Creatin sounds tasty.

a mate of mine used to do it, well either that or some sort of protein milkshake. don't think it worked tho - he still looks the same.

i'm not a big fan of taking supplements really, of any kind. don't take vitamin supplements/any of that stuff. i think if you have a good balanced diet, you can get everything you need from food.

creatine, does indeed increase water retention.
The idea behind creatine is that in your body, creatine phosphate is used as a energy store in muscles, cos it has a 'high-energy' (a typical biochemical misnomer) phosphate bond. And this allows rapid ATP renewal, etc.

However, the fact it 'works' is due to the retentive aspect. It causes your muscles to look larger, but be exactly the same efficiency. If it worked for you because you're a veggie, it means simply you didn't have enough protein in your diet. Eating an egg or two or those shakes would have been more effective. Furthermore, Creatine has been shown to have a placebo effect on work outs. Those on it and on a placebo substitute had 'statistically insignificant differences' in a variety of tests.

LPG has it in one- balanced diet, the best way forward.

that's not how it worked for me as I have plenty pf protein in my diet...it's incredibly hard to have a protein deficient diet in the Western world unless you really try to...and I eat loads of eggs, cheese etc....Creatine is not a protein, it's an acid and it may be argued that vegetarians may be deficient .........

"In humans, approximately half of stored creatine originates from food (mainly from fresh meat and fish). Since vegetables do not contain creatine, vegetarians clearly show lower levels of muscle creatine which, upon creatine supplementation, rise to a level higher than in meat-eaters"

I quite clearly felt a difference during training....my lactic threshold increased considerably, meaning during interval and power training I could work harder and longer....so my muscle mass and power increased....it was very noticeable....I attributed this to the water retained around the muscles diluting the lactic acid....but that's guessing!

but as I said before not worth taking unless you have serious race ambitions and your body seems to get used to it, so it becomes less efffective....I took it for three months every year in the final speed and power building phas of my training and into the race season.

rocky didn't have his two egg milkshake every morning for nowt.

the best thing I heard recently, that is backed up anyway, is that milk is the best after excercise drink. Due to the fact that it is essentially blood plasma with added goodness, it is as good as you can get.

Milky science!

What Winston said.

Don't believe all those protein myths. Lots of research was funded by the meat and dairy industry, with tests done on rats, which have significantly different nutritional needs to us.

If it worked due to a placebo-effect, whatever, it still worked; only the effect wasn't event-specific enough, it tasted shite, and I couldn't be bothered with it anymore. I prefer 'real' food, don't do energy or recovery drinks, and found that being more disciplined about WHEN I ate and drank was the most salient factor regarding improving performance/fitness.

I'm all for scientific experiment and conjecture, but you see a lot of lab-based results (or those from research which attempts to emulate competitive conditions) that don't really marry up with athletes' real-world findings/feelings.

I'm going to stop creatine a fuss now.

hmm, no, but i can't be arsed to argue.
1. Animal models are more effective than you give them credit for. Trust me on that one.
2. What you say about funding is sadly true (in certain instances)
3. The creatine study i mentioned was carried out on pro (ish) athletes (i think Oxford Oarsmen training for the boat race).
4. The milk study was not funded by the milk industry, however and is entirely expected when you consider milks composition.


[quote] I'm going to stop creatine a fuss now[quote]
ditto. :)

Re: timing, my coach mentioned the paleo diet. Not having big bursts of sugar and/or caffeine though would probably kill me. If it's not full of E numbers and wrapped in 14 layers of packaging, backed by NASA researchers I don't want it.. ;)

Yep, the gym instructors (which are 'properly' qualified; they all have sports science degrees - so I think it's fair to say they are fairly reliable) wrote an article in the Imperial student newspaper Felix saying that skimmed milk was one of the best and most cost effective things to consume after a workout.

If it was a load of nonsense I'm pretty sure a lecturer/researcher/student at Imperial would have argued against it - I never saw anything in the following issue.

I started working out in the gym for the first time at the start of this term. I have very little visible muscle and consider myself to be quite weak and skinny but after I'd guess about 6 or 8 sessions (3 times a week with 1 pint of skimmed milk straight after) I can see a difference, especially my legs. When I got back home to Basingstoke I've noticed I can climb hills waaaay quicker than I used to be able to as well :)

pumpkin seeds rock, do you know if roasting them nullifies the benefits?

^ I hope not, but luckily I have them in both guises, so I'll leave you to do the research.

***

I'm sure milk works fine for recovery/muscle building (and colostrum is all the rage), but I'll pass. Not too happy about your average dairy farming operation, and the mucilaginous properties fuck up my breathing, which seems to be a very important factor in things like hillclimbing.

And I've heard a load of 'gospel' from university lecturers/researchers over the years that was ivory-tower-self-facilitating wank. Obviously I've seen just as much wank on the internet or via any other medium. If I'm looking for wank, I'll get it by myself ;)

is/was your lecturer stacked like a mofucker? Probably not cos he aint on the supps. Basically, anything that ups the amount of ATP my muscles cry out for is good in my book. Im on creatine, protein shakes, Amino1500, XenadrineEFX, and potentially opening the door to NOS.

Anyone else blogging? so stoked you guys love my blog. GET SUMMMMM

Yeah, your blog is extremely motivational.

i drank two eggs once for a bet, and that stringy harder lumpy bit got caught in my throat as they were going down, which made me vomit.

interesting comments, please feel free to share them with other people on other forums!

what the hell is NOS when refered to in this post
or is 'he' eating old bike parts and there in tact packages for seconds lol

oh and Mercx ate steak for breakfast morning of a race i believe, protein best

... for me

Must be this NOS

Too swift on my toes...

Roasting pumkin seeds will not destroy the all important zinc content, but it will dmage the fats in them......

for the same reason don't eat margarine...yes the oringinal ingredients sound helathy, olive and sunflower oils, but they don't mention the production process...Hydrogenation, high pressured heating, which dmages the fats and takes away the benfits of the original raw oils, you're better off eating butter which contains butyric acid, which actually breaks down bad cholesterol.....

speaking of pounding Milk, supposedly Goats milk is the closest thing to breast milk there is and it's also supposedly the best type of milk for you. However I am no doctor so it may be completely unfounded.

I make all my shakes with mineral water and take only a few supplements, unfortunately I cannot enter into the discusison of the pros and cons of Creatine as I can't take it because of Migraine.

NOS is a enegry booster type product, check out NOS Blast for the an example..

Fixed! How's the knee?

I try and eat a chunk of raw ( introduced to a flame for a minute ) steak once a week.
Masses of fruit, cereals, vegetables, cheese, olives ( and oil ) and fish.
Never taken supplements before and this diet works well for me.

Cool. I have been in the pool a couple of times, so another few weeks and I'll be ready for action.

er and puss. dont forget the puss in milk. mmm tasty. something like a million puss cells per glass? eeek.

stringy harder lumpy bit? are you sure they were eggs???

I still hold the Milk Challenge Record btw. my mates.. 4:10 for 2L. Milk is great.

Arf!

soya milk! thats the way forward.