MAX BLOG

VALUABLE NUTRITION FOR YOUNG ATHLETES

may 08, 2012 12:14pm

I was recently at a local high school function that dozens of coaches and athletic officials attended. I was happy to learn that virtually all prominent athletes were using Max Muscle products. The coaches were all well aware of the fact that their athletes need supplemental protein products to help them recover from intense training for their sports. Max Muscle stresses that while protein is very important in repairing and recovering from intense workouts, good nutrition as a whole still needs to be your primary focus.
Your body is a complex mechanism with thousands of chemical reactions that rely on nutrition and proper health to maintain its balance. It’s truly amazing all the functions that your body can perform. From brain activity to the movement of each individual muscle fiber, nutrition powers it all. If you don’t supply your body with the nutrients it needs, it will slow down and begin to function poorly. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals are all essential parts of our daily lives and our overall health and well-being, and as an athlete you need to make sure these bases are covered as well.
Athletes demand more from their bodies, and you as an athlete or parent should be aware of just how important proper nutrition can be. If you’ve ever felt your body give up when it is completely drained of nutrients – it’s called “bonking” or “hitting the wall” when your body shuts down – then you understand the importance of nutrition.
Twenty-five years ago, most people did not even know what carbohydrate-loading was, and it has become one of the biggest breakthroughs in sports nutrition. Endurance athletes were the first to discover its benefits, finding that they could run longer and delay “hitting the wall” if they ate large amounts of dense-carbohydrate foods, such as pasta, grains and bread one or two days before their event. Soon other athletes adopted this practice, from football players and basketball players to virtually any athlete in any sport that required energy and endurance for more than one hour at a time.
Another huge breakthrough in sports nutrition was discovering the importance of replenishing electrolyte minerals in athletes’ bodies. Electrolytes are the minerals that your body sweats out during exercise, such as potassium, sodium and chloride, and they all can affect your athletic performance. Gatorade was the master marketer of the electrolyte explosion. Now all athletes make sure they hydrate and supplement with electrolytes before and during their athletic events.
Many runners or weekend warrior athletes don’t think they need to worry about recovery. I like to point out that during a short run or a pickup game of basketball, you will flex your thigh muscles several thousand times. When you run, jump, cut left or right, you are flexing your leg muscles. Yes, thousands of repetitions at a time! When you think of it that way, it’s easy to see how muscles can be over-trained. If athletes don’t eat a proper diet and get higher amounts of protein, their legs can become fatigued from over-training and actually lose muscle mass. If you want to get stronger and faster and jump higher, you’d better eat adequate protein to ensure proper recovery.
Max Muscle stresses the importance of proper nutrition, which is vital to ensuring that you are not an over-trained athlete. Our stores have Certified Fitness Nutrition Coaches in them. We also offer a free “Student Athlete Guide to Proper Nutrition", and have created a line of products dedicated to the Athlete, Athlete's Choice. Stop by, visit with a Certified Nutritionist, and get your athlete on the right path for maximizing performance today! MS&F

Your Opportunity

december 05, 2011 11:14pm

Attention Football Players: Today is December 5th, and most of you will officially start football around August 1st.

Reality check; you have 239 days until August 1st.

This represents 239 opportunities, 239 opportunities to get bigger, stronger, and faster, 239 opportunities to improve your skills, 239 opportunities to become a better football player. In that time, you have 1434 meals to eat. That’s 1434 opportunities to put the right nutrients into your system, 1434 opportunities to fuel your body correctly for growth. You need to sleep 1,912 hours before August 1st. This represents 8 hours a night, this is the minimum hours of sleep we need to facilitate growth and maximize our development potential. Remember, the growth paradigm is a three pronged approach; we must eat, sleep, and train. All 3 are of equal importance in facilitating maximal development. One word that should resonate from these statements- opportunity. You have the opportunity to make dramatic changes before the next season starts, the question that generates is: will you seize that opportunity?

At first glance, this timeframe seems like an eternity, doesn’t it? After all 34 weeks is 2/3 of a year. That’s 5736 hours, 344,160 minutes so what’s the rush, and we have plenty of time, right? It’s not an eternity; in fact this time will fly by. August is around the corner. Time is of the essence, its hard work to get better; it takes time to grow, to build muscle, to get faster. These facts cause me to return to the word opportunity. You have 239 opportunities. Every day is a either a day of progression or regression, there is no standing still in the quest to be great. We have to continue to move the chains. Even if it is a day of rest, you have 6 opportunities to fuel properly, and the opportunity to get 8 hours of sleep or more and allow your body to truly recover.

Many athletes are tempted and get lulled into the trap of procrastinating; as the upcoming football season seems so far away that they aren’t committed to the mindset of preparing for next year. Let me return to the word opportunity. While others procrastinate, while others are relaxing, the opportunity exists for you to get ahead of your opponent, and the opportunity exists for you to lead your team by example and start the push for next year. What you do with this opportunity is crucial, so seize it with a sense of urgency. Make the most of this time and develop a thorough plan of attack in all three phases to ensure that come next season there is no doubt as to whether or not you made the most of the offseason.

The reality is that your window to play football is short lived; it is not a game that many are able to play for very long. So if this is a game you love to play, a game you want to be your best in; I challenge you to take advantage of the opportunity that exists and commit to making the next 239 days a journey with the destination being a season of greatness. Never forget, you gotta grind to shine, and if you want to shine next fall, the off season starts NOW!


Yours in Health,
Chad Case, C.S.N
Director of Nutrition
National Football Academies

Children and Nutrition

november 09, 2011 12:01pm

The Institute of Medicine recently reported that about 9 million children ages 6 and older are considered obese. This statistic shows “childhood obesity,” which refers to children ages 6-19 years, continues to be an growing and dangerous trend in our country.
More than one out of every three children are overweight or obese, according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The ratio, having tripled in the last 30 years, has resulted in children now developing diseases once dominated by adults. Health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are now common place in our much younger generation.

Think it’s not a big deal? It’s deadly serious for the kids. For the first time in history, children are not expected to live as long as their parents, due to childhood obesity.

The Surgeon General has called childhood obesity an epidemic but this public health term does not begin to describe the emotional nightmare that overweight kids endure on a daily basis. The stress of being stigmatized and teased by peers – and sometimes, even family members – is understandably overwhelming.

Pre-adolescent and teen years are tough enough to navigate without the added issues of being overweight. Besides the physical toll, overweight children often suffer emotionally. For many kids, being overweight or obese can have a negative impact on self-esteem. Potential consequences include extreme shyness, depression, anxiety and even suicide. Obesity robs them of many of life’s grandest experiences. Kids deserve better.

Time to take responsibility
No need to point the finger at government or school administrators. As parents, it’s our responsibility to oversee what our kids gobble up. Without a thought, parents take the initiative to teach children how to brush their teeth, bathe, tie their shoes and more. Kids are taught that cigarettes and drugs are bad choices. But poor food choices and lack of exercise can be just as destructive. Why not take the time to teach them how to live a healthy lifestyle that includes understanding and applying good nutrition?

Parents who practice a healthy lifestyle are the best, positive influence on the lives of their children. If the parent isn’t already eating well and getting exercise, leading by example may involve some tough changes. But what could be more worth it than both the parent and child living happier and longer lives? That’s an investment that really pays off.

As much as teens will deny it, children want to be like their parents.

Reading is fundamental
Teaching kids a simple way to read food labels will help them quickly decode whether a food item is OK to eat. That gives them a foundation for a lifetime of informed eating choices.
The best place to learn about labels is in the local supermarket. Take the kids on the next grocery gathering trip and point out some of these facts:

Listed Serving Sizes – Packaged foods often contain more than one serving. Learning this critical aspect of the label will set them up for a lifetime of proper “portion control.” Too many people think a portion is the entire package.

Good Fat vs. Bad Fat – All fat is not created equally. Teach kids the difference by keeping it simple:
Unsaturated fats can be beneficial, but should still be limited due to higher calorie counts. Adequate fat intake is essential to growth and development. Young kids, especially, need a certain amount of fat in their diets to help the brain and nervous system develop correctly.

Saturated fats and trans fats should be limited as they are linked to higher cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart disease.

Sugars – Simple sugars are a sub category of carbohydrates found in snack foods, candy, cereals and fruit juices. They should be eaten in very small amounts because they contain a lot of calories and little nutrition. Look for variations that are labeled “low sugar” or “no sugar added.” Kathleen DesMaison’s new book Little Sugar Addicts studies the correlation between sugar, health and behavior. She concludes that too much sugar can turn the happiest, calmest most collected child into a teary-eyed, angry little terror.

Nutrients – It’s a numbers game. Teach kids to look for lots of protein and vitamins on food labels. More good stuff and less bad stuff. That’s great place to start.

Family dinners aren’t dead
Families who sit down to dinner together are more likely to eat more nutritious food and less likely to be overweight, according to many studies. Kids who ate three or more meals a week with their families were 12 percent less likely to be overweight than those who ate few or no meals with their families. Those same family friendly kids were 20 percent less likely to consume sweets, fried foods, soda and other unhealthy foods.

Eating five or more meals together reduced the likelihood of poor nutrition by 25 percent, eight studies revealed. Kids who ate with their families also were 35 percent less likely to engage in “disordered eating” behaviors aimed at losing weight, such as binge-eating, purging, taking diet pills or laxatives, vomiting, skipping meals or smoking.

People often ask me, “What do you feed your children?” The answer is pretty simple, because I don’t know of any parent who has time to prepare two separate meals for the family – one healthy and one junky. I normally respond with: “I live a healthy lifestyle that includes a nutritious, well-rounded diet. My day consists of a variety of lean proteins, fruits, veggies, nuts, nut butters and beans. I occasionally have treats such as pizza and doughnuts. I drink lots of water. My kids do the same.”

What’s good for the parents is good for the kids. What’s bad for the parents is bad for the kids. Children will not wilt if they don’t get a daily dose of treats, sweets and runs to Mickey D's!
Kids learn to like what is put on the table. Leading by example and education are the two key elements to giving children a chance to be healthy in what seems like an increasingly plumper population. It’s past time for parents to feed their children’s minds, bodies and souls in the best of ways.

The Growth Paradigm

july 13, 2011 04:05pm

Football season is about six weeks away for most players, and the annual push to gain weight and to improve performance for football is in full swing. Realistically, if we are putting on healthy lean mass, we can and should expect to be able to put on 8-14 pounds in the next 6 weeks. I understand that there are always exceptions to the rule, but again I said realistically, so while we can hope for more, we want to look at what is fully tangible and plan for that. The objective and desire for all right now is to come into fall camp bigger, stronger, and faster than last season.
Unfortunately there is so much misinformation in regard to how to gain weight and such a lack of proper instruction that it is no wonder that athletes repeatedly fail when trying to increase lean mass and gain weight for athletic advantage.

We need to realize we do not gain weight in the gym; no one has ever got under a bench or into a squat rack and emerged 10 pounds heavier. It simply doesn’t work that way. The only way to gain lean mass is to hone in on the 3 part equation that facilitates optimal mass acquisition; Eat and Supplement Right, Train Intensely, and Sleep Deeply.

Eat and Supplement Right- The adage you are what you eat holds so much truth that it’s downright scary. Have you ever seen what a professional athlete eats? You don’t see them mowing down double cheeseburgers and fries with a chocolate shake day in and day out. Those who realize the importance of nutrition in relation to performance will map out their plan of attack on using food and supplementation as fuel the same way a workout is planned out or a coach game plans’ for the upcoming game. There is a definitive way to do things.To gain lean mass we need to create a caloric surplus to allow the body to increase bodyweight and build lean muscle, in other words, you have to eat to grow. I have heard countless coaches in leadership positions telling young men to simply eat till it hurts and then eat more. It is true that most athletes are under nourished during their critical growth phases between the ages of 11-18; but this way of thinking doesn’t account for the nutrients we need or empower the athlete to “own” their development. Athletes are not livestock; the idea is not to fatten them up, but to develop lean, powerful, and explosively performing machines. So before sitting down to the training table to eat whatever you want whenever you want with the expectation that you are doing what needs to be done, you need to set up a time to talk to a Certified Nutritionist about what you should be eating, and what types of supplements will be best for your goals of athletic excellence.
Athletes need to be eating 6 times per day, 7 days a week, which gives you 42 opportunities a week to fuel your body properly, this accompanied with proper and safe supplementation puts you in optimal position for growth and take you 1/3 of the way through the paradigm of lean mass acquisition.

Train Intensely- Each workout needs to be intently focused on. There has to be an internal switch that allows you to focus on what the objective is. The objective is not to just get through the workout, it is to unequivocally get better. Remember, there are athletes all over the country training right now(as you are reading this, someone is training somewhere, and they want what you want; to be the best). Admittedly some workouts you will feel better than others, but that is where the internal switch must be turned on. If your goal is to be different, to be not average, not good, but great, you have to find a way to push through the mental blocks you will surely face and push to new thresholds beyond what you thought was possible. To gain lean muscle, you have to train with intensity and train with a purpose, you have to create a stimulus for your body to build muscle. There are athletes who go to the gym and give their all and there are athletes who go to the gym and get through the workout; which of those guys do you want at your side when the game is on the line, which kind of athlete do you want to be? The one who did enough to get by or the one who maximized every opportunity they got to develop?

Remember, you only have so many training sessions to improve and create the stimulus needed to build lean mass before the upcoming season. On average from the day school is out to the day fall camp starts(using June and July as out of school months) you should have logged 40-45 workouts over the summer. Are you on pace to hit this number? Generally every athletic program has a training protocol for athlete’s to follow, the question in regard to this is simple, are you training to get done, or are you training to get better? If you need help here, you need to reach out to your coaches immediately, the clock is ticking and wasted workouts are just that; wasted.
We still have 16-20 opportunities to get better before the fall season starts? Will you seize this opportunity or look back and wish you had? By training with purpose you have completed another third of the paradigm.

Sleep Deeply- One of the more neglected aspects necessary for optimum muscle building is proper sleep. When maximum muscle growth is the goal, most athletes understand that it is important to train intensely, and now we better understand how vital nutrition is. But most athletes fail to realize that it is equally critical that you give your body appropriate rest. The amount of sleep an athlete gets has a large impact on sports performance.

Currently, scientists divide sleep into two general types: REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and NREM (non-REM). Non-REM (Stage 1-4 sleep) accounts for 75-80% of total sleep time and are also in the stages that your body repairs itself and it's when the real growth occurs. Non-REM sleep is an anabolic state marked by physiological processes of growth and rejuvenation of the organism's immune, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems. Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory has been following the sleep patterns and athletic performance of Stanford athletes for years. Research continues to show that getting more sleep leads to better sports performance for all types of athletes. One study published in 2009, followed the Stanford University women's tennis team for five weeks as they attempted to get 10 hours of sleep each night. Those who increased their sleep time ran faster sprints and hit more accurate tennis shots than while getting their usual amount of sleep. In earlier studies, it was found that getting extra sleep over several weeks improved performance, mood and alertness for athletes on the Stanford men's and women's swim teams and men's basketball team. This research is some of the first to specifically look at the impact of extra hours of sleep on athletic performance and suggests that sleep is a significant factor in achieving peak athletic performance, growth and development. Athletes can easily fail to get regular, consistent hours of sleep. This lack of sleep, or "sleep deficit," appears to have a negative effect on sports performance, as well as cognitive function, mood, and reaction time. Much of this can be avoided by making regular sleep as much of a priority for athletes as training intensely, practicing skills for their sport and eating and supplementing correctly. The take away from all of this is simple- there are 3 critical cogs in the development paradigm, and by neglecting any one of them the potential you have is truly limited. As an athlete you have a decision you have to make and that no one can make for you.

What do you want? How badly do you want this, and are you willing to commit to do the things necessary to achieve this? The thing to understand is that to achieve more and to get better, we must change. Change is not an easy thing, so if you truly desire to make a change, to be more and to get better, the time is NOW. The only thing holding you back from what you desire is you, are you willing to do what others are not? If so, plan your attack, and then do just that…….attack!
“A goal without a plan is just a wish”

Yours in Health,
Chad Case, CSN
CEO- Max Muscle Nebraska
National Director of Nutrition
National Football Academies

The Importance of Water in an Athlete’

may 16, 2011 10:50am

Many athletes overlook the benefits of hydration. There are those who do not like the taste of water, therefore they drink soda, tea, coffee, etc. No matter what the excuse, they are missing out one of the most important factor in sports nutrition.

What is so important about water and
how much do we need to drink?

The human body cannot make or store water so it is necessary to drink water throughout the day to replace what you eliminated. Water makes up makes up about 60 percent of body weight and is
involved in almost every bodily process. As a rule of thumb, everyone should strive for eight cups of water each day, which amounts to around two quarts. You can also figure out how much water you
need to drink by taking your bodyweight in pounds and multiplying it by 0.55 to figure out how many ounces you need. For the athlete, you must drink plenty of fluids before, during, and after competition to avoid overheating and to stay hydrated. You want to replace whatever fluids you lost due to exercise as soon as possible. You want to be drinking even when you aren’t thirsty. By the time you are thirsty, you have already become dehydrated. Continue to drink even after you are satisfied. If you stop when you are satisfied, you will actually only get about half the amount you really needed.

Water Cleanses the Body
In the world of athletics, higher protein diets are extremely common and necessary. With that being said and understood, the body needs to cleanse itself from the urea and ketones which is brought on by higher protein consumption as well as to rid itself from toxins that are caused from pollutants in the air, free radicals and oxidative stress. Simply put, water helps your body perform more efficiently.

What are some tips to staying hydrated?

1) Weigh yourself before and after your workouts and drink 2-3 cups of water for every pound of weight you lost during your workout.
2) Drinking small amounts of water frequently rather than large amounts less often.
3) Pay attention to the amount and color of your urine. You should excrete urine
that is nearly colorless. Small amounts or dark colored urine can indicate dehydration.
4) Drink cold beverages to cool your core body temperature and reduce sweating.
5) Carry a water bottle with you at all times to ensure you can drink throughout the day.
6) Start and end your day with water. Your body loses water while you sleep so by drinking some when you first wake and when you go to bed you will ensure proper hydration.
7) When struck by the flu or a cold, you will become dehydrated and should always keep water by your side at all times.

As always, if you have any questions,
please feel free to call 4021-4214MAX or you can also contact me at chad@maxmusclenebraska.com, or for NFA and PFIT athletes,, please email me at chadcase.pfit@gmail.com

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march 23, 2011 09:35pm

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