Drink Sports Drinks with Carbs and Protein

It turns out that drinking sports drinks with a mix of carbohydrates and protein is better than a sports drink with carbs alone. That was the conclusion of John Berardi and a team of researchers when they studied the impact of different sports drinks on cyclists and their recovery times from workouts.

Berardi, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Precision Nutrition, was recently interviewed by ScientistLive. During the interview, Berardi explains the study and its results as well as some of the mechanics that drive those results. The entire interview is a great read for Players who want to get a detailed understanding of what goes on in their bodies when they consume sports drinks.

Click here to take a look at the entire interview.

One Hundred Pushups

A lot of Players on introPLAY have talked about the One Hundred Pushups program. We wanted to show our love for this great program. Basically, they have set a program where you will be able to do 100 consecutive pushups without rest, regardless of your current condition, after just six weeks.

Just take their initial test and then start their program using their Week 1 instructions.

And remember, as you go through the 6 weeks of building up your strength, you can record your progress as Strength Training on introPLAY. And if you need some extra motivation, start a pushup introLEAGUE today!

Good luck!

New Physical Activity Guidelines Out Today

The Department of Health and Human Services today put out its 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. The guidelines include a wealth of information and resources for individuals of all ages. They are meant for the public and are based on a committee report published earlier in the year, which we wrote about here.

What’s the bottom line? For adults, it is to get 2 1/2 hours of exercise per week.

Some of the information that came out today includes:

• The full guide
• A report for adults
• A toolkit for communities and organizations
• The original committee report

Of course, we would highly recommend individuals, organizations and communities all take advantage of introPLAY‘s full set of services for tracking workouts, forming communities, sharing with others and improving motivation! How can introPLAY help? (Registration required.)

1. Instead of using a paper journal to keep track of your workouts, use our workout tracker
2. Get more value from your workouts by viewing statistics and comparisons with other Players
3. See what other Players are doing in the Workout Ticker
4. Expand your physical activity presence to your Facebook account by taking advantage of our Workout Olympiad Application
5. Start an introLEAGUE to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to take part in your goal to increase your levels of physical activity

In fact, if you are a member of an organization or part of a wellness initiative for your organization and you would like to find out more about partnering with introPLAY, please contact us.

An All-New introPLAY

We are proud and very excited to announce the launch of the new introPLAY site. Here are just some of the new features you will enjoy:

• Faster and easier to navigate
• Talk features to send messages to other Players and in introLEAGUES
• Workout “Partners,” or introPLAY’s version of friends
• More stats, charts and analysis everywhere
• Alerts. Get important messages and notifications on introPLAY
• Easily track previous workouts from the workout entry screen
• Public Player Cards to increase your visibility

Current Players should take note of a couple of changes from the former site:

• Calisthenics and weight training have been combined into one activity called “Strength Training”
• Forums have been taken down for retooling and updating

Our “official” launch is going to be Monday but we wanted to try and roll the site out as smoothly as possible. Of course there are always obstacles: we have been bumping into issues with Internet Explorer. We recommend using the Firefox browser while we get all the issues sorted out with IE. We agree that this is far from ideal but we will have it resolved shortly. If you experience any other problems, please use the contact us form at the bottom of the site or email us.

Lastly, we want to thank all the Players who have participated in introPLAY from its early stages. We truly appreciate all your support. We are excited to get things rolling from here! The new introPLAY site is a major milestone as we strive to be the premiere Athletic Performance Network, providing the best community-based services to help you train and achieve your individual goals.

Welcome to the new introPLAY! Sign up today.

UPDATE (8/4): Check out the press release related to our launch.

Remembering why we introPLAY

We started introPLAY to help all our Players train hard and train together to reach higher levels of health and fitness. The main elements of introPLAY are sports, camaraderie, competition and fun. If you’re having fun, the achievements and health benefits will follow. Regardless of what your personal or group goals are, we know that consistently working out is the only way to get there.

On the eve of the launch of the new introPLAY, we remember and renew our commitment to creating a community dedicated to the improvement of our collective physical health and conditioning. Recently, health experts reminded us of how bad the obesity epidemic will get if we do not do something about it. They projected that 86% of Americans will be overweight or obese by 2030 if the current trends continue. This statistic is shocking: it means that 312 million of us will be overweight or obese in less than a single generation.

Not only that, but we need to work out more to sustain weight loss. Researchers now recommend 55 minutes of exercise 5 days a week for sustainable weight loss. That is significantly more than the traditional 5×30 (30 minutes of exercise 5 times a week) that has been promoted. It is also said that being consistently active is the single most important factor in achieving sustainable weight loss–perhaps even more important than diet.

This is a call to action for every one of us. We at introPLAY are committed to doing our part by providing a community that revolves exclusively around sports and activities to help us be engaged in consistent physical activity. Most importantly, we need to have fun together. If you are in great shape, then get involved and help out someone who has a tough time with working out or someone who is struggling with weight loss. Start an introLEAGUE and stay on top of one another’s workout habits. Let’s get our families, friends, work colleagues and everybody to introPLAY together.

Link Science Daily and link to Time

Female Athletes and Knee Injuries

We here at introPLAY want all our Players to train to reach their utmost potential and achieve their personal goals. One of the most important things to remember is the need to train smartly and focus on injury prevention. With that in mind, we want to help spread awareness on preventing knee injuries suffered by female athletes.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine featured an article entitled “The Uneven Playing Field.” The author discussed at length injuries sustained by female athletes, focusing on ACL injuries in younger female soccer players.

The author mentioned one routine that focused on injury prevention, called the PEP Program created by the Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Group. The PEP Program is a 15 minute warm up replacement session, meant to be practiced 2 to 3 times per week. Results from this program are proving to be successful in bringing down the number of ACL injuries experienced by women playing soccer. (A PDF of the program can be downloaded here.)

Also, in an article released today, Medical News Today reported that the Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago has released a pamphlet titled “Leveling the Playing Field: Knee Injury Prevention Strategies for Female Athletes.” The pamphlet reports facts on such injuries and tips and techniques to help prevent them. Unfortunately copies are not available online. You can contact Sandy Langston at 773-250-1009 or email sjlangston [at] neuro-ortho [dot] org to request a copy.

If you are a female athlete or you are a coach or trainer charged with the conditioning of female athletes, we highly recommend you take a look at the PEP Program and the Neurologic and Orthopetic Hospital pamphlet and adopt some or all of the routines recommended by these great, free resources.

Moose at the U.S. Olympic Trials

The U.S. Olympic Trials is still going on in Eugene, Oregon. The decathlon took place over two days on Sunday and Monday. introPLAY’s own Mustafa Abdur-Rahim finished in 9th place out of a field of 20 in the decathlon.

We here at introPLAY salute Moose’s strong performance at the Trials. We are definitely inspired by your will and determination, Moose. Thanks for representing us at the biggest athletic stage in the nation.

If you are interested in keeping up with the all the results at the U.S. Olympic Trials, please click here.

Government Report on Physical Activity

Recently, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services released a report called the “Phyiscal Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Report, 2008″–a very long name for a very long report. We are still poring through the contents, but we wanted to give you the scoop on some of the major highlights.

One of the department’s goals was to summarize the prominent scientific research and recommendations with regards to physical activity. Here is a summary of key points:

• For adults, the study recommends 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each day on at least 5 days per week. Also, muscle strengthening exercises are recommended at least twice per week.
• For children, the recommendation is to do 60 or more minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each day.
• “Adults of all shapes and sizes gain health and fitness benefits by being habitually physically active,” including overweight or obese individuals (we have talked about this previously).

The report also had some basic rules of thumb when it comes to physical activity, frequency and injuries:

• Some physical activity is better than none (as little as 1 hour of moderate activity per week).
• More physical activity is better than some (2 1/2 hours of moderate to vigorous activity per week).
• Vigorous activity is better than moderate activity.
• Injuries usually occur when people are more active than usual. So ease into increasing intensity and frequency of activity.

We all know that physical activity is good for us and many of these guidelines are very well known. But it is good to read exactly how strongly the scientific community verifies that belief and how diverse the benefits are. For introPLAY Players, it just means, keep training, keep being active and keep recording your workouts.

A PDF copy of the report can be downloaded here.

Exercise to Get Healthy

Every once in a while, it helps to be reminded of the benefits of exercising. For those of us who would like to shed a few pounds, we should remember that exercise has many levels of health benefits. Even if we do not see the pounds coming off (or they are not coming off as fast as we would like), don’t forget that exercise is improving our health, conditioning and cardiovascular fitness. All too often, we tend to think of exercise solely in terms of our goal to lose weight. And when we don’t see results we get frustrated and quit.

In fact, researchers at Indiana University recently published a study in Obesity that looked at the fitness benefits of exercise in overweight individuals. They looked at 16 overweight men–8 active and 8 inactive. They found that active men had significantly better vascular function than the inactive men, regardless of how intensely the active men were exercising.

So bottom line: even while you can’t see the results of your effort, you are still improving your health so keep exercising!

Link to UPI article and link to abstract in Obesity

Exercising the Wii

We have thought about whether the Nintendo Wii or one of the games, Wii Sports, should be added as an activity on introPLAY. We own a Wii and Wii Sports is definitely a fun game that makes video games more physically active than they have ever been. There is no doubt about it. But the question is: does the Wii work your body out enough to be considered a bona fide workout and should it count on introPLAY?

Our initial answer to that question is not yet. A preliminary UK study concludes that while the Wii uses more energy than a traditional game, it is nowhere near the effort level of ‘live sports.’ In other words, it is better to play the Wii than another game system, but you cannot use the Wii to replace the running, jumping, throwing and playing of traditional exercise and sports… yet.

We acknowledge that there are people who have stories about their weight loss from video games. Mickey DeLorenzo detailed his story of losing 9 pounds during a 6 week Wii Sports workout regimen. And the press has been consistently reported how the Wii gets kids off the couch and can even make you sore.

Our thoughts also do not relate to other games that are more physically active such as Dance Dance Revolution (categorized as dancing in introPLAY) or Nintendo’s upcoming Wii Fit. Who knows? Maybe Wii Fit will be an activity on introPLAY?

Link to BBC and link to Ars Technica