I want your next season to be your very best, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalizing on your off-season lays the groundwork for a great season ahead. The off-season, or as I prefer to call it, the transition phase, is a time ripe with opportunity for long-term gains and consistent PRs. Who doesn’t want that?
Making the most of this time begins with adopting the right mental framework. This is why I prefer to talk in the terms of two phases:
CrossFit Downey owner Oscar Ramos works to shatter cultural ties to Big Soda and educate his mostly Hispanic membership on the dangers of sugary beverages.
As a child, Oscar Ramos was not allowed to go outside to play unless he drank his entire “fat bottle” of lime-flavored Gatorade.
A 32-ounce bottle of the so-called thirst quencher contains 56 grams of sugar, or about 14 teaspoons—more than double the 6-teaspoon daily limit the World Health Organization recommends for normal-weight adults. Added sugar is linked to metabolic and chronic diseases including obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Today, 37-year-old Ramos knows better than to drink Gatorade, soda or other sugar-sweetened beverages. But that’s not the case for all of his members at CrossFit Downey in Southern California.
“It’s our culture,” said Ramos, who is half Mexican and half Puerto Rican. “It’s gnarly.”
Hispanics have some of the highest percentages of diagnosed diabetes in the United States: 12.8 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “National Diabetes Statistics Report, 2014.”
This is what Ramos must battle as he attempts to educate athletes at his gym, which sits a mile northwest of a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
“It’s just educating people,” Ramos said, “not on soda but what soda’s trying to do and what … soda can do to you."
Having trained with Pavel Tsatsouline and many of his expert instructors, I understood how barefoot training helps us master the proprioceptive link between the foot and the ground to generate force and balance.
Welcome to our brand new weekend roundup, Three of the Best! Every Sunday, we'll post up Breaking Muscle's top three articles of the week. These pieces have caught your attention throughout the last seven days. So here they are in one place for you to consume, digest, and enjoy.
Film examines sugar-industry documents detailing PR campaign that mirrors the Big Tobacco playbook.
Someone probably forgot to shred them.
When the Great Western Sugar Co. shuttered a factory in Colorado in 1976, its records eventually found their way to Colorado State University. You can find a detailed index here, and toward the bottom of the list you’ll note a series of entries related to the trade group The Sugar Association Inc.
Dentist Cristin Kearns did exactly that, and when she dug through the boxes she found the confidential sugar-industry documents that are at the center of Michèle Hozer’s documentary “Sugar Coated.”
Trailer: “Sugar Coated”
Just over 90 minutes long, “Sugar Coated” uses the likes of journalist Gary Taubes and Dr. Robert Lustig to outline how increased sugar consumption is linked to obesity-related health issues.
“Sugar Coated” has to set the table for those who use the film as an access point to the sugar-obesity issue, and it does so at the expense of those who might want truly ruthless investigative treatment of an industry’s repeated and very successful attempts to influence governments and the public over several decades. Nevertheless, the film does a fine job of summarizing the whole issue for neophytes. Diet-conscious CrossFit athletes might find the scenes linking added sugar and obesity to be preaching to the choir, but that’s a minor criticism, and the reminder might actually be needed.
After all, the sugar industry has succeeded in yelling more loudly than science for about 30 years.
“Sugar Coated” is now available on Vimeo on Demand.
