31.01.10
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, The Zone Diet Blog at 12:42 pm by Colin McNulty
Whilst on Facebook recently, I came across a friend who has just started Crossfit and was being advised by his mates to start taking supplements, e.g. creatine, and eating plenty of carbs, specifically bananas were mentioned. I couldn’t help but give a balancing point of view and quoted the Crossfit 1 sentence diet of: “Eat meat and veg, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.” I got a typical mainstream dietary advice response.
However I decided not to feed the troll and replied privately to my friend refuting the high carb advice he’d been given. Dr Sears was right when he said that trying to change someone’s diet, was easier than trying to change their religion! Anyway, I thought it would make a good blog post, so here it is, the other blokes advice is preceded with a “>”:
Of all the books I’ve read, this one is a really good one to start with. It’s a relatively concise, cheap book that’s very accessible, and unusually for diet related books, written by an English Doctor as oppose to an American one. Further, he has no diet (or supplements!) to sell, so has no stake in the game other than the search for truth. You can pick up a 2nd had copy off Amazon marketplace for a £fiver.
http://www.colinmcnulty.com/books/the-great-cholesterol-con.php
> there is a difference between refined and fruit sugars as well as how they are processed within the body.
Nope, all carbohydrate is just sugar in transit. It’s all processed ultimately to the same end: it gets broken down and shoved into the blood. Some manages to get out of the food and into your blood stream a bit faster than others (which is where the Glycemic Index (GI) diet comes from), but fruit sugars have a pretty high GI and are accessed pretty quickly. High GI means a spike in blood sugar, which is dangerous, so your body produces insulin to bring it down quickly. Insulin converts blood sugar to fat. This is why a high carb diet makes you fat. Do this over a few decades and your pancreas (which is where your insulin is produced) packs up and hey presto, you have diabetes.
> [A banana has] as much sugar as a snicker bar maybe, yet less than a quarter of the calories and easily digestible….
That statement is only significant in you think both A) calorie counting is important and B) fat is bad for you. I don’t believe either A or B. And “easily digestible” just means “gets the sugar into your blood quickly” which as I’ve already said is bad. So pretty much an own goal there.
> And too little starch is dangerous as many so called *bad* starchy foods contain the very fibres that prevent colon cancer.
Starch is just highly concentrated carbs and yes you do need some carbs, but get most of it from nutritious veg and some fruit. You get loads of natural fibre from eating real vegetables and fruit. Fibre (or just roughage) is the stuff you can’t digest and is just bulk to clean out the bowels. Even if you entertain the idea that eating less starch might increase the chance of colon cancer, however small that increase might be, it is vastly outweighed by the reduction in chance you’ll die from heart disease, which is responsible for about 1/3 of deaths every year. How many people do you know who’ve died of colon cancer? His argument is akin to saying: you shouldn’t do exercise because moving increases the chance you might lose your balance, fall over and break your neck.
> You don’t have to go far into the internet to find out what a predominantly protein diet does for the metabolism and eliminatory system.
I certainly never suggested a “predominately protein diet”! That would be madness. However a balanced diet, has a little more protein than mainstream dietary advice advocates. Baring in mind that mainstream dietary advice says you should eat a huge pile of carbs (about 80% of your diet) and low fat, and errrr normally says very little about protein, assuming it will somehow magically look after itself.
> The diet you advise is not varied enough to have long term health benefits… Yes rapid weight loss, but the second you deviate the weight will pile back on and then some…
So taking out bread for example, which is low in vitamins and minerals, high in salt, sugar, (and fat lol) and preservatives, and replacing with vegetables and fruit is “not varied enough”…?!? I eat in the region of 10-15 portions of fruits and vegetables each day, instead of bread, potatoes and pasta. Which looks like the “not varied enough” diet now?
And yes he’s right, go back to a high carb / high sugar diet and you’ll pile the pounds back on. Nice of him to argue my point for me! Fortunately most people who realise the truth about diet, see the evidence in their own body, look great, feel great and have a full, varied, flavoursome and abundant diet that doesn’t leave them hungry, rarely go back to their old stodgy high carb ways.
> Diet change is ‘gaming’ mother nature so a holier than thou statement won’t wash with someone who has worked WITH mother nature for years….
Don’t know where to start with this. Eating a diet of natural, unprocessed food is gaming mother nature? WTF?!? Taking synthetically produced supplements, as he originally suggested, is hardly working with nature is it?
> High protein diets are one of the greatest lies… Just another Atkin’s variant and we only have to look at what that evidence shows, diabetes, heart disease all through wanting a quick fix…
It’s stupid really, but take a look at all the diets, and they all get their knickers in a twist over the definitions of “high” and “low”. Yes, eating a diet that contains >50% protein (let’s say by calorific value) is probably not good for you. I don’t know anyone who would suggest that. Atkins bashing is another own goal. Dr Atkins (who was originally a cardiologist remember) treated tens of thousands of people for decades and the evidence showed not only a reduction in heart disease, but many of the diabetic patients that came to him, were either able to massively reduce their medication, or come off medication altogether. An impressive result.
The issue with the Atkins diet was this. There are 4 “stages” to it. Stage 1, which should be strictly limited to no more than 2 weeks, was a very low carb diet (just 20g per day) which Atkins himself said was unsustainable, hence the 2 week time period. No one should stay on stage 1 Atkins for any length of time, it’s bad for you. He advocated it to give your body a good old jolt, to kick in physiological processes that your body is designed for, but likely never used in your life: specifically burning fat for energy.
Stage 2 sees you constantly increase your level of carbohydrates week on week, until you stop losing weight, ending up eating many times more carbs than stage 2. Now you know your carb limit for weightloss, stage 3 sees you reduce your carbs to a level you’re happy with which sees you lose weight at the speed you want. Once you reach your ideal weight, stage 4 puts you back at your maximum carb intake without gaining weight.
Sounds like a simple plan huh? But here’s the rub: if you are a high carb dietician, and this doctor is rubbishing everything you’ve ever been told about nutrition and diet, and saying your whole career is a sham, and you want to hit back at this diet… which stage are you going to pick when you do a nutritional comparison of his diet? Obviously you hold up stage 1 Atkins and laugh. Which is what all the Atkins bashing studies do. It’s a shame as they throw the baby out with the bath water.
> Creatine is already in the body,
Ah, nice that he admits that the body can create its own creatine. Don’t you think that given the correct natural resources (in terms of the right amino acids from your diet) your body is perfectly attuned to work out how much of something it needs and creating just the right amount of it? Or do you think it likely that after 3 million years of an active lifestyle we evolved to not produce enough creatine to manage the after effects of exercise? Rather our lofty science, in the last 20 years or so, has spotted nature’s mistake? It’s laughable really.
> However noone can deny that having a diet rich in vitamin c would enable iron metabolism which boosts the balance of energy within the body.
Are we getting into Chinese mysticism now? What does “boosts the balance of energy” mean? How in fact can you boost a balance?!?
I’m not sure why we got onto vitamin C, but you get more than enough from fruit and veg, e.g. a few satsumas. Actually I had a friend round the house this morning, who has been very worried he’s got bowel cancer or similar. He’s been to the quacks and hospital several times for a battery of tests in the last couple of months and they can’t work out what’s wrong with him. After doing some research, he decided to stop taking his vitamin C supplements: guess what, all his symptoms cleared up in a matter of days! Scary stuff these supplements, even with something seemingly innocuous as vitamin C.
To be clear then, the Crossfit diet as I quoted at the start is basically the Paleo diet, which could also be described as the Caveman diet, or summarised succinctly like this: “Don’t eat anything that was invented in the last 10,000 years.” So the Paleo diet says what you should eat. If you follow the Zone diet for example, that says what proportions you should eat it in. Which in summary is 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fat. Ironic isn’t it that this so called low carb diet still gets most of its content from carbs and 30% protein could hardly be called a high protein diet. Sadly, the naysayers rarely bother to look at the facts before they try to rubbish it.
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14.09.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, The Zone Diet Blog at 9:18 pm by Colin McNulty
At the beginning of September, I decided to have a go at the Paleo Diet. In brief, you could call this the caveman diet, the stone age diet, the “don’t eat anything invented in the last 10,000 years” diet. So you can see that there’s a lot of things that you can’t eat when eating Paleo(lithic)ly. No:
- Bread
- Pasta
- Grains
- Cereals
- Flower
- Dairy (Milk)
- Cheese
- Sweets
- Chocolate
- Alcohol
- etc etc
Now I should say, that I agree with most of that, but I wasn’t doing the Paleo for the reason most do. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight. There’s no doubt at all, that if you follow a classic western diet, or even the recommended high carb, low fat diet, you will definitely shed the fat on this diet. No question. Not only that, you will feel full of energy and probably the healthiest you’ve felt since being a hormonal teenager.
But I am already at a good weight. In fact, many of my friends and family think I should be putting a few pounds on! I also have good energy levels and rarely feel tired. That’s what 2.5 years of the Zone Diet has done for me, a story I’ve told a few times on this blog. So the reason for trying Paleo, was to see if it would make me feel even better… and the short answer is: it didn’t.
You see my diet was already close to a Paleo Zone diet, as recommended by Crossfit. The Crossfit dietary recommendation is simply:
“Eat meat and veg, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.”
However for me, I would have to rewrite it slightly, to be more like:
“Eat meat, fruit and dairy, nuts and seeds, some veg, little starch, occasional sugar, no wheat.”
Yes my balance of fruit to veg is probably off, but that’s down to lifestyle and lack of time to prepare veg for every meal. I also don’t eat wheat as I’ve discovered it simply doesn’t agree with me. The major addition is the dairy though. I drink a pint of milk a day + eat cheese regularly. That was the thing that really put the stopper on a proper paleo diet. Removing dairy would mean no:
- Milk
- Cheese
- Yoghurt
- Chocolate *
- Ice Cream *
- Cakes, even wheat free ones *
- Even salami!
* = these foods can be “zoned in” on the Zone diet, and so are not taboo from a Zone perspective.
Milk crops up in a lot of places that I must confess, I hadn’t originally thought about. I like the zone diet, because you can eat anything you want, so long as you adjust portion sizes to compensate. So that occasional chocky bar, whilst not condoned, can be fine, so long as you balance it with some protein. Or indeed, a few glasses of wine are ok with a meal, as long as the meal is light on carbs to compensate. The point is, with the exceptions of bananas, offal and egg yokes, nothing is off limits on the zone. (And they are only strongly advised against, at least in most circumstances.)
Whereas a straight Paleo diet is the opposite. It heavily regulates *what* you can eat, but places no limits on when or how much you eat. The zone diet is quantitative; the paleo diet is qualitative. So ironically, doing a Paleo Zone diet is actually the worst of both worlds, you are restricted in what you eat, and you can only eat certain proportions!
Either way, I simply decided, that for the gains the paleo might have brought me, it simply wasn’t worth the sacrifice. That’s a personal choice and I applaud the Paleo diet’s goals and ideals and heartily recommend it, if you are hoping to lose weight and currently struggling. Personally, I’d try the Zone diet first, it’s worked for me. And indeed I mostly follow a paleo zone diet, but with dairy and the occasional sugar and wine, however 90% of the meals I eat are simple meats, nuts and fruit & veg. A healthy and balanced way to live in my opinion.
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18.05.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 9:02 pm by Colin McNulty
Last week was a relatively normal week: I left home on Monday morning for the working week away, went shopping Monday night for food for the week, went to work Tuesday, went to the gym Tuesday evening… all pretty normal. Until that is, on Wednesday morning I spotted something that was decidedly NOT normal!
My neck normally looks like this:
But on Wednesday morning whilst shaving, I noticed it instead looking like this:
Where the hell did that hickey come from?!? I couldn’t believe, what’s more I didn’t think my wife would believe it either! I go away for 5 days on business and come home with a mystery love bite on my neck, this I’m reliably lead to believe, is just not the done thing. This was seriously bad news in it’s own right, but even more so because I had no idea how it had happened.
After some thought and no small amount of panic, I came to the inescapable conclusion, that it was Crossfit’s fault. You see on Tuesday I’d been to the gym. Now I don’t actually follow the Workout of the Day (WOD) from the main Crossfit.com site, instead I do the previous day’s WOD from Crossfit Manchester, my regular gym back home. I do this because it guarantees an hours workout, it helps me to keep in touch with the members of the gym whilst I’m away, and I get an element of competition because I can see what weight / time my peers have done.
As it happens, the workout I should have done at Aspire Fitness (my Cardiff gym, more on them another day, I still owe them a setting the record straight post for erroneously calling them a “globo gym”, my bad) was this:
Deadlift: 5 – 5 – 5
Then 7 Rounds of:
- Run 200m
- 15 Wall Ball
- 10 Pull Ups
- 5 Push Press, 55kg
- Rest 1 min
But I’d done heavy deadlifts the last time I was there, and they don’t quite have the setup for things like wall balls. So instead I did this from the Crossfit Manchester WOD the Thursday before, which was:
Clean and Jerk: Doubles
Then:
- Run 860m
- 3 Rounds of;
— 5 Knees to Elbows
— 10 KB Swing
— 15 Box Jump
- Run 860m
There was my love biting culprit: the clean and jerk doubles. I’d worked up to 85kg and was getting pretty tired. I made a last effort for a 90kg double, I got the first one but it was an effort, I repositioned my grip on the bar, I set myself, I pulled for all I was worth, the bar was faster than the eye:
But I was trying too hard, was off balance, my legs were tired, I twisted slightly, over pulled, dropped under and promptly smacked myself in the neck with 90kg (200lbs) of Olympic Weightlifting bar! Not surprisingly, I didn’t make the clean and tried not to gag as I threw the bar away.
Still 85kg was respectable and I moved on to the rest of the workout.
You can see how it’s easily done, the above mid-clean photo was actually taken this weekend at Crossfit Manchester doing power cleans followed by front squats, here’s the bottom of the front squat position, which is where I would have been receiving the flying bar at the bottom of the clean (there’s 85kg on the bar in the pic):
And so there you have it. Doing Crossfit = doing clean & jerks with heavy weights = getting tired = hitting yourself in the neck = bursting a blood vessel = a dodgy looking bruise which gets you into trouble with the missus when you get home from a week away! Actually to be fair, I didn’t really get into trouble, well at least I don’t think so, yet….
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21.04.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 7:54 pm by Colin McNulty
I was browsing the main Crossfit.com site at lunch time and the workout for last Saturday was:
- For time: 100 Inverted burpees
I’ve never heard of inverted burpees before and they look like an interesting thing to try (click image for the big version):
“The Inverted Burpee: starting supine, kip (or sit-up and roll) to standing, kick-up to handstand. This burpee derivative involves similar amounts of work and greater skill than the traditional burpee.”
So I tried them tonight. That’s the great thing about Crossfit, there are plenty of times you don’t actually have to go to the gym to do the workout, I did this on the landing at home! After the first 10, you soon realise it’s going to be a slog. My time: 21:35
As I was at home, I decided to check my heart rate recovery. When I first started exercising about 30 months ago now, I recorded what I was doing, what my heart rate was immediately after “exercise” (really it was just a warm up back then, and what it was again 10 minutes later. Here’s what I did on the 15 October 2006, 2 rounds of:
- Samson Stretch
- 10 Squats
- 10 Sit-ups
- 10 Push-ups
- 10 Supermen
My heart rate immediately after was 140, and ten minutes later was 112.
Now today, that “workout” was what I did for the warm up for my 100 inverted burpees! Anyway, after the upside down burpees I immediately took my heart rate, which was 132. Note that I counted 33 beats in 15 seconds. The reason I did this was, as I continued, I counted 63 beats in 30 seconds. So in just that extra 15 seconds, my heart rate has already dropped by 3 beats. If that makes sense? Actually I’m not sure which measurement is the correct one, anyone?
The 10 minute mark also saw a drop, at 92 beats, a full 20 bps less than when I started. That’s tangible
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18.02.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, Olympic Weightlifting at 9:03 pm by Colin McNulty
I haven’t posted much in the way of workouts recently, so thought I’d stick up what I’ve done the last 2 days at the globo gym in Cardiff. Yesterday I was really hopeful the new bumper plates had turned up so I could do some Oly lifting, but no. It’s been over 3 weeks now. Worse, they tell me that they’ve cancelled the order cos the guy hasn’t even taken their money yet, so all his promises of they were “in the post” were clearly tosh. So now they have to find a new supplier and start the process all over again, gah!
Anyway, yesterday I did:
- 3 x Snatch Pulls at: 40kg, 50, 60, 70, 75 and 80.
- 3 x Front Squat + 1 jerk at: 40kg, 50, 60, 70. I tried 80 but it was too much for me, bringing the metal plated bar down gently.
- 10 minutes double under challenge, this time I got 164 which was very pleasing.
Today, after 3 weeks of nagging, they relented and allowed me to use the existing broken bumpers. But to be honest, I was so worried about them falling to bits completely, it put me off. I worked on Snatch technique at 60kg for an hour, then did some cleans in the power rack. But the fat bar was weird and it all went wrong when I got to 90kg.
A frustrating couple of days.
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09.02.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, Olympic Weightlifting at 10:22 pm by Colin McNulty
Well I went to the Northern Masters Olympic Weightlifting in Keighley, Yorkshire at the weekend, along with several other members of Crossfit Manchester. I’ll get the video edited and uploaded sometime next week (I haven’t got round to getting it off the camcorder yet). Long story short my lifts were:
Snatch: 65, 70, 75F
C & J: 90, 100F, 105F
Given my lack of preparation for this competition, I didn’t feel comfortable starting higher than 65 on the Snatch, and I was pleased to get the 70, as that’s the first time this year I’ve snatched 70kg.
The 90kg Clean and Jerk was simple enough and I went up a big 10kg, cleaned the 100 but didn’t get the jerk (same as last time at the Yorkshire Open Weightlifting Competition). I was going to have another crack at the 100 but was convinced to go for death or glory at 105, aiming for the 175 total I needed for to qualify for the British Weight Lifting Association 2009 British Championships. I didn’t even get the clean up. :S
However it’s not all doom and gloom. Bill Barton, the guy who runs the BWLA Masters (held at Lilleshall, Shropshire) knew what I was trying to do, and told me to put my application for the British Masters Championships in anyway! Woot!
I have to say, there’s a part of me that feels like a cheat if I get to go and lift in the British Masters without meeting the qualifying totals, however I am very sure that with the extra month of practice, I’ll be able to lift the 175 total actually on the day, and then I’ll feel much better about it all. So the race is still on for that elusive 75kg Snatch and 100kg Clean&Jerk!
The other Crossfit members acquitted themselves well, as ever. Bev was particularly spectacular, not only winning the best female lifter overall award, but lifting only 4kg off the British Record for clean and jerk. Very impressive.
Oh and interestingly, I met 2 people there who had visited this blog! Les and Michael, if you come back, do please comment! 
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11.01.09
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 10:05 pm by Colin McNulty
It’s Sunday night, which is the worst part of the week, as I’m preparing to go away again for the week. It’s a tough thing to do as I hate leaving my daughter as she’s great fun to be around. I had a personal training session at the gym today to work on my olympic lifts before the Northern Masters in 3 weeks, and took the kid down too. We had her working on deadlifts with a 7.5kg technique bar (she weighs 24kg). Then we had her do a quick Crossfit workout of:
3 rounds of:
100m row
10 jumping pull ups
10 box jumps
5 dumbbell push presses with 3kg DBs
She managed this is a respectable 10:10. The dumb bells were bought from Newitts in their new year sale and the kid loves them. I’m going to try to get her doing at least 1 Crossfit style workout per week, if not 2.
This weekend we had 2 new members at the gym, 2 members of the Ugandan Olympic weightlifting team, one of which made it to the Beijing olympics! They were impressive to watch, weighing in at under 60kg, they were both doing easy power cleans, push jerk and clean and jerk complexes up to 100kg. They weren’t so good at the other stuff though. Rowing form and dumb bell push presses for example. It will be interesting to watch them as they progress.
As a slight aside, the wife has taken up spinning. Not as in exercise bikes, but as in sleeping beauty style spinning wool with a spinning wheel. So we went to some farm wool show in the middle of the country, south of Macclesfield. The trip was uneventful, but for one event: when driving down the drive at dusk, we were buzzed by a barn owl! I’ve never seen an owl flying in the wild before, hunting dinner I guess. It was spectacular.
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15.12.08
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, The Zone Diet Blog at 9:51 pm by Colin McNulty
This was a hard post to do as I’ve actually not got that many photos of me from a few years ago, but here are 2 pairs of before and after photos, I’ll let you work out which is which! 
Both the before pictures are from 2006, before I’d heard of Crossfit or the Zone Diet, both the after are from 2008. Click the picture for a bigger version:
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08.10.08
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, Olympic Weightlifting at 6:51 am by Colin McNulty
I posted on Monday about the mini olympic weightlifting competition at West Wythenshawe. Here are some more photo’s of the lifters from Crossfit Manchester, courtesy of my 7 year old daughter, the photographer:
- West Wythenshawe – Olympic Weightlifting from Crossfit – Larraine
- Bev
- Jane (with no Y of course)
- Jo O
- Sharron with an emo hairdo
And last but by no means least, the indomitable Mark Beck:
- Mark Beck doing a massive 105kg Clean and Jerk
Just to put Mark’s lift into perspective, he weighs in at about 65kg, so that’s an impressive 1.6x his body weight!
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28.09.08
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 2:35 pm by Colin McNulty
I recently bought 2 weightlifting DVDs from World Class Coaching. They had been recommended by one of the Crossfit Journals I got in the full back catalog I received as part of the Crossfit Certification I went on a few weeks ago. The 2 videos are:
- The Fastest Lift in the World aka the Snatch
- The Most Powerful Lift in the World aka the Clean
Note that the site actually says it’s the Clean and Jerk but there is no Jerk component to the 2nd DVD wihich is a bit of a shame, however I have to say that the videos are excellent. I’ve never seen such attention to detail and the lifts broken down so thoroughly and comprehensively with loads of teaching aids, coaching points and learning progressions.
The videos show world champion lifters going through the motions, slowed down footage, comparisons of unloaded, loaded and competition weight lifts all shown at the same time. Details of where the bar should move and the curve it takes are shown, as are instructions on where the bar should touch, how your body should move and how the feet should jump etc. If you have never been shown these Olympic lifts, these 2 videos will give you all the information you need to know to learn it.
There is 1 gotcha though, the continuous drone of the comentator does get a little monotonous and it’s been edited to remove most the pauses in the comentory. This means that it can be a bit full on at times and I had to stop and rewind in many places to understand what was really being said, as a small lapse of concentration means you can miss an important progression. Oh and “the science bit” at the end is laughable in it’s user unfriendliness!
Still they are highly recommended weightlifting DVD’s
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