👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #57 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (4 min read):
🍫 Curbing blood sugar with the Glucose Goddess
You'd be pretty sceptical of anyone who’s a self-proclaimed Goddess.
But French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé knows what she’s on about.
Better known as the Glucose Goddess, she’s out to help us understand the role of blood glucose in our lives.
See, glucose is a type of sugar found in some foods.
It’s our main source of energy.
We eat it. Digest it. Absorb it. Then transport it through the bloodstream to our cells, converting it to energy.
Our blood glucose (or blood sugar) level is the amount of sugar in our bloodstream at a given time.
Having stable glucose levels is critical to our health and performance.
The opposite is high glucose variability (lots of “spikes”).
High glucose variability is linked to fun stuff like diabetes, insulin resistance, heart disease, Alzheimer's, fatty liver disease, cancer, inflammation and aging.
But it’s also linked to our performance. Science shows that balancing your glucose levels can help:
- Sleep, fatigue and energy dips
- Brain fog and migraines
- Cravings and hunger
- Immunity
- Mental health
- Gut health
- Skin and wrinkles
- Hormones and fertility
- PCOS symptoms
- Weight loss
- Inflammation
So... we probably wanna pay attention to it.
What spikes our glucose?
Mostly high-carb foods.
But that doesn't mean we have to avoid them. Absolutely not.
We can eat them intelligently.
Our French biochemist has 12 science-based hacks to help stop glucose spikes.
Which all make sense once we understand this:
We digest different foods at different speeds.
Carbs, fats, protein and fibre all digest at different rates. Carbs are the fastest. Fats are the slowest.
So eating carbs with (or better, after) fat, protein and fibre slows down how quickly they're absorbed. Which helps limit our glucose spikes.
The only time we don't wanna do this is when we're fueling before or after training.
Most of Jessie’s hacks are based on this underlying knowledge.
Examples:
- 🥦 Eat veg first / veg entré
- 🥑 Throw avo and eggs on your morning toast
- 🍨 Satisfy your sweet tooth with dessert rather than an isolated snack
There's also a handful of other tools which can help curb spikes:
Short walks after meals (or any activity), vinegar or cinnamon with meals, and cold water immersion a few times a week are all tools to buffer glucose spikes.
But all the hacks are probably worth a read.
Everyone responds to food differently. And there's now wearable tech that can give you live feedback on your own glucose response... But more on that soon. In the meantime, these are good tools to keep in mind.
🤕 The best injury antidote
If you play sport and don't like being injured, consider lifting heavy things.
Research looked at over 26,000 people with 3,400 injuries and found "strength training reduced sports injuries to less than 1/3 and overuse injuries could be almost halved".
Even something as minimal as 3x 25 kettlebell swings (with a heavy-ish weight), twice a week would make a huge difference (vs nothing).
🏋 Recharge your strength signalling
When you start doing strength training, progress is rapid.
After a while, it slows.
The big jumps aren’t as big.
See after we train, our muscle cells signal to the body saying “hey we need to repair and regrow here”.
It starts a domino effect of reactions that rebuilds our muscles bigger and stronger.
The process is called anabolic signalling.
And the signal is shorter and weaker in trained athletes (vs untrained).
They reckon this might be why we plateau in training after a while.
Here’s the cool thing:
Research in the Journal of Molecular Sciences found a way to revive the signalling pathway in trained athletes:
A 10-day rest (or back off) period from training.
The signalling process was good as new (without affecting muscle size).
Practically, this probably looks like a detraining week every 5-8 weeks. Which is exactly what performance wizard Andy Galpin recommends.
Maybe more often for elite athletes training at a super high intensity. And longer for untrained folks.
Note: putting the feet up for a week can cook our momentum. So going lighter and mixing things up is probably the go – we’ll still get neural and recovery benefits.
So if you’ve stopped improving, consider a lighter week in the gym every couple months.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
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The Everyday Athlete Newsletter is not a licensed health service and is not a substitute for professional health advice, treatment or assessment. The information given in this email is general in nature, written for a specific audience. If you’re struggling, please see a healthcare professional.
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