Wallaby injuries: poor diet?

[bryce]

I seem to remember Liam Gill on the GAGR podcast a while back talking about the work he was doing to put on some muscle as he wanted to increase his playing weight by a few kegs. He said, if I remember correctly, that he had to 'keep an eye on his carbs' or words to that effect. I remember being struck by that, as I assume he meant that he was trying to cut back on the carbs? This seemed very strange to me - surely an elite athlete who is putting in all those hours in the gym and on the training field, and also trying to gain weight, would be upping his carb (and protein) intake in a big way?

Maybe I misheard or misunderstood what he was saying, but I remember thinking that it seemed very strange, and reminiscent of the sort of hollywood fad diet you hear gym rats going on about when they are trying to 'cut' and look like underwear models. Maybe someone else on here knows more about this, but how can a professional rugby player function if he is restricting his carb intake? Is that why they all have that cover model look but are running out of steam on the paddock?

Contrast this with an article I remember reading about Brad Thorn a few years ago. When asked about his longevity and fitness, the topic of his diet came up. He just said that he tried to make sure that he ate plenty of vegetables and drank plenty of milk. Seems like pretty basic stuff. No talk of watching the carb intake. I also recall Richie McCaw saying that he was a 'meat and three veg kind of guy, nothing too complicated'.

 

[en_force_er]

bryce, professional athletes destroy baked beans and other stuff like there's no tomorrow because they need crazy amounts of carbs. The kind of amounts we couldn't even fathom, the blokes train twice a day and have huge amounts of 'lean mass'.

Obviously they watch there carb consumption because if they go over what they should that's where they are likely to pack on extra kegs (read: fat) but I think you misinterpreted what Gill meant.

Also, Thorn's veggie and milk centric diet sounds reasonably low in carbs to me.

 

[hammertimethere]

Gilly would have been talking about "watching his carbs" in the following way
- making sure he gets enough so he gets reaches the total kilojoules to fuel him for each training day, with another few hundred on top to ensure he's in the positive energy balance he needs to grow.
- making sure he times his intake of carbs in and around his training sessions so that his body is in a state to preferentially direct them to glycogen (muscle glucose) re-synthesis rather than fat stores, which is what you want if muscle gain is the goal.

One of the reds staff who I know socially did joke to me once that Gilly was one of 5 or 6 players that turned up for their first testing/training sessions of the pre season fit as anything on the beep test thing that they do but on the high end of their skinfolds (enjoying mum's cooking too much I guess). He may be one of the guys that can get a little fat if they don't stay switched on to it all.

 

[Piggy]

We have an alarming number of soft tissue injuries at the moment, should diet be investigated? But more, traditional lines of diet? Eg organic vegetables and meat, unprocessed vitamins/milk, natural forms of protein like eggs and sweet potato, instead of heavily processed and manufactured supplements?

As long as the diet is meeting requirments the source of nutrients is generally inconsequential. There is no nutritional benefit in eating organic over conventionally produced food. Unprocessed milk has no advantage over processed milk - unless you call an increased risk of food borne illness being advantageous. As long as the biological value of the protein is high it will be readily absorbed in the body (milk & derivatives - whey, eggs, whole soybean and then meats are your best sources), btw sweet potato has bugger all protein.

The only thing of that paragraph that has some basis is vitamin intake. It is generally better to ingest your vitamins and minerals within foods, interactions within foods/meals are important for good uptake. If you can't do this for whatever reason then you need to source vits/mins in an organic (ie the chemistry term) form rather than the inorganic forms often found in supermarket supplements.

Inappropriate training, inadequate recovery, incorrect technique and poor biomechanics will have a greater impact on injury/reinjury than nutrition.

 

[bryce]

Makes sense. Thanks fellas.

 

[Brumbies Guy]

In fact I think it was only our flyhalves who went down for an extended period of time? Colby missed the season, but other than him and To'omua/Lealiifano, I cant think of any other actual injury issues?

Our injury list by the end of the season was pretty extensive actually. To'omua, Lealiifano (x2), Palmer, Fardy, Carter, Fainga'a, White, McCabe, Speight and Tomane all required surgery or reconstructions in the off season.

 

[hawktrain]

Compare him to players like Beiber, Cooper, Beale, Digby, Higginbotham etc etc, who look like male models that have been in a day spa when they're not admiring each others pecs in the mirror at the gym

I think Higginbotham would be pretty stoked at being called a male model lookalike, can't imagine he gets many of those comments with a head like that!

Personally I think the amount of soft tissue injuries is partly due to players carrying too much weight. Imagine the stress that is put on the tendons and ligaments of a body carrying 100kg and doing heavy duty sprint and power work on a regular basis for about 11 months of the year. Look at Berrick Barnes for example, he's a naturally small bloke, but he has tree trunks for legs now. On wikipedia it says he's 87kg, but in Rugby News NZ it has him listed at 92kg for this season, so I assume he's put some on in the last year or two. For his frame, 92kg is a lot. Now when he does fast feet exercises, all of that body weight is julting down on his hips, knees and ankles, so as well as soft tissue strain, he's also putting a strain on his joints. Eventually, that will catch up with you, and I think it might be part of the reason for so many soft tissue injuries. The more weight, the more force and strain put onto the tissue.

This goes for most footballers, not just the Wallabies. You see this a lot in the NRL, so many muscle and ligament tears.

 

[USARugger]

Vitamin C is the single most important ingredient required for the production of collagen and elastin, which is what tendons/ligaments/muscles etc etc need to maintain their suppleness and durability. With him being out for the whole international season with a..hamstring strain..does this sound logical?

We have an alarming number of soft tissue injuries at the moment, should diet be investigated? But more, traditional lines of diet? Eg organic vegetables and meat, unprocessed vitamins/milk, natural forms of protein like eggs and sweet potato, instead of heavily processed and manufactured supplements?

The players you mentioned earlier (especially JOC (James O'Connor)/QC (Quade Cooper)) pretty frequently tweet pics of their food and both get their veggies in. I would be absolutely fucking shocked if there wasn't a large daily portion of fruits/veggies in the Wallabies training diet regimen. There are really only a select few fruits/veggies that aren't absolutely loaded with Vitamin C. In fact, I'd say it's one of the easiest Vitamins to obtain large amounts of, right up there with Vit K!

Source: Health nut/study Human Evolutionary Biology with a focus on how diet/activity has impacted the shape of our bodies over history

The fact of the matter is, the human body is an unbelievably complex machine and unless it's an instance like when QC (Quade Cooper) blew up his knee, it can be extremely difficult to pinpoint the exact reason why athlete X received injury Y. This is obviously barring previous/chronic injuries to an area.

Top shelf thread by the way! Studying for a few tests right now but I look forward to reading the rest of the responses and maybe adding some more myself

 

[USARugger]

I think Higginbotham would be pretty stoked at being called a male model lookalike, can't imagine he gets many of those comments with a head like that!

Personally I think the amount of soft tissue injuries is partly due to players carrying too much weight. Imagine the stress that is put on the tendons and ligaments of a body carrying 100kg and doing heavy duty sprint and power work on a regular basis for about 11 months of the year. Look at Berrick Barnes for example, he's a naturally small bloke, but he has tree trunks for legs now. On wikipedia it says he's 87kg, but in Rugby News NZ it has him listed at 92kg for this season, so I assume he's put some on in the last year or two. For his frame, 92kg is a lot. Now when he does fast feet exercises, all of that body weight is julting down on his hips, knees and ankles, so as well as soft tissue strain, he's also putting a strain on his joints. Eventually, that will catch up with you, and I think it might be part of the reason for so many soft tissue injuries. The more weight, the more force and strain put onto the tissue.

This goes for most footballers, not just the Wallabies. You see this a lot in the NRL, so many muscle and ligament tears.

This could be a possibility. It's pretty common knowledge in the Powerlifting/Competitive Lifting world that muscles can very easily outgrow ligaments/tendons and expose them to excessive amounts of force and strain, quickly leading to injuries. This is why it's pretty common for these guys to be doing 15-20mins of shoulder warm ups before a chest day (just an example). It's not impossible that these younger guys like JOC (James O'Connor) was was pushing 90+kg at 17/18 years old that his ligaments/tendons hadn't quite caught up or developed to the level where they could entirely handle the forces his musculature were capable of generating. On the flip side the trainers of these guys should be looking out for this actively and adding exercises to compensate for this that more directly target these ligaments, tendons and minor muscle groups.

 

[en_force_er]

I think the soft tissue injuries is more or at least as much to do with the increasingly large amounts of force dealt out by the opposition rather than just the force of one's own weight.

But I agree, there is something a bit irksome about seeing guys who would naturally weigh 80kg walking around at 95kg.

 

[USARugger]

I think the soft tissue injuries is more or at least as much to do with the increasingly large amounts of force dealt out by the opposition rather than just the force of one's own weight.

But I agree, there is something a bit irksome about seeing guys who would naturally weigh 80kg walking around at 95kg.

It's a combination of both but in instances like Big Kev or Rabbit's hamstring injuries, those are almost always self inflicted and can be caused by poor running form, a divot in the ground, or a thousand other things.

It could just simply come down to the fact that we are today pushing the limits of human physiology and as the forces involved, amount of games played, amount of training done have all gone up and so will the injuries as a result. If you ask any upper level S&C coach today they will tell you that they spend at least as much time monitoring an athletes workload to avoid over-training as they do actually designing and implementing the training programs.

 

[gel]

Given the forces involved and the greater playing time, is it also possible that a lack of confidence (resulting in improper/inconsistent body positioning) could lead to a greater chance of injuries? If I were to define the Wallaby (and even the super rugby players) individual performances since just prior to the world cup, then lack of confidence would be right up there as one of the descriptors.

 

[Hugh Jarse]

That's it. I'm opening a gym with a sheep room.

Now that is going too far.

Methinks you are trolling for a comment on the popularity of your gym and its ability to attract former residents from certain countries.

 

[nugget]

I'm sure I read the ABs S&C guys build specific training exercises into various player's programmes such as fence-posting, other farm work, and so on; builds real usable strength, and gives them variety from the grind. And it seems to work.
Can't really speak for the dietary impact in soft tissue injuries, but I'm sure it all goes hand in hand.

here's how it's done:

 

[Brumbieman]

The players you mentioned earlier (especially JOC (James O'Connor)/QC (Quade Cooper)) pretty frequently tweet pics of their food and both get their veggies in. I would be absolutely fucking shocked if there wasn't a large daily portion of fruits/veggies in the Wallabies training diet regimen. There are really only a select few fruits/veggies that aren't absolutely loaded with Vitamin C. In fact, I'd say it's one of the easiest Vitamins to obtain large amounts of, right up there with Vit K!

Source: Health nut/study Human Evolutionary Biology with a focus on how diet/activity has impacted the shape of our bodies over history

The fact of the matter is, the human body is an unbelievably complex machine and unless it's an instance like when QC (Quade Cooper) blew up his knee, it can be extremely difficult to pinpoint the exact reason why athlete X received injury Y. This is obviously barring previous/chronic injuries to an area.

Top shelf thread by the way! Studying for a few tests right now but I look forward to reading the rest of the responses and maybe adding some more myself

To en extent, yes. Though, if you read just how much processing modern veges go through/what they're doused with chemical wise, before they make the supermarket shelves, I think you'd be absolutely horrified. To the point where the farmers who grow these crops are on record saying they'd never eat their own produce (the stuff that is then sold). How much is left of whatever nutrients/vitamins were in there originally, only a scientist could work out.

Its a bit like the milk point: Thorn says he 'makes sure he stretches a lot and drinks plenty of milk'. That milk in NZ isn't the pasteurised/homogenised stuff we get here, which is basically just dead. Humans started drinking milk thousands of years ago for the vitamins/cultures/lipids and the raw energy and sustenance it provides. If you read A Secret History of the Mongols, it details many times how Mongol scouts/warriors were able to survive for up to 3 weeks at a time, on a diet of blood and raw milk from their horses, travelling distances of up for 2000miles in those three weeks, and THEN fight a battle.

If drinking milk and eating meat is what gave them that endurance/fitness/battle hardness, then I say we put the Wallabies on it. It can hardly make things worse, right?

 

[USARugger]

To en extent, yes. Though, if you read just how much processing modern veges go through/what they're doused with chemical wise, before they make the supermarket shelves, I think you'd be absolutely horrified. To the point where the farmers who grow these crops are on record saying they'd never eat their own produce (the stuff that is then sold). How much is left of whatever nutrients/vitamins were in there originally, only a scientist could work out.

Its a bit like the milk point: Thorn says he 'makes sure he stretches a lot and drinks plenty of milk'. That milk in NZ isn't the pasteurised/homogenised stuff we get here, which is basically just dead. Humans started drinking milk thousands of years ago for the vitamins/cultures/lipids and the raw energy and sustenance it provides. If you read A Secret History of the Mongols, it details many times how Mongol scouts/warriors were able to survive for up to 3 weeks at a time, on a diet of blood and raw milk from their horses, travelling distances of up for 2000miles in those three weeks, and THEN fight a battle.

If drinking milk and eating meat is what gave them that endurance/fitness/battle hardness, then I say we put the Wallabies on it. It can hardly make things worse, right?

I'm totally aware of how the industrial food complex works and how our food is treated and processed. While the idea of consuming massive amount of "X-cides" (pesti, herbi, etc) is pretty awful, the preparation method of food is largely what determines the nutrient content. Preparing your vegetables one way or another is a much larger factor in how much of the initial % of the nutrient content you will receive. It also comes down to the genetic level in how receptive your body is to these nutrients. I don't know how it is in OZ but I know here (Philadelphia, PA USA) it is really easy to get organic produce (I usually shop for my veggies/fruits at Trader Joe's - great prices). On top of that, the FDA regulates the nutritional labeling of all of the packaged vegetables (like bags of Kale for example) so you know pretty much exactly what you're getting if you were to eat the product raw. I prefer the taste/texture of most of my veggies raw anyway and a single serving of raw Kale will exceed your daily requirements of Vits C/A by a pretty big margin.

There isn't really a shred of hard scientific evidence or any scholarly studies done that have proven a definite benefit of raw milk vs. pasteurized milk that I've heard of or read. In fact, there's much more concrete evidence pointing to the possibility that consumption of dairy products in general has had a negative impact on human health in the past few centuries (but they will never take my chocolate milk from me!!!). When you think about it, we never evolved to consume the various cultures/antibodies contained in cow milk. Whether or not our bodies are even capable of coping with them properly is still up in the air to begin with. It's very similar to the concept of our reliance on dentists/orthodontists to maintain our oral health today as a result of our diet changing much more rapidly than our genetics. In the scope of things, the consumption of dairy products only encompasses a fraction of a percentage of the time we've been around as a species. The only real differences between raw and pasteurized milk would be the Vit C/Iodine content (which is still pretty marginal), the antibodies and bacterial content, and the fat content. You also need to acknowledge the embellishment of history with the Mongols story you recited. Horse's milk contains a much higher lactose content than cow's milk before fermentation, which makes it a very strong laxative. Those Mongol warriors either had iron-clad stomachs, were supplementing their diets with something else, or were dying of dehydration by the end of those three weeks.

While there are definitely lots of problems in the Wallabies camp right now I really don't think nutrition is one of them. It just wouldn't make any sense for a major and modern international footballing body not to have a modern nutritional program. Even small colleges here in the USA have pretty well defined and sport appropriate nutritional guidelines for their athletes. To be honest I think a lot of what is wrong right now comes down to team culture and administration/coaching. We were completely lost every time we had the ball vs. France, I see this happen when I coach our new players/take the 3rd XV out to scrimmage each other. This coupled with the seeming lack of confidence in ourselves is what is killing Wallaby rugby right now. I appreciated the piece that came out on the front page about the "Rosario 22" a few weeks ago but that still wasn't a winning attitude we saw in that match. It was a level of desperation that is pretty hard to imagine that led to that defensive performance, not a belief that we were the side that should walk out victorious. You can practically feel it in the way the boys play out there. For me the most prevalent comparison is between the recent tests and the Tri-Nations/Bledisloe tests of last year. Hong Kong especially sticks out, we played like a team that actually had a plan and had actually been in camp together before the test. They played with confidence, mongrel, skill and aggression. That is why we beat the All Blacks then and until those factors all return, we won't beat them again.

 

[Bart]

great thread, and from the outside looking in, a lot of the Wallabies look to have great 'beach muscles' - massive biceps and the like. I don't notice any of the All Blacks with biceps the size of their heads! Perhaps they are training wrong. Training to look good, not be good?

Carbs, protein and fats. All equally important and needed. Protein to build bigger muscles, carbs to fuel your workouts and playing, and fats, well, out nutritionist tell us we need them for something or other!! But you don't build bigger bodies by eating more carbs, but you need carbs to fuel the workout and then feed you muscles protein to get them to build etc, etc, etc.

All these blokes know what they should eat, the top teams all have nutritionists that will know what is needed to maintain weight, gain weight, lose weight, whatever it is that is needed. However, you can lead a horse to water and all that, so it's up to the players to follow the eating plan.

As for the working on farms and chasing sheep to get fit (har har). Nope, afraid that's not the secret. Hore would be the only AB left that does any work on a farm, and that is for the 6 and half minutes that international players have off each year between the end of year tour and the start of the Super season!

AS for the injuries you've had this year, if it carries on next year, than something IS wrong, at the moment, file it into the 'bloody bad luck' bin I reckon. It can only get better next season.

 

[en_force_er]

great thread, and from the outside looking in, a lot of the Wallabies look to have great 'beach muscles' - massive biceps and the like. I don't notice any of the All Blacks with biceps the size of their heads! Perhaps they are training wrong. Training to look good, not be good?

That's not true, look at Hosea Gear or Jerome Kaino. Ma'a Nonu looks awkwardly big whilst there were always gags about Jerry Collins' biceps impeding his rugby. We Wallaby fans can find negativity in the strangest places.

I think some athletes (i.e. Pocock) just have excellent genetics for being massive and would probably have a terrific built if they'd never even been in a gym. Such is life.

 

[Bart]

funny, I've never noticed them - although Collins did look like a freak, I'd forgotten about him.

 

[cyclopath]

Must be the slimming nature of the black uniforms.