Kelly Frankson DOT COM

So… typically three weeks before a competition things start to tapper down to allow the body to be full strength competition day. Because of my little tabata jumping squat incident we got a little behind schedule. 

Progress with the quad is definitely being made.  Power is now transferring through it an my back squats are climbing back up (now comfortably doing 3 sets of 3 at 95kg-was doing 3 of 3 at 105kg before the incident so still a ways to go, but much improved from not being able to do 75kg a few weeks back).  The bigger problem is going to be recovering from this week-getting so far behind schedule meant that this week was really our first chance for a heavy week giving my body just 7days to recover before the competition. 

For those of you who are planning on coming out and watching, it is going to be held at Semiahmoo Secondary School-1785 148TH St. in Surrey.  You can pretty much just go all the way along 152nd to get there.  I’ll weigh in at 1pm and then don’t compete until 3pm so aim to be there by 3. 

The 58kg (my category) and 63kg women will be competing together.  I’m not sure how many people have signed up, but I know alberta is sending some athletes as well.  How it will work is at about 2:50 all of the lifters will line up and get introduced.  The first lifter will then do their first attempt at 3pm.  The order of the lifters will depend on the starting weights.  So for instance, if there were 3 lifters with the following attempts scheduled:

Lifter 1-50kg, 53kg, 56kg

Lifter 2-57kg, 60kg, 62kg

Lifter 3-50kg, 55kg, 58kg

Lifter 1 would go first, if she makes her lift, lifter 3 would then have 1 minute to complete her lift, if lifter one missed her lift, she would have the option of either repeating it after lifter 3s attempt or increasing the weight (you can never go down in weight only up). 

Lifter 1 would then take her second attempt at 53kg, if she misses her second attempt, and chooses to re-due it, since she will be following herself (because there are no other lifters attempting the weight) she will get 2 minutes to do the next lift, if she made her second attempt, then lifter 3 would have one minute to do her second attempt.

Lifter 1 would then do her third attempt at 56kg, even if she misses it, she does not get anymore attempts (you only get three tries in total regardless if any of them are successful or not).  Lifter 2 would then have one minute to do her first attempt (so lifter one would have finished all three attempts before lifter 2 even begins the competition.

This will happen for snatches first (where you take the bar from ground to overhead all in one motion).  After the last lifter has made her last attempt there will then be a 10minute intermission before the clean and jerks happen.  The clean and jerk is a two part lift where you first take the bar from the ground to your shoulders and then you stand up with it and jerk it over your head. 

There will be three judges who will determine if the lift is legal or not-2 out of the 3 need to say yes for it to be a legal lift.   For a snatch to be legal, you must land with your arms locked out (ie now behind in the elbows) and stand up with the bar to show that you have control over it. For the clean to be legal only your feet can touch the ground and your elbows cannot touch your knees)  for the jerk to be legal you must again land with your arms locked out (no bend in the elbows or press) and straighten your legs showing that you have control over the bar.

Typically in a competition your first attempt is one that you should make, your second attempt is around a personal best and your third attempt is a new personal best so lifter are aiming for 2 out of 3 with 3 out of 3 being a GREAT day.

Depending on how my warmups go, most likely my attempts will go as follows:

Snatch-57kg, 60kg, 62kg

Clean and Jerk-75kg, 78kg, 80kg

The number of lifters will determine how long the session will last, but typically with about 10 lifters it takes 1.5 hours.  i would expect that there will be less than that next weekend so probably be done by 4pm.

Any questions just let me know!

kel

I’ve been getting lots of questions about my recovery…its definitely progressing.  Started back on back squats friday (went from doing 3 sets of 3 at 105kg before the injury to 3 sets of 3 75kg on Friday, but its a start), been doing mainly hang power cleans and snatches and having problems getting any sort of power comming form the leg on cleans, but yesterday things felt like they were starting to come together and I was able to do working sets of power snatches at 51kg, full snatch working set at 55kg, clean and Jerk at 72kg, 3 sets of 4 back squat at 85kg and snatch pulls at 65kg so it was a big day for my leg and it held up pretty well and is only a bit tired today.  I’m not very good at this doing nothing thing, so I’m happy progress is being made

So… I officially withdrew from crossfit games.

I registered for the games months before I hurt my quad, and since the jumping squat incident I have been holding on to my spot figuring that I would see how the recovery progesses and make a last minute decision whether I would compete or not.

Recovery is progessing (been doing lots of low resistance rowing and high hang power work-which has actually been good for me as I frequently short the extension on my pulls and rely on my big squat to save lifts but now I’m up to doing working sets of 50kg power snatches.  I’m still planning on competiting at the o-lifting competition in White Rock end of June, and think my snatch will be ready, but my clean and jerk…Friday was the first o-lifting session where I felt any power comming from the leg-really odd thing, full range of motion and no pain, just no power running through it.  Friday was also the first session where we started doing back squats again (although I went from doing 3 sets of 3 at 105kg before the incident to 3 sets of 3 at 75kg on friday).  Dan (my coach) told me that if the quad felt good on saturday do some more strength work (3 sets of 3 back squats at 85kg and 3 sets 5 snatch deadlifts at 70kg) so I woke saturday morning and the quad felt good, but I could feel the glute, hamstring and thigh on the left side… but it all went good and today my body feels good.

But after having a much needed dinner with a good friend and making the comment about how if I go to the games and I still have my spot you never know what would happen-I was reminded (and already knew-just needed to hear it from my trusted advisor :) exactly what would happen, I would end up competing, going full out, probably doing pretty well, but end up tearing more muscles, possibly even more seriously and shooting the resting of the lifting season. 

So I went home, typed up the email and waited about 5 mintues before actually pressing send, but now that I have withrdawn, I’m happy with the decision and can purely concentrate on O-lifting and rebuilding the quad.

I’m still going to attend the games, actually going down a week early to workout at Mikes Gym and work on some olifting stuff with Brad and Josh, but will help coach the Crossfit Vancouver team instead of compete.

And thats that!

Your body has enough glycogen and fat stored to get you through a normal workout. Just eat healthy pwo and you will do fine. Digestion takes a ton of energy….so hence your CNS response is greater on an empty stomach…add in some coffee/caffeine and you will be exploding out of the gates.

However be careful because there’s a big difference between training on an empty stomach and training with depleted glycogen stores so how well you’re able to perform following a fast largely depends on how active you’ve been during the fast and how much stores you have left.

Give it a try and see if it works for you.  For me, I like doing crossfit metcon workout on an empty stomach, but I struggle through o-lifting session if I haven’t eaten enough before hand.

Interesting discussion from the performance menue site, check this out:

Another concern of the fat-free-post-workout camp is the blunting of the insulin response. The rationale of maximizing the insulin response is to counteract the catabolic nature of the post-trained state, switching the hormonal milieu into an anabolic one, thus speeding recovery. Although this might benefit those who train fasted or semi-fasted, many don’t realize that a pre-exercise meal (and in some cases the mid-exercise meal) is doing more than enough spiking of insulin levels for anticatabolic purposes.

It’s an important objective to not only maximize muscle protein synthesis, but also minimize protein breakdown. However, the latter doesn’t require a massive insulin spike, but rather just a touch beyond basal/resting levels. To illustrate this, Rennie & colleagues found that even during a sustained high blood level of amino acids, no further inhibition of muscle protein breakdown occurred beyond insulin elevation to approximately 15 ?U/l,20 which is slightly above normal basal levels of 5-10 ?U/l.

To reiterate, the pre-exercise meal can have profound effects on insulin levels that surpass the length of the training bout. Tipton’s team found that as little as 6g essential amino acids + 35g sucrose taken immediately before exercise (45-50 minutes of resistance training) was enough to keep insulin elevated to roughly 4x above fasting levels 1-hour post-exercise.21 It took 2 hours post-exercise for insulin to return to resting levels. A similar insulin response was seen with 20g whey by itself taken immediately preworkout.22 If carbs were added to the pre-training protein, there would be yet a greater insulin response.

As far as solid food goes, Capaldo’s team examined various metabolic effects during a five hour period after ingesting a meal composed of 75g carb (47%), 37g prot (26%), and 17g fat (27%).23 Although this study didn’t examine training effects, this meal would make a nice post-workout meal due to its absolute (and proportional) amounts of protein and carbohydrate. The fat-fearing camp would warn against the meal’s fat content interfering with the insulin response. However, this meal was able to raise insulin 3 times above fasting levels within 30 minutes of consumption. At the 60 minute mark, insulin was 5 times greater than fasting. At the 300 minute mark, insulin levels were still double the fasting level.

Elliot and colleagues compared the effect of fat-free milk, whole milk, and a higher dose of fat-free milk (to match the calories of the whole milk) taken 60 minutes post-resistance exercise.24 Whole milk was superior for increasing net protein balance. Interestingly, the calorie-matched dose of fat free milk containing 14.5g protein, versus 8.0g in the whole milk (an 81% advantage), but still got beaten. The investigators speculated over the possible mechanisms behind the outcome (insulin response, blood flow, subject response differences, fat content improving nitrogen retention), but end up dismissing each one in favor of concluding that further research is necessary to see if extra fat calories ingested with an amino acid source will increase muscle protein synthesis. Lingering questions notwithstanding, post-workout milkfat was the factor that clinched the victory – at least in overnight-fasted subjects.

To put another nail in the coffin of the insulin spiking objective, post-exercise glycogen resynthesis is biphasic.25 Unlike the subsequent “slow” phase which can last several hours, the initial “rapid” phase of glycogenesis lasting 30-60 minutes immediately post-exercise is not dependent upon insulin. Maximizing post-workout hyperinsulinemia may be beneficial for athletes with more than a single exhaustive endurance-containing training bout separated by less than approximately 8 hours, but in all other cases, the benefit in “spiking” insulin is nil.

In line with this theme, interesting research has surfaced in recent years challenging the idea that highly glycemic (and thus insulinemic) carbohydrates taken post-workout are the optimal for recovery. Erith’s team found no difference between post-exercise high- and low-glycemic index (GI) carbohydrate intake on exercise performance the following day.26 In a similar study, Stevenson’s team actually saw better next-day performance in subjects who consumed low-GI post-exercise carbohydrate than those who consumed high-GI post-exercise carbohydrate.27

Is spiking insulin necessary post-workout? Generally not.

-No greater inhibition of muscle protein breakdown has been seen beyond insulin elevation to approximately 15 ?U/l, which is slightly above resting/basal levels of 5-10 ?U/l.

-In one study, whole milk was superior for increasing net protein balance post-workout, despite the calorie-matched dose of fat free milk containing 81% more protein.

-The initial 30-60 minute “rapid” phase of glycogenesis immediately post-exercise is not dependent upon insulin.

-There’s no need to attempt to spike insulin for recovery purposes since maximal effects are seen at minimal elevations. Simply getting enough total substrate surrounding the training bout suffices, at least within the context of a 24-hour separation between exhaustive training of the same muscles. Multiple depleting endurance-type bouts per day (i.e., < 8 hours between bouts) may be the exception to this rule.

-On a related tangent, it’s been commonly recommended to maximize post-exercise hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia by consuming high-GI carbohydrates. However, this strategy has been seen to offer no benefit on next-day performance, and one recent study even saw endurance impairment.