9bar is described as having been designed to get the maximum nutritional goodness from seeds in a convenient and delicious way’.

The bars are great for active people as the unique mix of seeds and other natural ingredients provide a valuable source of nutritionally dense energy for both physical endurance and immediate impact. The company has many endorsements from a variety of competitive sports people who claim that it is easily digestible and that they have no problem eating them during an event or training such as ultra running and triathlons.

As a sports person looking to refuel without empty calories a 9bar is great. Each 50g bar is free from egg, dairy, gluten, lactose, wheat, yeast, preservatives and artificial colours. It is also approved by the vegetarian society.

9bars come in five different varieties: pumpkin, organic, nutty, flax and original. As an example of the nutritional content here is the nutritional information for the flax bar:

• 262 calories,
• 8.7g protein,
• 16.75g carbohydrate
• 17.75g fat of which
  • 5g saturated
  • 4.8 mono unsaturated
  • 7g polyunsaturated
  • <0.1g trans fatty acids
  • 0.6g omega 3 fatty acids
  • 6.5g omega 6 fatty acids
  • > 3g fibre
  • <0.1g sodium.

With an average egg or 150g pot of low fat yoghurt each containing only 6g of protein a 9bar is a good hit of natural people protein to help rebuild muscle after competitive exercise or training.

The Taste Test

I have to admit that looking at the packaging it doesn’t look that appetising.  I know this as before being asked to review them I received a bar in a post race goody bag and I chose to give it away. The description of a nutritious carob topped mixed seed bar with flax and hemp combined with the images or piles of dried seeds conjured up thoughts of seed bars we leave out for birds and did not seem appealing after a race compared with the post race food I had bought with me.

Fortunately for the benefit of our readers I agreed to give them a taste test and I am glad I did. Firstly 80% of the time cereal bars are hard, crunchy and dry which always puts me off or hurts my teeth. These 9bars are soft and chewy.

The second important discovery was carob. I had never eaten carob before and didn’t realise that it tasted like chocolate.  In fact even when I was really concentrating on trying to describe the taste it could only come up with chocolate. As such a healthy alternative to chocolate I’m surprised that there aren’t more products using it.

Most cereal bars are made up of rolled oats and bran. But the mixed seeds in this 9bar comprised of sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, poppy, flax and hemp making a tasty combination. I was unable to distinguish great differences between the various flavours when I ate a different bar every day. Pumpkin may have been slightly sweeter although it did not have the carob topping and the Nutty may be slightly nuttier but fortunately the texture and chew-ability remains the same.

After this taste testing I certainly won’t be complaining if I receive any flavour 9bar in my next post race goody bag.

Overall

For active people who are looking for nutritious energy source 9bars are a great source of calories and protein, before or after exercise. They are easily digestible making them ideal for taking on long walks, cycles, runs, or paddles.

For those dieting I feel that a whole bar is quite high in calories, although half may be suitable when you are craving something sweet, without stocking up on empty calories and the fibre will help fill you up.

9bars are widely available across the UK and are stocked by health food stores, Holland and Barrett and all major supermarkets.

For more information you can visit www.9-bar.co.uk or find out how you can win your own box of pumpkin or original 9bars in our competition here.

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Rolling back massagers are OK for relaxing the whole back but I never find they reach my shoulder area. And handheld manual massagers such as the ones supposedly that treat cellulite don’t get deep enough. So I was happy to trial a new massager from HoMedics who identify themselves as ‘an innovative leader in self-care, wellness and personal health products.’

What is Percussion Massage?

The HoMedics Compact Percussion Massager is described as having ‘Percussion action for deep tissue massage’. As I thought percussion was term to describe musical instruments I wasn’t really sure what that means in terms of massage so I did a bit of research, apparently in massage percussion movements are known as tapotement.

The purpose being:

• to vibrate tissues
• trigger reflexes from the skin
• cause widening of the blood vessels (vasodilation).
• disperse fluid and inflammation from an injury
• reduce swelling

Benefits of percussion movements include:

• being very stimulating
• particularly useful to athletes before an event.
• strengthen muscles by stimulating the muscle to contract.
• useful in reducing fatty deposits and flabby muscle areas

Sounded great, although in massage terms as it is described as a cupping action I presumed that this massager was going to work the vibration principle.

HoMedics Compact Percussion Massager is described as compact and light weight. I found that it weighs 850g, around 950g with the plug and cable, and is 33cm long. Not that compact for carrying around, but it is the perfect size for what it is designed for. It is solidly built and if it was lightweight I would feel it wouldn’t be massaging deep enough, just tickling the surface of the skin. It is however not too heavy that you can’t hold it with one hand over your shoulder to massage your trapezius muscle effectively, although after a few minutes held in that position you can feel your hand and arm vibrating on their own. In terms of the length of the handle (25cm) it is ideal for reaching all areas of your body with the appropriate pressure.

It comes with 4 customisable attachments including, soft, medium, firm, although I have to say that I didn’t notice much difference between the various options. Admittedly I didn’t require very deep tissue massage such as after a marathon but I found them effective in easing stiff muscles the following day after a 10k race. There is also a heated attachment, but this requires the vibrating action to be switched on whilst it was heating and I felt I needed a stand whilst it was heating as I didn’t want to just hold it for 5 minutes but if you but it on a table it vibrated off and I was worried about leaving it on a carpet incase it over heated. Luckily it doesn’t heat that much to worry about, just enough to be soothing and whilst it isn’t silent it is no louder than an electric toothbrush.

Whilst I tested the compact massager there is also a version with a width adjustable head. I however was happy with the width of the compact head, it was a perfect size for my arms and what I found most useful was for treating my tarsal tunnel syndrome.  It was the exact width for massaging the base of my calves to relieve my symptoms and especially useful was to use one head with the heat attachment on the base of my heel.

Overall

HoMedics Compact Percussion Massager is easy to use alone, due to the long handle and the solid head allows massaging of deep tissues efficiently.

Has two different speeds offering variable intensity massages for strong and therapeutic relief. The different attachments did not provide obvious differences in massage intensities.

Not particularly lightweight but appropriate for massaging deep muscles effectively.

Soothing heat attachment provides warmth whilst massaging but needs a support whilst heating which takes a while.

HoMedics Compact Percussion Massager RRP £34.99, available from Amazon,  Boots, Sainsbury’s, and Lloyds Pharmacy.

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Firstly they plan to restore sport funding and generally this is going to be through the National Lottery. Conservatives pledge to ensure that the sports, heritage and the arts will each see their original allocation of 20% of National Lottery good cause money restored. Labour also want to fine tune how Lottery proceeds are spent and as a proportion of Lottery funding is going to the Olympics after 2012, this proportion will return to culture heritage and sport. The Liberal Democrats say they plan on a gross profit tax on National Lottery to provide more money for Exchequer and good causes however they don’t specify which causes.

All parties maintain they will support bringing more high profile international events to Britain including World Cup 2018 to England. The Conservatives also specify that to support high-level sport further they will work with the Scottish government to deliver a top-quality Commonwealth Games in Glasgow 2014 and to ensure that the 2013 Rugby League and 2015 Rugby Union World Cups are successful.

All the main parties claim they will deliver a successful Olympics. The Conservatives state their commitment to the Olympics that will bring lasting benefits for the country as a whole. Part of the community sports budget of the National Lottery will be responsible for delivering an Olympic legacy, including the vigorous promotion of competitive sports through a national Olympic-style school competition.

Labour really went into detail on its sporting pledges, wanting to ‘build on the renaissance that British sport has enjoyed in the last decade.’ They aim to achieve outstanding medal success at the Olympics and Paralympics, with a talent development system striving for excellence and successful British athletes spanning all disciplines and events.

Labour also pledge Britain will be the first Olympic hosts to create a world-class sports system from elite level to the grass roots:

• Providing resources to give every child the opportunity to do at least 5 hrs sport/week through schools and 3,000 new Olympic inspired sports clubs.
• Invest in new national network of school sports coaches to increase quality and quantity of coaching in deprived areas.
• Backed by Pupil Guarantee, will ensure every pupil has access to competitive sport and coaching.
• Continue investment in free swimming for children and over 60’s

Top marks to Labour for setting out detailed plans for grass roots sport, whilst Conservatives perhaps could have gone into more detail with what an ‘Olympic-style school competition’ would be.  Both, however, fail in revealing how they plan to pay for this legacy, will it be government backed, sponsorship from the private sector or will the National Lottery be paying again? But at least they have considered the long term benefits of hosting the Olympics, the Liberal Democrats don’t even mention how they plan to develop a Olympic legacy.

In fact the Liberal Democrats don’t spend much time discussing sport in their manifesto at all. But their two sport pledges are unique to them and specific:

• Use cash in dormant betting accounts to set up a capital fund for improving local sports facilities and supporting sports clubs.
• Close loopholes that allow playing fields to be sold or built upon without going through the normal planning procedures.

Labour also set out plans to improve the regulations and reputation of sport:

• Protect integrity of professional sport toughen measures to combat cheating and use of illegal substances.
• Ensure professional clubs are accountable to their stakeholders run on sound financial principles with greater community and supporter representation.
• Scrutinising of club takeovers for long term interest of club and the sport.
• Registered Supporters Trusts enabled to buy stakes in their club bringing mutualism to the heart of football.

So there you are a round-up of the main parties sporting pledges. In an era where our population is so overweight and inactive, it is a severe cause of death and burden to the health services I was expecting more sport related pledges in the manifestos. Labour was the party with the most in depth sporting aims but little suggestion of how these were going to be funded. I have little faith in these pledges actually being carried out but at least sport and the Olympics were considered by the major parties unlike some of the other political parties including:

• The Green Party, who want to stop the selling of playing fields and will also extend the ban on other blood sports, but they mention nothing about the Olympics, and
• UKIP, who mention the word sport in their manifesto only to suggest school assessment should include non academic abilities such as sport.

Obviously sport related pledges won’t be the deciding factor for your vote but hopefully I have given you something else to consider, when you place your vote tomorrow.

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Although I have my own regular swimming classes through my local councils swim scheme, yesterday I was asked to cover for a colleague at a different pool. If you cover at your regular pool, the parents recognise you, you have probably taught them or their siblings in previous lessons and they know the structure of the lessons. Covering at a different pool is a challenging experience.

After 5 weeks, I think even a nervous 5 year old child should attempt some water confidence skills without wearing arm bands.  This could be just walking across the pool pulling the water with their arms, or sitting on the steps trying to pick up some sinkers. Obviously wearing armbands restricts these actions as they don’t allow the arms to go under the water.

As we sat on the steps picking sinkers from the floor I hear ‘Oi! Teacher’, from the balcony above. The parent proceeded to shout how her child needs armbands. I explained that we were working on water confidence and they could wear them when we start swimming. But the mother bellows she knows what her child needs and he is going to be terrified when he goes under the water. The child who was happily sitting on the steps collecting the toys from the bottom of the pool then begins to cry as his mother continues to shout at me. So I put him in arm bands and he struggles through the lesson as he can’t put his feet on the ground to walk and tries to swim vertically.

The next group were slightly more advanced beginners who I was supposed to teach breast stroke legs to. Some kids can’t grasp front crawl kicking straight away and have trouble moving but are natural breast stroke swimmers. But because some children who are obviously good frontcrawl kickers were struggling with these new strokes, the parents complained very vocally that what I was teaching was too difficult. Never mind that other children were mastering it, it was too hard because theirs couldn’t. All that ended up happening was those children listened to their parents announced they couldn’t do it, and refused to try.

Yesterday I was angry. Not only because of the public, vocal way they made their feelings known but also in the way their views affected their children who were happily doing as I asked until they listened to mum and dad shouting. Whilst I appreciate that the parents are paying money for the lessons, I wonder why some of them are. One would think it was because I have professional qualifications and 8 years experience so could teach their children to swim better than they could themselves. If their child was so terrified of water, we have classes that children and parents can go to together to overcome those fears, yet the parent chose not to en-role them in that class. The parents complaining about the breast stroke teaching would also complain when they move up to the next class and find the other children joining the class have mastered both front crawl and breast stroke leg action and their child is left behind.

Today I have calmed down and realised that I am as bad as some of those parents. When I have a sports injury I go to the physio and they recommend 6 weeks of rest or no training so I can recover. The first thing I do is complain that is so unreasonable. I whinge to my friends that sport is my life, what will I do for 6 weeks, and that the physio doesn’t understand. But I guess the physio just thinks, ‘Why did she bother coming to see me and paying the money if she is going to ignore my professional, experienced opinion.’

It’s not just me though. I overheard a girl in a running shop having her gait analysed and when she discovered she was a severe over-pronator, refused to buy a suitable shoe because they looked like a special shoe you would get from a hospital and instead went for one she liked the look of. Why bother wasting time having a professional analysis? And how often do you hear people complain that ‘their doctor has given them antibiotics and has unreasonably said they can’t drink alcohol. But it’s a big work party on Saturday so of course they are going to drink.’

If we are going to see a professional for a service, especially when we are paying, maybe we should remind ourselves why we chose them. Rather than dismissing their opinion just because it’s easier than accepting them.

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Phosphocreatine is a high-energy storage molecule found within skeletal muscle. During intense exercise, phosphocreatine provides immediate replenishment of ATP (Adenosine-5′-triphosphate), which transports chemical energy from within cells for metabolic processes.

Traditional endurance training induces physiological adaptations such as improved aerobic capacity, along with a reduction in glycogen utilization and lactate accumulation. HITT has been shown to be an efficient way to produce similar effects.

Multiple HIIT bouts are designed to deplete phosphocreatine stores in the working skeletal muscle, and so reducing power output.

It takes more than six minutes to fully recover phospho-creatine stores after exercise-induced depletion. Therefore, if recovery intervals during HIIT bouts are less than six minutes, phosphocreatine may not be fully replenished, leading to a reduced performance.

Supplementing with creatine has been demonstrated to effectively increase muscle phosphocreatine stores. Specifically, one study showed a 20% increase in muscle creatine with ingestion of 20 g of creatine per day for just 5 days.

The purpose of the study published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition was to determine the effects of high-intensity interval training and creatine supplementation on cardiorespiratory fitness and endurance performance.

The subjects were 43 college-aged men who typically performed 1-5 hours of exercise per week. None had taken sports supplements, including any form of creatine, in the three months prior to the beginning of the study.

Participants were randomly assigned to a creatine or a placebo group and supplemented for 30 days at a dose of 10 g per training day, taken in two doses – one dose 30 minutes prior to and one dose immediately following training.

• Creatine group consumed 5 g of creatine citrate mixed with 15 g dextrose
• Placebo group consumed 20 g of dextrose

A control group, consumed no supplements nor completed the high-intensity interval training, and instead only completed the testing measurements.

Participants performed HIIT five days per week, for six weeks at progressively increasing workloads, determined as a percentage of the participant’s baseline VO_2PEAK max workload. Training increased in intensity each session beginning at 90% of their VO_2PEAK max workload and progressing up to 120% of their VO_2PEAK max workload.

Each training session began with a five-minute warm up, followed by a protocol of five sets of two-minute exercise bouts, with one minute of passive rest in between exercise bouts.

A maximal graded exercise test on a cycle ergometer was used to determine:

• maximal oxygen consumption (VO_2PEAK)
• maximum heart rate (HRmax).
• total work done (TWD)
• time to exhaustion (VO_2PEAKTTE)
• ventilatory threshold (VT), this is the point during graded exercise in which venitilation increases disproportionately to oxygen uptake.

Endurance performance is commonly assessed using a measure of aerobic capacity. While the HIIT program was effective in improving maximal oxygen consumption by 9%, creatine supplementation had no further influence on aerobic capacity. Ventilatory Threshold (VT) is another useful predictor of endurance performance as an indicator of the ability of the cardiovascular system to adequately supply oxygen to the working muscles. Performing exercise at intensities greater than VT often result in an inadequate supply of oxygen to the working muscles, quickly leading to fatigue.

If VT can be improved it could increase the time to exhaustion, reduce fatigue, and may enhance the efficiency of the body to supply oxygen to the working muscles.

However, when measuring VT in this study, significant improvements were only observed in the creatine group (16%), although the placebo group demonstrated a trend for improved VT (10%).

The researchers from University of Oklahoma found that HITT is an effective way to improve maximal endurance performance. The study also demonstrated an improvement to time to exhaustion with HIIT. However, whilst adding the use of creatine did improved ventilatory threshold, it did not increase total work done.

Previous studies have shown improvements in TWD after creatine supplementation which included a loading phase (20 g/d for 5-7 days). A loading phase was not used in the current study, so it may be possible that muscle phosphocreatine levels were not increased enough to aid in improving TWD.

The researchers did suggest that it is possibile that any benefits of low-dose creatine supplementation were masked by the effectiveness of HIIT alone.

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During exercise and training the body is stressed and immune responses may be compromised. In last years Proceedings of the Nutrition Society of New Zealand research was published showing that muscles incubated with a kiwi extract displayed a marked increase in maximum force and a significant delay in fatigue onset compared to control muscles. Kiwi extract also had an anti-inflammatory effect and protected muscles from exercise induced oxidative stress.

This week at the American College of Sports Medicine Conference, new research presented from the Oregon Health & Science University, showed people who drank 10.5 ounces of cherry juice twice a day for seven days while training for a long distance run, reported significantly less pain after exercise than those who drank another fruit juice beverage. Traditional NSAIDS (non steroidal anti–inflammatory drugs) can have adverse effects, which may be avoided by using a natural whole food alternative like cherry juice. The researchers suggest the cherries post exercise benefits are likely because of the fruit’s natural anti-inflammation power, attributed to antioxidant compounds called anthocyanins which also give cherries their bright red colour.

Blackcurrant supplementation also suppresses exercise-induced oxidative stress, as reported this month in the American journal of Physiology Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. However, as the authors point out exercise-induced oxidative stress is instrumental in achieving the health benefits from regular exercise. Therefore, inappropriate use of fruit-derived products, may counteract the positive effects of exercise. Their findings support the concept that consumption of blackcurrant anthocyanins alleviate oxidative stress, and may, if given at the appropriate amount and time, complement exercise’s ability to enhance immune responsiveness to potential pathogens.

The benefits of fruits don’t stop with immune responses and muscle performances. A further review out in the current issue of Aging Research Review suggests that dried plum, or prunes is the most effective fruit in both preventing and reversing bone loss. In two separate animal models of osteopenia (a mild form of decreased bone density, that doesn’t meet the criteria of osteoporosis), results indicated that dried plum not only protects against but more importantly reverses bone loss. In addition in a 3-month clinical trial the consumption of dried plum daily by postmenopausal women significantly increased various serum markers of bone formation by 6-17%.

These interesting findings will prove useful as new types of functional food ingredient for sports drinks and other foods targeted at strengthening bones, enhancing muscle performance, immune function and overall recovery from exercise.

Look out for a cherry and kiwi flavoured sports drink in a shop near you soon!!

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