by Joan Kent | Mar 24, 2014 | Health and Wellness, Leading Group Rides, Master Instructor Blog
Image from http://www.sustainablemontreal.ca/2010/07/13/7-milespotato-the-beauty-of-the-bicycle/
By Joan Kent, Ph.D.
“Sugar is bad stuff, but what should I eat on a long ride?” Over the years, many cyclists have asked me that question. In reply, I came up with the idea for Dr. Joan’s Potato Goo. (No, that’s not a brand name, just my private joke.)
I’ve used Potato Goo successfully on many long rides, including indoor centuries. The late, very great Jim Karanas made it the staple of his diet on long rides (he also ate other foods on ultra rides). I’ve often made extra for group rides, and it has developed quite a following. It even brought a skilled rider back from a complete bonk after he’d been eating bars and gels all ride long.
Never one for complicated recipes, I make this the easy way. You’ll need:
– raw potatoes of any kind (red potatoes have a really terrific, smooth texture, and I use organic)
– salt (sea salt is nice for the minerals, but not essential)
– a little water (I used distilled)
– snack-size zipper bags
– a food processor.
Select about 3 or 4 potatoes and cook them, with skins, any way you like. I microwave because I’m the laziest cook in the known universe, but choose your favorite method. They should be soft when done.
Let the potatoes cool. Slice them and place them in a food processor with some sea salt. How much salt depends on the number and size of the potatoes, but you’ll need to taste the mixture once you’ve started mixing. IMPORTANT — It should taste salty, but not overly salty.
Add water, a little at a time, to make a paste. You’ll be squeezing the Goo out of the corner of the zipper bag, so adjust the consistency. Too thick will obviously not squeeze out easily; too watery will make a runny mess.
Once everything’s in the food processor, just start it and let it run until the Goo has a uniform texture. Taste for the salt, add more if necessary, add water if necessary, and done!
Spoon the Goo into snack-size zipper bags, filling each bag with only the amount you’d want to consume at a rest stop. I actually carry a few zipper bags of Goo in my back jersey pocket, inside a light-weight plastic bag from the grocery store, and keep the empty zipper bags in the plastic bag until I find a place to dispose of them.
So what do you get with Potato Goo that you don’t get with bars, gels, shots, or other sugars? You get the recommended electrolytes — potassium from the potatoes, sodium from the salt — along with the fastest carbs going. Much faster than sugar. Glycemic index (GI) is hardly the be-all/end-all, but here’s one instance in which it’s quite helpful. The GI of potatoes is far higher (faster) than that of sugar, so the potatoes start working almost immediately. You can really feel them. There’s no sugar crash. And potatoes don’t cause the gastro-intestinal upsets commonly associated with fructose — a common ingredient in many bars and sports drinks.
For anyone who’s sensitive to sugar, this is a better way to fuel because you won’t find yourself dealing with sugar cravings, withdrawal, malaise, or other after-effects of sugar consumption.
Caution: No nutrition surprises on Performance Day! If you have a major ride coming up, try this on a training ride first. Know how your body responds before you invest 100% in Potato Goo. Please always eat a solid pre-training meal before your ride.
Dr. Joan’s Potato Goo has worked for indoor and outdoor cyclists, runners, and indoor rowers. If you try it, please let me know how it works for you.
by Joan Kent | Mar 17, 2014 | Health and Wellness, Master Instructor Blog
By Joan Kent, Ph.D.
A looong time ago (1998), I wrote a doctoral dissertation that started with several observations about women with binge-eating disorder. One was their relationship with sugar. As I examined the DSM-IV criteria for substance dependence against the DSM-IV criteria for binge-eating disorder, it became obvious that addiction to sugar was very likely driving the binge eating. ‘No kidding,' you say, but this was radical thinking in 1998.
My research divided the participants, all screened for binge-eating disorder, into three groups. The low-sugar group was given low-sugar nutrition guidelines to follow. They logged their food intake, including any binge episodes and/or cravings, and came to weekly support meetings.
The low-fat group followed low-fat guidelines, logged their food, binges and cravings, and attended weekly meetings. The control group had no nutrition guidelines or support meetings and simply logged their food, binges and cravings.
All groups reported periodically for weigh-ins and measurements.
Bingeing and craving decreased most in the low-sugar group. Weight loss was greatest in that group, although the weight loss couldn’t be fully explained by comparing calorie intake among the groups.
What I find funny (okay, maybe a little irritating) is that people are now — in 2014 — finally — at long last — finding a connection between sugar addiction and the obesity epidemic. I guess the 1985-1999 low-fat craze — and a “craze” is what it was — had to die before people could see what was going on. (What can I say? My mother always told me I saw connections others didn’t.)
So how does sugar contribute to the obesity epidemic? Let’s take a look at what sugar does:
- Sugar triggers a “priming” reaction — even a little makes us want more. This is due to a specific dopamine receptor in the brain. Some people experience this more acutely than others. I consider this effect of sugar the main argument against eating “a small amount” of what we crave. Priming can turn that into a very large amount.
- It’s addictive, so it definitely makes us want lots of sugary food and encourages over-consumption.
- Sugar addiction is physiologically real. It may cause withdrawal symptoms (cravings, agitation, restlessness, inability to focus, and more) when it’s not available. Seeking and eating sugar frequently to end the discomfort of withdrawal can lead to overeating and weight gain.
- Sugar may be responsible for what I named “secondary fat consumption”. None of the study participants got cravings for fats. Almost all got cravings for sugar. But! In response to the sugar cravings, they’d often eat foods that contained lots of fat. For example, a craving for sweet was likely to be answered with a bowl of ice cream — high in both sugar and fat. Why? Research shows that fat makes sugar taste sweeter. The added calories and fat were significant in all groups.
- It triggers the release of beta-endorphin in the brain. Beta-endorphin inhibits the brain’s primary satiety center (the VMH). That may increase appetite, increase food consumption at a given meal — and lead to more frequent meals.
- Beta-endorphin changes food preferences toward other beta-endorphin triggers: fats or more sugar. The preference for healthful fare, such as vegetables, shrinks in comparison to those foods. Calorie intake can easily rise. Also, meals that are high in fat can trigger ghrelin, a hormone that tends to increase appetite as it slows metabolism — a potentially dangerous combination for weight and health.
It’s clear from this list that sugar makes it all too easy to over-consume food and calories, especially empty calories. We can see the role it plays in binge eating and overweight. I stress that this connection was crystal clear to me in 1998 when I wrote my dissertation, and still in 1999 when it was completed.
So thanks for indulging me. I just needed to take credit for this, since credit is now being claimed by others some 15-plus years later.
by John | Mar 16, 2014 | Best Practices, Big Box Instructor, Master Instructor Blog
I enjoy poking around the RateYourBurn Instructor review site to get an understanding of what participants are looking for in our class. Sure some of the comments can be a bit harsh, but many of the actual reviews are well written and offer very specific “If you would do ___________________ I would enjoy your class more” advice.
Case in point – this RateYourBurn Review on a new SoulCycle Instructor named Chris The Curious Case of the Missing Countdowns
So yeah, I liked a lot of things about Chris, but the ride was… improvable. Luckily for Chris, these nits are absolutely fixable.
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A little head's up, please? Countdowns: We really, really need them. Without countdowns, I start to wonder if you're just making up moves on the spot; I don't know when to exert the most effort, and I start worrying whether we'll be in a second-position jog FOR ETERNITY.
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Choreography was not really timed with the music. Chris could work on ending the choreography segments to time up with each song. There were three different songs where we ran out of music while continuing choreography. Again, this feels like the class is a little bit tossed together in the moment rather than planned out. According to his bio, Chris has been a dance educator for more than a decade: timing choreography to the music (and giving countdowns to help with that) is likely second nature for a dancer. Just bring it to the bike!
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Timing of pushes. These felt a little awkward and were usually too short. One thing that would help would be for Chris to cue us ahead of time when we were going into a push, but the pushes always came with the command “pick up your legs now!” and ended with “slow down” – no warning, and no countdown to the end. Help me gear myself up for a 30-second push, and then let me know when I'm just a few seconds from the finish line – I'll work much harder when I'm not ambushed by a sprint!
There's an old adage about giving effective presentations that goes something like this;
- Explain to everyone what you're going to say or expect them to do.
- Say or do it.
- Remind them what it was you said or what they just did.
In the first and third comments above, the reviewer is frustrated because Chris is skipping #1 – and not giving advanced notice to what's coming next. I can't speak for the women in your class, but many of the the men who ride with you are sequential thinkers like me. We like to start with A, move on to B, C, and then D. It drives us crazy when you skip one or more steps and completely throws us off our game.
I'm completely guilty of point #2 – not getting my choreography matched to the length of the music at times. I'll blame the combination of my slowly failing eyesight and those tiny little numbers on the Spotify App for not understanding the time remaining for a specific track. My classes are very cycling specific and feel I do a good job prepping everyone for the upcoming efforts. Where I feel I get into trouble is I take too much time leading up to the start of say a 4 minute Best Effort, using a 5:00 minute song. I can't see the time remaining and the music ends before the interval – not very professional 🙁
I'm very tempted to move back to iTunes music and use the new Schwinn Class Tamer App simply for the option in the settings to really embiggen the font size so I can see it.
Question for you [wlm_firstname]…
If you had access to this type of constructive criticism, would you accept and use it?
If so how?
by John | Mar 6, 2014 | Instructor Training, Master Instructor Blog, Training With Power, Zone based Heart Rate Training
Take away their common language and destroy a great team. Wikipedia image
In the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, God wanted to prevent Man from building a tower that reached into the heavens. Construction of the tower was going along very well as everyone was working efficiently toward their common goal of reaching into the sky. Now I'm sure God could have just sent a storm to knock down the semi completed tower… but then Man would have simply started over. So instead he wrecked their construction team by causing everyone to speak a different language. Confusion was rampant since no one understood what the other's were saying. Construction halted and the team disbanded. Problem solved.
The recent survey we conducted included a number of questions about Teaching with Power – to get some understanding of “how's it going?” and the impact power has on your classes.
I see Instructors as bright people, who understand the root of many of the problems they encounter in class. So I asked the question:
It's Déjà vu!
Back during the Spring of 2011 we surveyed Instructors, asking the exact same questions – only about Heart Rate training. Unsurprisingly we got similar results.
So what can you do?
First you need to decide; “how much do I care about this issue?” Are you content to ignore it? Or are you someone who sees a problem and then looks for a way to solve it?
At the risk of sounding simplistic, all you need to do is create a common language between you and the other members of your Instructor team. Easier said than done, but don't make it too complicated.
And don't wait for Management – or expect them effectively solve this even if your Dept Head is 100% committed to the cause. Anything imposed on you and your team, without the voluntary buy-in from each team member, is guaranteed to fail. If you're in a Big Box and have experienced multiple new branded class formats, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Two weeks after the “big change”, everyone is back to their old style of teaching 🙁
My suggestion is to discuss this amongst yourselves. You could lead off by asking the question in an email with the intent to find a few other Instructors who see the problem:
Hi Team,
Do you feel like I do… that our class communication would be improved if we all spoke the same language around; Heart Rate and/or Power – Watts?
And then see what happens. Nobody wants to be forced into changing – but a few maybe willing to hear more from you. If you find some like-minded Instructors try to get them together – you might even offer to buy coffee. Present a simple solution; “my vote is we agree to only use 3/4/5 HR or Power Zones.” Just pick a number that everyone will agree on. Then discuss how do you decide the actual personal numbers that form the zones; Metabolic testing, Threshold tests, etc… Again you're looking for agreement, not who's right.
If you try this I'd love to know what happens.
by Joan Kent | Mar 3, 2014 | Master Instructor Blog
Image from http://adkjerseygirl.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/what-is-going-raw/
By Joan Kent
I’m often asked for my opinion about raw food diets, so I've done some research on them. Here’s what I think.
On the surface, it seems reasonable that raw foods would be better for us. After all, every process we put our food through, from start to finish, detracts at least a little from the nutrition. Raw foods would undergo the least processing, so they’d be more nutritious. Perhaps because of that, many raw foodies say they feel more energetic on a raw diet.
A couple of problems may occur with raw diets, though. One has to do with substances called goitrogens that some foods contain. These goitrogens can interfere with thyroid function, making it wise to limit or even avoid foods that contain them.
So which foods contain goitrogens? The list includes cabbage, peanuts, pine nuts, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, spinach, bok choy, cauliflower, soy, mustard greens, collards, radishes, turnips, and more. As you know, some of these foods have a well-deserved reputation for being nutrition-packed all-stars, so we don’t necessarily want to eliminate them.
The good news is that heat from cooking can effectively destroy goitrogens, so these very healthful foods can still be part of your diet — as long as you let go of the raw rule where they’re concerned. I was in the habit of juicing several of these raw foods and stopped when I learned this information. Now I always steam or saute them. In the case of soy, fermentation (miso, tempeh) will do the trick.
Another problem I’ve seen has to do with which “track” the individual chooses. It actually appears to be quite clear-cut: Some raw foodies go in the vegetable direction, some in the fruit direction. It’s the fruit direction that concerns me. Fructose, the sugar in fruit, is nasty stuff.
Health-wise, fructose can induce insulin resistance, decrease glucose tolerance (both may lead to diabetes); increase blood pressure; increase LDL (bad) cholesterol or make it smaller, denser and more likely to form arterial plaque; raise triglycerides and risk for heart disease; rapidly convert to body fat; increase clotting; interfere with copper absorption, which is necessary for hemoglobin; and cause cavities. It doesn’t stimulate leptin and or suppress ghrelin, leading to increased appetite. It’s addictive, may stimulate sugar cravings, and can cause malabsorption and gastro-intestinal disturbances.
Fructose is also a relatively ineffective training fuel, either pre- or post-training. It absorbs less rapidly than glucose during exercise, promotes less water uptake, leading to dehydration, blocks sodium absorption, and replaces glycogen poorly.
Raw foodies who favor fruit tell me how great it is to “eat raw” because they “can have pie for breakfast”, and it’s perfectly fine because it’s raw. The pie shell is typically made from crumbled nuts, while the pie filling is fruit puree. Variations on this theme can be found in stores. Whole Foods, for example, sells cookies resembling Oreos, with a cookie made of crumbled nuts and filled with a paste-like fruit puree.
The advantages of raw food diets would seem to lie in the consumption of lots of vegetables, as well as the elimination of many unwholesome foods. Someone who goes from eating lots of bread, cakes, desserts, and other sugar- or gluten-containing foods to eating plenty of raw vegetables will undoubtedly experience a noticeable shift in health, weight, energy, and symptom management.
But if you’ve already made healthful changes in your diet and don’t eat much junk of any kind, you’ll probably notice a less dramatic change when switching to raw foods. Even a subtle change may feel worth it to you, however, so make your own decision.
If you decide to switch to a raw diet, please do yourself a big health favor and lean toward adding more vegetables to your meals, rather than fruit. My suggestions here are simple: Cook any foods that contain goitrogens, and get on the raw vegetable track, rather than the fruit track.
Fructose is sugar, no mistake. And in quantity, fruit and fructose can pack quite a mean punch. The fact that they’re raw won’t change that.
by Gino | Feb 25, 2014 | Instructor Training, Master Instructor Blog, Training With Power
Different Methods Same Skewed Results
A different approach with a professional researcher still produced mixed results
Let’s start with the good news. I’m sorry, I was completely pulling your leg. I really don’t have any good news. I know, that’s terrible — you can throw pencils and small farm animals at me next time you see me. I was really looking for the good news in these results and I just can’t find any. This last series of retesting the same three bikes to see if we could garner the same or similar results each time we measure the bike has led to 2 out of the 3 bikes demonstrating a “skewed distribution” of data. In other words, data that you could not and should not try to predict with because they are in a word, unreliable. That means my hope for creating a “handicap” for each bike to render them even and fair for comparisons and competitions is not possible.
Statistical measurements often use Standard Deviation to determine how much variation there is in the individual readings or occurrences of data (in our cases — the differences between the actual power and the measured power). There is something called the “Emperical Rule” (http://www.pmean.com/08/SdTooBig.html) “…it says that approximately 95% of the data lies between plus and minus two standard deviations of the mean.” This 95% rule is for data with a “normal distribution”. This is what we were hoping for when we measured the same bike several times.
Please remember, this stage of the research was RE-measuring the same bikes, not measuring the differences in power between bike computer and actual power of the power pedals. We knew all along the pure accuracy would not be there, we were simply hoping that the amount or degree to which it was “off” would be consistent.
So getting back to our “Empirical Rule”. There is a corollary to that principle, and that is “If a non-negative set of data (which we have with our power numbers study) has a standard deviation that is more than half of the mean, it is an indication that the data deviates substantially from a bell shaped curve. Almost always this is an indication of a skewed distribution.” The second column to the end (right side) indicates if the distribution of repeat, same bike readings has a skewed distribution or not.
Bike 14 tested 3 separate times, looking for consistency between tests, for reliability to set bike handicaps.
With bike #14, it is notable that Trial #2 and #3 area actually fairly close except for at the 175 Watt stage. However, when we add our first set of numbers to the analysis, all but two wattage levels are skewed. If we just consider 1 bike, we might make a case that if we were to do 5 to 10 repeat trials, we might see these better numbers continue. This was something Sarah (our statistician) suggested as a next possible phase of the research; to conduct a much higher number of trials to see if we begin to see greater consistency or normalcy to the data.
Bike 1 tested 3 separate times, looking for consistency between tests, for reliability to set bike handicaps.
Again, with bike #1 we have only 2 out of 7 different wattage stages that are not demonstrating a skewed distribution of data. At a “gut feel” level, I was hoping to see less than 5 watts difference between measurements of power when it was the same stage. I was willing to accept a difference of 10 watts since accuracy was still not the main driver here. However, again we must remember this is not the power difference, but just the repeating values on the same bike — how reliable it is for a consistent representation of power. Unfortunately, 30% of all the individual stages rendered differences greater than 10 watts and statistically 4 out of the 7 stages were considered skewed.
A Glimmer of Hope?
Bike 19 tested 3 separate times, looking for consistency between tests, for reliability to set bike handicaps.
Our last bike does seem to show a glimmer of hope though. While this specific bike had some of the largest differences in actual to measure power differences (in the 15 to 25 watt range), at least it showed those big swings fairly consistently. Notice how small the Standard Deviation is compared to the average delta (simply means the difference) among all three trials. This thus demonstrates a more “normal” distribution and could indeed support a type of “Power Handicap”.
So perhaps I have saved the good news for last. Maybe… just maybe, this means that some bikes would be amenable to a type of handicap while others may not. Picking up on Sarah’s suggestion, a lot more research (translate that — time spent repeating tests on the same bikes, many bikes) might lead to a set of bikes that are “good to go” with a handicap, and a set that are not. Naturally, being the proverbial curious cat, I would want to find out if there is some reason the unreliable bikes are that way. We might even be able to take those bikes through a preventive maintenance routine, recalibrate them to the furthest extent, and repeat the same retests. If we come up with a majority of the bikes being statistically solid and reliable, then we have not only created a handicap system, but we’ve validated the calibration method.
However, having spent as many hours as I have so far on this project, I’ve hung my lab coat up for now, so you won’t be blinded by science from me or a while. If I were Keiser corporation though, I believe I would have a vested interest in picking up where this research left off. I have moved this conundrum past the “blank page” and created a possible path that they could very well negotiate to a workable solution for their clients. Perhaps many clients don't care. I get that – not everyone even uses the training tools. Yet they were bold enough to lead the industry with power and have played a major role in seeing this industry change for the good. I believe Joe Public is becoming increasingly more savvy when it comes to training, and this is rapidly becoming a more educated marketplace. Especially if they consider just their own clients, such an undertaking should be received very well, supporting their image as a company that takes training seriously enough to put in the time and energy to make it right.
