Tag: earthing

3 Powerful Recovery Strategies for Athletes

I hope you had a great weekend. I had a busy few days as I spent Friday and Saturday with the US Women’s Olympic Team, then headed a little north to watch UMass Lowell’s home opener with my friend Devan McConnell. As always, it was great to work with all the girls and the coaching, medical and support staff with the US Team. Such a great group of people. It was also nice to finally get to watch some hockey!

As you may know, I spend the better part of my non-coaching time attending courses or reading research/books on a variety of topics within the fields of sports training, manual therapy, and physical therapy. The underlying scientific explanations and interactions are of particular interest to me, because these create the foundation for the way the body adapts to everything we throw at it, from a therapy or training standpoint. In the realm of recovery, there is A LOT to consider. With the advances in technology and the efforts of private companies to simplify taking your health into your own hands, it’s now easier than ever to measure things like heart rate variability, nutrient status, food sensitivities, and hormone levels, all of which can have a profound impact on an athlete’s ability to adapt to further training stresses, and therefore are worth monitoring. A couple weeks ago, I finished reading Biochemical Monitoring of Sport Training by Atko Viru and Mehis Viru that dives into these topics in further detail. It’s a little outdated at this point, but still has a lot of interesting information.

That said, the reality is that only a small portion of the athletic population are even aware of these factors, let alone the importance of monitoring them. Those that get this far still may not know HOW to monitor these things and/or be able to afford the available options. Furthermore, it seems silly to track a lot of these things when most athletes have sporadic sleep patterns and horrific diets. As is often the case, recovery efforts, and therefore maximizing your ability to adapt, starts with mastering the basics.

This was a main part of the 2-hour talk I gave to the Flyers Junior Team at the beginning of the season. The goal is to simplify powerful strategies that you almost always have control over, so that you can be CONSISTENT in adhering to these basic concepts. Below are 3 powerful strategies to maximize recovery.

1) Stay Hydrated
Even mild dehydration can significantly impair physical and mental performance. This is one of those things that everyone knows, but few athletes are diligent about adhering to. Keep a water bottle with you sip water throughout the day. There are lots of water recommendations, but the easiest way to assess how you’re doing here is by checking your urine color. Clear, consistently, is the goal. Naturally, the more active you are and the more you sweat, the more fluid you’ll need to replenish. If you’re a heavy sweater and/or prone to cramping, it may be worth looking into picking up some Gatorlytes, which are just packets of electrolytes to give you a little extra sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. When you sweat, you lose water AND electrolytes. Your body likes to keep a specific concentration of electrolytes based on the amount of circulating fluid to optimize a number of processes (like muscle contraction). If you only replace the water, you’re missing a big piece. A lot of people do fine with this simply from eating food or from taking a quality sports drink like Biosteel or Generation UCAN, but some athletes benefit from getting in a little extra. Gatorlytes are easy to transport and take in a hurry, so there a good option. You can get them at a lot of places, but I tend to buy a lot of my supplements from a site called Vitacost.com because you can get quality brands at discounted prices.

The most powerful supplement there is…

Anecdotally, I can tell you that a lot of times when players come to be complaining about early fatigue in practices or games, and a variety of other symptoms like not being able to concentrate or getting headaches, poor hydration is an underlying factor.

2) Get Quality Sleep
When it comes to minimizing the damage of accumulated stress (e.g. that from training, practices, school/work, relationships, nutrition excesses or insufficiencies, and the environment), nothing is more powerful than quality sleep. Simply, it’s time for your body to rest, repair, and regenerate. We are very poor “resters” in our country. From a practice and training standpoint, there is often an overemphasis on “doing” and an underemphasis on “adapting”, which takes a more holistic look at the stimulus-recovery relationship. That said, even those that try to sleep long enough may not be getting quality sleep. Here are a few tips to help get you started on the right path:

-Track the number of hours you sleep every night. The goal is to be above 8 every week. Factor in that it probably takes 30 minutes for you to fall asleep, meaning you’ll need to set aside closer to 9 hours to get 8 of sleep each night.
-Go to bed and wake up within an hour of the same times every night THAT YOU CAN. In short, get off of Twitter and Facebook and stop texting in bed. -Remember the phrase “An hour before midnight is worth two after”
-Keep the room COLD, DARK, and QUIET! Use blinds to block outside lights, turn alarm clocks away from you, place cell phones face down (so you can’t see the light), and turn off your ring or vibration. It can wait until the morning.

All of these things can go a long way toward improving your sleep quality. If you have trouble falling asleep, I’d look into picking up an Earthing Sheet (Read more about this here: Recovery Week: Earthing Products) and/or a magnesium supplement like Poliquin’s Uber Mag Px or TopicalMag, both of which are great at quickly quieting your mind and helping you transition into a deep sleep.

Rub a few squirts of this on your feet for the best sleep ever…

3) Eat REAL Food, Almost Always
Simply, real food can be hunted or grown. The overwhelming majority of the kids I talk to eat very little, if any, real food throughout the day. Most eat something along the lines of cereal, sandwich with chips, and whatever my parents cook me (typically pasta or chicken…and pasta). Everyone can do better. The overwhelming majority of food that enters your body should be meats, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and various oils (e.g. Extra Virgin Olive Oil). The food you eat literally provides the building blocks for every structure within your body. If you build your body with garbage, you will feel and perform like garbage. This may express itself in different forms. Some people get fat, some are moody, some have frequent gastrointestinal distress (cramping, bloating, farting, etc.), some have poor energy or attention spans, some have a difficult time putting on muscle mass, and some are more injury prone (among others). NO ONE is unaffected. Think about the meals you have over the last week and how many of them have been comprised of real food. Start by changing breakfast and move on from there. There are TONS of quality meal ideas in Ultimate Hockey Nutrition so check that out if you’re not sure where to start.

I tell our players that there are times when you don’t have control (or you have less control) over what foods you can eat (e.g. on the road), so it’s important to eat as well as you possibly can during the times when you DO have control (e.g. during the week and during weekends with home games). The goal is to spend as much time eating “right” as possible, so maximizing controllable opportunities is a big piece of the puzzle.

As you can see, there is nothing overwhelmingly advanced about any of these strategies. Every athlete has almost complete control of these at all times. Although none of these are very “sexy”, they are extremely powerful. In a couple days, I’ll be back with a few more recovery considerations, but until then, stick to the above and start gaining some momentum toward optimal health, recovery, and performance.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Interview with Earthing Creator Clint Ober

Last week I posted a fairly comprehensive article on the benefits of Earthing. If you missed it, check it out here: Earthing Products

Shortly after writing that up I came across some video of an interview Dr. Mercola did with Dr. Ober that I thought some of you may be interested in. They broke it up into 7 videos so if you have ADD like I do and can only sit still for 15 minutes, you can easily work your way through the information. Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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Recovery Week: Earthing Products

Several months ago, Mike Potenza wrote a great article for HockeySC.com titled “What’s New in Regeneration Training?”

In the article, Mike outlined several interesting pieces of technology that can be used to facilitate or monitor recovery, one of which included “Earthing” products. Earthing, or “grounding”, is one of those naturalistic concepts that I think a lot of people will write off despite it being fairly intuitive. Quite simply, the earth has an electrical charge that has restorative properties when we come in contact with it. Thanks to rubber-soled shoes (think insulation), houses, cars, etc., in general, we spend drastically less time in direct contact with the Earth than our barefoot walking, hole in the ground sleeping predecessors. Other than certain house pets, we’re the only species on the planet that is removed from exposure to the Earth’s electrical charge.

Think of how you felt the last time you walked through grass barefoot, dug your feet into the sand at the beach, or went for a quick dip in the ocean. In almost every case, you’d experience an increase in energy and sense of well-being. Naturally, being outside also means being exposed to the sun, which has its own benefits, but the feeling you get in these circumstances isn’t entirely from sunlight or from the fresh air. When we come in contact with the Earth, we are influenced by its abundance of free electrons (negatively charged ions) such that our bodies shift toward reaching an electrical equilibrium with the Earth, similar to how water might empty one tube and fill up another until they reached an equal height if a bridge was made between the two. In Earthing by Clint Ober, Dr. Stephen Sinatra MD, and Martin Zucker, the authors write “…the biological clock of the body needs to be continually calibrated by the pulse of the Earth that governs the circadian rhythms of all life on the planet.” This statement, as I’ll discuss shortly, is supported by some pretty fascinating research.

Some of the reported benefits of Earthing include:

Decreased inflammation
Reduced chronic pain
Improved sleep quality
Increased energy
Lower stress and improved calmness
Normalized biological rhythm
Thins blood and improves blood pressure
Relieves muscle tension and headaches
Lessens hormonal and menstrual symptoms
Speeds healing
Reduces jet lag
Protects the body against environmental electromagnetic fields
Accelerates recovery

A quick scan of that list reveals that Earthing could have a positive impact on our health and performance through a variety of mechanisms. One of the first studies conducted on Earthing products involved tracking 60 people (38 women, 22 men) who had some form of sleeping problem. After 30 days of sleeping on an grounded bed pads, they found that:

85% went to sleep more quickly
93% reported sleeping better
82% experienced a significant reduction in muscle stiffness
74% experienced elimination or significant reduction of chronic back and joint pain
100% reported feeling more rested the next morning

Another study had 12 individuals with sleep problems, pain, and stress (as a brief aside, this essentially describes the overwhelming majority of the US population!) sleep on Earthing pads for 8 weeks. Their individual daily cortisol (commonly referred to as the “stress hormone”) levels were assessed at 4-hour intervals for 24 hours at the beginning of the study and again 6 weeks later. Cortisol is supposed to peak around 8am, decline until about noon, remain at a slightly elevated rate until around 4, and then tail off, reaching it’s lowest point around midnight. This natural fluctuation can be used as a marker of circadian rhythm. At the beginning of the study, there were HUGE amounts of variability among the individuals, with several having ridiculously high peaks at 8am, or random peaks in the middle of the night. Interestingly, even after this relatively brief exposure, all of the individuals’ 24-hour cortisol profiles aligned to converge toward what could be considered optimal, such that the variability between the individuals was essentially negligible. No more random spikes during the night or excessive spikes in the morning. 8 of the participants also had an increase in melatonin, another important hormone that helps regulate sleep and the circadian rhythm.

Most of us are familiar with the importance of eating foods rich in “antioxidants” to combat the free radicals throughout the body. Free radicals, in essence, are simply positively charged ions scavenging for a negatively charged ion to latch too. Earthing provides the body with the extra electrons to serve this very function. Also, studies using infrared imaging to assess tissue temperature have found that Earthing causes a significant reduction in “hot” areas thought to be associated with inflammation.

Having studied neuroscience in grad school, thinking of the human body as an electrical network isn’t that big of a stretch. After all, the nervous system communicates via electrical impulses and even things such as simple as an unspoken thought can be mapped by viewing the neurons that fire to produce it. What many people are unaware of (which can be tested by simply walking around with a voltmeter) is how significant of an influence living in an electronic world has on our bodies. We are CONSTANTLY being exposed to electromagnetic fields from wires in the wall, TVs, iphones, microwaves, etc. The neat thing about Earthing products is that in addition to providing all of the aforementioned benefits, it also shields us from these other electrical influences, which, as you can imagine, can have a disturbing effect on the electrical state and processes within our body.

For more information, check out Earthing.com

At this point, you might be wondering how the Earth’s natural electrical field has been turned into a product series. Basically, you can buy a mat (which you can put under your desk to rest your feet on and/or in front of your keyboard to rest your forearms on) a half-sheet to put on your bed, full sheets, sleeping bags, and mattresses that are lined with wires which can relay the electrical charge from a wire plugged into the ground (the circular hole beneath the two vertical plugs) of an electrical outlet. Of course, you could run a rod out your window and stick it directly in the Earth, but this isn’t as practical for most people.

On a personal note, I dropped $200 on the “Earthing Starter Kit” which included a mat and a half-sheet about 4 months ago and have been using it consistently since then. I noticed an immediate difference in how quickly I fell asleep and how I felt the next morning. After several months, I can say definitively that I sleep considerably better, I recover faster from stressors of all forms, and I’m more even-keeled in general. In fact, I had one day that felt out of the ordinary a couple months back; I was sorer than usual from training, didn’t have much energy, etc. I realized that night that I had forgotten to plug in the half-sheet I sleep with the night before and I discovered the next morning that the mat under my desk was unplugged as well. Honestly, I would have never guessed it would have that kind of impact, but it clearly did (and does).

Earthing has a significant impact on inflammation, neutralizes free radicals, shields from electromagnetic fields, and regulates our biological rhythms. All of these things allow athletes (and people in general) to handle stressors more effectively and ultimately to adapt and perform better. To me, Earthing products are one of the most affordable, practical, effective and underutilized recovery tools available today. I can say, without hesitation, that it was some of the best $200 I’ve ever spent!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. If you want to maximize the transfer of your off-ice training to on-ice performance, you’ll want to follow a specific hockey training system designed to do just that.

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