Mma Fight Nutrition And Hydration

Sports Nutrition for MMA

Fluid Needs for Fighting

Your mom may have told you: drink 8, 8oz. glasses of water per day. Although this advice is considered conventional wisdom, it surely isnt based on any science. If that advice does apply to anyone, it certainly isnt mixed martial artists who spend a good amount of their day jumping, punching, and wrestling in a hot, stuffy gym. Your fluid needs are unique, and as such, need a unique approach. As you likely know, dehydration results in a tremendous reduction in performance capacity. If youre dehydrated, your body and mind will suffer. In the ring, this is a formula for disaster. There are two major reasons why an MMA practitioner has different fluid needs than both your average Joe and other athletes: one is that your activity level is much higher than most other athletes. Because MMA training is unusually intense and usually has a long duration, there is significantly more fluid loss than a steady-state activity like jogging. Secondly, because of the level of conditioning required to be competitive, mixed martial artists tend to have significantly more muscle mass than most. Glycogen, the storage form of carbohydrate, needs a lot of water. The vast majority of glycogen is stored in muscle, so you need to drink more fluid just to keep the glycogen in your muscle hydrated.

How Much Fluid Do I Need?
Simple, everyone is different. Alright, so figuring out exactly how much fluid you need isnt quite so simple. But, with a little bit of work up-front and a commitment to monitoring your progress; you can ensure youre getting the right amount of fluid. Here are some general guidelines that you can use as a baseline:

Hydration Before Training
Drink at least15-20 fl oz. 2 hours before training/competition
Drink 8-10 fl oz. 15-30 minutes before training/competition

Hydration During Training
Drink 8-10 fl oz every 10 minutes
If youre training more than an hour and a half, drink 8-10 fl oz. of electrolyte replacement drink every 30 minutes.

Its possible that what youre already doing closely resembles these guidelines. However, because the variability of ones training varies so much, there is a more accurate way of going about staying hydrated.

Easy Ways for Mixed Martial Artists Assess Hydration
Although following the guidelines above gives you an excellent baseline, there are many variables like altitude, humidity, and clothing that can make generic guidelines inaccurate. One of the most accurate ways to assess hydration is to check out your urine color. If its cloudy and yellow, then you know that youre dehydrated. This is because the toxins that your kidneys filter out arent diluted in a large enough urine volume to be invisible. On the other hand, if its clear, youre likely getting enough fluid. Its normal to have a slight color in your urine, especially first thing in the morning or after taking a multivitamin.

Another fantastic way to monitor your hydration is to weigh yourself before and after your training session. Although you do burn a bit of fat during training, the vast majority of your weight loss is fluid. For example, if you weighted 155lbs. before your training session and weigh in at 153lbs. after your training, which means that, you lost 32oz. of fluid. (1 pound=16 ounces of fluid). A 2-3% loss of bodyweight during training can impair your performance and put added stress on vital organs. You should try to maintain adequate levels of hydration during training and replenish any losses within 1 hour of training. If you weigh more after training than you did before, thats a sign you overdid it and drank too much.

The Hydration Plan Recap:
1.Mom may know best in most cases, but not when it comes to your hydration!
2.Everyones fluid needs are different from yours-so learn what your body needs.
3.Use the hydration guidelines as a starting point. Adjust to your training and body needs.
4.Check the color of your urine. Dark Yellow/Brown=severe dehydration, Yellow=moderate dehydration, Slight Yellow/Clear=Hydrated!
5.Weight yourself. Before and after training to get an idea of how much fluid you have lost and drink according. Sipping works better than chugging.

Train hard, eat smart and stay hydrated!
Daniel M. Solomon, Registered Dietitian (RD)

Reference: (1)Benardot, Dan. Advanced Sports Nutrition. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2006. Print.
(2)Clark, Nancy. Nancy Clarks Sports Nutrition Guidebook . 4th. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2008. Print.
(3)Judelson, Daniel. Hydration and Muscular Performance: Does Fluid Balance Affect Strength, Power and High-Intensity Endurance?. Sports Medicine 37(2007): 907-921. Print

Looking Good With Herbal Nutrition Supplements

Herbal nutrition supplements are those supplements that you take alongside your regular diet in order to supplement your intake of the various vitamins and other things that we don’t always get enough of in our diet. This has a vast range of health benefits and is also very good for athletes who are looking to improve their performance without using unnatural substances. However herbal nutrition supplements also have another benefit – they make you look good. The people we think are attractive in this world are the ones who are healthy. Those are the people who look as though they’d provide good genetic material for children, and who look as though they could protect us and have the resources to provide for us and look after themselves. They also look ‘clean’ and that’s always a good thing. But how can natural health supplements have this remarkable effect? And which ones in particular can make you look more attractive?
Here we’ll look at a few and how they work.

Fat Blockers: Fat blockers prevent fat from being stored as fat cells. When we don’t utilise the carbs or the fat in our body for instant energy they get converted to fat cells and placed under the skin making us look less defined and more ‘chubby’ in appearance. This is where fat blockers come in and work by preventing this process from occurring providing a healthy way to lose weight when coupled with a low fat diet.

Protein: Protein shakes such as soy protein enable us to tone up and build muscle. These provide the ‘amino acids’ that our body utilises to perform a range of repairs around the body and if you don’t have the right amino acids to hand in your body when those repairs take place then your muscle will not grow after a workout. A muscular frame is something that is highly desirable especially for men and at the same time simply having lots of muscle mass can provide a healthy way to lose weight as your body burns fat in order to sustain your new muscle.

Vitamins and Minerals: Many health supplements include vitamins and minerals and these have a range of benefits. Of course they will help to keep your healthy and strengthen your immune system, but at the same time they are also useful for the body to improve your skin, nails, teeth and hair. Without getting the right minerals and vitamins your skin and nails will look damaged and your hair thin. Vitamin E also further enables the body to heal scars and cuts and make your skin look smoother as a result.

Omega 3: Omega 3 fatty acid is also found in many herbal nutrition supplements and is useful for many things. The oil will further help to give your skin buoyancy and ensure your hair shines. However another benefit is that it is an antioxidant meaning that it can eliminate the free radicals in your body which causes damage to the cells and can contribute to the physical effects of ageing on the skin.

The Benefits Of Urine Testing For Optimal Nutrition

Urine testing has been used since ancient times for the detection of abnormalities. Early medical practitioners would pour urine on the ground and observe it to determine whether or not it would attract insects. If insects were attracted
to the urine, it indicated it was sweet, which we know in modern times to be a symptom of diabetes. In the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, it was common practice for physicians to actually taste their patient’s urine.

Fortunately, today’s clinicians no longer have to become quite so intimate with their patients body fluids and can rely on sophisticated analytical
techniques to uncover the wealth of information found in a simple urine sample.

Each of us has a unique physiological makeup. That is why it is very important to use vitamin supplements based on your body’s needs and biochemistry. The strategy of those low-cost one-size-fits-all vitamin supplements provide either too little of what you do need or too much of what you don’t.

Urine testing allows you to know which vitamin supplements to target specific areas of deficiency to help your body achieve an ideal nutritional and chemical balance.

For instance, urine sampling is an excellent method of evaluating:
– Hydration status
– Acid/Base balance
– Blood sugar regulation
– Existence of certain cancers
– Existence of pregnancy and complications of pregnancy
– Liver diseases
– Infections
– Functional nutritional status

While science limits us from testing for every conceivable illness, we can determine if certain nutritional deficiencies exist through urine testing. Urine testing really tells you what’s going on in your body, and what you need to know if these nutrients are getting into your cells and how your cells are using them. One of the best ways to do that is to look at the end products of your metabolism in your urine. These individual tests called ” Priva Test ” utilize a urine sample which you provide through an in-home test kit

Two main purposes exist for urinalysis:

1. The first is to diagnosis actual damage or disease to the physical kidney itself. In this instance, substances normally found in urine will be increased or decreased. This reflects alterations in the filtration system of the kidney due to disease. This
is the basis for the standard urinalysis screen.

2. The second is to detect disturbances such as endocrine or metabolic abnormalities. In this instance, the kidneys function normally but excrete abnormal amounts of metabolic end products, indicating alterations in metabolic pathways. This second function is the application that is used in the PrivaTest.

The three areas evaluated in the Priva Test are major areas of concern for any person living in our industrialized society. The three compounds measured in your urine at the laboratory give you vital information about:

– Your body’s ability to detoxify toxic substances.
– Your body’s ability to balance the production of an important regulatory compound influencing immune, nervous, and vascular system function.
– Your body’s ability to handle challenges to its antioxidant systems.

Each one of these areas can be manipulated favorably by personalized nutritional supplementation.

Health Juice Making Nutrition Easy

Tired of worrying about how to get the proper nutrition? It is a long and tedious process of planning out exactly what foods to eat and not eat. It would be much easier if there was a health juice you could drink and get all the nutrition of eating several different fruits and vegetables.

I am not going to lie, I have an extremely hard time planning my diet, even though I know it is something that has to be done in order to give me body the nutrition it needs. For a long time now I have been suffering day in and day out figuring out what exactly I should it as well as what not to eat. It got exhausting after a while, and frankly I figured it just was not worth all the hassle.

About this time I began searching for a way I could give my body the nutrition it needs in a quick and easy way. I started looking into health juices. Many contain vital fruits which provide nutrients my body knows and loves. Though I began to realize that very few of the juices offered all the nutrition I would hope for. They would give vitamin C or B, or some other variety but hardly enough to be what I wanted. So I refined my search even more to looking for a health juice that would give me the ultimate variety of nutrients. After awhile of searching I ran across MonaVie juice. MonaVie juice is a health drink that has a combination of 19 different fruits. Each fruit offers its own health benefits and when put together it really was exactly what I was looking for.

MonaVie juice is a little pricy but I have yet to find another product like it. It seems to be the perfect blend of fruits, and I will tell you, my body agrees. The best part about MonaVie juice is that it makes my life 10 times easier. I simply wake up drink 2 ounces and then go about my day, and that it.

Facts On Diet And Nutrition

Having the right knowledge on what constitutes diet and nutrition will lead dieters towards the right path in weight loss. Although there are many manufacturers for weight loss products that includes diet books, machines, fitness programs and even surgery they actually come with a price. Moreover, uncertainty remains as to whether these products and methods are indeed safe and efficient.

The answer to weight loss is to know the basics. How does the body works? What are the foods that could result in such progress? Some may think they already know the answer but the truth is they are lingering on many weight loss misconceptions around.

If you think that staying away from foods will do you good, well the answer is no. Starving yourself thin would actually result more weight gaining. Once you take in food you body would interpret that storage is necessary rather than utilizing it for energy. And there are also cases that people who starve themselves tend to overeat once faced with delectable dishes. Having a good meal is nevertheless important.

There are many concepts for dieting offered today. Some say that having a high-carbohydrate meal is good others say it should be high-protein or even high-fat diets. Researches state that most of these concepts can work but it still depends on how individuals would react to such diet. The presence of individual differences should always be considered. It means that one particular diet that has worked wonders for some may not induce the same results for others. The only thing that dieters must keep in mind is that the true secret of weight loss is to burn more calories than it consumes. Hence, practicing calorie count is also beneficial.

Many weight loss products asserts that just by buying the product dieters may achieve weight loss without having to go through strenuous exercises. This can be possible if one would engage themselves in a daily consumption of low calorie foods, so low that their regular activities would enable to burn them off effortlessly. But there is also the question in nutrition supply. One needs to achieve satiety in order to avoid cravings. Hence, it is quite obvious that dieters should eat right and later on burn it off through exercise.

What constitute the right diet is one that includes fruits, vegetables and fiber. These food types are known to be low in calories which provides nutrition as well as burns off easily. There are many diet recipes, books and even cooking TV programs that offers delectable dishes that has already pre-counted the calories it may have.

The benefits of exercise have resulted in a long list. Most people may engage in such just to burn fats and calories but alongside it also helps in developing leaner muscles that are essential for fat burning and increase metabolism.

As mentioned, staying fit and healthy is very easy. Always remembers the one true secret of weight loss, burn more calories than you consume.