 Joel Younkins We all know Nutrition is important, especially if you're trying to improve your physique and physical performance. I've said it before, that your nutrition should be built around your training goals and lifestyle, so today we're going to dive a little into one part of building your nutrition into your training and lifestyle. Let's enter the world of Pre Workout Nutrition! Pre WO Meals fall into this category called Nutrient Timing. It's not the most important element in regards to a proper meal plan, but it's up there and it can either drastically improve or decrease performance in your workouts depending on how you utilize this. First, let look at what a Pre Workout Meal can look like.
Second, it's good to realize why Pre WO Meals are important.
Make sure, that you get something in you before your workouts (preferably some protein carbs together). Whether that's a regular sized meal 1-2 hours before your workout, or something smaller 30-45 minutes prior to training, it will be extremely beneficial to your training progress and physique goals. Talk soon! P.S. This was a direct insert from my latest weekly VIP Newsletter. If you liked what you read here on this page, and would like to read more information like this in regards to your training progress, be sure to subscribe by clicking the button below! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!
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 Joel Younkins In this Lifestyle Blog, I wanted to share a collective list of 10 Things that all Motocross & Off Road Racers should be doing regularly to help physically prepare them for competition. This is not the only 10 Things that you need to be doing, but if you can check off all of these, you're in a very good place in your Physical Preparation. Check out this list below to see if your checking off all of these boxes... 1.) Strength Train 2-3 times per week You're a racer, you need to be strong for performance reasons and for injury prevention reasons. Strength Training isn't just about weight lifting a barbell either, it can be body weight exercises, bands, dumbbells, and machines. Using a combination of these training tools 2-3 times a week will help improve strength levels! 2.) Perform Mobility/Flexibility Drills during each gym session If you want to feel good and help your chances to remain healthy, perform some Mobility & Flexibility drills during your gym workouts. I'd suggest performing Mobility Drills in your warm up and using some Stretching Exercises as a cool down. By doing this, you can help even increase the length of your career! 3.) Perform an active warm up before your races Be physical ready to go when the gate drops, and stop relying on just adrenaline to get you going. Whether you perform some light cardio work, calisthenics, or some mobility drills, this will help ensure you are physically ready to compete from the get go! 4.) Perform both Low Intensity and High Intensity Conditioning When performing your Conditioning Training, make sure you don't fall into the categories of performing only Low or just High Intensity work. You will need a combination of both throughout your competitive season. Think; Low Intensity=Build Endurance & High Intensity=Strength of Heart Muscles! 5.) Consume lean protein at every meal Protein isn't just for Bodybuilders, it's for everyone, especially athletes. Protein will help you rebuild from vigorous training, practice, and competition. It will help protect against muscle loss and it will help rebuild every cell in your body. A few lean protein sources could include, Chicken, Steak, Ground Beef (90/10 or leaner), Eggs, Turkey, Fish, and Whey Protein! 6.) Consume "clean" carbs at every meal For racers, carbs mean energy. It is very important that you are feeding yourself clean carbs at every meal. This will help you recover from hard workout and practice, but also allow you to fuel up for the next session. Don't fall into the Keto trap unless you want to see your performance decline! 7.) Consume "healthy fats" over trans fats Trans fats do nothing for you unless you are starving to get in calories. They yield no positive Physical Performance benefits other than them being extra calories if you're in dire need of them. Trans fats are fried foods, baked goods, and most fast food places. Get majority of your fats in by consuming healthier options fats like Olive Oil, Avocados, Nuts, Coconut Oil, Butters, etc instead of fast food spots. 8.) Drink at least half your body weight in ounces of water every day This is your minimal requirement. If your urine isn't pale yellow to clear, you need to drink more of it! 9.) Add salt to your meals Salt is great for balancing out all of the water that you've been drinking. It will help improve the functions of your muscles as well. Add small amounts of Iodine Salt to your meals just to taste. More is not necessarily better! 10.) Plan your riding practices I'm not a riding coach, but believe me, you need to have a plan when you practice. I see too many racers just trying to log in as many 30 minute motos in as possible. And this is good, but are there areas that you need work on to improve your game, but you're neglecting because you are not planning for it? Have certain objectives each riding session and be sure you're addressing your weak areas, this is what practice is for, to improve your skills. When your riding your bike with a high amount of efficiency, you will you save a lot of energy! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins It was not too long ago, all the hype made it seem like the holy grail to your success with your workouts was to use a Foam Roller religiously. Now many Fitness Professionals claim that Foam Rolling is made out to be a waste of time when looking to improve your training sessions and quality of muscle health. What's going on here? Just like what happens to so many topics in the Fitness Industry, sides get taken and we end up with extremes. Seems like a line has been drawn in the sand once again... What is my take on this topic, and what do we do? Lets discuss! First, Foam Rollers are intended to help you "massage" your soft tissue (muscles and fascia) on your own. Whether you are stiff, sore, or suffering from a muscle strain, a Foam Roller is a possible tool to help your problem. Research is still very limited on Foam Rolling since it's a relatively new tool, but in the research that we do have, it shows to have some good short term benefits. And this is where my philosophy lies with using them. I do not believe that Foam Rolling is the key to fixing all of your muscle issues. But what I do believe is that it can make an impact to help you feel better in a short term time frame. These attempts to create short term progress over an extended time, can potentially add to for long term progress of keeping your muscles healthy and pliable. I also believe that if you are experiencing some acute muscle shortening in certain areas, foam rolling can help work these issues out before they get out of hand and you get yourself into deep water. For example, if you're running a lot, your I.T. Band (long muscle on the side of your leg) may start tightening up. Before it gets too debilitating, you could use a foam roller to help reduce this tightness and discomfort. We have many case studies here at our facility of using a Foam Roller and other self massage tools (like a PVC Pipe and Lacrosse Ball) to help clean up some of these small issues, before they become larger issues and need to be outsourced for more aggressive measures! Where I think a Foam Roller really shines is before your warm up. Because Foam Rolling seem to have short term effects, performing 5-10 minutes of Foam Rolling prior to your warm up can potential help you "feel better" before you even start to train (the psychological benefit could be just enough to enhance your workouts). Whether you're still a little sore from previous training, stiff from driving in your car, or dealing with some tight areas on your body, I 100% believe that Foam Rolling can help reduce some of these symptoms to allow you to feel better and receive a higher quality of workout. So what do we do at JYT with our Foam Rollers? Basically what I have already outlined above. We program in a couple different mandatory Foam Rolling movements for our clients to perform before each session. We have them roll out their back 30-60 seconds, their glutes 30-60 seconds each side, and their quads for 30-60 seconds before every workout. If they have any other tight or tender areas, they can roll those areas out as well. After this series, we then begin our active dynamic warm up. We don't live and die by Foam Rolling, but when you have a few of them on hand, the reality that they're pretty cheap, and it only takes a couple of minutes to potentially just feel better before you start your workout, to me it's a no brainer to incorporate into a training program. But before you jump on a Foam Roller, don't expect it to magically heal a serious injury like a herniated disc or a pulled hamstring. Just realize that for only a couple minutes to get some short term benefits for your workout, it may be really worth that time and effort to sneak this in before each workout. Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins I think it's becoming quite clear that a lot of coaches/former athletes/parents are concerned about athletes specializing in a sport too young or even in high school. Times are catching up where we are realizing that our young athletes are getting overuse injuries from their sport, can throw a ball better than they can perform a push up, and have a sports schedule that is all year round now. Times are changing fast, and the model for our young athletes don't seem to be changing any time soon. Have things gone too far to turn back around? Is there anything we can do to help manage their year long sport schedule? My goal for this Lifestyle Blog post is to help allow you understand why Early Sport Specialization could be detrimental to young athletes, realizing that it's probably not going to change any time soon, and that if we choose to stay this route what I think can help solve a couple concerns that come with this sport schedule. What Are The Main Issues With Early Sport Specialization? At first glance, it may seem like a good idea to specialize an athlete early on in their sports career (12 and under) if they show signs of excellence in it. The thinking of trying to capitalize on talent at a young age could only give them a much more advantage in the future. Or have the thought of, everyone else is playing year round, my child better do the same if he/she doesn't want to get left behind. But any extreme actions will always come with a cost. There are some negatives to this, so let me point out a few flaws that could potentially happen to these athletes.
Please let these implications sink in before we move on... I'm Not Sure What The Future Holds When I was in Youth Sports, Junior High, and High School, I was never really aware of the idea of specializing in one sport, even though by the time I was 16, I was left focusing on one sport 100% which was football. I never looked at it as "specializing," I just wanted to focus on football and to be honest, I rather play football and train for it more than I rather play for other sport teams. So personally, I can't say I am confused by this new wave of sports culture, but I know if I could go back I would change a couple things. This Lifestyle Blog isn't about me, just giving you some insight, so lets move on... The reality of players specializing in one sport is a normal conversation in the athletic world. Athletes are specializing much younger now too. Unlike waiting until you're deep in your high school career. Trends are taking place in sports to go all in because of competition levels are raising each year. Few athletes seem to have the athletic abilities to jump from sport to sport and still outperform the athletes that play it all year round. But for the rest, they may feel pressure to focus on one sport very early on. Below are a couple reasons where the pressure is coming from.
So as much as I'd love to see some pressure released from these young athletes and rebuild a sports model in this country that encourages our youth and high school athletes to play multiple sports. And to allow athletes, parents, and coaches to have the awareness that when it comes to college, the cream will rise to the top. But for now, I just don't see that shift happening anytime soon. What Do I Think Should Happen Next? You can call me being biased all you want right now, but I have come to grips that this model of athletes playing all year round isn't going anywhere any time soon. It may take a couple generations for this to die off. But until then, I highly suggest that these athletes coming to realization that if they want to play Baseball, Volleyball, Motocross, Basketball, etc all year long, then you better be spending at least 8 months out of the year in the gym building physical abilities and preventing yourself from injuries. High concentrations of repetitive movements is a recipe for injuries, unless you are doing something about it to build and protect yourself physically off of the field, court, or track. Two to three times a week of short gym workouts can go a long ways to keeping an athlete healthy and on a positive note, actually allow you to play this sport that you're so passionate about, at a higher level! Conclusion I get it, athletes are specializing too early too often. Coaches are struggling to fill rosters because athletes are limiting their sports that they play. Injuries are happening that shouldn't and some athletes are missing out on certain athletic abilities that their sport doesn't provide. But try to get comfortable with this culture of athletics, because myself and your Facebook posts about Christian McCartney article about playing multiple sports aren't going to change anything (yet). We have to figure out ways to keep our young athletes safe and healthy if this is the road we're letting them go down. I am highly against specializing at the youth level, but once the athlete becomes mature enough to start thinking about their future (13-16 years of age) and they want to start focusing more on one sport, you better be ready to keep their physical abilities up to speed with their sport skills. We can at least try to do this for our athletes! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins Have you ever said, "I don't have great balance"? Whether you're referring to balance in general or balance in a specific skill. If you've never had to say this, I'm sure you're aware of the idea of feeling unbalanced from time to time. Quite often, balance gets brought up in the training world and people speculate on ways they think how they can improve it. In this Blog I'm going to explain to you how most people think to improve balance and how to actually improve balance, both generally and specifically! What Most People Think Is Balance Training When people think of training methods to improve balance, both generally and physically, they would assume to train on unstable objects. For example, Bosu Balls, Swiss Balls, Indo Boards, are just a couple of options. They believe that if you make the surface unstable, that it will help the "small muscles," "core," and "coordination" with everything else that you do physically. There is a flaw to thinking this way. Training on unstable surfaces can be great for the rehab setting. Going from unhealthy, back to baseline health. But in the world of going from baseline to improve performance, training on unstable surfaces majority of the time, is a waste of time and can even be counter intuitive to your training. When you train on something unstable, you drastically decrease the amount of force that you can produce. This means you become weaker. Imagine that you're walking with shoes on a sheet of ice. You stop and tell yourself to either jump as high as possible or to start sprinting as fast as possible. What will happen next is that you can't, your body will shut itself down to purposely to make you weaker as a defensive mechanism to provide you safety. The second reality is that, training on these objects, you will just improve the skill of training on that specific object. Say for example, you start doing Squats on a Bosu Ball, you may realize it becomes easier after a couple weeks. What's happening? You're simply improving by learning the skill of standing/squatting on a Bosu Ball, not really by getting stronger. This will actually have very little, to no carrying over to training balance in real life. It's like saying learning how to throw darts will make you better at typing on a key board. So What Should I Do To Improve Balance Then? You know how earlier I told you that there's General and Specific Balance? We're going to go over these concepts and I'm going to give you a background on how to approach these to give you direction on how to improve both qualities. General Balance- This is just your overall balance as a person. It's knowing we're your center of gravity is. The best way to improve this, simply just moving through ranges of motion and moving as a person. What also drastically helps this, is having stability in your joints, especially the hip and ankle joints. When you can create stability, it will help give your body frame a stronger foundation to keep you stable. Specific Balance- Specific Balance is having spacial awareness in whatever activity (skill) that you're performing. Meaning, recognizing what your body is doing without having to think about it. So just like with General Balance, you can learn to know where your center of gravity is, but we can take this concept further in developing Specific Balance. It's very helpful to just create drills to have landmarks to control your body. For example, Line Hops, Altitude Landings, and Agility Drills. Once you master these types of drills, these will help the balance in your Specific Skills (sport). Conclusion Improving balance isn't about training on objects to make you less balanced. It's about building stabilization throughout your body and then learning and improving your spacial awareness. If you have a specific activity that you need to perform, mastering the correct technique of that skill will almost always help improve your balance for that! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins Welcome back to the last installment of the Lifestyle Blog: Motocross Training Part 3! In Part 1, I briefly reviewed the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches of Motocross Training. I gave you a quick back ground of the sport and essentially why it's important to be physically fit. In Part 2, I shared my philosophy on the use of Strength Training and Plyometic Training when training Motocross Riders. In Part 3, I'm going to cover another very important topic to the Motocross Athlete; Conditioning! Conditioning When it comes to Conditioning for the Motocross Racer, we keep it all primarily aerobic based. We perform training that focuses on primarily using oxygen as it's primary fuel source which is your Aerobic System. Whereas compared to the other two systems, Lactic and Alactic Systems that do not use oxygen as their primary fuel source. This is critical to understand because when we can utilize oxygen for energy, we can sustain our energy outputs for potentially hours on end. If the racer doesn't have an efficient Aerobic System, their heart rates will likely climb higher much faster and more often when they try to push the pace on race day. When heart rates become too high, your body doesn't want to use oxygen as it's primary fuel source anymore. It needs something that works faster to produce more energy. It starts using glycogen (sugar) from your muscles to create that energy to keep up with the higher rate intensities. This is what we call our Lactic System. This may sound like a good thing, like it's your body's reserve, and essentially, yes it is. But, after 30-90 seconds of running off of your lactic system, this will cause immediate fatigue and you gas out. At this point, you will basically have to ride around slow to bring your heart rate back down until you can recover. This may take a few seconds or even a minute or two and in a race, we don't have this kind of time to spare. And, this cycle will probably keep happening the rest of the race if you try to push the pace again if you don't have an efficient and developed Aerobic System. So at this point, you may be asking yourself... "How come when I watch Supercross, the announcers say that they are 90% of their max heart rates? That seems really high to me." To answer this question, yes it is high, because of stress and anxiety levels. Think about sitting down to watch a scary movie. Your heart rate may be elevated compared to what your body physiologically is doing inside. It's stress hormones that is causing the increased heart rates. Motocross Racers are humans, not aliens with special powers. At this point, if you are feeling confused, just realize that there is a certain number of your heart rate that you will quickly run out of energy. And you do not want to race above this heart rate number (remember, this number will be lower inside of the gym compared to on race day). We call this the Anaerobic Threshold; the tipping point where you start to shift from using mostly oxygen to using glycogen. What do I recommend and do for our racers? It's pretty straightforward, nothing too fancy. It's just manipulating a few numbers and following some parameters. We really just focus on developing a couple of qualities to improve aerobic performance.
Conclusion We covered why a Motocross Racer needs to be physical fit for competition, Strength Training, Plyometric Training, and Conditioning all so they can perform on race day at a higher level. What I want to leave you with is a realization of how this all fits together. Because Motocross Racing is a sport with a large amount of variables that dictate success, you have to realize that your ability to ride the bike is ALWAYS the most important variable. Everything else that you do should support this variable (riding ability). Your physical fitness, practice, bike set up, nutrition, and overall planning and organization of your program. Training WILL WORK BEST when it is working with your riding abilities. If you put good work in the gym, but are not riding, the work will not fully be able to express itself because of decrease in seat time. It's the same thing as building your race bike in the garage to have all of the best parts, but you don't decide to ride it until round 1 of your series. The gym is the garage for your body. I hope that you've enjoyed this series and you can now take away some value or at least clear up some confusion on certain fitness topics in regards to Motocross Training. If you've enjoyed what you've read so far, you will really enjoy and get much more from my eBook that I am re-releasing Friday March 1st. The JYT Moto Method 2.0. It will have much more detail than what I've covered in this series, plus an 8 Week Competitive Training Program, 4 Riding Practice Methods, and a Moto Mindspace section where you can gain insight from today's and yesterday's top racers! We'll see you inside The JYT Moto Method 2.0! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins Welcome back to the Lifestyle Blog: Motocross Training Series! In Part 1, I briefly reviewed the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches of Motocross Training. I gave you a quick back ground of the sport and essentially why it's important to be physically fit. There are many different philosophies for training motocross racers, but I'm writing this to share mine with you. In Part 2, I'm going share my philosophy on the use of Strength Training and Plyometic Training when training Motocross Riders. I'll share my perspective in regards to utilizing Strength Training and I will share how common Plyometric exercises can be incorporated in a training plan for a Motocross Racer, in a way that many heavily overlook! Strength Training A lot of racers (and some Motocross Trainers) are intimidated when it comes to getting their racers stronger with lifting weights. Some even think it’s counterproductive to the sport. They may claim that it's the culprit to arm pump and that you don't need to get big and bulky as it will cause a decrease in a racer's endurance. The reality is, if you're an athlete and not lifting weights trying to improve strength levels, you are really missing the boat when it comes to improving Physical Performance. Even Golfers lift weights to perform better. Not taking anything away from Golfers, but when the recreational form of their sport is encouraged to drink beer while they play, it really says something when competitors still put in the work to improve their strength! At my facility, our racers train all of the same compound movements (Squat, Bench, Deadlift, Rowing Variations) that the rest of my athletes perform. My goal is to get them as strong as possible with the given amount of time that we have to train. Strength gains are most important while not placing too much emphasize on building size. You can improve strength while not improving muscle mass. I do typically like to add some muscle mass (5-15lbs) to them if we feel it's needed so that they have added protection on their skeletal system when they crash. But if they’re serious racers, they will never really have the time to “get huge,” but I do want them to be put together as athletes; think a MMA Fighter frame, not a Bodybuilder frame. The goal isn’t to give them so much volume that they turn into Elite Weight Lifters, but I don’t want them to have the same levels of strength as a marathon runner would have either. But in all reality, serious racers don’t even have enough time to perform enough Strength Training to get too big and too strong for their sport. When you factor in their aerobic training (we’ll get to that in Part 3) and all of their riding they need to do to keep skill level high, there simply isn’t enough time or energy to lift enough to make dramatic size increases. So, this is actually very important to understand, because the time that they do have for Strength Training, needs to be taken very seriously! Plyometrics We don’t perform Plyometric Exercises so that they can jump higher and run faster. But we do use them as a means for them to train the shock component of these exercises. True Plyometric Training is actually intended to be Shock Training. Plyometrics cause a shock to the body and that is where athletes learn to absorb and produce force. I don't worry much about producing it with Motocross Racers because I'm mostly concerned with them being able to absorb it. Why is this important? Well, remember in Part 1 when I discussed that the body needs to withstand forces from the track? Between Strength Training and learning to absorb forces using Plyometric methods in the gym, we can help train this ability to be prepared for optimal performance when racing. We’ll do different jump/plyo methods so their lower body can withstand the forces on the track through their foot pegs and through the handlebars. For the upper body, I mostly use medicine balls to do a lot of reactive passes off of the wall or the ground. For the lower body, we’ll have them perform box jumps, altitude landings, reactive plyo jumps, and some reactive hurdle jumps. While their bikes have suspension to absorb the forces from the track, the use of Strength Training and Plyometric (Shock) Training enhances the racer's ability in helping their bodies absorb the shock from the track. In addition, it helps them maintain proper riding technique. When a large shock happens to a racer during a race, it’s not uncommon to see hands come off of the bars, feet come off of the pegs, and see their heads simulate a whiplash pattern. We put the work in to prepare our athletes for these moments for their most effective racing performance. Up Next In Part 3 of this Lifestyle Blog Series we'll be covering my philosophy on Conditioning for the Motocross Athlete. See you in Part 3! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins Since beginning my coaching career in 2010, I’ve been working with Motocross racers as part of my clientele. My personal and professional ties to motocross racing have given me a unique opportunity to learn and understand the training needs of these clients. I listen to the racer's feedback as well in developing my approach which I will share with you in this next 3 part series of the Lifestyle Blog. With this Lifestyle Blog Series, I wanted to help give you an understanding of the sport and the physical demands. Whether you're a racer looking to broaden your training knowledge, a fan of Motocross, or a fitness enthusiasts interested in learning more about motocross training, you're on the right web page. In Part 1, I'll briefly review the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches. As the blog progresses, you will gain insight in the my training philosophy. Sport Overview First, let's start off with a quick background of the sport of Motocross. It’s a race where you have races vary in length (my professional racers race 2, 30 minute motos plus two laps which is about 35 minutes total) and racers have to perform jumps, hills, turns, bumps, etc. on various natural terrain. It’s a continuous event, so they don’t stop until the checkered flag waves. There are different styles and formats of dirt-bike racing, like Supercross & Off-Road events, but we’ll stick to Motocross in this blog series as it is the basis of dirt-bike racing and will simplify the preparation requirements for training that we’ll discuss. These same principles will fit into the other forms of competitive dirt bike racing. Sport Demand Physically, here's a quick overview of the demands as an athlete who races: Racer's bikes have a lot of power, so they accelerate fast. The bikes withstand a lot of forces from the track even though they have good suspension. And the racers absorb forces as well. Which means they operate the whole race on high elevated heart rates. It’s a true mixed event as they need to be aerobically fit to maintain high energy outputs, but also be strong enough to withstand the forces of the bike and the tracks to maintain proper physical riding technique. If they crash, it’s not only important that they are in good physical shape to promote recovery, but good physical fitness also lowers their chances of an injury when an accident does occur. Popular Training Approach If you dig a little into the motocross industry on how coaches/trainers are preparing their racers, you will see a lot of different approaches. And in my opinion, this has caused more confusion between the racers than it has helped. You will see everything from Circuit Training workouts, to Crossfit as being the holy grail, and to training racers to simulate endurance/road bicycle athletes. When I got into working with racers, it was very hard to listen to everyone in the industry. I decided to stick with what I learned through Track and Field Coaches and from traditional Strength & Conditioning Coaches that I was learning from at the time in my younger 20’s, and I adapted these same principles to create my own philosophy in training Motocross Racers. The biggest challenge in preparing motocross athletes, is that there are a ton of variables in play when the race is happening. It can take time, and feedback, to see if what you’re doing is working, both as a trainer and as a racer. I develop training programs to promote their physical fitness and check in to see how training is helping their performance. I like to hear my athletes say that they can charge at the end of the races to make last minute passes. This give me a good indication that our aerobic endurance and aerobic power are translating to their sport. I also like to know that because they’re stronger, they can maneuver the bike with less effort, which in return can allow them the opportunity to perform their skills at a higher level. Lastly, but most importantly, I want to give them the best chance at staying injury free when they crash, so tailoring their training toward their performance, success, and safety is my ultimate goal. Up Next This is my philosophy on training Motocross riders and in the next section, I will move on and share my perspective on Strength Training & use of Plyometic Training Philosophy and how I have incorporated these principles for competitive racers. See you in Part 2! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins Have you ever heard about the Anabolic Window for muscle growth? You know, that magical 30 minute window after your workout where it is extremely critical to get protein in you to make huge gains?! Well, if you have been up to date on the research, it doesn't really seem to be a real thing, or at least that window is extended much greater than 30 minutes. If this is news to you, don't worry, your workout still counts even if you don't get protein in immediately after your workout session. So, what does this mean about protein powders now? Do we need to throw away our protein powder because this isn't as true as we once thought? Not so fast...If protein powders fit into your budget, don't throw them away just yet. I'm going to share my thoughts on why I still drink a protein shake post workout and recommend them to my clients as well. Yes, I have my own Private Label of supplements, and yes I'm going to tell you that they taste amazing and they seem to digest really well for most people. I like to think that it's a great quality product. I even created this Brand after I knew that the Anabolic Window wasn't a real thing...But, I DO NOT MAKE A LIVING SELLING SUPPLEMENTS. In all honesty, I created the brand to have supplements that I knew my clients could have access to. If people outside of my facility want them, then that's cool too! But, me having my own Brand ONE EVO, has zero influence of my opinion on this topic. So hang tight and lets get to my thoughts on protein shakes... "I got the shakes that'll make you quake" -Cheeseburger Eddie We know that in our body, we store protein in our bloodstream. We don't have any fast reserve of using protein. So, I find it very beneficial that if you're trying to gain muscle or minimize muscle loss in an optimal manor, you should be consuming protein at least every 4 hours. I find this to be a very good idea if you're trying to maximize performance and physique of your muscle quality. Why is this important to know? Let's talk about training and meal timing. Most people are going to have their pre workout meal 1-2 hours before your workout. Then they will probably train for a hour or so at the gym or wherever it is. Then it may be another 1-2 hours until they can have their post workout meal. So if you're like me, my pre workout meal and my post workout meal will be closer to the 2 hours range as I need time for food settle to digest in order to train well and I can never eat solid food right after a workout. Let's do some basic math for people like myself who need the 2 hours pre and post workout. Pre Workout Meal: 2 hours Workout: 1 hour Post Wokout Meal: 2 hours Total time between meals=5 hours So, this is where I believe a protein shake can help fill a small void in your day. When you have a decent amount of time that passes by, like your workout, you can easily drink and digest a protein shake to get some protein in your bloodstream. This idea is not motivated by the 30 minute anabolic window, it's just to a convenient time to digest a shake and will mostly NOT HURT your progress if you do decide to drink a shake afterwards. Most people are not going to be able to eat and digest steak or chicken during or after training to rely on getting in their protein. This is where the idea of drinking a shake can come into play to help you fill that big gap. We are talking about convenience, not solutions to bigger problems. What is the most important thing for you to consider about protein shakes? That they are available to HELP YOU along throughout your day. They are not meant to replace any lean protein food. I tell my clients that supplements are like icing on a cake, and that if the cake itself isn't any good, no icing will make up for it. So if you have protein powder and it helps you fill a void throughout the day to keep your nutrition in check to help you, then by all means drink your protein shake! Even if the Anabolic Window is a lot bigger than we thought... Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!  Joel Younkins If you read my last Lifestyle Blog, What I'd Tell Myself As A Young Athlete, you would've read about things that I obviously did wrong and how I would've improved them from what I now know and understand. But in this Lifestyle Blog, I wanted to follow up the last post with the positives that I learned from training while playing College Football. As I look back in this phase of my life it was really a big learning experience not just for life lessons in general, but it also really helped open my eyes to learning new insights about training from what I used to do and thought I knew. And I wanted to share with you some of the things that I learned then, that I've even carried with me even up to today! 1.) Eating "healthy" doesn't mean it's correct. I remember during my first collegiate football season, I was a Redshirt Freshman. This meant that I got an extra season of football, since during a Redshirt Season you only practice and do not play in games. Because I wasn't playing in games, and only had to worry about practice, I didn't take my nutrition too seriously. I didn't gain the Freshman 15, but I knew I wasn't at my best and wasn't eating as good as I should be. After that first season, I knew I didn't want to play on the Scout Team again, I decided to start stepping my game up and focus on getting better to make sure I could play on Saturdays instead on standing on the sidelines. So during the Winter Break, I really focused on eating clean and followed a healthy diet. I thought I was on point with it and I came back on campus about 10 pounds lighter, but feeling really good! Then, sometime before Spring Football, when I still played on Offense, we had to do these self evaluations, then have a follow up meeting with our coach about them. One of the things was Nutrition, so I circled Championship performance because I was proud of myself for how "healthy" I was eating. Well my running back coach, Coach Eddie said to me, you've lost weight since you've been here, I don't think you're at a Championship Level. At first I was crushed thinking, "damn I thought they would be happy I'm eating so good" and I tried conveying that to him. So he told me to talk to our Strength Coach at the time who was Todd Burkey, who I always had a ton of respect for and still do to this day. So I met with him and he gave me some great ideas of how to eat more towards performance and not just eating to follow a general healthy diet. This way I could still perform well but not lose weight as well. That was a moment that changed my outlook on how I looked at Nutrition and that eating healthy means various things. 2.) I learned how to squat correctly. In my last post, I wrote about how I would've like to squat more at a younger age. But I didn't really get proper coaching on the squat until college. This actually made squatting more enjoyable and didn't feel like my body was going to snap in half. I went from squatting bands in high school as my primary leg work to being able to Squat over 400lbs in college. 3.) Technique will take your training to the next level. I only got to work with Coach Burkey for about a year before he stepped down as the Head Strength & Conditioning Coach and went on to work as Men's Basketball Athletic Trainer. But I'll never forget this one quote on one of the first days working with our new Strength Coach, Coach John Patrick who I gained a huge amount of respect for as my coach and later on as a mentor. He told us, "if we can't perform something with no weight, then how will we expect to do something with a lot of weight." That really stuck with me. I'm not sure why, but it was just one of those things and I used to think about a lot as I was training in college and even afterwards. I think it started my thought process to really think and breakdown each movements to fully understand them! 4.) Old habits can sneak up to bite you later on. Before my Junior Season in college, I was running during a team workout before the official Summer Conditioning started. We were in this long gym in Stambaugh Stadium. I was running down the court, and out of nowhere, it felt like someone shoved a knife right into my spine. I didn't know what the hell just had happened, but by the time I left the stadium that morning, I couldn't stand up straight. It never fully recovered and I could never rehab it back to the level it needed to be to play college football again. I would have never guess that morning, that would've been my last team workout I participated in. I went through a period of depression that I never wanted to admit to or really tell people about. But I don't ever remember blaming anyone for it. I think I only blamed myself because by this point, I knew my high school workouts weren't the smartest workouts. And if I had anyone to blame, it was myself for not trying to be more intelligent about my training when I was younger. Hard training will only last for so long if it's not calculated. I simply think the abuse from the game and not so great training in my younger years, it was just a breaking point for me and my time was up. 5.) Set your goals higher than what you think you want. Growing up, I used to just dream and work towards playing college football. I always thought NFL would be awesome, but the dream was college. I just enjoyed following it more, always have. But when you set a goal, and you reach it, sometimes you find yourself looking around, saying "what's next?" This happened to me a lot during college and I remember saying to myself, "ok I've made it hear Joel, now what are we going to do?" What I learned was that the guys who ended up going pro, always wanted to go pro more than playing college. This is what I've concluded when I hear NFL Athletes speak. That was always their dream and college was just a stepping stone to the NFL. I'm not saying that I would've ever been even good enough to play in the league (I think my college career would've been better playing linebacker, my position I always played, but that's another topic for another day) but I think that shift in focus goes along ways when you look at why you're doing something in that moment. Instead of just saying, I want to play for YSU, in my mind I could've said, I have to play collegiality so I can get to the pros. This isn't a regret, this is just a lesson learned that I've taken with me after college was over. I know now, when I set a goal, I think how can I make this goal even bigger??? Conclusion I wanted to follow up the last Blog post with this one, because this was the next evolution towards a Coaching Career. These 5 things I shared weren't the only things that I learned in college. And I could've probably wrote what I did wrong in college article too, but I wanted to balance out the good with the bad. All in all, you shouldn't have any regrets, because it's all just lessons learned from mistakes and victories! Lessons Learned... Talk soon! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! |