muscles and central nervous system). And I know that there’s no amount of pleading that I can do that will make you want to come to the gym (maybe offering high fives to people with good attendance will help?). You have to want to be at the gym. Once you realize that you can be a better human and decide that you want to change for yourself and no one else, we can help you. We have the 
tools to make you better.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Day 16... Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart

Whether the new thinking will be reflected in this year's revision of the federal dietary guidelines remains unclear
By Melinda Wenner Moyer
Tuesday, April 27, 2010


DONUT DEFEAT: This year U.S. dietary guidelines may target refined carbohydrates, which increase the risk for cardiovascular disease.


In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis—which combines data from several studies—that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.


The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter to the conventional wisdom that saturated fat is bad for the heart because it increases total cholesterol levels. That idea is “based in large measure on extrapolations, which are not supported by the data,” Krauss says.


One problem with the old logic is that “total cholesterol is not a great predictor of risk,” says Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Although saturated fat boosts blood levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, it also increases “good” HDL cholesterol. In 2008 Stampfer co-authored a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that followed 322 moderately obese individuals for two years as they adopted one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on American Heart Association guidelines; a Mediterranean, restricted-calorie diet rich in vegetables and low in red meat; and a low-carbohydrate, nonrestricted-calorie diet. Although the subjects on the low-carb diet ate the most saturated fat, they ended up with the healthiest ratio of HDL to LDL cholesterol and lost twice as much weight as their low-fat-eating counterparts.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Weekly WODs



Workout #1
Part1
Complete three rounds for time:
10 floor press
50 double unders/ 200 singles (jump rope)


Part 2
Strict pull ups & KB wall ball sub
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1


Workout #2
Run 1200m
Four corners 4 rounds:
1. SB press
2. SB squat
3. Push ups
4. Squat thrusts
(Walking lunge to each corner)
Run 1200m


Workout #3
Chipper
Knees to elbows
Walking lunges
Push ups
Ring rows
Air squats
Parellet dips
Sit ups
Tucks
(Coaches choice on reps)

Day 15... LUIS VILELA'S STEADICAM PARKOUR SHOTS


Watch more video of Parkour on SICFIT on sicfit.com

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Day 14... What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?


What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

By Gary Taubes
Published: July 07, 2002
If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.
When Atkins first published his ''Diet Revolution'' in 1972, Americans were just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.


Friday, May 20, 2011

Day 12... Fight the T-Killing Toxins

Fight the T-Killing Toxins


When your dad was your age, it was probably easier for him to build muscle and burn body fat than it is for you. Does that annoy you? It should.
We've dumped 85,000 chemicals into our environment since World War II. Why should you care? All that environmental stuff is for tree-hugging hippies, right? Well, not quite. You see, certain chemicals and toxins act like a sledgehammer to the balls.
Your balls.


Toxins Lower Test

The cause? Many point the finger of blame at environmental toxins. Anything that affects testosterone will affect your ability to build muscle, burn body fat, and get strong.
These toxins have a huge effect on the human endocrine system. The average sperm count fell from 113 million per millilitre in 1940 to 66 million in 1990. In addition, the definition of a "normal" sperm count fell from 60 million per millilitre to 20 million in the same period. (1)
A survey of 1,350 sperm donors in Paris found a decline in sperm counts by around 2% each year over the past 23 years, with younger men having the poorest quality semen. (2, 3, 4)
You don't have to look far to confirm this either. I bet you know someone who's having trouble conceiving. And have you noticed the increasing amount of infertility clinics around?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Day 11... Food Addiction Works Like Drug Addiction In The Brain

Food Addiction Works Like Drug Addiction In The Brain

Tempting Food Trigger
First Posted: 04/ 5/11 11:10 AM ET Updated: 04/ 6/11 10:48 AM ET

Seeing a milkshake can activate the same areas of the brain that light up when an addict sees cocaine, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The study helps explain why it can be so hard for some people to maintain a healthy weight, and why it has been so difficult for drugmakers and health experts to find obesity treatments that work.
"If certain foods are addictive, this may partially explain the difficulty people experience in achieving sustainable weight loss," Ashley Gearhardt of Yale University in Connecticut and colleagues wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Gearhardt's team wanted to see what happens in the brain when young women are tempted by a tasty treat.

They used a type of brain imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study brain activity in 48 young women who were offered a chocolate milkshake or a tasteless solution. Women in the study ranged from lean to obese.
The team found that seeing the milkshake triggered brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- brain areas that have been implicated in an addict's urge to use drugs.
And this activity was higher among women in the study who had high scores on a scale that assessed their eating habits for signs of addictive behavior.
"These findings support the theory that compulsive food consumption may be driven in part by an enhanced anticipation of the rewarding properties of food," Gearhardt and colleagues wrote.
People who are addicted to a substance are more likely to react with physical, psychological and behavioral changes when exposed to that substance. Altering visual "cues" -- billboards of tempting treats, for example -- might help curb the urge to indulge, they said.
"Ubiquitous food advertising and the availability of inexpensive palatable foods may make it extremely difficult to adhere to healthier food choices because the omnipresent food cues trigger the reward system," they wrote.
The study suggests that advertising might also play a role in the nation's obesity problem, and future studies should look at whether food ads trigger this same kind of brain activity.
Obesity is one of the biggest health challenges facing the United States, and health officials already added a requirement to President Barack Obama's new healthcare law requiring that restaurants add calorie counts to their menus.
(Editing by Laura MacInnis)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Day 10... 8 Stupid Myths about Squatting

8 Stupid Myths about Squatting

Editor’s note: We here at Strength+ continually strive to bring you the most current and effective training advice in existence today. Usually, that means finding weightlifting’s best coaches and asking them to divulge their secrets in exclusive content for Strength+. Sometimes, however, we run across pre-written gems that we feel compelled to share with our readers. This article is one of those gems. It recently appeared on www.charlespoliquin.com.
By Charles Poliquin
It’s time to put an end to the fallacies about this great exercise.
8 Stupid Myths of Squats - Strength PlusWe‘ve all seen it. Massive iron plates loaded to the max on the 45-degree leg press – sometimes augmented with the weight of a dedicated training partner riding the sled like a cowboy at a rodeo. This obsession with monster leg presses inspired one equipment manufacturer to develop a machine that could handle 6,000 pounds of plates! But equally as impressive as the weights used are the elaborate rituals that are often associated with this exercise: knee wraps tightened to an excruciating degree, a weight belt cinched to create a waistline which looks like someone that Jessica Rabbit would admire, and the loud grunting that accompanies each slow, painful rep the trainee grinds out, finally reaching a crescendo with an ear-splitting ARGHHHHHHHH as the exhausted trainee pushes out the final half rep and allows the sled to slam down against the safety supports.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Day 9... Feats of strength on display at Cross Fit Gym in Reston

E-mail this article \ Print this article

Shamus Ian Fatzinger/Fairfax County Times
Madison Fox, 24, of Annandale flips a tractor tire as part of the Capital Classic Strongman Challenge hosted by the Edge 2.0 training group on Saturday at CrossFit Gym in Reston.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Weekly Wod's



Workout #1
TEAM Chipper
Jump overs
Pull ups
Jump rope
Lunges
Team run
Lunges
Jump rope 
Push ups
Jump overs
(Coach assigns reps)


Workout #2
Partner Workout
Complete 3 rounds of:
Partner deadlift 10
Bar facing burpees 30
Partner box jumps 30


Workout #3
Complete 5 rounds of:
2 X running relay
2 X prowler relay
Rest 3 minutes



Day 8... Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

Homo sapiens emerged once, not as modern-looking people first and as modern-behaving people later
2011-03SheaF1.jpgClick to Enlarge ImageFor decades, archeologists have believed that modern behaviors emerged among Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years after our species first evolved. Archaeologists disagreed over whether this process was gradual or swift, but they assumed that Homo sapiens once lived who were very different from us. These people were not “behaviorally modern,” meaning they did not routinely use art, symbols and rituals; they did not systematically collect small animals, fish, shellfish and other difficult-to-procure foods; they did not use complex technologies: Traps, nets, projectile weapons and watercraft were unknown to them.
Premodern humans—often described as “archaic Homo sapiens”—were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.
As Misia Landau argued nearly a quarter of a century ago in the essay “Human Evolution as Narrative” (American Scientist, May–June 1984), prescientific traditions of narrative explanation long encouraged scientists to envision key changes in human evolution as holistic transformations. The idea of an archaic-to-modern human transition in Homo sapiens arises, in part, from this narrative tradition. All this makes for a satisfying story, but it is not a realistic framework for understanding the actual, complex and contingent course of human evolution. Most evolutionary changes are relatively minor things whose consequences play out incrementally over thousands of generations.
In order to better understand human prehistory, I recommend another approach, one that focuses on behavioral variability. This trait, easily observed among recent humans, is becoming more apparent in the archaeological record for early Homo sapiens. Prehistoric people lived in different ways in different places at different times. We must seek out and explain those differences, for, in evolution, only differences matter. Thinking about prehistoric human behavioral variability in terms of various adaptive strategies offers an attractive way to explain these differences. But first, we need to discard an incorrect and outdated idea about human evolution, the belief that prehistoric Homo sapiens can be divided into “archaic” and “modern” humans.