Chris Rushton .com

There are tons of protein shake type products available for people willing to spend their money on them but a lot of the time they taste nasty, overly sweet or saccharine and sometimes floury and gritty.  I’ve drank my fair share of them in the past and here is my experience on three of the best ways to drink the stuff.

Straight Up

For the no fuss person who just wants his / her hit of protein you can’t go wrong with 30g protein shake and 250ml (1/4 litre) of room temperature water.  Mix in a screw top container and chug in one, without it even touching the sides of your mouth. No fuss, no hassle, no mess.  Straight out the door and on with your life.  Ideal for breakfast.

Velvety Smooth

For those of you that want to take your time with your shake, in the evening perhaps, while you are watching tv.  For someone for whom the standard water or even milk mix is just not enough.  For someone who demands the highest quality in their protein shake drinking experience.  Take 30g protein, 1 scoop of vanilla ice cream and about 500ml (1/2 litre) of ice cold skimmed milk.  Shake for a couple of minutes, let the ice cream mix fully with the milk and powder.  Pour from your mixing beaker into a tall glass if you want.  Hell, you could even stick a party umbrella in it if you wanted, the mixture will usually be thick enough to support it. Kick back and enjoy the smooth cool and creamy drink.

In my experience it is best to use skimmed milk.  Semi-skimmed makes the shake too thick and it won’t mix properly.  This depends on the amount of ice cream used though.  If you only have a small scoop then semi-skimmed will most likely be fine.  I like a big scoop though, so I can’t really get away with semi-skimmed.

Dirty Power Gainer Shake

This is for the athletes amongst us who want to get the most out of their workouts.  A combination of carbohydrates and protein that will help develop your muscle growth to it’s highest potential.  This isn’t the nicest shake in the world but by god does it get the job done.  Combine 30g of protein with 80g oat flour and mix with at least 500ml (1/2 litre) of skimmed milk or water.  This is the shake that I have as I am leaving the gym (water version) and often later in the evening (milk version).  The oat flour gives you a nice stream of extremely low GI carbohydrates that, when combined with the protein, will help your muscles recover quickly from their workout.  Over time this will help you become a better athlete, assuming you carry on training of course!

Elite Athlete Shake

Based loosely on the Dirty Power Gainer shake, this recipe is slightly more refined.  It is for the athlete but for the connoisseur of shakes too.   Mix 30g protein with 40g maltodextrose, 5g creatine monohydrate and 40g oat flour.  Throw in some water, approximately 500ml and shake.  The combination of higher GI carbohydrates coming from the maltodextrose, which is tasteless by the way, and the creatine will help to suck the nutrients into your muscle tissue, radically reducing the recovery time and the muscle gains achieved from each work out.

Maltodextrose is the only high GI carb I have found which doesn’t have a sickly sweet flavor.  Other carbs such as palatinose, fructose and dextrose / glucose are all substitutable for the maltodextrose in this recipe in terms of their nutritional value but if you are using a flavored protein shake the sweetness may be overwhelming.

Advert

I’ve used some high quality products in my shakes, almost exclusively from http://www.myprotein.co.uk.  I’m not sponsored by them but I can heartily recommend their products based on my own personal experience.  The price and the quality is right.  Everything that I have mentioned in this post can be bought from them.  If you want to get a discount on your first order, feel free to use this (my) referral code: MP73163

In Closing

These are simple straight up recipes that can be mixed together in powder form and carried around in your bag throughout the day.  They all can be mixed using a standard screw top protein shaker and don’t require any fancy blenders or such like.  If you are interested in even more exotic recipes, using fresh ingredients that need to be drank quickly, I have scoured the internet and gotten you a couple of interesting links to check out:

76 Protein Shake Recipes from “Fat Loss School”

3 More Recipes from “How To Lose Weight Fast in 14 Days”

My first blog post was written on the 20th June 2009 and I thought that it would be interesting to look at how far I have come in the last 5 and a bit weeks.

Technical

Firstly, I think I am finally comfortable with the style of the site.  I apologize to anyone who was trying to view pages when I was flicking between a few different themes a week or so ago, but there were always a few little niggles I wanted to fix.  This is all done, for the moment…  The only problem with the current theme is that I had to modify the code to let the stat tracking work.  Not really a big deal to be honest, but for my own vanity I did lose around 90 page views for my overall stats.  I don’t think there are any major changes that need to be made to complete my “vision” of a blog.  In stylistic terms anyway.  I’d still like more content.

The nitty gritty internal workings seem pretty much set now. After exploring a few blogs and trying to figure out exactly what they are doing, I think I have managed to cherry pick the best ideas.  There are some very successful blogs out there and a lot of them talk about how they got successful, so that wasn’t really too hard.

Financial

Financially the site is making money.  Not enough for me to quit my day job, but enough to pay for a decent night out once a month.  I won’t go into details here but I will let you figure it out for yourself.  I am debating paying an extra $12 a year to remove the annoying little popup ads that my server insists on putting on my site.  I think this would make the online experience better for everyone.  I am still tweaking the structure of the adverts on the site and I am also exploring new and exciting ways to generate money from this site.  I have plans for an online store driven by Amazon’s affiliate system and also adding a donations page sometime down the line.  All these things need plenty of traffic, and more importantly, more high quality posts.  I can’t ask people to donate money towards a crappy project can I?  I’d best get on it.

For people interested in exactly how this site makes it’s money, the answer is simple.  I currently make money via ad clicks coming through Google’s adsense program.  The business plan is simple.  I create material that people want to read and distribute it for free.  Google places ads on my site for products that their affiliates are selling.  If you find an ad interesting and decide to look at the product, Google generously gives me a cut of their profits.  In the future I would like to extend this by selling my own ad space directly, cutting out the middle man and making me more money in the process.  This all depends on traffic however.  Until my daily page views are in the high hundreds, I have very little leverage and am best served only using Google’s service.  It is free after all.  The best price!

Content and Direction

On posts, I am happy with the style of my posts.  The ratio between long articles and quick posts seems about right and the frequency of posting feels good too.  I’ve been playing this by ear, posting when the traffic from an old post seems to dry up.  I think I will carry on with this strategy for the time being, since it also gives me the freedom to write reasonably regularly but not force myself to churn out really lame posts just to meet a quota.

Every now and then I get a massive hit, like today for example.  I haven’t made a new post for almost a week or promoted my site heavily recently.  I think a few people have been browsing my site in depth.  This makes me happy since it means people like my content.  Conceptually the blog should be a place for me to express myself but if people like it then it’s even better!

All in all, I am very happy with the progress of my blog up to this point but I am bullish about the future too.  I am too savvy to rest on my laurels right now since this is the most important time in the development of this as a viable business.

It is critical to any serious musician that they are able to read music.  Playing guitar makes reading music a little more difficult than (for example) a piano because there are multiple places to play each note on different strings.  High E can be played in 3 places for example.  On a piano, just the one.  Being able to identify the notes as they appear on manuscript is just the start of the story for the guitarist, who must then figure out the most efficient way to play the notes written.  You could always try and find a tab for what you are looking for, but the tab has no rhythm information and it is unlikely that you will be able to find many good works written in tab.  The people that play this kind of music can normally read normal music.

There are endless resources on the web which will tell you what each note looks like on paper so I’m not going to go into any detail about that, but instead offer some advice for associating the names with the physical action of playing them on a guitar.  The following is a description of a game I used to play with my guitar teacher but with a bit of effort can be done by an individual.  It isn’t as much fun to do it by yourself but it definitely helps you to get used to the positions of all the notes.

• A beat is set up, either using a metronome or a tapping foot, it’s up to you
• A string is decided, for example 6th string
• The first person calls a note in time with the rhythm, eg 6th string, A
• The second person has until the next beat to play the note
• The second person now calls a note keeping with the rhythm
• Process repeats until someone gets the wrong note and a new string is chosen
• If you lose 3 times you lose the game

This game is quite easy once you know where all the notes are.  If you are finding it too easy, increase the tempo until you start making mistakes.  If you want to make it even more challenging, try to picture each note the way it would look on a sheet of music at the same time as playing it or don’t call the note, use flash-cards of the note instead.  This is difficult and definitely not doable if you are practicing alone.

There are other ways to get more used to the positions of notes on the guitar such as playing scales and arpeggios.  Whist these are good technique builders and certainly shouldn’t be excluded from a good practice schedule, I find this method a lot of fun, especially if you have someone to practice with.  It is good to try and push each other to be better but a teacher should never lose to a student at this game unless the student is extra special.  I never beat my teacher!