Beetroot Juice = Improve Endurance

In my previous post I was about to embark on a little supplementation experiment with beetroot juice and its effects on endurance.

I loaded Thursday, Friday and Saturday with 70ml each day coupled with some apple juice to taste it up a little.

As usual I salt loaded Friday lunchtime and had my regulatory Powerade pre game (50% Powerade and 50% water) but I also added my last beetroot juice load to that drink.

The results?

Nothing world beating but I managed to get through the entire 4 quarters rather well for my near non existent endurance training regime. We got pumped as well which means there was a ridiculously high volume of ball coming into our backline which meant you barely got your breath back before you had to go again. I also had 3 blokes changing through my position so they were fresh as daisies. Yep, tough day at the office!!

I will continue with this throughout the year except I will load from Wednesday which I would have done last week but I couldn't find anywhere to get it until Thursday.

Hopefully I'll also be able to hit the training track with a little but more frequency too which will help but you'll be amazed how you're endurance can improve simply through running as hard as you can throughout a game.

So if you're one of those blokes like me who can't get to training for whatever reason (hopefully it's a good one though, not a lazy one) then get as much out of a game as you can. Don't just run for the sake of it, but run to receive, run to make space, run to assist a teammate. These are all things that you should be doing anyway.

Beetroot Juice = Improved Endurance?

At the best of times of times my endurance sucks balls. At my absolute fittest back in the mid 90's, I could maintain a fast sprint with rest but a decent continuous pace is not what my body was made for.

This year I think I've only been able to get to footy training no more then 5 times with 2 full games and an intraclub game under the belt.

So it's fair to say I'm so far behind the 8 ball it's ridiculous. So I'm looking for any edge I can get at this point.

Enter Beetroot Juice.

I first read about the benefits of beetroot juice in regards to improving endurance a few years ago and with my great history of not trying new foods, never really gave it a second thought.

With already a bunch of injuries at my footy club this year (we're only up to round 2 and had 6 - 8 changes this week!) then I need to be able to run out a game sooner rather then later.

Beetroot juice contains nitrate which for all you supplement taking gym goers will recognise as the nitric in nitric oxide (NO Explode). Unless your one of those blokes who just take supp's becaase your mate is then you should also know that nitrate increases the diameters of your blood vessels allowing for greater blood flow to working muscles.

On Wednesday after Google searching then ringing a bunch of places that haven't stocked the stuff in years (take your websites down when you're out of business areseholes!!) then I finally got onto an Everlyn Gaye shop in South Melbourne on Thursday that had just plain old beetroot juice where I made my purchase and off I went.

So Thursday, Friday and again tomorrow I have had 70ml of the beetroot juice with some apple juice for tasty purposes and we'll see how it rolls. A 1 liter bottle costs $8 so it's cheap enough and pretty easy to drink with the apple juice.

I only managed to train Thursday this week so I haven't gone and ran a bunch of marathons (thoughts with Boston by the way) to improve my endurance and I eat the same foods Thursday to game time so if I see any improvements then it will be from the juice.

In the next few days I'll report back with how it went.

Training Stuff You Never Even Knew Existed

It's 3/4 time in the Bombers / Demons game and it's 102 points so there could simply not be a better time to put together a little blog post.

How do most blokes train in the gym?

Go in, lift some weights for 3 sets of 8 - 12 then go home.

Not much thought goes into it. It's been done like that for years so it continues to stay that way. What stands out more than anything is that this style of training will rarely give you much in the way of actually making you a better footballer. You might get stronger in the gym buy when did you ever do a 100kg bench press in a football game? You might leg press (yes, leg press actually made it into my blog...it only took 3 and a bit years!) 200kgs but when did you ever do something resembling that on a Saturday? Never I hope.

Before I go on just be sure that I am not one of those people that thinks genetics is everything otherwise this blog would be useless but AFL players have something genetically over most of us. They are either bigger, faster, stronger or much better natural runners then everyone else. So for them, a lot of their gym training is based around just keeping the body strong, not to actually shatter powerlifting records, and to build enough armor to combat collision after collision as well as to ward off non contact and contact injuries.

Take someone like Lewis Jetta for example. He is freakishly quick so I assume a lot of his training is to build his endurance and strength. That is piss easy to program for and it's basically all up to him to how far and how hard he attacks this to become the complete player.

Most of us in amateur and local football leagues need to train differently then most blokes described above. We might not be blessed with blistering speed or natural body strength so we can't train the way someone who does have these traits and expect to be just like them.

Over the coming weeks I'll list some things that I have trained in my own training that you probably didn't even know existed, why to train them and how to do train them.

Things like force absorption, eccentric overload, forefoot, breathing patterns, core training, speed strength, strength speed, contrast methods, sprinting and anything else I can think of that I haven't really covered yet on this blog.

As always if there's something you've heard about or seen that you'd like to know more about then let me know via the Facebook page and I'll put something up on that too.