Today I will be experimenting with NO2 supplements, which I've been taking on and off throughout this experiment but today and through the weekend I'll be taking at least two doses a day, expecting to see results on Monday.
And since I'm flying to SF at an ungodly early hour tomorrow morning, doing an improv show with the ineffable beloved herself, and returning home Monday at midnight to rehearse and then perform at the Pink Door...let's just say I'm really hoping for results. One week from today I'll be gearing up for my first performance, this gorgeous shining grail that has birthed this great experiment. It doesn't feel ladylike to give out details since I'm on private contract through another group, so sit tight and I'll send you photographic evidence after the fact.
Since lowering the dose to the appropriate amount, have experienced no cramps or icky nausea. Still enjoying relatively high energy and a clear head. That is not an invitation to the peanut gallery.
That is all.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Attention Contortionists, Aerialists, Hard-Working Clowns and Tumblers!
Throughout this week+ long experiment (still 1.5 weeks to go till showtime), the major element has been creatine. I've worked hard almost every day, pushing my limits and my comfort zone continuously.
I have not gotten sore. Not at all. Every day I begin to warm up it's like getting a fresh body. No tweaky bits to favor because of a too-hard workout the day before.
Do you realize what this means? No more two steps forward, one step back. No more walking the line of extremes until injury or illness forces a respite. Eureeka! The messiah has come.
Our extremism has been enabled. The Great Enabler is Creatine.
So take 2 grams a day and press on, my crazy brethren.
I have not gotten sore. Not at all. Every day I begin to warm up it's like getting a fresh body. No tweaky bits to favor because of a too-hard workout the day before.
Do you realize what this means? No more two steps forward, one step back. No more walking the line of extremes until injury or illness forces a respite. Eureeka! The messiah has come.
Our extremism has been enabled. The Great Enabler is Creatine.
So take 2 grams a day and press on, my crazy brethren.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Rest...
...it has to happen. Filled with the songs of choirs of vitamins in my tissues, I climbed down from only my second climb feeling confused. Why was I tired? Why were my forearms already packed with blood as though I'd been up for 30 minutes? Why had the week-long high of incessant energy suddenly left me bereaved of its magic?
An uninterrupted week of pushing my tissue capacity as far as it could go each day.
That's why. Apparently, even on a Power Rangers diet of supplemental awesome, I need rest. So I didn't even go to the studio yesterday, instead trompsing along the Ballard Seafood Festival (which looks and feels just like any other festival, but with crabcakes! Yum!) with Shaun. We discovered rose gardens and libraries and enjoyed the excellent dog-watching, and did no circus. I even watched the late Spain vs. Netherlands in an effort to peer into my roommate John's own circus at the benevolent George and Dragon in Fremont. It was good times.
Today I can't wait to be back. In fact I'm getting off right now to begin the process, hopefully accumulating in my returning here tomorrow to tell you how much a day of rest improves your stamina. Pink Door tonight for those in Seattle; come on down to partake in the bolognese that earns the title "17 minutes of satisfaction!"
~~~
Goals for the year:
1) PROCURE A CAR. The bus is inefficient, expensive, and a black hole for time consumption. Want freedom and the ability to do more than one thing a day! Go Mini Cooper!
2) Perform in Europe.
(dream big, focus small).
An uninterrupted week of pushing my tissue capacity as far as it could go each day.
That's why. Apparently, even on a Power Rangers diet of supplemental awesome, I need rest. So I didn't even go to the studio yesterday, instead trompsing along the Ballard Seafood Festival (which looks and feels just like any other festival, but with crabcakes! Yum!) with Shaun. We discovered rose gardens and libraries and enjoyed the excellent dog-watching, and did no circus. I even watched the late Spain vs. Netherlands in an effort to peer into my roommate John's own circus at the benevolent George and Dragon in Fremont. It was good times.
Today I can't wait to be back. In fact I'm getting off right now to begin the process, hopefully accumulating in my returning here tomorrow to tell you how much a day of rest improves your stamina. Pink Door tonight for those in Seattle; come on down to partake in the bolognese that earns the title "17 minutes of satisfaction!"
~~~
Goals for the year:
1) PROCURE A CAR. The bus is inefficient, expensive, and a black hole for time consumption. Want freedom and the ability to do more than one thing a day! Go Mini Cooper!
2) Perform in Europe.
(dream big, focus small).
Friday, July 9, 2010
Finding the Scoop
In the midst of my dad’s man-cave (aka the pool house), we sat on a weight bench surrounded by the detritus of supplements and vitamins once coveted, then forgotten, then rediscovered. We were devising a plan, and it’s name was Creatine. Creatine Ethyl Ester, to be more specific, as opposed to the 80’s version of creatine, creatine monohydrate.
Creatine is prized for its ability to super-hydrate muscles; enabling growth, speeding recovery, enhancing performance, and making you look all buff and swollen. There’s a lot more to it than that but I don’t know about it. Creatine monohydrate’s cons were that it tended to cause bloating and sometimes cramping as well. CEE, as the name implies, is esterified, making it much more efficient for the body to absorb. So it virtually eliminates these undesired side effects.
So dad gives me a bucket of CEE and sends me home with instructions to try about 5 grams in my shakes immediately after training. Goody gumdrops, I thought, let’s get the party started.
The bucket of CEE weighs like a bucket of loose chalk would, and has a similar consistency. On the label it tells me that one scoop is 2 grams. Alrighty, says I, I will use twice the scoop. Only I can’t find the scoop. I dig around through the fluffy crumbliness of the creatine for a while; as soon as I break up half, the other half re-solidifies through the pressure. So I give it up and decide that a teaspoon sounds like a pretty good estimate for 4-5 grams of anything. After all, the MSM I'm using tells me the 1/2 a teaspoon is 1.7 grams. If anything I'm undercutting it, right? I put a heaping teaspoon of both MSM and creatine into my shakes for use post-training.
Two days pass. After my training shake, which tastes enormously like drinking aspirin, I feel a gentle yet insistent urge to vomit for a few hours. Amazingly, through this feeling I still have high amounts of energy and continue to live life normally; going to the movies, writing online, washing clothes, blablabla. High energy, urge to vomit.
After four days of two shakes a day, I'm almost out of my protein powder which I find alarming, since the jar is in fact the 2 lbs. macho size. After voicing this concern, along with my realization that I'm eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight (140 lbs.), my roommates give me the crazy eyes and I begin to rethink my plan.
And then, when making my next post-training shake, I find the scoop. At first I think I must be mistaken, it is just a stray bit of plastic among the chalky crumbles of the creatine. No scoop could possibly be that small. There's hardly a scoop to be spoken of, only a brief indentation at the end of a plastic tab. If one were so inclined, a bit of cocaine could be measured as hardly acceptable in this alleged scoop.
See photographic evidence, with commonplace household items (a banana, a teaspoon, my hand) for scale:
You can imagine my consternation to discover that I've been dosing myself with probably 20 grams of creatine, 10 x the recommended amount. After a little research the not at all mystery of my urges to vomit is solved. However I've already made my shake for the day. With a huge pile of creatine sinking into the chocolatey protein powder, my biggest dose ever. Probably 25 grams of creatine. Not wanting to waste what I've already made, I think I'll probably survive.
Of course it tasted more than ever like drinking chocolate-tinted Goody's headache powder. And I got nauseous for hours. The nausea even overrode the energy for a while.
To sum up: a teaspoon does not a measurement of weight make. And something with the consistency of chalk (creatine) will not weigh the same as something with the consistency of light snow (MSM).
Live and learn.
Cutting the protein by 25% at least today and the creatine to 6 grams (loading period). After this week I'll go down to 2 grams per day for three weeks.
Always find the scoop.
Creatine is prized for its ability to super-hydrate muscles; enabling growth, speeding recovery, enhancing performance, and making you look all buff and swollen. There’s a lot more to it than that but I don’t know about it. Creatine monohydrate’s cons were that it tended to cause bloating and sometimes cramping as well. CEE, as the name implies, is esterified, making it much more efficient for the body to absorb. So it virtually eliminates these undesired side effects.
So dad gives me a bucket of CEE and sends me home with instructions to try about 5 grams in my shakes immediately after training. Goody gumdrops, I thought, let’s get the party started.
The bucket of CEE weighs like a bucket of loose chalk would, and has a similar consistency. On the label it tells me that one scoop is 2 grams. Alrighty, says I, I will use twice the scoop. Only I can’t find the scoop. I dig around through the fluffy crumbliness of the creatine for a while; as soon as I break up half, the other half re-solidifies through the pressure. So I give it up and decide that a teaspoon sounds like a pretty good estimate for 4-5 grams of anything. After all, the MSM I'm using tells me the 1/2 a teaspoon is 1.7 grams. If anything I'm undercutting it, right? I put a heaping teaspoon of both MSM and creatine into my shakes for use post-training.
Two days pass. After my training shake, which tastes enormously like drinking aspirin, I feel a gentle yet insistent urge to vomit for a few hours. Amazingly, through this feeling I still have high amounts of energy and continue to live life normally; going to the movies, writing online, washing clothes, blablabla. High energy, urge to vomit.
After four days of two shakes a day, I'm almost out of my protein powder which I find alarming, since the jar is in fact the 2 lbs. macho size. After voicing this concern, along with my realization that I'm eating a gram of protein per pound of body weight (140 lbs.), my roommates give me the crazy eyes and I begin to rethink my plan.
And then, when making my next post-training shake, I find the scoop. At first I think I must be mistaken, it is just a stray bit of plastic among the chalky crumbles of the creatine. No scoop could possibly be that small. There's hardly a scoop to be spoken of, only a brief indentation at the end of a plastic tab. If one were so inclined, a bit of cocaine could be measured as hardly acceptable in this alleged scoop.
See photographic evidence, with commonplace household items (a banana, a teaspoon, my hand) for scale:
You can imagine my consternation to discover that I've been dosing myself with probably 20 grams of creatine, 10 x the recommended amount. After a little research the not at all mystery of my urges to vomit is solved. However I've already made my shake for the day. With a huge pile of creatine sinking into the chocolatey protein powder, my biggest dose ever. Probably 25 grams of creatine. Not wanting to waste what I've already made, I think I'll probably survive.Of course it tasted more than ever like drinking chocolate-tinted Goody's headache powder. And I got nauseous for hours. The nausea even overrode the energy for a while.
To sum up: a teaspoon does not a measurement of weight make. And something with the consistency of chalk (creatine) will not weigh the same as something with the consistency of light snow (MSM).
Live and learn.
Cutting the protein by 25% at least today and the creatine to 6 grams (loading period). After this week I'll go down to 2 grams per day for three weeks.
Always find the scoop.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Experiment!
Muahahahaha!! After visiting with my daddy-o, including much talk of proteins and body efficiency, I have decided to conduct an experiment on...myself.
Today is July 7th. On July 22nd I must have an 8 minute long aerial fabric solo completed and ready for performance. This means that I will be working a lot this month. I want to take extra, very, amazing care of myself to withstand these here rigors and give my body everything it needs to continuously heal.
The plan:
That's whey protein (much faster absorption than even eggs, which are probably the most perfect protein that there is...except they take forever to get your energy to you)-
MSM, used by the body in tons of functional ways-
Esterified Creatine to repair tissue-
Nitric Oxide for vascularity-
Oh, and some chlorophyll. Cause I'm really a begonia. Or because I'm eating a bunch of weird vitamins and who knows if it could make me smell weird.
I also take prenatal vitamins. Cause their really good vitamins, not because I'm knocked up.
to be clear, no bun in my oven.
And fish oils, because my brain slips through its own holes on a bad day.
For the past couple days it's been a protein shake before and immediately after training. The creatine is important to take immediately after intense training for optimum effectiveness, apparently. So the 1.5 hour I usually spend getting from training, changing, and bussing it home is possibly when my tired muscle fibers are gasping for sustenance.
Most notably, I'm on my third day and energy is high, high, high. Even when I felt nauseous from drinking so much chocolatey protein I was still overflowing with energy.
Had a cramp in my calf during an inversion which is odd...I almost never cramp up and I suppose with all this extra stuff I assumed no ill effects from training would be felt. O naivete.
Stay tuned for more fascinating updates on my experimental self exploits.
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