Top food #1 - Grass fed beef

For a top quality source of protein you cannot go past beef. With upwards of 22g of protein per 100g it is one of the highest protein foods by weight. Traditionally all New Zealand beef has been grass fed, and most still is, but there is a worrying trend towards using grain and corn to ‘finish’ (raise bodyweight) the cattle before slaughter or to introduce corn and grain as a supplemental feed on a day to day basis.

Recently a client of mine sent me an email that read:

(more…)

If you are doing a 6 hour AR event in Britain or flogging your guts out in a 2 man 24 hr MTB team in the dust of Queensland you will quite likely see a reasonable portion of the field wearing a pair of i-RULE knicks and a smaller portion wearing the high tech shirts; it’s very rare to see anyone in the inVEST. The reason this is a little strange is if you talk to i-RULE’s Founder and Designer Daryl Foy he will swear ( he does that a lot anyway – he is Australian) until he is blue in the face that the inVEST is the best product he has ever done ( along with the new RONIN I’d say but more on that later) and among the athletes they have supported over the years it’s the one thing they choose to take with them every time they train. I had to find out why.

(more…)

Mark Eliott writes.

AR and Multisport are sports that test the bodies’ limits at both a psychological and physiological level. To achieve sporting excellence requires an athlete to push the envelope of performance. Quite often the outcome is not your next PB in training or racing but a continual battle with slotting in Physiotherapy appointments between work and your next adjusted training session.

On the positive side, the advantage in being a Multisporter is the ability to carry on some form of training when one part of the anatomy is not willing to carry the load. With a shoulder injury you can always run, with a calf strain you can always kayak or swim.
(more…)

Joe McMillan writes.As you my have read in the previous article on hill running we know that a hill provides a greater resistance due to gravity acting down on us…so the steeper the hill the greater rate that gravity pushes down. This means that the steeper the hill the greater the cost on our energy requirements.

Again as with running, cycling hills involves an increased contribution from the muscles involved in our transport. This is provided by the greater recruitment of the posterior muscle such as hamstring and glutes. The greater the angle of the hill the greater the recruitment of these muscles. This has the effect of increasing heart rate and consequently perceived effort. Hip flexors (muscles running across the hips and the front of the legs) typically work harder especially as the hill gets steeper).

(more…)

Cold environmental conditions maybe less enticing to train in but can produce better endurance performances. Depending on the exercise intensity, endurance performance in hot or even warm ambient conditions is predominantly limited by thermal stress or increase in core temperature. During exercise in the cold, metabolic heat loss to the environment is far more effective and therefore the rise in core temperature during exercise is less than at the same exercise intensity in hot environmental conditions.

(more…)

Exercise physiologist Olivia Maclaren writes. One of the questions that a lot of female athletes ask themselves is why does it seem to be so much easier for guys? How is it that male’s are stronger and recover quicker no matter how hard we females train?

(more…)

Core strength for paddling

Core stability is a many varied thing to many varied people but it is a simple concept.

My simple working definition is that core stability is an ability to control your body (that covers arms and legs as well as pelvis and chest) with the control centred in the abdominal and hip regions.

Now there are as many core stability exercises nowadays as there are ways to wear a pair of jeans, but in this article I am going to skip over the more general and basic of these and head straight into some kayak specific ones. If you are new to core stability training then I suggest that you ask a trainer for a more basic program until you have built up some strength and endurance.

(more…)