150512 - Breakfast, the Most Important Meal of the Dayyyyy???

Caffeinated Coffee...Breakfast of Champions!

A few of us have tightened up our nutrition and are Zoning before the Bolder Boulder 10k race on Memorial Day. If you don't know, the Zone is a way of basing your daily food intake off of protein requirements for your lean body mass. It introduces precision to eating/fueling. When we apply the Zone to general Paleo recommendations, we have a powerful tool to tweak and measure the effect of food on performance. 

With the Zone recommendation, we are given a fixed amount of food to intake throughout the day and I'm often asked what's better: many small meals or a few big meals. Lots of meals means lots of hits of insulin. Insulin is produced to regulate glucose in your bloodstream when you eat carbohydrates. The signaling that occurs when you intake carbohydrates fires up your pancreas to produce insulin. When insulin is produced your metabolism down-regulates and ceases the processes that contribute to fat burning. Sucking down a smoothie or a glass of OJ with your stone-ground oatmeal first thing in the morning will fire up the insulin cascade and boom! Metabolism shutdown. 

Breakfast is important for folks who've never had breakfast before. If you haven't seen how you feel after a solid week of breakfasts since adulthood, then it's about time to see what happens. For folks who have consistently had breakfast, it may be time to mess with the timing of this morning meal.

Ask yourself, "Am I hungry?," If the answer is no, then maybe wait until a little later to eat. Give your natural overnight fat-burning state some more time to work. Also, if you work out first thing in the morning, wait until after your workout to get your meal in. If you don't work out in the morning, maybe hold off until you start to get hungry. There's going to be a lot of trial and error here.

And that's the point. 

There are few overarching recommendations that we can make that apply to everyone. It's important to treat yourself as an experiment and with experimentation comes logging and assessment. Try a week of skipping early breakfast. This doesn't mean skip the food intake altogether. This just means you'll have to shift that intake around; you've got to get all your blocks in.  

If you're interested in meal timing, the Zone, Paleo recommendations and anything else associated with food and performance, shoot me an email or talk to me during class about setting up a nutrition consultation. We'll get you straight!

General warm-up
3 rounds
200m row or run
10 EB thrusters
10 ring rows
10 hand-release push-ups

Mobilize:
Squat hell

Strength 
Front squat 5, 5, 3, 3, 3

CrossFit 
"Angie"
100 pull-ups
100 push-ups
100 sit-ups
100 squats

or "Lil' Ang"
50 pull-ups
50 push-ups
50 sit-ups
50 squats

5/3/1 Week 6 Deadlift
Specific warm up
5x 40%
5x 50%
3x 60% 
Work sets
3x 70%
3x 80%
3+ 90%

Accessory
Frangie mod 2
100 pull-ups
100 sit-ups
100 thrusters M:75 F:55

or Lil' Frangie mod 2
50 pull-ups
50 sit-ups
50 thrusters M:75 F:55