Creatine: Worth it or just a placebo effect?

Effect of Creatine Supplementation and Resistance-Exercise Training on Muscle Insulin-Like Growth Factor in Young Adults, published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition in 2008, aimed to look at whether or not creatine supplementation actually made any difference in the strength and size gains of young men and women participating in an eight week resistance-exercise training program. The study sample consisted of 24 young men and 18 young women that had previously been involved with at least 30 minutes of structured activity 3-4 times a week, but had less than one year of resistance training experience. Eighteen of the above mentioned participants were vegetarian for at least three years, adding to the scope of the study. The researchers also hoped to understand if creatine supplementation had a different effect on the gains made by vegetarians, as opposed to non-vegetarians. (Burke et al, 2008)

Previous research and anecdotal information have led to the idea that creatine supplementation can help improve strength and size gains in those participating in a resistance training program. “Theoretically, creatine supplementation might enhance the metabolic adaptations from regular resistance-exercise training sessions, leading to greater production of insulin-like growth factor-I (IFG-I) over time.” (Burke et al., 2008) Basically, the addition of a creatine supplement has the potential to allow your body to enhance its reactions to your workouts, letting you work harder and/or longer, producing more strength and more muscle growth. Prior to the above mentioned study, the research team hypothesized that “creatine supplementation during resistance training would increase IGF-I over placebo, and vegetarians on creatine would experience greater gains than non-vegetarians". (Burke et al, 2008)

Following medical approval, a Physical Activity Readiness Questionnaire, a three day dietary journal and blood tests, the study began. The loading phase consisted of four doses a day of creatine, .25 g/kg of lean tissue mass for 7 days. They were to take the doses in the morning, afternoon, post workout and before bed. The maintenance phase was to be taken post workout (when it has the opportunity to increase muscle maintenance the most) and was .006 g per kg of lean tissue mass for 49 days, to coincide with 8 weeks of resistance training. The exercise program consisted of four days a week of all over body exercises that were heavy load and heavy volume. The routines worked through seven cycles, with each cycle varying from 3-5 sets of 4-12 repetitions. Training logs were used to keep track of the workout volume completed by each participant. (Burke et al, 2008)

There were no actual differences in the volume of training over the course of the entire 8 weeks of the study between the placebo or dosed groups. The creatine did lead to greater training volume for the creatine group during the second and seventh week. The researchers also found that over the study vegetarians consumed 3-400 fewer calories less per day and consumed about 60g of protein fewer than the non-vegetarian group, whether they were getting the placebo or not. While the average gain in IGF-I was 55% for the placebo group, the creatine dosed group had a 78% gain in IGF-I. (Burke et al, 2008) The creatine group had a greater increase in both strength and size. To break down the creatine dosed group, the vegetarians gained an average of 2.4 kg of lean body mass, while the non-vegetarians gained 1.9kg of lean tissue. (Burke et al, 2008) It is possible that because the vegetarians were eating a fewer amount of the essential amino acids and they entered the study with lower creatine amounts, their bodies may have been set up to absorb the benefits at a higher rate than the non-vegetarians, however, they did not indicate higher levels of IGF-I than the non-vegetarian group. “A diet low in essential amino acids reduces IGF-I production…suggesting that essential amino acids are necessary to maximize IGF-I production.” (Burke et al, 2008)

The benefits of creatine supplementation come from an increase in “high energy phosphate metabolism and training intensity”. (Burke et al, 2008) The bump in the high energy phosphate metabolism allowed for the increased volume seen in weeks 2 and 7. In conclusion, the study showed that young men and women who participate in a high volume, heavy load resistance program do indeed benefit from creatine supplementation. However, it is important to understand the correct dosages and ensure adequate nutrition and water intake to avoid any of creatine’s possible side effects, such as low blood sugar, high blood pressure and kidney stones.

Creatine. (2014, July 15). . Retrieved July 15, 2014, fromhttp://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/creatine/safety/hrb-20059125

Burke, D. G., Candow, D. G., Chilibeck, P. D., MacNeil, L. G., Roy, B. D., Tarnopolsky, M. A., & Ziegenfuss, T. (2008). Effect of Creatine Supplementation and Resistance-Exercise Training on Muscle Insulin-Like Growth Factor in Young Adults. International Journal Of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism, 18(4), 389-398.

Wednesday Workout!

Hello there! I started this post at 6:06 in the morning while I finished my preworkout drink, a cup of black coffee. Remember my post about how it releases fatty acids into your bloodstream for use during workouts? It also just makes me feel human before I start my workout! Here is what I had planned for this morning: 

1 mile run

100 air squats (full depth of course!) 

100 sit ups (all the way up, feet together in front of you, like you're stretching) 

100 biceps curls (alternating, I used a 10 pound weight)

Sounds fun, huh? The sit ups kicked my butt, normally I can power through those pretty quickly, but this morning they took some time. It felt like a great all over workout! I've got a lot of preparing to do, I just signed up for the J&A Wicked 10k in October and the Harbor Lights Half Marathon in November, I'm so excited! I've done the Wicked before, it's always a lot of fun. The Harbor Lights is brand new and will be around downtown Norfolk which should be pretty awesome. Time to start training! There will be a lot more running in my future. 

Last night, Vic and I watched one of our favorite shows, Extreme Weight Loss with Chris and Heidi Powell. I had shared on Instagram and Twitter a picture of myself on my recumbent bike while I was watching the show and had tagged Chris and Heidi Powell in the comments. Chris Powell responded back to me and said I rock! I probably shouldn't be so excited, but it made my week!

We got in our Juice Plus+ tummies for Ryker. He loves them! I only give him one in the morning for now. I cut it up into four little pieces and he couldn't get them in his face fast enough. Lately, he's been a pickier eater than normal, just refusing some things that he normally loves, but from what I've read this should pass. He sure has a little personality these days, and some days it has quite a bit of attitude! We might be in trouble for when he gets closer to two!

Well, Vic is at school tonight so I'm watching my episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians and the Real Housewives of Orange County and I am going to bed EARLY! I hope you had a great Wednesday, talk to you soon!

Dear Misty, welcome to the 2nd Trimester!

You made it! The second trimester is a time for a lot of Momma-to-be's to breathe easy and relax, for a number of reasons. According to the American Pregnancy Association, most miscarriages happen in the first 13 weeks. I know for us, I didn't even want to really believe that I was pregnant until I got past the 12-13 week mark. Something about making it past that first trimester made it so much more real!

12 weeks

19 weeks, when I started living in pajamas!

Lately, I know your workouts have been a cause for concern, not because you aren't doing them, but because you're such a rock star that you're getting frustrated with what your mind and your body want to do in the gym. From here on out, those might be two different things and that's ok! We've talked a little about how you have so much more blood coursing through your body right now. For me, I swear that helped me recover from workouts and eventually I swear I got some crazy baby boy strength that made me leg press like a monster. But for now, don't be surprised if you feel slower and get winded faster. That body of yours is doing tough work! And remember, Baby H is getting PR's on all of their lifts! 

Speaking of lifts, have you checked out CrossFit Mom yet? They have some great suggestions during pregnancy for keeping up your WOD routines, with some modifications. For instance, pregnancy causes an increase in the hormone relaxin, which is what is going to allow your pelvis to spread to let that little human through when it's time for their big debut. For now, it can affect your joints making it a good idea to consider not going to full depth when you squat. I started to notice towards the end of my pregnancy that my knees and ankles just felt wobbly, like they were just bone and nothing was holding them together. That's when I stopped running and switched to bikes, rowing and the elliptical. It is one of the many things that I'll tell you "you'll just know, your body will tell you and you'll just know." CrossFit Mom also suggests that you stop laying on your back for exercises at this point too, since the weight of your uterus can cut off blood supply to the baby. Since you're already dealing with your abs splitting, I don't think you're going to be doing many crunches any time soon, but maybe it's time to consider changing sleeping positions. Have you gotten a body pillow yet? I absolutely LOVED my Snoogle, I slept with that up until a few months ago when I completely smushed the head part of it to flatness. I really cannot sing its praises enough. This full, wrap around pillow looks pretty awesome, too. 

Around the second trimester, when you wake up one day and go "Holy s**t, where'd that belly come from?" is when I started religiously using cocoa butter on my belly. I didn't buy anything all that expensive, but I did use a ton of Palmer's Cocoa Butter, just the normal stuff, I don't think there is a real difference with the stretch mark version. Some people swear by Mederma or other expensive options, I just liked the basic stuff and used it every night! 

The second trimester is a time for better sleep, better moods, your sex drive might come back (if it ever left, haha!), your appetite should return and pretty soon we'll know if it is a little girl or boy and you'll feel kicks! I loved my second trimester, it is so exciting! As always, I'm so happy for you and am waiting patiently for any questions I can answer for you! 

My new opportunity!

Last week a friend of mine posted to Facebook about having an awesome opportunity in the health and wellness industry. Of course, I jumped right on board and asked what was up. After listening to everything she had to say, hours of reading clinical studies and doing my own research I can confidently announce how excited I am to be a part of Juice Plus+! 

I have to be totally honest, I was skeptical and I haven't had the product long enough to give you a first hand experience, that will come with time. But my skepticism fell to the way side as I learned more and more about the company and their product. Basically, they take the juices of 17 different fruits, veggies and grains, dry them and put them into a capsule for you. Have you ever tried juicing? Vic and I did for a while. I tried to justify the money spent on produce that was above and beyond what we had as snacks or with meals. I tried to get over the lack of room in my fridge, the constant restocking (like every other day!), but what got me was cleaning the damn juicer. What a mess! Our juicing experience didn't last very long, sadly. 

Neither of us can stomach multivitamins, so we don't bother. But even with clean eating and tons of varied produce with each meal I knew we weren't getting everything we need. Enter Juice Plus+. It's not an excuse to give up on fresh fruits and veggies, but you know how you're supposed to get all the colors of the rainbow? It can help with that. Got kids that will not eat anything green? It can help with that, too. I'm so excited to see how we benefit from taking this supplement, especially since it's made from REAL FOOD. It's gluten and dairy free, and it has nutritional facts, not supplement information because again, it's real food! 

Please check out my site, link below, or shoot me an email if you want to learn more. From the original Juice Plus+, to protein powders and the Children's Health Study, I have so much that I would love to talk to you about! 

Website: http://ck37362.juiceplus.com

My email: ninarynae@yahoo.com

But really, take the time to consider how much you could benefit from bridging the gap between what your body wants and what your fridge and stomach can hold! 

Fourth of July weekend: Arthur can't keep us down!

How was your holiday weekend? My in-laws flew in from Colorado to do some business down in North Carolina and then beat Hurricane Arthur up the coast to come hang out for the weekend. Finding out that Arthur was going to roll through ON fourth of July, ruining all the fun sunshine plans that we had, was a little but of a bummer, but luckily Arthur was a big old wimp once he got up to our area, so he actually rolled through and was gone by early afternoon. Thursday night was crazy, we woke up at 1:30 in the morning to my phone's weather app going absolutely nuts about a tornado warning (watch? I always forget which one is worse, it was the worst one). Good thing no one else on our street was up, Vic and I got up and stood outside our house to check out the conditions in our underwear, we probably looked pretty crazy! I started the fourth off with a great workout with Misty, 140 slam balls and a mile run, broken up to make 5 rounds of work. It definitely helped me feel ready for bikinis! 

We made it out to the beach and the hotel where my in-laws were staying with enough time for Vic and his dad and sister to bodysurf in the gigantic waves. I took Ryker down there to watch for a while and saw a little girl get completely demolished by a lifeguard that was running to save someone. He apologized as he ran off, but the parents were pretty angry about their daughter getting tackled. I thought that was pretty silly, sorry the guy was sprinting to save someone and accidentally slammed in to your daughter that walked into his path, geez. I'm pretty sure if she was the one caught in a crazy undertow that they would want him to run off, too. I stuck around and asked the family if she was ok, in case she needed help, but she was just scared and a little sore. 

Ryker had sushi for dinner on the fourth of July! He LOVED it. That kid devoured edamame and California rolls like a pro. He never ceases to baffle me with his eating, he can eat like a champ and will eat almost anything. It is pretty exciting to think that he can enjoy his daddy and I's love of great food. Saturday we hung by the pool, actually Ryker and I stayed in the hot tub because the pool was too cold for us. I only let him put his legs in, he sat like such a good boy, staring at his toes and splashing like a maniac. He was worn out by early afternoon, so we took him home for a good nap. Saturday night we left him at home with Jayme and had a lovely seafood dinner with Vic's parents at Catch 31, easily our family's favorite restaurant. We watched the delayed fireworks off the balcony and had an all around lovely fifth of July. 

As much fun as it always is to have family in town, Vic and I are ready to get back to our clean eating and workout routines. I got my cop of Against All Grain this last week, Vic and I are both so excited to try out all of her awesome recipes!

Non exercise activity thermogenesis and resistance to fat gain

James Levine and Michael Jensen of the Endocrine Research Unit of the Mayo Clinic and Foundation, along with Norman Eberhardt of the Mayo Clinic’s Departments of Medicine and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology set out to provide a study that would explain why some people are better suited to eat more and not gain weight, while others can add to their caloric intake and efficiently store more fat. In order to understand this, they began with a sample of sixteen non-obese adult volunteers (twelve men, four women) that agreed to add one thousand calories to their daily maintenance requirement and only perform volitional exercise that met the low volume, low intensity requirements of the study.

The idea behind the study was that if they controlled the caloric intake by adding 1,000 calories and then controlled the caloric expenditure that was the result of volitional exercise, they would be able to understand how much non exercise activity thermogenesis affected weight gain. They did consider the idea that the body will use energy in order to process the increased number of calories, but they found that the increased expenditure was negligible, and fairly consistent across the board, indicating that while it did up the expenditure, it did so in a way that did not help to narrow down why some people store more weight than others. They found that on average 432 calories of the 1,000 excess calories were stored while 531 were burned via increased energy expenditure, accounting for 97% of the calories indicating “optimal compliance” (Levine, 1999) They also found that fat gain ranged from .36 kg to 4.23 kg, and not surprisingly the weight gain was inversely related to an increase in total calorie expenditure. (Levine, 1999)

Levine, Jensen and Eberhardt based their understanding of caloric expenditure off the idea that if they controlled the expenditure from volitional exercise, they would better understand how NEAT came into play. In the end, they study showed that with increased caloric intake, NEAT explained why some subjects gained more fat than others. However, the activity that was explained as NEAT seemed to be uncontrolled to me, for instance, the article indicated that one person was expending an additional 692 calories a day via strolling-equivalent activity. Now, it was outside of the study’s parameters for volitional exercise, but in my opinion 692 calories worth of “strolling-equivalent activity” should be classified as something closer to exercise than non-exercise activity. (Levine, 1999)

The findings of the study were nothing too surprising, if you eat more and then up your activity, whether that is through extra exercise activity or through parking your car at the end of the lot instead of up front, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator, you are going to experience less fat storage than you would if you decided to eat more and move the same amount (or less). They discussed possible errors related to not measuring calorie expenditure perfectly and a possible significance of a difference in gender differences, but I feel as if the study was too broad in what would be considered NEAT. I would suggest more effort be put into finding a sample that regularly completed normal tasks, and that didn’t intend on changing their NEAT habits throughout the study. The findings of the study make sense, but I don’t believe it really narrowed why some people store more fat than others. There is obviously more research that can be done on the topic!

Levine, J. A., Eberhardt, N. L., & Jensen, M. D. (1999). Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis in Resistance to Fat Gain in Humans. Science,283(5399), 212-214.

C-Sections and how they affect a baby's gut

In 2008, the Journal of Nutrition published Cesarean Delivery May Affect the Early Biodiversity of Intestinal Bacteria, a study aimed at understanding how the mode of delivery can affect the development of a gut micro biome in full term infants born in October of 2003 in Piacenza, Italy. Forty-six infants were enrolled in the study, which recruited eligible cesarean deliveries and the immediately following spontaneous births. Women were not offered enrollment in the research study if they experienced any of the following: prematurity, maternal infections during pregnancy, maternal clinical illness, maternal specific dietary regimen (i.e., vegetarian or any exclusion diet for any reason) as reported by means of last-week dietary recall, maternal antibiotic administration, or probiotic supplementation during the last two weeks of gestation, intra-partum antibiotic prophylaxis and babies given antibiotic prophylaxis or therapy.” (Biasucci, 2008) The entire sample was Caucasian and all were breast fed on demand with no formula supplementation. The fecal samples that were used for analysis were collected on the babies’ third day of life, in order to best understand the effect of delivery mode, as opposed to dietary effect.

Ryker and I meeting for the first time

E. coli was found in 39% of the vaginal delivery babies, while only 8.7% of the cesarean babies had the microbial group in their fecal sample. Bifidobacterium- specific primers were present in the samples of 56.5% of the vaginally delivered infants, and none was found in the rest of the babies. Bifidobacteria are very important to the immune system, working to prevent diarrhea in infants and young children, and may be effective against the common cold and the flu and atopic eczema. (Natural Medicines) The profiles indicated a more varied representation of inter and intragroup profiles among vaginally delivered infants, while the cesarean delivered babies had more constant results. Considering that the vaginal delivery process causes contact between the mother and face of the child, there is a greater opportunity for an increased introduction of various microorganisms, the controlled and sterilized nature of a cesarean delivery affects the availability of species for intestinal colonization. (Biasucci, 2008)

As mentioned previously, the representation of intestinal microbiota lends itself to an increased immune system, which may translate into an increased immune system as the child gets older. The findings of the study support the idea that vaginally delivery alone can optimally prepare the child’s immune system and provide an ideal gut environment. Other studies referenced by the article discuss the production of cytokines that are promoted during vaginal delivery that are not seen following a cesarean delivery. Cesarean delivery can be linked to increased instances of “disturbed intestinal colonization, and, possibly, occurrence of necrotizing enterocolitis in preterm infants”. (Biasucci, 2008) In epidemiological studies, cesarean delivery has shown to provide an “increased risk for allergic diseases in later childhood”. (Biasucci, 2008) The decrease in possible gut microbiome population may have a greater effect than may have previously been thought, and elective cesarean delivery may have more effects on the child that should be considered when deciding between a spontaneous delivery or a planned c-section.  

BIFIDOBACTERIA. (n.d.). . Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://naturaldatabase.therapeuticresearch.com/nd/PrintVersion.aspx?id=891

Biasucci, G., Benenati, B., Morelli, L., Bessi, E., & Boehm, G. (2008, September). Cesarean Delivery May Affect the Early Biodiversity of Intestinal Bacteria. . Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18716189