In today's blog, this and more:
Moving countries (from Australia to Norway),
Low CHO, High-Fat diets,
Recent Scientific publication update,
Future posts: Weight loss for cyclists & prolonged cycling metabolism
It’s been about a year since my last blog-post and so there is a long overdue update for the audience of the blog.
This post will be dived into the following sections, jump to whichever
one you find relevant/interesting:
1) What happened in 2015? why such big gap between
posts? à
Moving countries
2)
Low Carbohydrate, High Fat (LCHF) diets post in Cycling-tips
in 2015.
3)
Carbohydrate dependence during prolonged
time-trial scientific publication.
4)
Prospective posts for 2016à Weight loss for
cyclists and metabolism during very prolonged (>12 h) cycling.
1) What happened in
2015? why such big gap between posts? à Moving countries
I was appointed post-doctoral research fellow at the
Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and we moved with Kat here to Oslo from
Melbourne in June 2015, and it's been very hard to keep up with the blog.
This position is a fantastic opportunity to develop in my academic
career and we are very excited of starting this new chapter in our life. As with
all major changes in one’s life, it is full of challenges, but I see it as
opportunities for growth.
As you can imagine (or maybe you can’t) changing countries
and starting a new research position can be quite demanding as there are many
new things to adjust to. Additionally, and as part of the venture, I’ve been
working on several research projects in parallel, which depleted my ‘functional
reserve’ (i.e. that extra energy needed to write a blog). These projects
incorporated, among other things, travelling to the August Krogh institute in
Denmark to analyse human muscle samples for a study on post-exercise protein
intake for recovery after cycling, plan and set-up experimental studies and
work on a meta-analysis and many other things.
Also throw on top of that coaching athletes and training
when I’m not working at the school, and even some attempt at learning some Norwegian (I’m
still very bad at it!).
Currently, despite I’m far from being ‘not busy’ things are
slightly more settled and I expect I will be able to write more often.
Figure 1, A, B and C. Aerial photo of the Norwegian School of Sport Science and surrounding areas: beautiful, isn’t it? Photo credits: www.nih.no.
2) Low Carbohydrate,
High Fat (LCHF) diets post in Cycling-tips in 2015.
I should give credit where it is due and thank Ken (now in
HPTek) in Melbourne,
for suggesting me to write the article and for putting me in touch with Matt de Neef (one of the editor of cycling tips), who embraced my criticism to a former article on their page (if you're reading this, thank you guys!).
The article is about a year old, but you might still find it interesting. If you like the topic I would recommend you read the review on
this topic published by Louise Burke that came out in November 2015. The review article is
excellent, it adds more depth to what I described in that blog article written earlier that same year.
Here is a link to Louise's article, which is free.
3) Carbohydrate
dependence during laboratory-based time-trials scientific publication.
In early 2016 our publication titled “Carbohydrate
dependence during prolonged simulated cycling time trials” was published on
European Journal of Applied Physiology.
I hope it is understandable to the general audience (sadly most likely not considering all the scientific formatting and jargon within), but it
is still part of my plans to explain it in more lay terms in this same blog.
4) Prospective posts
for 2016. A) Weights loss for cyclists and B) Power-output and metabolism of
very prolonged exercise.
They say one picture is worth a thousand words. So I’ll let
this figure do the job:
Figure 2 – Weekly average body mass vs weekly net calorie
balance over the course of 3 months.
This is a sneak-peek of what the post will be about, which
is basically about weight loss for cyclists. Provided there is not a LOT of
information on the scientific literature about this, let alone with tight exercise and
diet control/record, and I can't run a full-blown scientific study on this at the minute I decided to run an experiment using my experimental subject
by default (myself). It aims at showing the power exercise nutrition and to document
changes in body mass and power-output (absolute and W/kg) over the course
of a preparatory phase of training when coupled with an planned and optimised nutritional intervention (and it is also a great excuse to get in
shape for the races coming up!).
The experiment (or I should call it intervention) is happening as I write this (body mass is
currently down to ~75.5 kg), and I’ve just killed a full bowl of banana split with vanilla ice-cream and Nutella:
Figure 3 – My Sunday dessert during weight loss: It’s not about starving. It’s
not about low carbs either.
As it is happening while I write, it is going to take me
another while until it is finished and I can publish it here. Additionally there is going to be a
LOT of data and numbers that will need to be crunched (today is 90 days of
uninterrupted daily food and exercise data logging), so it is likely going to be published as a series of posts rather in a one long post.
I’m aiming at shedding some light on this topic by including
unpublished data on very prolonged exercise in the lab together with other
insights on the topic. This will be happening most likely after the post on
weight loss.
That is all for today, stay tuned for the blog-posts coming up!
