Following on from my post last week on Understanding Energy, here’s ‘Part 2′, which explains the main energy sources, where they are stored and which is best.

Foods are made of different amounts of carbohydrates, fats, proteins and alcohol. Each of these nutrients provides a certain quantity of energy when it is broken down in the body. For instance, 1g of carbohydrate or protein releases about 4 kcal of energy, while 1g of fat releases 9 kcal, and 1g of alcohol releases 7kcal.

Fat is the most concentrated form of energy, providing the body with more than twice as much energy as carbohydrate or protein and also more than alcohol. However, it is not necessarily the ‘best’ form of energy for exercise. All foods contain a mixture of nutrients, and the energy value of a particular food depends on the amount carbohydrate, fat and protein it contains. For example, one slice of wholemeal brown bread provides roughly the same amount of energy as one pat (7g) of butter. However their composition is very different. In bread, most energy (75%) comes from carbohydrate, while in butter, virtually all (99.7%) comes from fat.

How does my body store carbohydrate?
Carbohydrate is stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver, along with about three times its own weight in water. Altogether there is about three times more glycogen stored in the muscles than the liver. The body can only store a relatively small amount of glycogen. The total store of glycogen in the average body amounts to about 500g; with approx 400g in the muscles and 100g I the liver. This store is equivalent to 1600-2000 kcal; enough to last one day if you were to eat nothing. Endurance athletes have higher muscle glycogen concentrations compared with sedentary people. Increasing your muscle mass will also increase your storage capacity for glycogen. The purpose of liver glycogen is to maintain blood glucose levels at rest and during prolonged exercise. Small amounts of glucose are present in the blood and in the brain and their concentrations are kept within a very narrow range, both at rest or during exercise.

How does my body store fat?
Fat is stored as ‘adipose’ (fat) tissue in almost every region of the body. A small amount of fat, about 300-400g is stored in muscles and is called intramuscular fat, but the majority is stored around the organs and beneath the skin. The average 70kg person stores 10-15kg of fat. Unfortunately, there is little you can do to change the way that your body distributes fat, but definitely change the amount of fat that is stored!!

How does my body store protein?
Protein is not stored in the same way as carbohydrate and fat. It forms muscle and organ tissue, so it is mainly used as a building material rather than an energy store. However, proteins can be broken down to release energy if need be, so muscles and organs represent a large source of potential energy.

Which fuels are most important for exercise?
Carbohydrates, fats and proteins are all capable of providing energy for exercise. They can all be transported to, and broken down in, muscle cells. Alcohol, however cannot be used directly by muscles for energy during exercise, no matter how strenuously you are working. Only the liver has specific enzymes needed to break down alcohol. You cannot break down alcohol faster by exercising harder either.
Proteins do not make a substantial contribution to the fuel mixture. It is only during very prolonged or very intense bouts of exercise that proteins play a more important role in giving the body energy.
The production of ATP during most fors of exercise come mainly from broken down carbohydrates and fats.

When is protein used for energy?
Protein is not usually a major source of energy, but it may play an important role during the latter stages of very strenuous or prolonged exercise as glycogen stores become depleted. For example, during the last stages of an Olympic distance event, or Ironman, when glycogen stores are depleted, the proteins in muscles (and organs) may make up 10% of the body’s fuel mixture.

In future posts I intend to cover related topics such as why fatigue occurs, how it can be delayed and how you can get more out of your training by changing your diet.

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More swim tips and advice aimed towards triathletes of all abilities. If you’re a beginner, they’ll keep you from flailing about like you being attacked by sharks, or if you see yourself as seasoned veteran, they’ll show you how it is possible to shave off the seconds without having to shave your legs.

Swim Tall
Water is 1000 times denser than air. So the simple most important factor is to slip your body through the smallest hole in the water. Imagine a central axis extending from the top of your head to the opposite end of the pool. Rotate your body along this axis with each stroke, stretching your leading arm as far forward as you can. Keep the muscles in your lower back and abs taut as you power through the water. Doing so will keep the propulsion coming from both your arms and legs.

Drop An Anchor
Swimming with just your hands is like jumping with just your feet. Instead, grip the water with your entire forearm and hand, holding your forearm at a right angle to your upper arm and digging in like you’re gathering sand with a shovel. Keep your hands broad, flat and firm. You’re not pushing your arm through the water as much as anchoring it and pulling your body over it.

Heavy Rotation
Each stroke begins with your leading arm having entered the water, and that side of your body (the low side) pointing almost at the bottom of the pool. The other side of your body (the high side) should be raised, with the arm that just finished its stroke getting ready to return to the water. Power is triggered when you drive down the high side of your body, throwing your high side arm forward along the central axis into the leading position and rotating your hips and torso. Meanwhile, your low side arm is the pulling arm under water, working with your rotating torso to provide acceleration.

Keep Your Head Down
Freestylers used to hold their heads high. That forced the rest of the body to drop, turning it into a high-drag plough. Try and look pretty much straight down at the pool. Obviously in open water you need to sight, try to keep this to a minimum though in order to avoid and un-necessary drag. In both situations not only will keeping you head down avoid drag but it keeps your torso high, reducing strain on your neck and lower back.

Find Your Glide Path
In the pool, fewer strokes is better. Your goal should be a high distance per stroke. Elite swimmers like Michael Phelps can easily traverse a 25m pool in seven strokes(each hand entry counts as a stroke). Try to keep yours below 20 by conserving momentum. Pull yourself over your anchor and continue to glide forward with one arm forward and the other back. When you begin to slow, start the next stroke.

Drag Your Feet
If you’re a good kicker, you’re a good swimmer. The secret is turning your feet into fins. Leverage rules, your legs should be taut, scissoring though the water, while your feet remain flexible. This will help them snap at the down stroke of each kick, adding oomph and helping twist your torso along the central axis. If your feet don’t flex as well, buy a set of fins to add flexibility.

Don’t Waste Breathe
Gasping for air every time your head nears the surface is a great way to drown. Instead make each breathe count. Exhale all the air from your lungs before taking a quick, full breathe on the high side. Beginning swimmers need to breathe after each stroke, but as your endurance improves, try breathing on alternate sides – that is after three strokes. It’ll reduce the strain on your neck and shoulders that results from always breathing on the same side.

Happy training!!

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To help you with your healthy eating and meal planning Trispace are introducing a weekly recipe, all of which are quick, simple and fun to make. They are specially designed for sports people who need to eat a diet high in carbohydrate, low in fat and rich in essential nutrients. Each recipe provides nutritional analysis to help you put together numerous healthy menus.The main meal recipes are divided into sections based oh nigh carbohydrate foods t enable you to plan your meals according to the recommended nutritional guidelines. Recipes suitable for vegetarians contain no meat, poultry or fish and are marked with a ‘V’ symbol.

First up is ‘Fish And Potatoe Pie’ (Serves 2)

Ingredients
450 g (1 lb) potatoes
200 g (7oz) white fish fillets (e.g. cod or plaice)
3 tbsp (45 ml) skimmed milk
2 eggs
1 tbsp parsley
1 tbsp (15 mil) lemon juice

Method
Remove any skin and bones from the fish, beat the eggs and chop up the parsley
Cut potatoes into chunks and boil until tender
Drain then mash the potatoes with flaked fish, milk, eggs, parsley and lemon juice.
Place in a dish, then cook in an oven at 200’C/400’F/Gas Mark 6 for 20 minutes
Serve with green vegetables such as broccoli and green beans

Done, Enjoy!!

Nutritional Information (Approx per serving)
Calories = 352
Carbohydrate = 39.4 g
Protein = 33.3 g
Fat = 7.89 g
Fibre = 2.8 g

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I’m back on the Time Efficiency waggon again and here’s five top tips to ensure your time spent training as well as thinking about training is indeed ‘efficient’.

Divide Your Time
Cycle at weekends, run and swim in the week. In most cases you are more likely to improve your cycling by doing two high-quality rides at the weekend. Trying to cram too much in mid-week can be a sure fire way to reduce quality. Instead focus on running and swimming when you have less time during the week.

Coach Class
It takes some triatletes years to learn this simple fact - ‘your swimming won’t improve without technique coaching’. Those who receive regular stroke analysis enjoy there swimming more because they keep on improving. if you do not have access to regular coaching, paying for one or two video-coaching sessions per year is a worthy alternative.

Sweat The Small Stuff
Shave minutes off your triathlon times by making improvements in non-training areas. These include transition skills, pace judgement, nutrition, technique in all three disciplines and mental preperation. You might improve faster by learning more than you do from training. A few hours a week reading is time well spent.

A Second Opinion
A coach has one benefit over you, objectivity. Effective coaches see the bigger picture whereas triathletes can become bogged down in day to day worries. An experienced and eager coach can help you cut the junk, keep the quality and maximise your training time.

Quality Not Quantity
There are no prizes for clocking the most training time per week. Six high quality, well thought out sessions per week are better than ten that are unplanned, rushed and fatigued.

Happy training!!

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When you exercise, your body must start producing energy faster than it does when it’s at rest. The muscles start to contract more strenuously, the heart beats faster to pump the blood around the body more rapidly and the lungs work harder. All these processes require extra energy. Where does it come from and how can you make sure you have enough to last through a training session or race?

Before you can fully answer such questions, it is important to understand how the body produces energy and what happens to it. You need to understand what takes place in the body when you exercise, where extra energy comes from and how the fuel mixture used differs accordingly to the type of exercise.

What is energy and ATP?
Firstly we need to understand what energy is. Although we cannot see energy, we can see and feel its effects in terms of heat and physical work.

Energy is produced by the splitting of a chemical bond in a substance called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This is often referred to as the body’s ‘energy currency’. It is produced in every cell of the body from the breakdown of carbohydrate, fat, protein and alcohol (four fuels that are transported and transformed by various biomechanical processes into the same end product).

ATP is a small molecule consisting of an adenosine ‘backbone’ with three phosphate groups attached. Energy is released when one of the phosphate groups splits off. When ATP looses one of its phosphate groups it becomes adenosine diphosphate, or ADP. Some energy is used to carry out work(such as muscle contractions), but most (around three quarters) is given off as heat. This is why you feel warmer when you exercise. Once this has happened, ADP is converted back into ATP. A continuous cycle takes place in which ATP forms ADP and then becomes ATP again.

The conversion of ATP and ADP.
The body only stores very small amounts of ATP at any one time. There is just enough to keep up basic energy requirements when you are at rest, sufficient to keep the body ticking over. When you start exercising, energy demand suddenly increases, and the supply of ATP is used up within a few seconds. As more ATP must be produced to continue exercising, more fuel must be broken down.

Where does energy come from?
There are four components in food and drink that are capable of producing energy; carbohydrate, protein, fat and alcohol. When you eat a meal or have a drink, these components are broken down in the digestive system into their various building blocks. Then they are absorbed into the bloodstream. Carbohydrates are broken down into small, single sugar units; glucose, fructose and galactose. Fats are broken down into fatty acids and proteins into amino acids. Alcohol is mostly absorbed into the blood.

The ultimate fate of all these components is energy production, although carbohydrates, proteins and fat also have other important functions. Carbohydrates and alcohol are used mainly for energy in the short term, while fats are used as a long term energy store. Proteins can be used to produce energy either in ‘emergencies’ (for instance, when carbohydrates are in short supply) or when they have reached the end of their useful life. Sooner or later all food and drink components are broken down to release energy.

In Part 2 next week we’ll look at energy sources and which fuels are most important for exercise.

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Less then 24 hours after the completion of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games triathlon, the International Triathlon Union today announced an innovative new platform for the sport by establishing a pioneering new series that will take triathlon to new heights.

This is a great step forward for triathlon and it is exciting for triathlon to be moving in this direction. The benefit of live TV is it creates a proper season. People will know when to watch and when to tune into triathlon.

The new format will consist of six World Championship events plus a Grand Final every year, extending the current single World Championships event into a series. A major feature is the world’s best athletes will now consistently race head-to-head. World class venues in internationally renowned cities will be selected to host each World Championship event with guaranteed live international high-definition television offered.

For the first three years, the events programme will be scheduled on a monthly basis from March to September. In an Olympic year, the Grand Final will move to October or November. This provides the athletes, coaches, National Federations, sponsors and television broadcasters with a well planned stable schedule of high quality events.

Each World Championship event leading up to the Grand Final will seek to integrate a mass participation and youth element alongside the elite races. The ITU Age-Group World Championships will be staged at the annual Grand Final event along with Junior and Under23 competitions.

ITU has formed a partnership with a major international sports business to collaborate on a fresh and exciting new programme of events, the ‘ITU Triathlon World Championship Series’.

I think this new series is a fantastic way to enable athletes to showcase triathlon to the world. Even better is the incorporation of the various age-group championships into the ‘Grand Final’. In how many other sports can ‘amateurs’ rub shoulders on the start line with ‘the elite’?

Well done the ITU!!!

Click here to watch the ITU promo video.

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Last week I wrote a post on Time Efficient Training. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a time efficient training session for each of the disciplines associated with triathlon, and here’s the first, a time efficient run session.

This acceleration runs increase in speed, culminating with a pace just above your target race pace. The idea is to progress each week by increasing the distance or speed of each increment. This session has many of the benefits of a steady tempo run but allows the body to gradually warm up, which reduces fatigue and injury risk. You can measure the increments in speed or heart rate. In this example heart rate is used. The formula may look a little confusing for each of the runs, however if you take a 5 minutes to work out the specific BPM’s (beats per minute) for your specific run you’ll feel the benefits in no time.

Acceleration Run For Sprint Distance Tri – 25 minutes continuous running as follows;

5 minutes at 30 BPM (beats per minute) below 5K pace OR 5 minutes steady

5 minutes at 20 BPM (beats per minute) below 5K pace OR 5 minutes at marathon pace

5 minutes at 10 BPM (beats per minute) below 5K pace OR 5 minutes half marathon pace

5 minutes at 3 BPM (beats per minute) below 5K pace OR 5 minutes just above 5k pace

5 minutes easy jog

Acceleration Run For Olympic Distance Tri – 40 minutes continuous running as follows;

7 minutes at 36 BPM (beats per minute) below 10K pace OR 7 minutes easy

7 minutes at 27 BPM (beats per minute) below 10K pace OR 7 minutes steady

7 minutes at 18 BPM (beats per minute) below 10K pace OR 7 minutes at marathon pace

7 minutes at 9 BPM (beats per minute) below 10K pace OR 7 minutes at half marathon pace

7 minutes at 3 BPM (beats per minute) below 10K pace OR 7 minutes just above 10k pace

5 minutes easy jog

Acceleration Run For Middle Distance Tri – 55 minutes continuous running as follows;

10 minutes at 28 BPM (beats per minute) below half marathon pace OR 10 minutes easy

10 minutes at 21 BPM (beats per minute) below half marathon pace OR 10 minutes steady

10 minutes at 14 BPM (beats per minute) below half marathon pace OR 10 minutes at marathon pace

10 minutes at 7 BPM (beats per minute) below half marathon pace OR 10 minutes at half marathon pace

10 minutes at 3 BPM (beats per minute) below half marathon pace OR 10 minutes faster than half marathon pace

5 minutes easy jog

Acceleration Run For Long Distance Tri – 1 hr 23 minutes continuous running as follows;

13 minutes at 25 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes easy

13 minutes at 20 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes steady

13 minutes at 15 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes steady

13 minutes at 10 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes steady to marathon pace

13 minutes at 5 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes just below marathon pace

13 minutes at 3 BPM (beats per minute) below marathon pace OR 13 minutes above marathon pace

5 minutes easy jog

Happy training!

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Great Britain’s Alistair Brownlee, a 20-year-old student at Leeds University, gave the world’s best triathletes a swim, a bike ride and a run for their money before finishing 12th in 30-degree temperatures at Ming Tombs reservoir earlier this morning.

However, at the front of the field a well-timed sprint from Jan Frodeno gave the German gold in a thrilling men’s triathlon race. He went clear with 50m to go to finish ahead of Canada’s Simon Whitfield and New Zealand’s Bevan Docherty, clocking one hour 48:53 seconds.

Alistair Brownlee, the second-youngest competitor in the 55-strong field, had been among the leading group for much of the run before fading to 12th place. Fellow Brit Will Clarke was two places behind Brownlee with Tim Don, suffering from a virus, failed to finish. Don, who had hoped to among the medals in Beijing, was struggling with illness in the build-up to the race and withdrew early.

Whitfield looked to have time his sprint finish to perfection, breaking from a group that included Frodeno, Docherty and pre-race favourite Javier Gomez of Spain. But Frodeno stuck with him and, with just 50m to the line, had the legs to out-sprint the Canadian to claim the gold.

It was a fitting end to a fantastic race in which Brit Brownlee more than played his part. The 20-year-old set the agenda on the 40km bike ride after a hugely impressive swim and looked in contention for a medal as he initially formed a six-man breakaway group in the 10km run.

But he just did not have the legs to keep up with the experienced Frodeno, Whitfield, Docherty, Gomez and Ivan Rana, falling off the pace with 7km to go, before crossing the line 86 seconds behind the winner.

Clarke was always playing catch-up after a disappointing 1.5km swim in a race which was competed in blistering heat.

You can watch highlights of the the men’s race here.

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The Evans Cycles End of Season Sale is now underway! Browse online for genuine sale savings across an unbelievable range of bikes, cycling equipment and clothing.

Evan’s have reduced over 20,000 current 2008 bikes - many at 30% off, plus they’ve also slashed the prices on summer clothing with items now at half price and end of line parts and accessories.

Go directly to Evans Cycles sale section to browse through the range of sale products. Check back regularly with Evans Cycles as they are adding new sale products daily.

Among so many other hot offers, just into the Evans Cycles warehouse is a shipment of 2008 Carbon frame bikes from Italian road bike specialists Bianchi. Exclusive to Evans Cycles these bikes are available in limited stocks and won’t hang around for long. Grab an amazing deal at up to 25% off retail price

Bianchi B4P C-Tech Carbon Ultegra

Packed with Shimano Ultegra components this bike is destined to be a big seller in the end of season sale.
Was £1,999.99 now £1,499.99
Save 25%!

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Emma Snowsill claimed triathlon gold for Australia as she stormed to victory in Beijing earlier this morning. I managed the early 3am start to watch the event live on TV and what a spectacle it was. The quality in the field of athletes was just outstanding and along with the beautiful scenery surrounding the Ming Tomb Reservoir, the race was just magnificent.

The Commonwealth Games champion, 27, broke clear at the start of the 10k run and never looked like being caught as she won in one hour and 58.27 seconds.

Portugal’s Vanessa Fernandes won silver and Australian Emma Moffatt the bronze.

British world champion Helen Tucker came 21st while Hollie Avil, who has been struggling with a stomach bug, withdrew during the 40k bike ride.

Tucker had been in contention at the changeover from bike to run, having been in the lead group for much of the race. But Snowsill stormed clear and another breakaway group formed and Tucker struggled to match the pace. Tucker was hoping to add an Olympic medal to her World Championship win earlier this year.

The Welsh triathlete finished more than four minutes behind Snowsill but Avil, the 18-year-old national champion, could not cope with the punishing pace.

Shortly after Avil retired an eight-bike pile-up at the end of lap five dashed the hopes of Canada’s Laura Groves and Russian Irina Abysova as riders careered over the barrier and into each other at the hairpin stadium turn.

For Snowsill her victory made up for the pain of missing out on selection for the team to compete at the last Olympics in Athens four years ago.

You can watch highlights of the the women’s race here. Roll on the men’s race tomorrow morning!!

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