Today’s guest is nutritionist Rick Brunner. Rick is the author of “Explosive Ergogenics for Athletes”, an Alpha GPC based power enhancer for athletes.
I first saw Rick speak at the CVASP Seminar back in 2014, where he unloaded a barrage of great information on a variety of nutrition topics. Shortly after the presentation, I started using Alpha GPC as Rick had recommended and saw some great results in my training, as well as even having enhanced mental cognition while under its effects.
Rick is a nutritionist who came up through the dawn of the sport supplement era and has a wealth of knowledge, not only of human physiology, performance, and related supplementation, but also of how modern marketing trends and consumerism has affected the nature of how modern supplements affect the athlete (which is not always for the better). Rick spent extensive time learning from Soviet scientists in his quest for optimal supplementation back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and was active in creatine’s early appearance on the US shelves.
In the past 31 years, Rick Brunner has helped over 1,500 explosive athletes and their strength and conditioning coaches in football, baseball, hockey, basketball, track and field sprints, throws, and jumps, Olympic weightlifting, and many others achieve breakaway gains in reaction, starting power, maximal speed, striking force, and power-endurance.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:11 — 55.1MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | JioSaavn | Podchaser | Gaana | Email | Deezer | Anghami | RSS
View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.
Key Points:
- Rick’s background in the field, his time in Russia and his experiences in the early field of sports supplementation
- Creatine’s early transition into mainstream use, mechanisms of how it works, selecting good quality creatine, and loading and deloading guidelines
- The place of pre-workouts in a performance training regimen
- The effectiveness of Alpha-GPC as a pre-workout and the principles behind it
- Stress response and nutrient timing ideals for maximal growth post-workout
- The balance between mTOR and AMPK
“You never want to get the body too comfortable with anything (any supplement)… you don’t want to give the body “goodies” all the time, you want to make it work”
“There’s nothing wrong with cell volumizing, it can be very anabolic”
“You have to have (a workout) create a stress of some kind. The body responds to stress, all of life is about stress and adapting to that stress”
“You don’t want to add in a bunch of supplements in the training regimen that are going to make the training easier”
“I don’t take anything during a workout…. I don’t want to interfere with the training response”
“Alpha GPC increases the Acetylcholine level in the synapse, keeping it in there longer so that more muscles can fire”
“People will feel (pre-workouts) but that doesn’t make it right”
“Everything you do with your supplements should have a long term benefit”
“I believe the workout should be such a targeted stress that your gains come in restoration”
“Enzymes drive everything”
“If there’s less energy, the body will make AMPK, if there is more energy, the body will make mTOR”
About Rick Brunner
For the past 31 years, Rick Brunner has helped over 1,500 explosive athletes and their strength and conditioning coaches in football, baseball, hockey, basketball, track and field sprints, throws, and jumps, Olympic weightlifting, and many others achieve breakaway gains in reaction, starting power, maximal speed, striking force, and power-endurance. As a nutrition scientist and coach, Rick pulls the facts from thousands of research studies to make practical sense of their application in real-world training/nutrition plans. Rick calls upon his extensive training and collaboration with Soviet and Russian scientists since the 80’s to help deliver modern useful information that athletes in explosive sports can use right away.
Free Speed Training eBook - Velocity 101
Improving speed is one of the most popular topics in the athletic performance equation. Where there are many ideas and thoughts out there, as to particular training exercises, or setups, the more core aspects of speed training often go without mention. These include the fundamental aspects of what makes an athlete fast, specific sprint-power concepts, the relevance of "3D" motion, motor learning and more.
Velocity 101 will help you take a leap forward in understanding of what makes athletes fast, and how to train it effectively