CategoriesBlog Move.

KB Deadlift: RDL vs. Conventional

written by, Erin White- Flow Fitness  Coach

Both styles are great to train the posterior chain but the conventional will recruit more muscle mass therefore giving you more power in the lift. 

  •  In both you will always start with a hinge position (sending the hips back first), keeping a neutral and locked lumbar spine, so there is no rounding throughout. Maintaining the neutral spine from neck to hips you will then reach for the bell. This is where the differentiating factor comes in. 
  • In the straight leg RDL you will see the hips sit higher and feel more tension and pull in the hamstrings. You will also see less bend in the knees. Back will be flat, shoulders down and back. You will feel this lift more in your lower back, spinal erectors, but if doing correctly and using your breathing to brace you will be able to work the lower back properly as well as focus on working more of the hamstrings and glutes. 
  • With the conventional, even with a KB, the setup will be similar with the shoulders down and back, neutral spine and the hinge first. At this point you will bend the knees until your hands reach the handle of the bell, sending your hips slightly down and back. To make clear this is NOT a squat, but your back angle and hips will be lower than they would be on the RDL. You will be using more of the posterior chain here to assist in the lift. From here power through the heels, stand tall and squeeze the glutes at the top. 

The lifts are meant to work differently and thrown into your training differently. But now you know each has a purpose in your programming. 

 Start Position: Conventional Kettlebell Dead-Lift

Start Position: Romanian Dead Lift (RDL)

CategoriesBlog Live Fit.

Rep Volume and Why It Matters

Burning fat, building muscle, or getting stronger — most athletic and aesthetic goals fall into or combine these three categories. Whatever your goals, however, resistance training is a must. But that doesn’t mean 500 curls with the 0.5-pound pink dumbbells off in the corner. It means an intelligently planned program that includes a rep scheme that dictates how much volume you train with for each exercise and that deliberately pushes you just to the point of failure.

That was a lot of jargon. Let’s break it down:

  • Resistance training:
    • Another term for strength training, resistance training is “a form of physical activity that is designed to improve muscular fitness by exercising a muscle or a muscle group against external resistance.”
  • Aesthetic lifting:
    • Typically associated with bodybuilding or modeling, aesthetic goals are focused on sculpting the body to a specific design.
  • Rep schemes:
    • Reps and sets are the backbone of any program. Every set has a specific rep (repetition) range in it. So, if you have a program that requires you to perform 3×5 squats, you will be doing three sets with five squats in each set. If a program has you doing 4×6, you will be performing four sets of squats with six repetitions per set. You rest between each completed working set.
  • Volume:
    • Volume is how much work you do. It is the total amount of weight moved over each rep of every set. If your squatting rep scheme  is 4×10 at 315 pounds, your volume for that particular exercise is 12,600 pounds.
  • Working sets:
    • Working sets are different from your warm-up sets. Any physical activity, be it running, lifting weights, boxing, or playing guitar, requires that you warm up before you can safely and effectively go full speed. Working sets are those included in your program as opposed to the preliminary lightweight repetitions intended to “wake your muscles up.”
  • Point of failure:
    • When your body simply will not go any further, you’ve reached your point of failure. If you can successfully do 20 pushups before your technique begins to degrade, then your point of failure for pushups is 20 reps. Only when pushing your limits does your body begin to adapt to the stress, so that you can eventually surpass those limits.

If this were the end of it, you might have a convincing case for those plastic 0.5-pound pink weights off in the corner, but it’s not. The body adapts to the type of stress you place it under. If you challenge the maximum amount of weight you can carry, it will adapt with gains in strength. If you challenge how many repetitions you can perform, it will adapt to be able to perform more repetitions. These physical adaptations show themselves in different ways. Increases in muscle size are referred to as hypertrophy, and do not directly translate into increases in strength. Similarly, increases in strength do not translate into massive differences in muscle size. Muscle size does increase with strength-focused resistance training, but at a much lower rate than if you were training specifically for hypertrophy.

Controlling your rep volume allows you to deliberately manipulate how your body adapts to the stress you place on it. This way, you can control whether you maximize strength gains, muscle size, conditioning, or a balance of all three.

Where exactly your volume and rep scheme should fall for your goal varies according to several schools of thought, but a few proven standards have stood out for providing solid results.

Getting Stronger

If you want to get stronger, you need to give your body a reason to get stronger. Performing too many reps will detract from the total amount of weight you’re moving per rep. Rep schemes of 3×3 and 3×5 tend to maximize strength gains.

Building Muscle

For building muscle and increasing size, like a model or bodybuilder, you want to do higher-volume work. This means using less weight, even though the only way to reliably get stronger is to lift heavy weight.

Look at it this way: The person who overhead presses 185 pounds with a rep scheme of 3×3 achieves a total volume of 1,665 pounds. The person who overhead presses 135 pounds with a rep scheme of 4×8 achieves a volume of 4,320 pounds.

The first person will make more progress in strength, but the second person will develop muscle size far more quickly.

Establish Your Goal and Design a Program That Will Help You Reach It

That mouthful of a header says exactly what you need to do. Every exercise and detail about how you approach it is a tool you can use to achieve a specific goal. If you want more defined muscles, increase your volume; if you want to get stronger, regularly challenge how much weight you can move with strict form. In either case, consistency is key. Keep grinding away, and you’ll get where you want to be.

CategoriesBlog Nourish.

Understanding Fats

Wrapping up the unveiling of understanding basic nutrition, we’re completing the macronutrient trifecta with a practical overview of dietary fats. Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are all essential to building and maintaining a healthy and resilient body. Having an understanding of what each does for you is a powerful tool in accomplishing your physical goals, as well as maintaining both physical and emotional health.

The human body is not a mysterious black-box, but a regular machine that with the appropriate tools (applied knowledge) can be manipulated into building the desired results.

In popular portrayal, fat is seen as a dietary boogeyman. The truth of the matter is that fat is an essential macronutrient that serves vital functions in our bodies, keeping us alive. We’ll discuss those roles below, as well as how to establish how much you should be eating to reach your goals.

Fat’s Role in the Body

The Hard Facts

  • 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories.
  • 1 pound of fat/lipid contains 3,500 calories of energy.
  • There are 2 essential dietary fatty acids:
    • Linoleic acid
    • Linolenic acid
  • Fats are essential for the breakdown and absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K in the body.
  • The ACSM (American College of Sports Medicine) recommends that the average person’s diet should consist of 20-30% fat, balancing saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats.

Translation

Where proteins and carbohydrates only have 4 calories per gram, fats have more than twice that amount with 9 calories per gram.

A single pound of body fat is equal to 3,500 calories of energy. Consider how many calories you burn jogging on the treadmill in one hour. You may be able to reach 200 at a moderate pace. To burn one pound of fat jogging at this rate would take roughly 17.5 hours. This obstacle, along with the fact that muscle consumes calories even at rest, is why weight training to develop muscle is incorporated into the majority of most weight loss programs.

Dietary requirements that are labelled essential are those that the body cannot synthesize itself and must be gained through the diet, just like the 9 essential amino acids that are used to construct proteins. Linoleic and linolenic acids are both considered essential to the human diet.

Linoleic acids and linolenic acids are both found in plant based foods. Your body uses these to build omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which are used in all tissues in the body.  A deficiency in linoleic acid can lead to reduced growth rates, abnormalities in the liver and kidneys, weakened immune functions, depression, and dry skin.

Various minerals and vitamins that are needed for your body to perform essential functions as well as regulate hormone production are fat-soluble. That means that they can only be broken down and absorbed in the presence of fats.

Saying that a diet consists of 20-30% fat means that 20-30% of the calories you take in per day come from fat. This has to do with balancing your macronutrients to ensure you get the most from everything you eat, that you get everything you need to eat, but that you do not overeat and take in too many excess calories.

Practical Tips

You could probably eat more fat to improve your health. Not all foods are equal, but by no stretch is a piece of pie going to kill you. With that said, there are some solid go-to sources out there you can include in your diet that will provide plenty of linoleic and linolenic acid that will keep you fueled up and feeling good.

  • Dark Chocolate
  • Cheese
  • Avocados
  • Fatty Fish (salmon, trout, mackerel, sardines, herring, etc).
  • Whole Eggs
  • Chia Seeds
  • Nuts
  • Coconuts and/or coconut oil
  • Extra virgin olive oil
  • Full-fat yogurt

Whether you’re hoping to be the 2030 World’s Strongest Man, are training for your first marathon, or just want an extra skip in your step walking down the street, keeping a balanced diet is an essential tool to reach your goals. Once you have the know-how, it comes naturally, so break off a piece of chocolate and enjoy.

To learn how to calculate your macronutrient balance, reference the “Balancing your Macronutrients” article listed just below.

Resources

The other articles in this series include:
Balancing your Macronutrients

Understanding Carbohydrates

Understanding Protein

 

CategoriesBlog

Understanding the Link Between Mental and Physical Health

There is a direct connection between the mind and the body. Your mental, emotional, and physical health all support or limit the health of one another. No one aspect of a person’s health exists within a vacuum.

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”

To more directly connect the dots, the Canadian Mental Health Association states that this connection is most clearly displayed in the relationship between chronic physical conditions and mental health.

Nowhere is the relationship between mental and physical health more evident than in the area of chronic conditions. The associations between mental and physical health are:

  1. Poor mental health is a risk factor for chronic physical conditions.
  2. People with serious mental health conditions are at high risk of experiencing chronic physical conditions.
  3. People with chronic physical conditions are at risk of developing poor mental health.

The United Kingdom’s Mental Health Organization has stated similar with “poor physical health can lead to an increased risk of developing mental health problems. Similarly, poor mental health can negatively impact on physical health, leading to an increased risk of some conditions.”

Connecting the Dots

The connection has a general consensus across the board that mental health affects physical health, and physical health affects mental health.

They “why” to this isn’t something that can be answered easily simply because of how many small functions our bodies take care of that directly or indirectly impacts the brain. Depending on how strong these different bodily systems are, they can provide different levels of support for the brain.

For instance, HDC (high density cholesterol), in addition to lowering your risk for heart disease and stroke is responsible for lubricating your skin, synthesize vitamin D, and creating several essential hormones the body needs.

To put that in context, people who suffer from SAD (seasonal affective disorder) produce less vitamin D. Vitamin D supplements and sun lamps which prompt vitamin D synthesis are two popular and effective ways to address this type of depression. A balanced level of cholesterol enables the body to naturally produce vitamin D.

While this is certainly not a cure all for everyone, the connection is direct. To a certain degree mental and emotional conditions that arise from an imbalance of or a lack of certain hormones can be corrected through the balancing of those hormones via reaching a more balanced level of cholesterol. This is achieved through the combination of a balanced diet and exercise.

Note, however, that if you do suffer from any form of hormonal imbalance, speak to your doctor. Improving your physical health, if done correctly, certainly can help with building up your mental and emotional health, but again, it is not a cure all and a professional diagnosis is always better than a personal hunch at what may be causing the situation.

What To Do

You don’t have to become a professional powerlifter or go run a marathon to reap these benefits. A 2006 study from the National Institution for Biotechnology outlined that

Health benefits from regular exercise that should be emphasized and reinforced by every mental health professional to their patients include the following:

  1. Improved sleep
  2. Increased interest in sex
  3. Better endurance
  4. Stress relief
  5. Improvement in mood
  6. Increased energy and stamina
  7. Reduced tiredness that can increase mental alertness
  8. Weight reduction
  9. Reduced cholesterol and improved cardiovascular fitness

The work for an average person to enjoy these benefits? Thirty minutes of moderate exercise three times a week. Nothing more than a brisk walk. In fact, that 30 minute brisk walk can be broken up into three ten minute walks.

The body was made to move, and the brain being just another part of the same larger physiological system as the heart, lungs, stomach, and every fibre of muscle and sinew in the body, directly benefits when the systems supporting it are happy.

CategoriesBlog Move.

How to Correctly Gauge your Workout Intensity

written by Flow Trainer, Mackennon Klink, B.S. CSCS, PN1

Does this sound like you? You’ve committed to going to the gym. You’re in the gym three to four times a week, crushing your workout, getting stronger and leaner. However, those 65lb dumbbells seem to be getting heavier. You’re using the same dumbbells from the previous week, but now they feel like 100lbs. What’s going on here??? Are you getting weaker, or is Flow Fitness playing a terrible trick on you?  Well, Flow Fitness isn’t playing any tricks on you, and you aren’t getting weaker.However, your rating of perceived exertion (RPE) has altered.

What are RPE’s? The American College or Sports Medicine (ACSM) defines rating of perceived exertion, better known as the RPE scale, as a psychophysical scale, meaning it calls on the mind and body to rate one’s perception of effort. The RPE scale measures feelings of effort, strain, discomfort, and/or fatigue experienced during both aerobic and/or resistance training.

In simpler terms, the RPE scale is a subjective measurement of how hard you feel like you’re working put onto a scale. If you train long enough, eventually those dumbbells will feel heavier than initially. This is normal. What we’re talking about is the difference between internal and external loading.

External loading is easy to gauge – that’s whatever weight you have on the bar for that given set or workout (ex: 135, 225, or 275 lbs)

Internal loading is more subjective –it’s how the weight of the bar feels.

For example, let’s say you’re bench pressing 225 pounds. The weight is a respectful amount, not a max effort, yet you’re not reppin’ it out for 10+ reps either.

On some days, 225 pounds feels likes nothing and you can absolutely crush it, yet there are other days when it feels like a literal ton of bricks. The external load never changed, yet how the weight feels varies wildly.

There are a few reasons for the higher internal loading, such as:

  • Fatigue from the previous training session
  • Change in training time

Cumulative fatigue from factors outside the gym such as:
– Poor sleep quality
– Excessive stress

How and Why Use the RPE Scale?
RPE works on a scale of 6-10 and looks something like this:

  • RPE of 10 –Max Effort – Congratulations, you just set a personal record!
  • RPE of 9 –Heavy lift – One rep left in the tank.
  • RPE of 8 –Difficult lift – Two reps left in the tank
  • RPE of 7 –Moderately difficult lift – Three to four reps left in the tank
  • RPE of 6 –Minimally difficult lift – four or more reps left in the tank. That’s light weight, baby!! Bump up the weight.

If you train long enough, eventually those dumbbells or weight may feel heavier than it did initially . While this is normal in resistance training, this illustrates why RPE’s can be beneficial in your training. A 6-10 scale works for nearly everyone. This makes integrating the RPE scale into your training simple. After a set, all you need to do is ask yourself: ͞how many reps did I have left in the tank?

Be honest with yourself and leave your ego at the door. If you overestimate and go too heavy, you can potentially hurt yourself and/or hinder your progress.

In addition, RPE allows you to customize every training session to ensure you are properly challenging yourself and getting the most out of your body. For the bulk of your resistance training, aim to keep the RPE between 7-8, 9 at the most. Remember, you want to feel stimulated, not annihilated after your workouts.

Summary:

Truth be told, a lot of us aren’t working as hard as we could be in the gym. This can be difficult to accurately gauge. I’m all for making life as simple as possible, so I prefer using RPE’s to properly monitor my exercise intensity. In fact, RPE’s are critical to know if I’m properly challenging myself or simply wasting my time in the gym. Eventually, your newbie gains will disappear. You won’t be able to walk into the gym and set a new personal record each day. Once that day arrives, you need to arm yourself with the necessary tools to step up your training. RPE’s are an effective and simple tool you can utilize to help you continue to crush your training goals.

CategoriesBlog Live Fit.

Four Tips to Maximize Your Workout Recovery

written by Flow Trainer, Erin White.

I’m sure we have all been there. Finished workout after workout, but yet not quite having the energy or strength to finish the workout fully satisfied or feeling accomplished. Or how I put it is – everything feels so heavy today, I feel like I took a couple steps backward.

Sure we will have good days and bad. There will be times your body is just not always feeling it. But a big part of us being able to have the energy, endurance and strength for our workouts is nutrition and RECOVERY.

1. Mobility/ stretching- (BEFORE + AFTER) So often we want to dive right into a workout, ( I myself am guilty!). What we need to remember is to prep our muscles for movement. We need mobility and stability. Meaning we stretch and lengthen those muscles we are using, open up those joints (example- shoulders, hips) and then we get those muscles firing or activated with smaller movements. (we get those muscles warmed up and ready to GO!) And yes it’s a before and after kind of thing. After the workout a lot of times a self myo-fascial release technique will also help (example: foam rollers and lacrosse balls).

2. Hydration. We all better know this one. H20. H20! So many incredible benefits for the body from hydrating, drinking tons of water. But especially when trying to keep our bodies hydrated through intense exercises. Try adding some natural electrolyte mixes into your water next time. And think CLEAN, less additives the better. But take a peak at ingredients and make sure you got those good electrolytes.

3. Pre/post workout fuel (food)– We always want to make sure we are working out with some food/nutrients in our system. This can be discussed more with nutrition. But yes food is fuel so it’s incredibly IMPORTANT to stay on top of your nutrition. Post workout is also so crucial. We put out a lot of energy during training, therefore we need to refuel our bodies. Thinking about a good clean protein and carb to replenish our glycogen stores and feed our muscles, to help them maintain and grow. (example: protein shake with some almond milk and bananas/fruit of some kind). Need more examples? Feel free to ask any of our trainers.

4. SLEEP – One of the most important factors, that most Americans don’t get enough of. I get it, life can be crazy. There might be some nights where we aren’t getting those 7-9 hours of sleep due to schedules, jobs, kids. That’s life, right? But making fitness a priority, we also need to somehow make sleep one as well. If not at least try to catch up on it when we can. If we aren’t letting our bodies repair and recover, those workouts will eventually suffer. Remember to take care of your bodies. When we train hard, train like athletes we need to recover and eat like athletes as well!

CategoriesBlog Live Fit. Nourish.

Understanding Protein

Continuing with our nutrition discussion, it’s time to get into proteins. In November we discussed macronutrients in a broader sense, and explained  how to maintain a healthy balance. Just last December we took the microscope to carbohydrates to explore their function in the body, and why they are so essential to your health.

Today, we’ll take an in depth look at protein, what it is, and why you need it.

As stated in the last article, save for a few medical conditions that create inconsistency in how nutrients are digested and absorbed, the body can be predicted. It is not a mysterious black box that operates at random, but a fine tuned machine that responds to change accordingly. Understanding how it responds to change is more formulaic than guesswork, and this is a powerful tool to use to achieve any health and/or fitness related goals.

Protein’s Role

Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body.” Most of the work performed inside your cells is performed by proteins, and they are needed for the regulation, function, and structure of all of your body’s organs and tissues.

Each individual protein is composed of hundreds — or sometimes thousands — of much smaller units called amino acids which chain together. There are 20 types of amino acids. Eleven of those amino acids are produced in the body itself, and the remaining 9 are gained through our diet.

The 9 amino acids gained through our diet are called “essential amino acids”. Being able to recall this from memory is useful for nutritionists and top level athletes looking to micromanage their diet to get the best performance out of their body, but for anyone with athletic or health goals that aren’t quite at the professional level, there’s little need to memorize all of these.

The specific jobs that protein performs include:

  • Providing nitrogen, which is essential for building and maintaining all body tissues, muscles, skin, blood, hair, nails, and internal organs such as the brain and heart
  • Formation of hormones, including those essential for growth, metabolism, and sexual development
  • Regulating the body’s water balance and acidic/alkaline balance
  • Building enzymes responsible for basic life functions
  • Building antibodies that fight diseases and other foreign bodies you are exposed to

How Much Protein Should You Eat?

1 gram of protein = 4 calories.

The American College of Sports Medicine states that an average diet should consist of 12% protein. There are a number of different ways to establish what a healthy range is, but one of the most simple is the RDA.

RDA = Recommended Daily Amount

The RDA states that .8 grams of protein should be consumed for every 2 lbs of body weight.

This number works for the majority of people, but must be taken with a grain of salt, because this number works for the “average” healthy individual. It has the same pitfall as a body mass index (BMI) measurement. It accounts just for weight that is higher than normal, but doesn’t leave room to account for someone having more muscle than the average person. So if someone is either overweight in terms of having excess body fat, or they have more muscle than the average person, the number given will be inaccurate and all calculations based off of that number will be incorrect.

There are a number of calculators out there that while they are not perfect, they give a much more educated guess than you would receive looking strictly at the RDA. Lucky for us, the formulas provided and used here provide citations to the case studies they are derived from. No room for pseudo-science here.

CategoriesBlog Nourish.

Understanding Carbohydrates

If every aspect of health and fitness is a tool ot be used then it’s just a matter of which tools are most important and cover the most bases to establish what you put priority on when starting out. Implementing and practicing baby steps are the best way to go, and the steps that cover the most ground should always be the first taken.

The body is not a mysterious black box, that is, there is a rhyme and reason for how it works, and saving certain medical conditions we can predict how it will react to certain conditions and stimuli. For understanding our metabolism that means understanding what we put into it and the role each of the three macronutrients plays in fueling our body’s.

A Carb’s Role

Carbon (carb) + Water (hydrate) = carbohydrate. As far as exactly “what” a carbohydrate is, that’s it. What it does for you and why it is so important is a bit more complicated.

The importance of carbohydrates cannot be understated. They serve as the main source of energy for muscular exertion and all bodily functions. They are responsible for allowing the digestion and utilization of other foods (fats and proteins), provide the immediate caloric energy for heating the body, and can be broken down into glucose and other free sugars that are essential for fueling the brain, nervous system, muscles, and other body tissues.

Carbohydrates are the main fuel source in the human diet. They are broken down into two groups; simple and complex.

Simple carbohydrates, also called “simple sugars” are found mainly in sweets. This includes fruit juice, syrup, molasses, honey, and processed foods like cookies, cereals, and white bread.

Complex Carbohydrates are found in unprocessed, whole foods. This includes rice, potatoes, corn, and most vegetables.

Neither one is necessarily bad for you, but in general for most people it would make for a happier heart to generally lean towards complex carbs over simple carbs.

Carbohydrates are also necessary for breaking down fat in the liver. While we will talk about the function and importance of fat in a diet in another article, having fat effectively broken down and processed is a must for a healthy nervous system.

Glucose and Glycogen

To understand how to manage carb intake understand why you feel hungry after a bagel or doughnut but not after bowl of oatmeal with the same number of calories needs understanding glucose, glycogen, and the glycemic index.

Glucose is what carbohydrates are broken down into so that they can be used. While carbs are responsible for muscular exertion, bodily functions, digestions, etc, it is only once broken down into this form that they can be used for those jobs.

Compare it to gas for car. While you put gas in your car to create energy to move, it’s not the gas itself that moves the car, but the energy that the gas creates when processed in the engine.

Glycogen is what your body puts into reserve for use later when there is extra glucose in your bloodstream. When you have excess glucose in your bloodstream you release insulin which chains together (polymerizes) the individual glucose molecules into glycogen. This process is called gluconeogenesis (glycogen + genesis/creation). The excess glucose now chained together as glycogen is stored inside of your fat cells for later use.

Glycemic Index

If you’re thinking ahead, you’ve probably realized the problem the above information presents. If you need a constant influx of carbohydrates for energy, can only eat at certain times during the day, but you have a limit on how much glucose can be stored in your blood, then how do you last the day?

If you’re asking that, you’re not alone. Anyone who struggles with being hungry throughout the day even when eating enough calories has the same difficulty. The trick to managing your hunger, so that you’re not hungry, but also not needing to eat every hour, is to understand the glycemic index.

Some carbohydrates digest and become glucose more quickly than others. Honey, for instance, is near the very top of the glycemic index chart, and is as close to instant glucose as you can get. Steel cut oatmeal on the other hand has a very low glycemic index rating. What that means is that it is much more slowly digested. That slow digestion provides a slow but constant release of glucose into your bloodstream so you always have energy available.

Being hungry does not mean your stomach is empty. Being hungry means that you have low blood sugar, that you do not have enough glucose readily available.

Put two and two together, and adding a low glycemic index food to every meal will keep you fuller much longer.

You can look over the glycemic index for yourself, here. While it’s not a complete list, it is extremely comprehensive.

So whether your goal is to lose weight, or just not be as hungry waiting for lunch at work – you can just replace the daily white bagel with a glycemic index of 103 with some banana bread with a glycemic index of 47.

CategoriesBlog Live Fit. Nourish.

Balancing your Macronutrients

As with anything fitness related, balancing your macronutrients is another tool to put into the box that you use to help accomplish your goals.

If you are going to balance your macro nutrient intake, you first need to know what macronutrients are. The term ‘Macronutrient’ refers to “any of the nutritional components of the diet that are required in relatively large amounts: protein, carbohydrate, fat, and the macro minerals.”

Minerals, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. We’ll focus on those last three.

The Numbers

There are two major organizations referred to for the recommended nutrional balances. Those are the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the Institute of Medicine, now referred to as the National Academy of Medicine (NASEM).

The recommended intake for the three macronutrients we are discussing, according to these two institutions, are:

  • Carbohydrates
    • ACSM: 58% of the body’s total caloric intake
    • NASEM: 45-65% of the body’s total caloric intake
  • Fats (lipids)
    • ACSM: 20-30%
    • NASEM: 20-35%
  • Proteins
    • ACSM: 12%
    • NASEM: 12-35%

The range available for each macronutrient as listed by NASEM is a reflection of how your body needs different amounts of different nutrients based on your lifestyle and the amount of stress you place upon your body. For instance, while we all need fat in our diets, athletes playing for the Seahawks will need a diet focused more on proteins to maintain and build muscle, and carbohydrates for energy and for processing that protein.

Carbohydrates

These are the primary sources of energy in the human diet. They are broken down into simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. The simple carbs are more easily, and more quickly, broken down into the glucose that you find in your bloodstream that is used as energy. This is reflected in stating that they have a high GI (glycemic index) value. This includes foods like honey, candy, and other sweets.

Carbohydrates are often given a bad reputation as simply being excessive calories. This is incorrect, though, for a reason we’ve already lightly touched. Neither of the other macronutrients can be broken down to utilized without the presence of carbohydrates in the liver. The fact that liver can only hold between 200-500 grams of carbohydrates at any given times means that there needs to be a regular influx of carbohydrates to continue to be able to process anything else that is eaten.

One gram of carbohydrates is equal to 4 calories.

Fats

First interesting fact about fats: there are 3,500 calories in one pound of fat.

Don’t think to burn all of that away immediately, though. You need fat to survive. Not only does fat act as an energy source, but it is essential for carrying the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K throughout the body. Fat is also responsible for making calcium available to the body. This is because fat helps the body to absorb vitamin D, which is essential for calcium absorption. Also, polyunsaturated fatty acids must be eaten in a healthy diet as they are essential to hormone production, are necessary components of cell membranes, even help reduce bad cholesterol levels in your blood, lowering your risk of strokes and heart disease.

Cholesterol is a type of fat, too, and it’s one you want. There are good and bad types of cholesterol, but in general it is key to know that it is essential for good health. This is because it is used in composing most body tissues, especially those of the liver, blood, brain, and nervous system. It is needed even for developing sex and adrenal hormones.

One gram of fat is equal to 9 calories.

Proteins

Protein is the most plentiful substance found in the human body next to water. It is composed of 20 different amino acids that the body needs, 9 of which must be consumed in the diet to obtain. While protein is most commonly associated with muscle, it is a major building material for the heart, brain, internal organs, skin, hair, nails, and even the blood. It is essential for forming hormones and regulating body functions. It is even active in making sure that the blood does not become either too acidic or too alkaline.

One gram of protein is equal to 4 calories.

With that you have a basic enough layout to understand the need for each of these macronutrients in your body, and the numbers to do the math to begin crossing the T’s and dotting the eyes to your own dietary requirements. Let’s kick the later off with an example for you to use.

Remember,

1 gram Fat = 9 Calories

1 gram Carb = 4 Calories

1 gram Protein = 4 Calories

If you have a 2,000 calorie a day diet and are aiming for a diet consisting of 20% fat, 35% protein, and 45% carbohydrates, that will look like this:

Fat = 400 calories from 44.4 grams.

Carbs = 900 calories from 225 grams.

Protein = 700 calories from 175 grams.