into your bloodstream to be used as energy for your workouts.
Always remember that your body doesn’t waste much and unfortunately it doesn’t discard unused calories like a dog shaking water from its coat.
Protein and carbs both have about four calories in each gram, but all fat —saturated, polyunsaturated, or monosaturated — has nine calories in each gram.
A rule of thumb is to consume roughly 2-3 grams of carbohydrate daily for each pound of body weight.
Don’t be fooled by “lean” or “extra lean” ground beef labels, or labels that proclaim “10 percent fat” or, “90 percent lean.”
While you should include protein in your meals throughout the day, research shows that it’s vital to consume some immediately after training, specifically, within 30 minutes of your workout.
Do 15 minutes of extra training and trim a couple hundred calories from your daily chow, and you go to bed at night with 300 to 450 fewer calories. Do this for a week and a half and there will be one less pound showing on the bathroom scale
CHAPTER THREE
All About Calories
Calories: We count them and curse them; we ignore them and try to “burn them off;” and then in our depression, we binge on them. What the heck are these little demons, anyway?
Some scientists define a single calorie as the amount of energy it takes to raise one gram of water (about a thimble full) one degrees Celsius. That is good to know the next time you want to heat up a thimble of water, but for our purposes here, let’s define a calorie as one unit of energy. You need lots of units to kick, punch, grapple, spar, perform kata, and thump on the bags. You need calories to train and you need them to lie on your couch and read this text. How many you need depends on the intensity you bring to these activities: easy days require fewer units than those days when you have killer workouts. The trick is to know how many to take in.
Since we all have different bodies and we all work, study, rest, and play at different intensities, each of us has different calorie needs. If you live, train and love hard (you animal!), you need more calories. But if you are a laid back kind of person, favoring the couch over painting the garage, and tai chi over Brazilian jujitsu, you don’t need as many because you don’t burn as many. It’s a simplification, but think of calories as gasoline you put into your car. When you accelerate hard and brake hard at stoplights, you need to refuel more often since you burn lots of gas. But when you accelerate slowly and brake gradually, you don’t need to refuel as often because easy driving uses less fuel. Before we burn any additional gas or calories here, let’s take a quick look at the components of nutrition.
We begin with the macronutrients: carbs, fat and protein. Knowledge of each one is important when calculating the caloric needs for your training, for your all-important recuperation and growth process after your workout and for your health needs in general.
Carbohydrates, or carbs, are found almost exclusively in plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, peas and beans. Milk and milk products are the only foods derived from animals that contain a significant amount of carbs. After you chew and swallow them, your body breaks them down further, converting them into blood glucose (blood sugar) to fuel your muscles, organs and brain for your daily activities, including your training sessions. An insufficient intake of carbs results in sluggish thinking and physical fatigue, attributes clearly not wanted by a hard fighting warrior.
In one study where participants were asked to exercise to exhaustion, those who ate a high-carbohydrate diet could continue exercising almost three times longer than those who ate mostly fat.4 Even when trying to lose weight, it’s vitally important that you take in enough carbs to fuel your body for all that you do in a day.
Carbs are categorized as simple or complex, which refer to their molecular structure and how the body uses them. Simple carbs have either one sugar molecule, called monosaccharides, or two molecules, called disaccharides, while complex carbs have three or more. Simple carbohydrates are usually low in nutritional quality, while complex carbohydrates are more nutritious, containing dietary fiber, vitamins, and minerals. In general, complex carbs are of greater value to your martial arts because they yield more energy for a greater period. Here is a list of the most common in each category:
Complex Carbs
CerealsBananasPearsWhole-grain breadsLegumesNutsPotatoes
Simple Carbs
Candy barsCookiesHoneySyrupWhite breadsCakes, pastry
There is nothing in the “Simple Carbs” list that you want in the finely-tuned fighting machine that is your body. We aren’t saying that you need to eat like a monk and never enjoy pancakes or a chocolate bar (don’t even get co-author Demeere started about the superiority of Belgian chocolate). We just encourage you to tread softly around these goodies. Maybe consider them a treat to enjoy on your Dirt Day (see Chapter 7) or, if you can justify the calories, on those days when you don’t train. But they should be avoided before training and on competition day for reasons explained in the next section.
Basic Wellness is Important, Too
In your study of health and nutrition, never skip over anything that relates to your basic wellness, your basic health. We mention this because so many students don’t care about their general health but are more interested in what it takes to get energy to train, recuperate, kick faster, punch harder, get stronger, and so on. They don’t consider that if they aren’t healthy they can’t put their all into their training. Always strive for optimum health first, before you go for the extras. Your mother was right: Eat your vegetables!
The Glycemic Index (GI) is a system that rates carbs as to how fast they are broken down and sent into your bloodstream to be used as energy for your workouts. The higher a specific carb scores on this chart the faster it enters your system. Think of the listed foods in the table as a comparison against pure glucose, which is 100 percent. If a food is absorbed faster than glucose, it scores over 100 percent. While having a quick backfist is a good thing, eating carbs that quickly enter your bloodstream isn’t.
After your body burns high scorers, your energy drops fast, commonly referred to as an “energy crash.” This is one of many reasons why you shouldn’t eat candy bars, doughnuts or other simple sugars before training or competing. They might give you a fast boost of energy, but too soon you are running on empty, with an hour left of class or an entire afternoon at a tournament. Low-scoring carbs, however, yield energy to your punches and kicks over a prolonged period, keeping your blood glucose steadier and preventing those sudden, bone weary crashes.
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