Athletes who participate in indoor sports such as ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, squash, and swimming are at obvious risk of being vitamin D deficient because they are inside so much. But is participating in an outdoor sport any better?

Do indoor sports cause bone deformity?

Let’s start with the obvious. A 1987 German study measuring the vitamin D levels of gymnasts confirmed what we would expect. Indoor athletes are very likely to be vitamin D deficient.

In fact, 33% of the athletes had vitamin D levels so low that they were at risk for developing rickets, a severe form of vitamin D deficiency that affects the body’s ability to absorb calcium and causes horribly deformed bones.

The authors X-rayed the gymnasts and found 19 or the 85 athletes studies had visible signs of bone deformity consistent with adult rickets.

Outdoor athletes fare no better.

A similar Finnish study compared the Vitamin D levels of female gymnasts to female long distance runners. You would think that the athletes who are outside all the time would be protected from low levels of vitamin D. They were not. Strangely enough, the outdoor athletes were as deficient as the indoor athletes. To make matters worse, 67% of the young women had dangerously low levels of vitamin D.

Bone damage does not sideline competitive women

You would think as the vitamin D levels became low affecting bone formation that these athletes would not be able to compete, but they soldier on. Unfortunately, the authors were not concerned about athletic performance. So we don’t know if the girls with low levels of vitamin D performed better as their levels of vitamin D levels were raised.

Being in a sunny climate doesn’t seem to help much

It’s easy to dismiss these studies by thinking you are protected by living in a sunnier climate than Finland or Germany, or that you are an outdoor athlete. Think again.

A study of indoor and outdoor athletes in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar showed that 91% of the athletes studied had blood levels of 25 Hydroxy Vitamin D below 20 ng/ml. Close to 60% of these athletes also had lowered bone density putting them at risk for stress fractures and other injuries.

Vitamin D is the repair hormone

There is some thinking that vitamin D is the “repair hormone” and athletes need more vitamin D because of the extreme wear and tear caused by training and competing. While this hypothesis has not been proven, it makes some sense in light of the consistently low levels of vitamin D found in athletes.

TAKE ACTION! Get your 25 Hydroxy Vitamin D level checked by your doctor. If you are away at school already, you can order a home test kit from ZRT labs. You should get tested twice a year, once in late August, when you levels will be at their highest, the other in early March when your natural stores will be depleted and at their lowest.

Optimal range for an athlete is between 50-100 ng/ml with the sweet spot between 60-70. This is much higher than most doctors feel is necessary, but with the extreme stress a DIII woman athlete is under, it’s better safe than sorry. There is not much benefit shown above 80. Vitamin toxicity only begins to show up when blood levels are above 200 for an extended period of time.

World class Olympic athletes train at a whole different level than most. Because the Olympics come only once every four years and competition is so fierce, these athletes look for every edge they can get. Some Olympians have discovered that vitamin D helps in their training regimen by helping them recover faster from the rigors of world class conditioning.

Why recovery is the most important time of an athletes day

The most critical time for an athlete is the time she spends outside the gym recovering from training or competition. The more she recovers, the better she can perform at the next game or practice. Insufficient recovery leads to decreased performance, injury, and if enough fatigue accumulates, mental or physical burn-out. One of the easiest ways to accelerate recovery time is supplementing with Vitamin D.

Vitamin D was used to help 2002 German Olympic athletes

Vitamin D expert, John Cannell, MD, quotes an unpublished German study about how Olympic level athletes benefited from vitamin D supplementation generated special UV tanning beds.

The researchers reported reduced lactic-acid build up, decreased pulse rate (indicating increased oxygen uptake and utilization) and a clearly increased athletic output on all of the endurance tests in the irradiated athletes. The paper did not mention the exact percentage of increased athletic output; however, the following is stated in the summation of findings.

“On the whole, it may be concluded that the continuous and repetitive exposure of the body to sub-erythemal (that’s technical wording saying they did not spend enough time in the tanning bed to get pink) UV radiation optimizes the performance capabilities of top-level competitive athletes, as well as alleviating the occurrence of recovery time from minor injuries and infections.”

Vitamin D does more than help absorb calcium

For a long time, absorbing calcium was thought to be vitamin D’s only role. However, a pattern of association being uncovered in past and current research is showing that the “sunlight vitamin’s” effect goes way beyond assisting the body’s assimilation of calcium.

Why you shouldn’t wait for Vitamin D to become mainstream

It’s going to be a while before the linkage between vitamin D and athletic performance is accepted as a fact and Gatorade starts putting it in their product, but why shouldn’t you benefit now. Simply adding 5,000 iu of vitamin D a day to your diet inexpensive, extremely safe, and benefit you on and off the court with more endurance. Its already been proven to help build more fast twitch muscle, facilitate quicker recovery from minor injuries, and help strengthen immunity from cold and flus.

TAKE ACTION! Start taking 5,000 iu of vitamin D a day and schedule a 25 Hydroxy vitamin D test with your doctor to make sure your levels are in the 50-60’s.

If you’ve ever had shin splints, you’ll never forget the pain. It robs you of your strength and speed and once the muscles start tearing away from your shins, there isn’t much you can do except “suck it up” for the rest of the season.

Is rest the only cure?

We are taught by the training room that shin splints are caused by over training and/or running on different surfaces, grass, turf, pavement, indoors, etc. Once you have shin splints the only cure is rest.

An ounce of prevention

Well, maybe, I’m not convinced the cause of shin splints is simply mechanical. What if there was a way to prevent shin splints that did not require special exercise or extra time with ice and stim? What if there is a hidden reason your shins are tearing apart?

Shin splints seem to occur more often at the beginning of the season and often as athletes move outside after training indoors all winter. I don’t think this is a coincidence and it has nothing to do with treadmills are easier on the shins.

The love/hate relationship with inflammation

Intense training releases inflammatory molecules called cytokines. These molecules are the body’s hormonal signal to repair, re-build and strengthen the body which eventually leads to getting stronger and faster as an athlete. So simply turning them off with ibuprofen may cut into your building new muscle.

The problem is too much of a good thing. If you cannot properly regulate the expression of these hormones, they end up causing chronic and systemic inflammation.

How starting your season overwhelms your body with inflammation

So here is the scenario. You are training all winter in the gym, lifting weights, running on the treadmill. Pre-season begins and the intensity of your training picks up, a lot. Sure you train hard in the off season, but you cannot duplicate the adrenaline and competitive intensity of actual practice.

Why ice baths are good, but not good enough

The intensity of practice floods your body with cytokines and the inflammatory process begins. After a few days, you begin to feel the soreness and, if you are smart, you get into the ice bath after practice. But ice does not control the cytokines, it only temporarily slams the brakes on the inflammation process and numbs your legs.

Damage is done even while you sleep

After, while you are sleeping, the excess inflammatory hormones are doing damage. Unlike the off-season, you don’t have enough time to recover in-between practices. You are now working out at maximum intensity six times a week, maybe more if you have two-a-days. The damage the excess cytokines are causing begins to accumulate.

That feeling of dread returns

The pain in your shins starts to build. You feel like a dark cloud is gathering, and hope it will just go away, but it doesn’t. Your coach notices you are not running smoothly and calls you over. You can’t avoid telling the truth any more. She tells you to take it easy, but you both know, you will be in pain for the rest of the season. Does that story sound familiar?

Why everybody doesn’t get shin splints?

So here is the million dollar question, “How come everybody doesn’t get shin splints.” The answer lies in how different athletes down regulate, or control, the inflammatory cytokines.

How the body controls excessive inflammation

When an athlete is suffering from inflammatory injuries, like shin splints, the standard treatment is rest, but that is not the only way. Your body has its own way of handling inflammation.

One of the ways the body controls inflammation and allows rebuilding and strengthening is with sunshine, specifically the formation of Vitamin D. That’s why your shins heal up in the summer only to get worse again in the winter. It’s not just the change of surface that’s causing all that damage, it’s the loss of vitamin D.

Studies have shown that athletes with higher levels of vitamin D, have lower levels of cytokines. These athletes have enough of the hormones to trigger muscle and nerve growth, but not the excessive quantities that cause chronic inflammation and injury.

How to avoid getting stuck on the sideline with shin splints

As a competitive athlete, you cannot avoid training hard, and the inflammation that ensues, but you can control how well your body recovers from that training. Vitamin D is a key component to your time spent recovering outside the gym.

The greater your ability to recover, the more intensely you can train, and the better athlete you will become. Rest and recovery is the yin that allows for the yang of training and practice. That’s why I named this website The Yin/Yang University and I encourage DIII women athletes to think outside the gym.

If you cannot recover, you cannot train hard. If you cannot train hard, you will never become the athlete you know you can be.

TAKE ACTION! Click on the Vitamin D link above to learn more about what you can do to be healthy this year.

At some point in your college career, you might be inspired to make major changes in how you eat or train. In fact, by spending time in the Yin Yang University, you probably will. Just like in real estate where everything is “location, location, location,” everything in training to be an successful athlete is “timing, timing, timing.”

If you don’t have enough time in between workouts, you do not recover fully and your performance begins to degrade and eventually leads to mental and/or physical burnout. (The two are closely linked, but that’s a post for another day.) On the opposite end of the timing spectrum, if you have too much time in between workouts, you will never get stronger, faster or better.

Your body is habituated to your lifestyle. It’s used to eating at certain times, sleeping X hours, studying for Y hours. When you change your routine, the body has to go through an adjustment phase. That’s why no matter how much you prepare, you are sore when practices first get going at the beginning of the season. The greater the change, the more time the body needs to recalibrate. Major changes in diet are especially hard on the body.

It can take 30-90 days for your liver to adapt to manufacturing different enzymes when you change your diet. The same can hold true for cutting back on carbs or eliminating gluten from your diet. It can take 30 days for your body to switch from carb burning mode to fat burning mode. So you can see why the off season is the right time to make any significant changes in diet or training.

The England World Cup made headlines when they hired a big name chef/nutritionist to prepare food for the team. Instead of giving the players what they were used to eating, he prepared a “perfect recipe for success” specialized diet that was going to propel Team England to victory. The only problem was it backfired.

England had it’s worst World Cup performance in years. The British tabloids blamed in-fighting and team chemistry, but if any of you have quit drinking coffee or cut carbs out of your diet, you know how grumpy you can get! By adding the metabolic stresses of adapting to a new diet along with the already enormous pressure of performing in the biggest sporting event in the world, the English coaches screwed the pooch.

TAKE ACTION! First off don’t use this information to justify by habits that rob you of your performance. Eating crap, drinking too much and sleeping too little are not habits you want to keep.

If you have to make changes during the season, make the changes incrementally. For example, if you decide to stop drinking coffee because it’s interfering with your sleep, don’t go cold turkey. Reduce the amount you are drinking slowly over a week and finally stop a day or two before you have your day off. That way you can use your rest day to recover.

Ideally you will save the big changes and experimentation for the off-season or summer. Give your body at least 30 days to adapt. You will feel more confident in your body knowing that you have had time to adapt.

TAKE ACTION! This is self-explanatory and a great foundation to give your body the fuel it craves.

On of my favorite bloggers, Dr, John Briffa, points us to an interesting study of 17 year olds. The study noted a correlation between carbohydrate craving (like the sugar in Gatorade) and lack of energy. There is some evidence linking eating too much bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and sugar to poor quality of sleep.

This brings us to another study at Stanford University linking sleep and athletic performance. Basically the study said if you don’t sleep enough, your performance suffers. Initially I filed the Stanford study in the Duh! folder, but in light of Dr. Briffa’s article linking eating to many carbohydrates and poor quality sleep, I pulled the Stanford study back out.

Here Dr. Briffa explains.

One of the effects of low blood sugar is to cause the body to attempt to top up blood sugar levels internally, through the release of sugar from the liver. To do this, the body can ramp up activity in the so-called ‘sympathetic nervous system’, which plays an integral part in the stress response. The body can also release stress hormones such as adrenaline (epinephrine) that simulate sugar release too.

An activated stress response ain’t so good for sleep. At the very best it will impair the depth of sleep and our ability to feel truly rested. Worse than that, though, is its habit of waking people up at about 3.30 – 4.00 am and then not letting them get back to sleep again until about half an hour before their alarm goes off.

I’ve found in practice that rectifying blood sugar imbalance with a ‘primal’, relatively low-carb diet does wonders for improving energy and mood. And within a couple of weeks, it will have usually sorted out any craving for the carbohydrate-rich foods that usually are the cause of the problem in the first place.

TAKE ACTION! Get sugar out of your life. Stay away from deserts in the dining hall, eliminate soda and sports drinks, skip the cereal at breakfast, leave the sugar out of your coffee, and skip fruit juices. You will be stronger, have more energy and feel more motivated. What’s not to like?

Food can either fuel you up or drag you down. The wrong foods make you feel tired, depressed, mentally weak and rob you of the performance you are trying so hard to increase. What good is spending hundreds of hours in the weight room if that pizza dinner is adding extra inflammation that leads to a weak ACL?

Think outside the gym!

Many athletes have eliminated one or all of these foods and watched their performance break through to new levels.

There are three groups of foods that you should take a look at and try eliminating from your diet to see if they are causing metabolic friction and keeping you from performing and feeling great.

Summer is a great time to experiment and tweak your diet. I don’t recommend making changes during your season unless, you are sick or injured and under supervision of a health care specialist.

OK. Here are the usual suspects.

Sugar - It seems like this one is a no brainer, but many college athletes succumb to the quick burst of energy provided by sugar and fail to account for the long term degradation of their performance. Sugar causes inflammation in the body and sets up your metabolism to burn only sugar. A sugar based metabolism requires constant feeding and sets you up for manic/depressive type energy swings.

Take Action - Skip soda, gatorade, candy, ice cream and sweet cereals for starters. Then start limiting desert to a special treat once a week. Then when you have got control of your sugar, ban it from your diet except for very special occasions. You’ll be surprised how little you miss it once you kick the addiction.

Dairy - milk and milk products have two problems. First is the most obvious, some athletes have some degree of intolerance. Food intolerances cause inflammation which robs your body of recovery. If you cannot recover from workouts, you cannot get stronger, faster or better. The second issue is too much milk and cheese can imbalance the calcium/magnesium balance in your body. This can also cause performance robbing inflammation and if it gets bad enough, muscle cramps and stress fractures.

Take Action - Remove all dairy from your diet for two weeks. See how you feel. If you don’t notice any improvement in your body, mind or spirit, slowly begin re-introducing milk into your diet.

Extra Credit - Raw milk from grass fed cows is a super food. Many people who are dairy intolerant are actually just intolerant of dairy processing. It’s amazing what they do to a glass of milk before you drink it. Many dairy intolerant athletes find they do just fine with the real stuff! I drink raw milk from our cows and love it! See if you can track down a source of raw milk at your local farmer’s market.

Grains - by now you know about gluten intolerance, but there are other problems with grains that can fly under the radar. You may not be officially allergic to gluten, but grains might be blocking absorption of nutrients critical to peak performance.

Take Action - See if grains are holding you back. Eliminate grains from your diet for two weeks. That means bread, pasta, pizza, wraps, cereal, oatmeal. Stick with fruits, veggies, meats and eggs.

For more information check paleo for athletes.

British nutrition expert Dr. Briffa thinks so. I tend to agree. Most athletes don’t need that many carbs in their diet, especially the crap carbs found in dining halls.

Yesterday, I was in the car again and listened to the men’s final featuring Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Djokovic won (impressively). In fact, he’s won 48 out of 49 matches this year, and has risen in the ranks to become the number one player in the World.

How’s he done it? A lot of hard work and self-belief, I should imagine. But he also attributes much of his success to a change in diet in recent months. It turns out that he was diagnosed with sensitivity to gluten (a protein found in grains such as wheat, oats and rye) and has eliminated it from his diet. I read that, as a result, he feels lighter and stronger.

I’m delighted for Novak Djokovic, but not surprised. I’ve seen countless individuals remove gluten-containing foods, and in particular wheat, and feel tonnes better for it. If Djokovic is gluten sensitive, then he will obviously have benefitted from getting this out of his diet. However, let’s not forget that there’s plenty of other things grains don’t have going for them, like being rich in substances called ‘lectins’ that can provoke food sensitivity problems and ‘phytates’ that impair the absorption of nutrients.

Here are the supplements:

Vitamin D
Iodine
Fish Oil
Magnesium
MSM

1) Why no multivitamins? - every athlete has unique nutritional needs. Studies have shown that nutrient needs can very from person to person, even amongst twins! A multi-vitamin is only needed if you don’t eat real food.

2) I already eat healthy, do I need to take these supplements? Ultimately, the choice is yours. However, most athletes benefit from taking one or more of these supplements. These supplement are chosen because our American civilized lifestyle creates some nutritional black holes. The fact is every culture has these black holes, and so does every athlete. If you can identify these deficiencies, a whole new level of strength, speed, and mental toughness are available.

3) Should I take more? Maybe. True athletes always want more, more training, more practice, etc. The desire for more is at the core of what it is to be a competitive athlete. However, it is also the achilles heel of many athletes. Work with getting these five supplements right, you may find after that you have enough.

Zen story about “maybe”
Origin of the phrase achilles heel

Vitamin D

Sunshine exposure and vitamin D levels have been shown to influence, pain, heart disease, diabetes, parkinson's, cancer, infections, weight gain, mental health and many other conditions. Now that Spring has sprung, and the midday sun has enough power to activate your body's production of vitamin D, it's time to review your vitamin D supplementation.

1) Get your 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels tested. If you are lower than 65 you need to supplement and/or get out in the sun.

2) Get 15 minutes of midday (11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.) sunshine on your face and arms each day. Any type of sunscreen or UV coating on glass will stop your body from making the vitamin D. Many face creams and even make-up now has sunscreen added.

3) Take at least 2,000 i.u of vitamin D3 a day even during the summer.

4) If you cannot get out in the sun regularly you need to take at least 5,000 iu of D3 a day.

5) If your test shows your vitamin D levels are low, you can take as much as 10,000 i.u a day to recover from your deficiency.