why am i still in ultimate talk? i don't know. but, to answer the criticisms of a recent post, here are my thoughts on diet, and a year round macro cycle of training for ultimate.
1) diet. recently, ultimate prognesceti (i just made up that word) ben wiggins posted a long winded email about diet on RSD. I disagree. If you care to look up ben's diet, do so, but here are my thoughts. Ben focuses on day to day variations of diet, but I think that you should eat well every day, and then, focus on nutrient maintenance on game day.
I have in the past posted longwinded stories that an ultimate players diet should be based on fish, chips, and beer. Here is the truth. That is a bad diet. Your diet should actually be based on the following principles.
1) Many small meals
2) A diet varied, and rich, in fruits and vegetables, minimum 5, and almost no maximum. I aim for 9 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. A serving is a cup of fruit, or a single fruit, like a banana. I typically start the day with either a bowl of oatmeal, w/ 1.5 cup of frozen berries (which i microwave first), and one banana. That is 2.5 servings.
3) To continue the many small meals theme, I include in my feed bag the following. 1 apple, 2 oranges, and a pear. I also include a 1/2 peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bowl of pasta, chicken, and veggies, and a 1/2 sanwich of HIGH QUALITY DELY STYLE chicken breast, salami, and cheese, and a V-8 6 oz can. I value the fat in that sandwich, and the fruit provides closure on my goal of 9 servings. By 3 pm, i have consumed 7.5 servings of fruit and veggie. I usually have a granola bar, or some almond/raisin trail mix in the feed bag to eat in the 30 minutes following my workout to provide glycogen reloading, and one more serving of veggies (1/4 cup of raisins = 1 serving of veggies). I eat at 5:30 a.m., 9:30 am, 10:30 am, 11:00 am, 1:00 pm, and then the post workout feed. What i eat from the feed bag is based entirely upon what i am hungry for. Protein/Car/Fat/Fruit. Dinner usually includes a salad, usually based on either baby arugula, or mixed frise greens, as they are high in vitamins. Sometimes I substitue a homemade gazpacho. Recipe follows:
32 oz can tomatos
1 jalopeno.
onion
1 spoon of garlic from one of those jars of pre ground garlic
cilantro
oil
vinegar
salt
blend
mix with one 8 oz can of V8, 1/2 cucumber, cubed, and 1 slice, home made bread, torn into 1 inch cubes.
season to taste. when lazy, skip steps 8-10, and dip low fat chips in previous mixture.
Note. Yes: that's a salsa recipe. But it's super cheap, and unbelievably high in antioxidants.
sometimes for breakfast (when not lifting weights) i make waffles. i use a mix. Hain brand. Buckwheat variety. Equal to in fiber or exceeding the oatmeal.
FOCUS on a varied diet. Make sure you eat immediately after working out. If weight gain is an issue, make sure that you eat 2-300 calories of carbs after working out, and then fight the FAKE hunger that will come later. Count your calories, and eat a diet that is based on the food pyramid. You think you are: you are not.
Tournaments: Get more salt. Eat many, small, meals. Use cytomax (etc), gu(etc), but use byes to eat sandwiches etc. If you eat enough meals and snacks, you should UNDEREAT at each meal. You should meet you caloric needs by the end of the day, but don't exceed. If you eat too much, it's in the way. If you eat too little, you bonk. I like a feed bag of the following:
Drink: Cytomax or Heed
Protein: Beef Jerkey or Beef Chunks (REI)
Carbs/Vitamins: Dried fruits, especially pinapples, raisins (pinapples provide vitamins not normally in your diet) and RIPE bananas. Do not eat green bananas. Causes digestive blockage.
Carbs: Bagels are fine. Also include fat.
Fat: Nuts. See bagels. Almonds or less good, peanuts. A half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is good too.
Vitamins: Oranges, bananas, tomatoes... whatever your stomach can handle. In the summer, I prefer seasonal peaches, nectarines etc. Easy to digest.
Eat icecream in the evenings, and eat a varied meal of lean protein, veggies, and complex carbs. Sushi is great. Don't eat fast food. The fat is appealing, but if you eat right there is plenty in your other sources of food. You will still crave it. Tough shit.
TRAINING:
Ultimate training is a year round commitment. The challenge an ultimate player faces is this. As a new player, you need to play all the time. As an older player, you need to take care of your body. I recommend the following program for a club player. Maintain periodicity. Take 1 day off entirely each week when training high impact (running). Minimal, take a day of active rest (swim/bike). Out of each 12 week macro cycle, take a full week as easy. NO FRISBEE. NO HARD OR LONG RUNNING.
1) Pre season. Mileage, Weights, and Throwing. The goal is to heal old injuries, develop strength, and maintain basic skills. Keep mileage moderate. While running is the best, biking/ swimming/ skiing is acceptable, but be aware that frisbee is a running sport, and some base running is required before sprinting. Weights should focus on major lifts. Bicep curls are worthless. Focus on lifts that accentuate multiple muscle groups and efficiency. Full parallel squats, bench, chin-ups alone are acceptable. Remember that 6-12 reps develops hypertrophy (muscle size) where 1-6 lifts develop power, and 12-20 lifts develop endurance. I recommend periodization. 1 month of 3 sets, 12-20 lifts, then 1 month of 3 sets of 8-12 per set, and 1 month of 1-6, high power lifts. If this is too much, skip every thing, do 3 sets of 3x10. Please don't bother w/ calf raises, curls, ets. Do explosive squats, and chin ups if you do nothing else. If you are fit, now, and in the early season is the time to incorporate plyometrics.
2) Early Season. You will be in maintenance weight phase. Fight the urge to skip weights for practice. The weights help sheild you from injury. Adjust weight to protect yourself. Workouts will move towards speed. Avoid the temptation to run HARD more than 3 days per week. Use weights/cross training/ and stretching to develop the shield you need to prevent injury. Continue to refine your throwing skills. Now you should always include dynamics (high knees, butt kicks, etc., but remember, adequate rest is always required)
3) Season. It's summer. Maintenace lift. 1 to 2 times per week, again, if you are hurting somewhere, this is MORE reason to lift, and less reason to 'run through it'. As your team develops tactics, you personally need to adapt you training to make you a better, more explosive player. Now is not the time to incorporate plyometrics beyond dynamics (which you can, and should include in all warm-ups where sprinting will be included). When injured, do not skip lifting. Focus especially on your mid-glute (accentuated by bar-bell step ups), and appropriate abdominal work. The abdominal core, accentuated by bridging (shoulders on ground, knees at right angle, ball between knees, straighten one leg, while not allowing hips to drop) will benefit.
4) off season. it is best to take one week off for every 12 of training. The challenge is to maintain your health. while you may want to return to frisbee asap, take one week off from training. Here is the frisbee challenge: DO NOT TAKE TOO MUCH TIME. Move into 'pre-season' phase asap. Take time from frisbee. Take as much as 1 month from throwing. DO NOT rest too much. That said, off season is the shortest season. Heal up wounds. If hurt, focus on cross training, and easy training.
OK, diet. exercise.
what do you want more of?
Watching video should improve your play. Strategery and tacticalllity for the next time someone bitches.
6 comments:
thanks for the info/recipe. a lot of my off season exercise (this year) is centered around single speed mtn biking (2x week)and now light lifting (1-2 per week).
i think you should buy fresh garlic and a food processer, for cooking.
shoot me an email if you want to exchange easy recipes. computerchrisa at hotmail dot com
peacers-
chris a
Great post, Luke. Right on.
Clarifying...I tried to stress in the diet article you mentioned that eating healthy every day is important.
Also, the day-to-day variation I suggested were for pre-tournament weeks only, not for every week. My advise for anyone trying to start an athlete's diet is to go with what Luke has written here, and MAYBE try something I wrote in the week before a tournament.
Luke, yeah?
yes. this is what i prefer. but you gotta know yourself. in any endeavor the greatest success comes from those who are willing to experiment. by all means tinker with what you do to make yourself successful. we're all individuals. and some of us are lactose intolerant.
just remember, that for every spiderman, there are 1000 pubescent teens who died a horrible horrible death after being bitten by a radioactive spider.
i mean, it just makes sense.
in your post you mentioned that young players need lots of play time in order to improve. how many days a week of playing do you think is possible without hurting yourself?
anon (if that is your real name) that's one of those questions that has many answers. you can play a sport 5 or 6 days a week. you can't play matches that often. but there are many skills in ultimate, and a yearlong/ seasonlong/ monthlong/ weeklong schedule can accomodate this with variations in running distance/ intensity, skills only, drills only, easy days, hard days, etc. the simple answer for a new player is get as much valuable tournament experience as you can, preferably in the division you want to be best at, and do play a lot, but remember that some games or tournaments are 'must win' and you must play within yourself, and some are 'process tournaments' where you work beyond the tournaments to develop yourself. remember though, that if you treat the team you pick up with as just another process opportunity, you are going to piss people off. in other words, probably better to be known as a shitty practice player and a gamer on sunday.
sideline engineer. i don't know. are you reaching for the salt all the times. sometimes i crave a little salt. or somefoods, like fries, are simply inedible without the addition of salt. perhaps you've heard the famous story that henry ford, met a man at a dinner interview, and denied the man a job b/c he salted his food without tasting it first. well i call bs. i know what food tastes like. and i know what it tastes like w/ a little salt.
uh, check w/ your doctor. mine says salt is fine for me for now. of course he also says, yeah, help your self to the little purple ones in the bubble wrap over there. they calm me down just fine.
Luke:
You may find this interesting if you haven't already read it. Or maybe it is better on the second read, I haven't tried that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Yup.
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