On eating

1. Jerk: heavy triple; 90% (of heavy triple) x 3 x 3
2. Power snatch: heavy triple; 90% (of heavy triple) x 3 x 3
3. Push-press: 75% x 5 x 4

Awesome bottom position from John, one of our newcomers.

I posted this link to the CrossFit Football nutritional prescription on our Facebook page today, and I wanted to mention it here for anyone who missed it. This is solid advice, and I wholeheartedly believe in this prescription and adhere to it myself and recommend it without hesitation to any of my athletes. Somewhat coincidentally, this is the first time I've actually come across this prescription from CrossFit Football, but it is nearly perfectly in line with the nutrition guidelines I've come to believe in over the years and articulated better than I could ever do myself.

There are a couple of especially noteworthy pieces I want to discuss. The first is the language "eat with abandon". This is solid advice, and I think one of the harder concepts to grasp for folks coming from a CrossFit background, especially if you've ever followed "The Zone". Folks want to "look better naked", and think they need to limit their intake in order to "get ripped". Well, throw that idea out the window. I've got news for you: you guys and gals all train HARD. Many of you are trying to follow both our weightlifting programming and regular CrossFit. This is incredibly demanding, and requires FUEL to keep you going. I'm a firm believer in the idea that you cannot over-eat on meat and vegetables. If you are eating quality food, eat as much of it as you can! Your snatches, cleans, jerks, squats, presses and pulls will thank you for it! You are not going to get fat. Eating meat and vegetables and training hard will not make you fat.

They also recommend limiting nuts, seeds, and fruit. Bingo. I've been on board with this for a while now. I know the CrossFit prescription is "meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar", but how many of you eat nuts by the HANDFUL? I'm not talking about five almonds, I'm talking about dipping your hand into the COSTCO jar and grabbing as many of those roasted and salted treats as you can, then going back for more. And don't even get me started on almond butter. How do you feel after eating all that? I've been there, and it's not nice. I don't like the word "paleo", but if you want to talk about what our ancestors ate, I'd be willing to bet they didn't eat nuts by the handful. They would have had to shell each and every one of those suckers individually. That's a pain in the rear. Easier to just dig up a few roots to eat probably and steal some eggs from a nest. And they weren't roasted and salted either. Plus, cooking nuts makes the oils in them turn rancid and does some bad stuff to you. I don't know all the science, but I've read enough about it to make me think twice about eating them and about cooking with stuff like grapeseed or olive oil. Nuts probably make a better choice than a Snickers bar, but my advice is in line with that of the CrossFit Football prescription, and that's to limit your consumption of them as much as possible. The same goes for fruit. Fruit is just sugar. I've always said that if you're going to eat a bunch of fruit, you may as well eat a handful of Skittles. Yeah, that's an exaggeration maybe, but you're going to get a pretty similar response from the two: spiking and crashing of the blood sugar and insulin response. Any time I eat an apple, I'm hungry twenty minutes later.

Anyways, the take-home message here is to eat good food, and to eat a LOT of it!