Too Much Of A Good Thing? A Closer Look At Vitamin D

Those of you on the vitamin D bandwagon should take note of a new study showing that too can lead to increased cardiovascular inflammation. “People should have their D levels tested before taking vitamin D supplements and tested again a few times a year if they stay on them", says Muhammad Amer, MD, an assistant professor of internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “They should not be ignoring the fact that D is a steroid-like hormone and may be harmful at some level.”

I’ve posted on the potential pitfalls of randomly jacking your diet with vitamin D a couple times recently. Most of us who spend time outdoors have no need to supplement it. However, as per usual in the supplement industry, there’s always something trendy that everyone’s recommending. And while the theoretical downside of overdosing D has been known, until now there’s hasn’t been much quantifiable data that it was a realistic possibility.

A study published in the American Journal of Cardiology in January has changed this. It looked at 15,000 healthy adults age 18 to 85 and found that, while increasing levels of D in the blood are associated with decreased cardiovascular inflammation to a point, once D levels go beyond that point, inflammatory markers actually begin to rise.

New Hope 360 reports:

This indicates a growing risk of stiffening blood vessels and other cardiovascular problems. This latest research is among several new studies that suggest, as Virginia Moyer, MD, chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, recently put it: “The nutrient falls into the category of something that both benefits and harms.”

They follow the news with an interview with Dr. Amer, the study's lead author. Click on the quote to read the entire article,

Vitamin D is beneficial for your cardiovascular health because it curbs inflammation, which is an underlying reason for atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). You should be on it if you are a candidate (because your D levels are low), but you should not keep on taking it indefinitely without keeping track of your levels. Again, at certain levels in the blood, vitamin D may become pro-inflammatory. If you can be on vitamin D rather than being on expensive statin drugs that compromise your kidney, liver and muscle, why not? It can definitely benefit you—it just has to be used judiciously.

It Ain't Over Til It's Over

Alizée Dufraisse: La Reina Mora 8c+/9a FFA from Prana Living on Vimeo

Today’s Psyche presents the definition of “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” This girl is gone. Outta there. Her body is convulsing, her elbows are chicken-winging and her ability to control the holds is shot. It seems unbelievable that her feet can stay on such small holds shaking the way they are. When you’re belaying someone who looks like this you’re well into catch mode. Yet she somehow finds a way to hang on, which is probably why she climbs harder than almost everyone. The fight she shows is some of the most impressive climbing I've ever seen.

You have to wade through a little bit of boring/envy-ness to get there (I want to spend 3 months in Spain) but, hey, it’s a Prana vid and if they’re going to produce stuff this cool you can cut em some slack for a little yoga promo. Plus, yoga is one of the best exercises for (insert almost anything here) so it might not even be staged. Yoga makes us better at physical stuff. Period.

Here’s a little background: Alizée is one of the new school of strong youngsters taking grades to a new level. This is one of the hardest ascents done by a female, which isn’t to say it’s a cake walk for the top men. In fact, a recent Psyche shows Dani Andrada, one of the world’s best, falling all over this same route.

P90X2 A Slam Dunk!

Congratulations to P3 athlete Jeremy Evans who won the NBA slam dunk competition on All Star Weekend. In this video of Evans training at P3 you’ll see him doing a lot of the same movements we do in P90X2, including the exact same PAP movements (step-up convicts to split squats).



He began training at P3 immediately after being drafted, where Dr. Marcus Elliott and his staff have turned him into a dunking machine. Over 60% of his baskets have come via dunk, not counting this one:



When people use their athleticism to punch their meal ticket this is the kind of training they do. And it’s no coincidence Jeremy’s doing what’s more or less an X2 workout, since Elliott and P3 were integral in its design. If you want to improve your hops, or any aspect of your athleticism, P90X2’s a slam dunk.

This clip shows Evans’ winning dunks, with a guest appearance from fellow P3 athlete Gordon Hayward. Incidentally, after Blake Griffin won last year’s contest jumping over a car Evans went out and did it “just to see if I could.” He one-ups him this year by jumping over a seated Hayward, catching and dunking two balls in the process. Insane. Then he jumps over someone standing fully erect. Wow.

Bike Racing Season Has Officially Begun

Even though the Psyche isn’t always a weekly feature I was admonished by a friend for not posting one this week. That’s because I’m down with a little cold, which is nice timing since my backs not back to 100% and Finnegan--my furry daily psyche reminder--has an injured foot so we’re out of commission anyway. But I always have trouble with creativity when I’m ill and just keeping up on work is hard enough. However, thanks to Reed, Sam, and a lag in posting I’ve got a good ‘un for ya on this weekend's racing in Europe.

Varmarcke attacks on 15% cobbles
this is an awesome display of power. it also shows why bike racing outside of europe might always pale in comparison. we just don't have the roads they do in europe.

Got an email from Sam on Sat stating “for me bike racing season starts today” because it’s when the big names start to show. Nowadays professional bike racing is almost a year around sport, with cyclocross and winter 6-day races getting coverage and southern hemisphere events like the Tour of Oz and San Luis attracting major riders. But let’s face it, nobody really cares if Contador drops everyone, Greipel outsprints Cav, or Valverde returns from two years off and wins out of the gate until it happens against the big guns. And those guys tend to start their season now.

I don’t ride my bike a lot during the winter. As a weekend warrior who participates in many sports I train seasonally even though I want to perform at a reasonable level, which I think is the best way to train. In fact, I think I should be more diligent towards time off. Year around training for a sport, in my opinion, is not only a waste of effort but a hindrance. The best riders in the world take time off and amateurs should follow suite. When Contador says “I hardly rode my bike between the Tour (France) and December" there is a lesson there. You can’t peak all year. Choose targets and train for them with a purpose. I like my training to revolve around big events because it’s easier to keep your psyche up.

Last K of Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne
hard to see but note the sky train (blue stripes and helmets) leading cav to the 200 meter mark perfectly, making winning a formality for him. textbook

My Twittter is suddenly filled with post from racers who’ve been silent since September. When Sky controls the field in Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne “like a video game,” the worry over being dropped in Oman is replaced with talk of the dominant season ever. And when Boonen get played like this everyone starts yappin’ about, well, the next Boonen. Sam is right. It’s on. Time to start getting’ after it.

Last K of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad
vanmarcke tricks boonen into going too early. beautiful racing.

above: highlights from omloop. vanmarcke and boonen are clearly the strongest two in the race as on or the other is on the front almost the entire race. note vanmarcke's attack on a flat cobbled section with 20k to go that splits the field. ridiculously strong riding.

A Defense Of Injury

“I had an injury, as I always do.”
- Jerry Moffatt, explaining what kicked off a great training cycle

We should change our outlook on injuries. We think they’re bad because they keep us from doing what we want at a given time. But they also force us to change, which with the right outlook is almost always a good thing. Change forces adaptation and, as any trainer knows, the specificity of adaptation is the key to making progress.

So just after training camp, during a full-swing translation towards building biking and running fitness back up, I hit a snafu. Or rather it hit me, as one of my dogs decided a snowy downhill run was a good time for some impromptu tackle football. Regaining my footing from her cross-body block wrenched something connecting to the old L5S1 injury and, voila, I’m back to traction exercises and back care yoga while my endurance training gets shelved a few weeks.

It’s not my first rehab rodeo and before I’d even assessed the damage I’d refocused my training schedule. A couple of years back, in the midst of recovering from the injury highlighted above, I took one of Kristen Ulmer’s seminars on the mental aspects of sport. Part of this was focusing on the beauty of injuries and how the changes they force on your life give you a new lease; license, or an excuse, to re-focus on something new. Reflection during this lesson confirmed it; many of my best performances have come in the wake of an injury.

The serendipity of this story is that Ben and I had become overly enthusiastic about sending a new route in the Coop. We were fit enough to get close but consistent redpoint attempts tend to make you weaker over time. Training makes you stronger, meaning if we stopped trying to climb and trained we would simply be able to do the route without all the fuss. When I called Ben to inform him that it was time to get serious about training he said, “I know what you mean. During one go (redpoint failure) I landed on the floor and just happened to be looking at The Beastmaker. I swear it was saying ‘Buddy, if you want to do that route you're staring at the answer.’”

Fingerboard (hangboard) training is almost perfect traction for the back. It’s also the single best way to get seriously strong for climbing. Its only downside is that it's hard to focus on because it's not necessarily fun. I haven’t had a meaningful climbing road trip, where I was peaking strength-wise, since sometime last century. Granted I've been focused on other sports but still; The Year of the Van beckons. My injury being the key to great success.

Soul Climbers

Crescendo |krəˈ sh endō| Sonnie Trotter AliasCinema from Alex Lavigne - AliasCinema.com on Vimeo.

For today’s Psyche here are vid profiles of two of the world’s most prolific climbers. Both are incredibly good climbers but make their living by doing things other than just climbing hard. They write, guide, do access work and put up a lot of first ascents . Though they preferred style of climbing is completely different they both share the same obsession with the climbing lifestyle and are the definition of soul climbers.

I lived like this myself for a long time. It was fantastic but I basically couldn’t hack it. I had too many varied interests in life to be so devoted to one thing indefinitely. And while I’ve had, and continue to have, a wonderfully rich life that’s filled with diverse experiences I still often pine for the simplicity and passion of how my life was as a climber.

Another soul climber, Canadian Scott Milton, once said something that I always reflect on anytime my life gets too conventional. We were talking about climbing icon Fred Beckey, whom I’d just seen in Joshua Tree. He was in his 80s, at a party, and living on the road as a “climbing bum” just as he’d been doing for the previous six or seven decades. A lot of people, even in Josh, seemed to find it strange. During my time as a climber I’d almost accepted it as fact that we were odd, and should probably consider joining the rat race again at some point if just to appease families and friends who’d thought we’d gone off the deep end. But Milton had a completely different perspective. “Imagine,” he said wistfully. “Staying psyched to be on the road for all those years. It’s my dream.”

Bravo to a couple of guys out there livin’ their dreams.

La Obsesión - A film about Dani Andrada from Haroun Souirji on Vimeo.

In Shape vs Sports Shape

After getting destroyed at the Ritte team training camp it seems like a good time to address the difference between being in shape and getting into sports-specific shape. It’s important for any weekend warrior or aspiring outdoor enthusiast to understand and plan around this difference. Today’s post is a primer.

A sport doesn’t exist where you can simply train in the gym and then compete at a high level without a period of integration, where you transition the fitness gains achieved into real world scenarios. There are various factors involved in the answer. The obvious is skill, as every sport has its own technique, but the more subtle issues that tend to get overlooked involving specificity of sport.

The easiest example to understand is skin conditioning. Skiing, running, climbing, biking, horseback riding, you name it; all require that your skin be in a specific condition. Do any of these things too long off the couch, no matter how high your fitness level is, and you’ll wind up with blisters at best. Push it too far and a real injury can occur.

Skin is the leader of the integration chain—the obvious link that breaks down fast but adapts quickly. Following are a slew of physiological processes that all require neuromuscular adaptations of varying levels in order for you to be efficient. I like to lump these under a made-up word for neuromuscular patterns that blankets this entire category: engrams.

Engrams are the patterns a sport engrains in your physiology, like the “once you’ve ridden a bike you never forget” saying. Though you don’t lose them at a basic level, such as how to ride, run, ski, etc., you absolutely lose them in the realm of high performance, especially when you’ve made physiological improvements in fitness level.

Fitness gains made in the gym take some time to integrate, which is why athletes should only try and make big physiological changes in body composition during the off-season and, conversely, the closer they get to their performance goal the more specifically targeted their training should be. An outdoor athlete should be spending virtually no time in the gym (living room gym, whatever) close to a big event. But if you want to improve year to year you should spend a lot of time in the gym during your off-season. Check out my 2011 training synopsis and see how my gym training sessions tapered close to each big event.

For an example of what happens when you don’t do this let’s use at the Ritte camp. In SoCal, where Ritte is based (click here for awesome Wired article on Ritte), racing season begins in early Feb. This means that camp, at least for some, is a final tune up to race season.

My race season begins in June and ended in November, putting me in the very midst of off-season training. If I were a professional I would not mix my training with such a group because it will cause too much breakdown and interfere with my program. No coach would ever advise such a thing. But I’m not a professional racer. I’m a professional lab rat and wanted to mingle with my team, most of whom I’d never met. So I showed up in very good gym shape but with almost no time on the bike in two months, knowing full well I’d spend the weekend blurry-eyed and hanging on for dear life under the guise of anecdotal evidence.

If camp had been about who can do the most pull-ups, core movements on a stability ball, or probably even one-leg squats I’d likely have fared well as most of the team had left the gym behind in November. Specific integration often means you lose some of your training-specific strength in favor of, in this case, your ability to turn bigger gears at the same cardiovascular output where you turned smaller gears in the off-season. This gear difference makes a rider a racer. The example works the same across all sports, and is how we differentiate between in shape and sports shape.

pics: brian hodges at velo images