Anyone who has ever chosen a CrossFit Gym for their workout routine, knows they are in for an intense workout that affects the entire body. Many CrossFitters associate the intensity of CrossFit based off the PHYSICAL responses; sore muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, how heavy the weight is, or how you feel mid workout in a 10 minute amrap of thusters and burpees. At this point many are even questioning why the hell they do this!
Effective workouts, however, are more than just the physical response – there is a whole other set of reactions going on INSIDE the body. All the important internal areas are being affected by this “intensity” and it affects your overall physical being.
As the owner of CrossFit Infernal in Chandler, Arizona, I have seen more than my share of athletes who come in, train hard and then literally have nothing left in the tank afterward. Why is this? Why is recovery sometimes so elusive? Well the short – maybe not so easy – answer, is post workout nutrition.
CrossFit by nature is VERY sympathetic (aka fight or flight mode) and extremely taxing on your central nervous system (CNS). By forcing your heart rate and blood pressure through the roof, taking muscles to damn near complete exhaustion over and over, and then asking your body to CONTINUE to work HARD for longer, your body is going to have to go into some sort of survival mode to allow you to continue to push.
In the beginning, your body will use its readily available/stored energy as fuel, for as long as it can, but at a certain point it’s going to need fuel INSTANTLY, and it’s not waiting around any longer. So now your body will start to access hormones, cortisol, and other essentials to keep you going.
Hormones play a very large part in your everyday life. They help with sleep, energy, performance, libido, stress control, etc., the list goes on. By continuously tapping these resources and NOT recovering them, you’re looking at a very dangerous and slippery slope. And these things take a LONG time to rebuild, and in some cases become so damaged that they DON’T rebuild (which I can bet a lot of you are at that point), and require external support.
So let’s talk rebuilding and recovery. What is the MOST EASY and EFFECTIVE way to achieve this? “Highly branched cyclic dextrin”, mixed with a quality ISOLATE protein (another topic for another day.) In a nut shell, this is a “sugar” and is broken down into such a pure form that your body literally uses ZERO digestion to break it down, making it instantly absorbed. When your body is in a state of crisis and it needs fuel NOW, it doesn’t have time to try and bring you back to life AND go through the difficult digestive process to get you what you need.
So, we make it easy on you. There is a product called Glycobomb and it contains HBCD, and IsoBomb (iso-protein) and it can literally change your lives. Trust me, it helps me DAILY, and I’ve watched it help more people than I can count. Where can you buy it? At CrossFit Infernal, DUHH 😉
For your own health, fitness, and wellness, ask yourself – how many times have you finished a Wod and literally NOT been able to move, and you try and walk out and forget your keys, or just feel brainless? How often do you feel the symptoms of tanking hormones, and how is it affecting your life? If this sounds like you, then you really need to start addressing your post workout nutrition and consider a product like Glycobomb or another iso-protein type product to get your body on the way to recovery quickly and painlessly without all the negative effects of a compromised central nervous system!
