Nutritional Information

By Brian Jordan, Technical Manager, NSF Certified for Sport^® at NSF International

The demands of a rigorous training and travel schedule during a season – which can span up to 10 months of the year – can place both physical and mental strain on an athlete. With the pressure to maintain peak training, performance, health and well-being while logging countless training hours, many athletes turn to supplements to help nourish their bodies. There are many safe and effective supplement options available in the marketplace today, and as an informed, responsible athlete, you should never compromise on product quality or safety.

The NSF Certified for Sport^® program was developed to keep athletes in the game through a reliable verification process athletes can trust, and has official recognition from a number of professional sports agencies, including the MLB, MLBPA, NFL, NFLPA, PGA, LPGA and CPSDA. The program provides key preventive measures to:

• Protect against adulteration of products
• Verify label claims against product contents
• Identify athletic-banned substances in the finished product or ingredients

So how do you know which supplements and nutritional products to trust?

Through the NSF Certified for Sport^® program, we work with brands and manufacturers to individually test each lot of product to ensure what’s in the bottle matches what’s on the label. As part of our meticulous testing process, we also screen every lot for more than 245 banned substances, based on the WADA list, that could potentially compromise an athlete’s career. This guarantees that when you see our seal, you know that you are consuming safer nutritional supplements and competing with the highest level of integrity and responsibility as an athlete. At any time, you can match your NSF Certified for Sport^® supplement’s lot number to what appears on our website, to ensure the exact product you have has been tested and certified through the program.
Quite simply, the best brands go the extra mile to guarantee their consumers stay in the game and compete at the highest level, banned-substance free. In addition to meeting the rigorous standards of the NSF Certified for Sport^® program, the top brands also take the following measures:

• They invest in third-party testing processes to ensure the quality and purity of raw ingredients.
• They work with medical advisors, PhDs and registered dietitians to make sure the product is formulated based on science and safety.
• They conduct an annual review of labeling and marketing materials to ensure consistency with current standards.

As a competitive athlete, I know first-hand that the day-to-day training for health and fitness demands significant time, energy and commitment, and is correspondingly rewarding when done with integrity. Make sure that you are properly fueling your body with food first, and when you need dietary supplements, choose nutritional products that come from certified and reliable brands.

Blog by Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Ms. Grimes is the founder of Simply Simple Health (SSH), author of “The Everything Anti-Inflammation Diet Book,” and a retained medical advisor for Klean Athlete. (biography click here)

Whether you’re following an intense training schedule or have an event on the horizon, performance is on your mind. You train day after day, whether your body is ready to roll or fatigue is knocking on the door. Let’s face it: Some training days, your get-up-and-go has got up and left. These days can affect your physical, mental and emotional health, and, if they occur frequently, can contribute to overtraining syndrome and put personal bests out of reach. The key to keeping your training fresh, invigorating and effective is to invest in your recovery.

For many athletes, “recovery” refers to rest and nutritional support after training and competition, but real recovery involves key strategies before, during and after exercise, as well as throughout the day. Essentially, athletes need to be in “recovery mode” at all times.

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Blog by Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Retained Medical Adviser (biography click here)

The following is the second of a multi-part series on nutrition for strength and power athletes and finding the optimal recipe for peak performance.
Click here to read Part I: Strength and Power Calorie Prescription

As all strength and power athletes know, muscles love dietary protein. The protein you eat provides the structural framework for muscle growth and development. It also allows your body to form antibodies to keep your immune system humming, enzymes to help you digest food and to support metabolic pathways that promote strength, and hormones that create an anabolic (“growth”) environment for your muscles. As we challenge our bodies physically, numerous physiological processes are accelerated in an attempt to meet the greater demands, and that requires the input of additional dietary protein.

Kami Craig is a member of the Klean Athlete sponsored USA Water Polo Women’s Senior National Team, training at their facility in Orange County, CA.

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Blog by Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Retained Medical Adviser

The following is the first of a multi-part series on nutrition for strength and power athletes and finding the optimal recipe for peak performance.

Bio
Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD, is the founder of Simply Simple Health (SSH) and author of The Everything Anti-Inflammation Diet Book. SSH creates and administers nutrition, fitness and health education programs for athletes, educators, coaches and sports teams at schools and colleges throughout the Boston area. Its programming includes individual and group sports nutrition counseling, as well as sport-specific personal training. SSH also contributes to numerous academic textbooks and magazines.

Karlyn has a dual Master’s degree in nutrition and exercise physiology from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from Colgate University, with a minor in economics. She is a registered dietitian (RD) with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a certified specialist in Sports Dietetics (CSSD) and a licensed dietitian nutritionist (LDN) in the state of Massachusetts. She is currently a faculty member in the Nutrition and Biology Departments at Simmons College in Boston, where she teaches sports nutrition, medical nutrition therapy, exercise physiology, anatomy and physiology, general biology, and numerous other courses.

It All Starts Here
It’s plain and simple: Strength and power athletes need more calories than their sedentary counterparts, but those needs vary tremendously depending on age, gender, body mass and sports-specific demands.  Case in point: Maximal strength and power is a universal goal among weight lifters and gymnasts, but while weight lifters go all-out to gain body and muscle mass, gymnasts strive to limit unnecessary baggage so they can jump, flip and tumble.  Determining your calorie needs is all about experimenting with current research-based sports nutrition guidelines so you can complete your own personal performance puzzle.

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By Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Retained Medical Adviser

Sleep, train, eat, work, repeat…. You follow a rigorous schedule making it critical to support each and every body part so you are game day after day, week after week… and you know the rest. Vitamin D, once primarily known for its intimate relationship with calcium to promote bone health, is now seen as a multitasking, super vitamin with many hypothesized benefits.^‡ Actually, vitamin D is more than just a vitamin – it is a neuroregulatory steroid hormone that influences thousands of genes, and researchers have identified receptors all over the body.^‡ Investigators are currently scrambling to shed light on vitamin D’s multitasking functions, especially since many Americans have suboptimal vitamin D levels. Let’s take a look at what we know now. Hint: Vitamin D may be an athletes best friend so don’t forget your daily dose of Klean-D!

Reinforce Like An Athlete

If you only focus on calcium to bolster your bone health, you may be missing the boat. Vitamin D is essential for the absorption of calcium. You can consume all the calcium you want, but if you skimp on vitamin D, calcium can’t get into the body to do its job. Adequate vitamin D will keep your bones happy into your later years.^‡
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By Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Retained Medical Adviser

This is a news alert!! Bacteria are on the rise with 100 trillion microbes (aka bacteria) taking up residence in your intestine right here, right now. This is 10 times more than the number of cells in the human body and 14,000 times in excess of our world population. So what are these little guys and gals up to? Good question. Fortunately, we generally have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in our gut also known as the gut microbiome. We feed them and they help us produce essential vitamins, absorb minerals more efficiently, keep our waistline trim, avoid nasty bacteria looking for trouble, synthesize more lactase enzymes so we can break down milk sugar, support healthy cholesterol levels, support our immune system, 70% of which resides in our gut, and provide numerous other benefits that researchers are learning about everyday.

The bottom line is that we want bacteria to flourish in our gut, but the “good” bacteria must dominate if we want to enjoy all these wonderful benefits. Continue reading …

By Karlyn Grimes, MS RD LDN CSSD
Retained Medical Adviser

Klean Isolate: A “Whey” Better Protein
Klean offers one of the purest proteins out there: WHEY ISOLATE. It’s clean and “fast-acting” so your body gets an immediate surge of all the essential amino acids required for superior muscle growth and repair, and stabilization of blood sugar levels. Klean Isolate also provides those ingredients required for creation of a fleet of enzymes, hormones, antibodies and other substances that will support your sport. And even though whey protein isolate is derived from milk, after the extraction process the remaining protein is virtually free of fat and carbohydrate (including lactose), and has no added artificial flavorings or sweeteners. Perfect for athletes always on the go in work and play, those who want to boost their protein intake without calorie overload, or for individuals who’s stomachs do somersaults in the presence of dairy. What’s more, Klean Isolate’s flavorless make-up is perfect for adding “pure” protein to smoothies and your favorite foods.

The Ideal “Whey” to Use Klean Isolate
Timing can be very important when using Klean Isolate. Here are some guidelines: Continue reading …

Skeletal muscle holds nearly 60% of the total body protein in humans. Increased protein breakdown and decreased protein synthesis is commonly seen during strenuous activity and exercise, while protein building occurs during the recovery period.   However, the rate of protein turnover is dependent upon the type of exercise performed.  For example, endurance exercise, defined by training 10 hours or more per week, induces different levels of protein degradation as opposed to resistance/strength training exercise.   Athletes want to be in positive protein (nitrogen) balance and this state has been reached at a protein intake of at least 1.2 g/kg per day bases on clinical experiments in various types of athletes. ¹

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Featuring Balazs Csoke, Klean Team USA Ambassador – Sponsored Athlete

Q: How early did you arrive to Kona to get adjusted? What are the weeks prior like? Does your training or nutrition change much?
A: I arrived in Kona two weeks before the race. This gave me enough time to get settled in, get my body adjusted to the time difference and a chance to familiarize myself with the course. I pretty much did the same training I’ve been doing the whole year and using the Klean Athlete products as a part of my daily routine worked so well for me there was no need to change anything for Kona. Using these products played a major role in toe to the line at the World Championship.

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