Athletes of all kind require proper nutrition to enhance their overall performance.
Dietary choices along with nutritional supplements can leverage an athlete’s ability to perform, often allowing them to achieve their top performances. Dietary changes, lifestyle changes and the addition of nutritional supplements can have a tremendous impact on sports performance.
Dietary Changes
One of the first and most important dietary areas to focus on to improve sports performance is the number of calories ingested daily.
Calories provide much needed energy to athletes during training and during their competition or performance. The caloric intake for an athlete is often significantly higher than that of a more sedentary individual.
Of the calories that an athlete intakes daily, a large percentage of those should be derived from carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates provide the body with much needed energy. And, excess carbohydrates can be stored as glycogen, which comes in handy for athletes during prolonged or even strenuous exercise.
To improve sports performance, athletes should ingest complex carbohydrates, starchy vegetables, dairy products and fruits. Endurance athletes in some cases even load up on carbohydrates the day before or the day of an event to improve performance.
In addition to carbohydrates, protein is also essential for an athlete looking to maximize their sports performance.
A typical diet should contain between 12-15% of its calories from protein. Of the protein ingested, it is recommended that athletes choose lean cuts of meat, poultry and fish. And while some would suggest that a high protein diet provides advantages, there are certain health risks associated with these types of diets, so most nutritionists point to a more well rounded diet for optimal sports performance.
Fat is also an important component of an athlete’s diet. In fact, some performance athletes increase the fat content of their diets when they near an event or competition.
No diet would be complete without the recommendation of water. Water is crucial to the body’s overall performance and for athletes, it is even more important. Athletes should consume an excessive amount of water to keep their body hydrated during and prior to events.
Some athletes find benefit in the addition of certain nutritional supplements in relationship to their sports performance.
Nutritional Supplement Options for Increased Sports Performance
AAKG is part of the amino acid family and has been linked to increased production of nitric oxide within the body’s muscles.
The effect on the body is an increase in blood flow, something that has been shown to aid athletes.
Creatine is a well known nutritional supplement, particularly within the weight lifting community.
It is commonly used to improve the muscle’s ability to build tissues, providing a needed source of energy for the muscles to contract during extreme workouts. There is some evidence that adding creatine to your daily diet can help increase lean muscle mass.
Most health care professionals recommend that individuals take a daily multivitamin supplement to ensure that the recommended daily amount of vitamins and minerals in ingested. This is even more important for athletes, as they often experience nutrient deficiencies more often than non-athletes. While there are not direct links between multivitamin supplements and sports performance, it has been proven that adding these important nutrients is important for improved health and overall bodily functioning.
Antioxidants have gained a tremendous amount of attention in recent years, in particular, due to the increased press surrounding superfoods.
Strenuous exercise has been shown to produce the production of free radicals within the body, which have been found to be harmful on the body. Antioxidants have been shown to reduce the damage or free radicals on the body when added to the daily diet. You can find antioxidants in a variety of fruits and vegetables, as well as within a variety of nutritional supplements.
Alkalinizing agents have been shown to enhance an athlete’s performance when added into the diet. In particular, this substance works to reduce the acids produced by muscles within the body during strenuous exercise.
Electrolytes have gained publicity due to their addition to many sports drinks.
It is important to point out that these nutrients, even when added to common sports drinks, are not intended to be a substitute for drinking water. But, they do provide benefits to athletes who are engaging in competitions, especially when exercising outdoors as the electrolytes replace important nutrients that the body loses through sweating.
Iron helps the body transport oxygen to the muscle cells. Most athletes do not gain enough iron within their daily diets, so nutritional supplements are often recommended.
However, most health care professionals recommend not to add an individual iron supplement to the diet unless a deficiency in the nutrient has been diagnosed, as there are some potential harmful health effects from ingesting too much iron.
To improve sports performance, it is vital to eat a healthy varied diet which includes food selections from every major category.
Calories play a vital role in the energy required for training and performance, and athletes often require a higher number of calories everyday for their resting metabolic rate and to fuel their exercise routines.
In addition to a healthy diet, there are a variety of nutritional supplements that have shown various benefits to the body and performance of an athlete when added into the daily diet.
Learn More
Aromatherapy
Yoga
Menopause
How to Achieve Healthier Aging
Osteoporosis
This article is exclusive to and copyright © The Vitamin Creek LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of The Vitamin Creek is prohibited.
