Look Ripped

Personal Trainers can compromise your health

We’ve all heard them, standing next to clients giving advice on everything from supplements to diet and the unwitting client soaking it up as fact, why? Because these guys are qualified trainers and they know their stuff. Well not so, a large proportion of trainers giving advice have gained their qualifications by doing short courses that scratch the surface on a surfeit of health related topics yet give little grounding on any particular one.

The would be Dietitian

Standing next to the treadmill the trainer spends the time pontificating about the types of food the client should be consuming and you guessed it, at the top of the list is protein. It would seem any personal trainer worth his weight in eggs is almost obliged under the unofficial trainer’s handbook to preach the benefits eating protein. A client recently spoke of her personal training experience how she was advised to eat a high protein diet punctuated with none other than the bodybuilders staple, the “protein shake”

The client’s goal was to lose a few kilos and tone up, obviously like a lot of other personal trainers out there he wasn’t acquainted with the fundamental principles of Net protein utilization (NPU).

NPU is the ratio of amino acid converted to protein to the ratio of amino acids supplied and can be determined by the dietary protein intake and the amount of nitrogen excreted.

Protein isn’t a magic macronutrient

Although most bodybuilders swear by the benefits of eating and drinking copious quantities of protein, in actual fact the body takes what it needs and the rest is converted to fat and stored, used as fuel or excreted via the kidneys. The more you eat isn’t going to make your muscles any bigger. The basic principle is that excreted protein ends in faeces and urine and can be identified by the amount of nitrogen found in urine, this amount is called "our nitrogen balance", what goes in equals what comes out.

Trainers are not dietitians

The best advice for any prospective client is to do your own research, ask the questions and don’t believe or eat everything your told, these guys are not dietitians and protein is only one of three macronutrients important for good health and wellbeing.

Can you be too muscled?

When you try to please every one you end up pleasing nobody it would seem, girls of tinsel town are doing it for themselves and pumping up a storm of controversy, can girls be to muscled? Well for some high profile chicks it would seem so, Jessica Simpson, Jada Pinkett Smith (Will Smiths wife), Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna are being outed as being overly muscled chicks suffering from anorexia athletica.

How they are beefing up

Jessica Simpson is apparently taking her weight training to a new level, training up to 2 hours a day combining weights and cardio to achieve her goal of becoming “ripped and lean” for her new movie Major movie star.

Will Smiths wife Jada, has appeared flexing a bicep and god forbid sporting a solid vein. Her regime has her training twice a day with cardio and weights, following a strict protein diet and insiders say courting long term health risks. Sarah Jessica parker is reported to be a lean mean pumping machine, showcasing lean vascular arms and a very low body fat, the pundits are saying the vascular appearance is an indication of over exercising, Apparently she has been motivated by the up coming Sex in the City movie.

There’s nothing unhealthy with iron

These women like many others in the spotlight of fame obviously do things at the extreme end of what’s good for you, but weight training is for every body regardless of age, and is a healthy activity that will put more life back into years than years into your life. From increased insulin sensitivity to improved metabolic activity, getting muscled up is a step in the right direction for good health.

If these women are considered unhealthy, bring on unhealthy please!

Sports people only get caught by default

How many times have you heard that a sports person has been caught for drugs, then only to find that they were caught not by the systematic drugs check but by chance. We are lead to believe that the system is catching drug cheats but in reality a growing proportion of athletes are being caught as result of poor house keeping habits, being shelved by disgruntled coaches or besmirched by jilted lovers.

Jilted lover spills his guts

Marion Jones is a perfect example of a lovers scorn, for years she had shared the same bed and in some instances syringe, only to end up having her glorious sporting career turned to shit by her ex lover, he figured that if he were a failure she would be to. Between the jilted lover, a coach trying to save his own backside and a drug peddler giving evidence to stay out of jail, Jones was sold down the river and her illustrious career left lying in tatters.

Cyclists only crime is being untidy

The tour de France is a sport infamous for the use of performance enhancing drugs and it would seem many cyclists and teams are being caught or implicated for drug use. But in reality a number of the high profile cases have been as a result of athletes poor house keeping habits by leaving empty vials of prohibited substances in bins or getting caught with a trunk load of paraphernalia used for blood doping (Homologous transfusions).

Level playing field is a field of dreams

The current drug protocols catch those that become to cocky about their ability to outrun, swim or play their rivals with the assistance of drugs, natural athletes are natural only up until their jilted lovers, burnt out coaches or lazy habits bring them into disrepute.

Is organic environmentally friendly?

The organic purists would have you believe that eating organic is better for your health and places a smaller environmental footprint on Mother Earth.

It’s also asserted that organic cattle and poultry farming are more environmentally sustainable and humane. So, are organically certified farms any better than the average? And are the assertions of a few tree-hugging greenies really the whole picture? It’s a fact that food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuel regardless of its certification.

Food and petroleum

An ecologist from Cornell (USA) estimated that to grow, chill, wash, package and transport a box of organic salad weighing 1 kilo from the point of origin to the plate of a US consumer, the cost in fossil fuel energy would be 478 kJ for every KJ of food. Assuming a box of salad (lettuce) weighs 1 kilo and contains 672 kilojoules of energy, that’s 38,720 kilojoules of fossil fuel energy for every box of lettuce.

Scratching organic hens

Most of us that buy organic or free range chickens do so in the hope that we are making the short lives of our next meal a little more comfortable. When organic and free range are mentioned, most of us envisage cows roaming over virgin pastures and chickens scratching in open pens, but in actual fact nothing could be further from the truth. Free-range hens are housed not much unlike their antibiotic eating brothers and sisters, living and dying in huge in huge sheds where space is a premium. The area provided for chickens to access fresh air and sunlight is no bigger than an average front garden and rarely used. The only upside for organic hens is that they are slaughtered two weeks later than there antibiotic fed counter parts due to the fact that they don’t grow as fast and take longer to achieve a similar body weight.

Fill the car with lettuce

So next time you open your organic salad box have a thought for the amount of fuel your lettuce may be consuming, it could be competing with your car.

Sports stars are product whores

Sports stars make most of their money from product endorsements, the income from sporting pursuits only supplements the obscene amounts they receive for prostituting themselves to corporations like Nike, General motors and a plethora of other companies using sports stars to push their products to the masses.

Kournikova saleswoman extraordinaire

Anna Kournikova had already made over $11 million dollars by 1999 and that was just from product endorsements, the old adage that sex sells really rings true in the world of sport and the girls don’t get all the cream either, in the upper echelons of sport male superstars may be the next billionaires.

Tiger woods and a little white ball

In 2005 Tiger Woods earned $90 million dollars at the age of 32 with gold chip investments and endorsements from Nike, G.M and Amex to name a few its estimated that Tiger may have the capacity to earn around $6 billion dollars before he’s finished whacking the little white ball around the green.

Michelle Wie a millionaire by 15 years of age

Michelle is the newest female golf star to hit the scene with her 16 th birthday just around the corner she wont be worrying about gifts, Nike has just signed her up on a $10 million dollar a year four year contract. Obviously sex sells on the greens or the courts equally as well.

The rich list in lucrative sports

David Beckham may have just made a move on the sporting rich list from 10th to third, his deal with LA Galaxy netted him $250 million dollars over 5 years, on top of that his annually earnings from sponsorship deals with Pepsi, Motorola, Gillette and Volkswagen bring home a further $25 million and that doesn’t take into account his earnings from clothing and other merchandising.

Stars on their backs

It would seem that the ringing of cash registers may be drowning out the cheers of the fans, and with the new millionaires coming from sport being called a jock doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing anymore.