Hello everyone. How was the first day of school? Traffic chaos on the Deerfoot? Kids fighting to stay home? Shocked at the list of needs for the year that they brought from the teachers? All I can say is Sadie loved meeting all her buddies on her first day of class, she can’t wait to see all the other cars on the road, and her treat and toy list is endless… Granted our little mutt is a priceless addition to our family, but I don’t miss what our new moms and dads are facing with school these days. Being kid-less does have some advantage…
So the last long weekend of the summer is here. August has flipped to September. Traffic is back to normal (well, after the calf robe is finished). September is always a beautiful month in Alberta even though the sun just doesn’t seem to be around like it used to be. This weekend should be a great one to get out and enjoy the last few festivals that remain on the calendar.
We will meet at Max Bell Arena for our Saturday training. This is the red and yellow arena just off Memorial Drive between Barlow and Deerfoot Trail. We will head south to enjoy the paths of the Western Irrigation District. Haven’t been out this way? If you keep following the path you will be in Chestermere before lunch! For us we will see you at 8 am. Email if you need directions.
A big congratulations to our friend and local Schmoozer in Edmonton, Nick Lees. The Edmonton Journal writer and wine lover raised around $50,000 with his tenth annual Zin on the River event last week in support of the Arthritis Society. I so wanted to join in the fun and wine but a Wednesday night event 300 km to the north is a tough sell to HRH. Someday…
One of my Facebook ‘friends’ is a site called I Love to Run. Every day they have an inspirational poster that I love to see. A couple of weeks ago they had this little guy who reminded me of the double amputee racing in the World Championships. The only difference I see is…well no difference…just sweet victory.
So you couldn’t make it out today to train?
I am always looking for the next GREAT training tool to get us all to the next level. I know Janelle and Afton have been diligently preparing for their Joints in Motion fundraising by selling chocolates, among other events. I wasn’t really sure that chocolates were the way to go until I read this article in the New York Times. Now I see the ulterior motive for their fundraising. It is all part of training!
How Chocolate Can Help Your Workout
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
For those who worry that fitness requires nutritional denial, there is good news, with caveats. Auspicious new science suggests that chocolate can have a surprisingly large effect on the body’s response to exercise, although not in the ways that many of us might expect, and certainly not at the dosages most might hope for.
Researchers have known for some time that chocolate has healthful effects, and recent epidemiological studies have shown that people who regularly indulge in moderate amounts of dark chocolate are less likely to develop high blood pressure or heart disease or suffer strokes. But chocolate’s potential role in exercise performance had not been studied, or probably even much considered, until scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions gave middle-aged, sedentary male mice a purified form of cacao’s primary nutritional ingredient, known as epicatechin, and had the mice work out. Epicatechin is a flavonol, a class of molecules that are thought to have widespread effects on the body.
The mice were given small liquid doses of epicatechin twice a day. A separate control group of mice drank equal amounts of water.
Both groups were divided into two. Half of the animals in each group began a light exercise routine, which consisted of strolling on a treadmill for a short period each day. The regimen was not meant to get the animals into tiptop shape, only to get them moving. After 15 days, all of the animals completed a treadmill test, during which they ran to exhaustion. The researchers also biopsied the animals’ back leg muscles.
By and large, the animals that had been drinking water were the first to give out during the treadmill test. They became exhausted more quickly than the animals that had received epicatechin. Even the control mice that had lightly exercised grew tired more quickly than the nonexercising mice that had been given epicatechin. The fittest rodents, however, were those that had combined epicatechin and exercise. They covered about 50 percent more distance than the control animals.
The muscle biopsies offered some explanation for their dominance. The muscles of all of the animals that had been given epicatechin contained new capillaries, as well as biochemical markers indicating that their cells were making new mitochondria. Mitochondria are structures in cells that produce cellular energy. The more functioning mitochondria a muscle contains, the healthier and more fatigue-resistant it is.
The leg muscles of the mice that had been given epicatechin and exercised displayed far more mitochondrial activity than the leg muscles of the control mice. Even the mice that had drunk epicatechin and not exercised contained markers of increased mitochondrial health, suggesting that the flavonol prompts a physiological reaction even among the sedentary. But that response is greatly heightened by exercise, no matter how slight.
Exactly how epicatechin intensified the mouse muscles’ response to exercise is not yet known, but “it seems likely that muscle cells contain specific receptors for epicatechin,” said Dr. Francisco Villarreal, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the authors of the study, which was
published last week in The Journal of Physiology. Epicatechin binds to the receptors and “induces an integrated response that includes structural and metabolic changes in skeletal and cardiac muscles resulting in greater endurance capacity,” the study concluded.
Mice are not people, though, and it remains to be seen whether the fitness-boosting effects of epicatechin will be identical in humans, especially since most of us would be getting the substance not in purified liquid form but in chocolate. “Processing destroys epicatechin,” Dr. Villarreal said, so heavily processed milk chocolate contains almost none of the flavonol, while cacao-rich dark chocolate has far more.
And even for those who adore dark chocolate, there is a catch. “A very small amount is probably enough,” Dr. Villarreal said. Extrapolating from his group’s mouse data, he said, five grams of dark chocolate daily, or just a sixth of an ounce — about half of one square of a typical chocolate bar — is probably a reasonable human dose if your aim is to intensify the effects of a workout.
Sadly, “more is not better,” he continued. “More could lessen or even undo” any benefits, he said, by overloading the muscles’ receptors or otherwise skewing the body’s response.
But given human nature, microdoses of chocolate may be impractical, underscoring the difficulties of using nutrition to bolster fitness. Dr. Villarreal’s colleagues regularly filch from his cache of dark-chocolate bars, he said, and despite his admonitions, they invariably finish the entire thing. “I keep telling them that’s too much,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They want to eat the whole thing and,” no matter what the expert tells them, “they do.”
So don’t ever forget that training is not all about higher, stronger, faster…some days it is good to just have funnier, dirtier, and memorable. At least that is what I like.
All the best,
John
