Shaq vs. Forrest Griffin, Weight Cutting Tip For Combat Athletes (& More) Weekly Round Up - 11 NOV 18

Every week I bring you the best in training & nutrition from around the web and social media. Sometimes it's my own content, sometimes it's not, but it's always something I found a gem in.

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Although ketogenic diets are popular for fat loss in the mainstream currently, they are frequently frowned on in athletic circles due to their affect on performance. Many experts like Dom D'agostino however, insist that given a long enough period of adaptation, this initially loss will be recovered. Here we have a fat adapted athlete crushing the fastest time for a 100 mile trail run. Although this is an ultra-endurance event, we are are beginning to see more athletes performing at very high levels under fat adapted conditions. It will be interesting to see if the ketogenic diet starts to take hold in the martial arts and combat sports, even if only in therapeutic applications after careers are over in order to help deal with the after effects of traumatic brain injury.

Congratulations to @zbitter! A great example of the potential of a fat-fueled athlete. https://t.co/gzcei5NrnX

— Benjamin Bikman (@BenBikmanPhD) November 11, 2018

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Although during my (short) amateur career as a combat athlete, I never cut weight for a fight, for most fighters an inevitable fact of life is cutting weight for an upcoming fight, and often feeling hungry. When you sit down to eat, and you've been hungry since your last meal, it's easy to miss your 80% fullness cue, and over eat. Here, we have a strategy from Alan Aragorn, which basically amounts to filling yourself up on water in advance of your meal. When I was young, all of my friends were on the wrestling team, and they would quite often use very poor choices to cut weight, like eating one slice of pizza and calling it good for the day. No matter how strategic, or backed by peer reviewed research a tactic like filling up on water before meals, should not be used until basic, sound nutritional skills, like focusing on whole foods and meal prep are mastered, however, for those combat athletes who must shed fat before a fight can use this trick to help make it through the inevitable periods of hunger that can last for days, weeks, or even months (note that this tactic can not be used during weight cutting in the week, or two prior to weigh in, when dehydration is the key strategy).

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The “Water Trick” is a uniquely effective tactic for dieters because it puts the focus on adding or increasing intake instead of reducing or taking it away. It’s ideal for occasions such as eating at restaurants or social/family gatherings. - The attached are my own research-adapted methods that work consistently in the trenches. The upper end of the guidelines (bravely) exceed the doses in the study protocols :). I nudged the 30 minutes down to a max of 20 minutes as well. Lo & behold, this almost never fails to curb the desire for large food servings, a second plate, or a post-meal dessert. - These tactics are ideal for those who want to default to lower caloric intake with minimal effort toward calculating or quantifying. - #inthetrenches #streetwisdom #boom

A post shared by Alan Aragon (@thealanaragon) on Nov 10, 2018 at 8:52pm PST

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Shaq vs. Forrest Griffin in the octagon?! It happened folks and you saw it here first! Of course this was just a little playful exhibition match, but it would have been nice to see Forrest go a little harder just to see what the weight and size vs. skill difference really would have made. Despite his tremendous size, Shaquille O'Neil was an incredible athlete who could really move, so although Griffin is the veteran here, Shaq's size and sheer athleticism could have posed a real challenge. I have a friend in Vegas who know's Griffin personally, and he says he's pretty banged up after his UFC career, so I'm sure just avoiding injury was the main objective here. As a martial arts instructor just cresting into middle age myself, I completely understand.

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In the video below, YouTube creator and meal prep extraordinaire Bobby Parish takes you on a tour of Costco to his top picks for eating well. I was shocked to learn about Costco's organic eggs receiving such a low ranking from cornucopia.com. For me it underscored that we should frequently check ourselves: what do I know, and how do I know it? Quite often the narratives the we spin in our own heads do not match up to reality. I had begun a narrative in my mind that all Costco products must be good, because that narrative aligned with how I feel about Costco as a company, and how they treat their employees. Similarly, people often sabotage their own efforts at nutrition by spinning a story around their choice like "it's okay I ate a dozen donuts just now, because I'm heading to the gym, and I need the pre-workout..."