Sports Nutrition

Carbo-loading:

Boost your endurance during high-intensity workouts. Carbohydrate loading can improve your performance during high-intensity endurance exercise. Use this strategy to prepare for a marathon, triathlon or another endurance event. Perhaps you're training for a marathon or triathlon. Or maybe you're a long-distance swimmer or cyclist. Whatever your sport, if you plan to complete 90 minutes or more of high-intensity exercise, carbo-loading (carbohydrate loading) may improve your performance.



Resistance Training for Endurance Athletes

The food you eat contains carbohydrates, protein and fat. These nutrients supply the calories your body uses for energy. Although your body needs all three nutrients, carbohydrates are your body's primary source of energy.

Carbohydrates are found in grains, vegetables and legumes (beans and peas). They are also found in sugar and sweets, including fruit and dairy products. Each gram of carbohydrate contains four calories.

During digestion, your body converts carbohydrates into sugar. The sugar enters your bloodstream and is transferred to individual cells to provide energy. Your body may not immediately need all of this sugar, however. So it stores the extra sugar in your liver and muscles. This stored sugar is called glycogen.

Do You Need Carb Loading?

Carbohydrate loading works by forcing your body to store more glycogen. You taper the amount of exercise you're doing before a high-endurance event to conserve your body's stores of glycogen. At the same time, you eat significantly more carbohydrates. As a result, glycogen stores in your muscles increase, which boosts your endurance.

Extra carbohydrates not necessary for the average athlete and carbohydrate loading isn't for every athlete. But if you want to improve your performance in a high-intensity aerobic endurance event, carbohydrate loading might help.

Long-distance running and swimming, soccer, canoe racing and triathlons are appropriate activities for carbohydrate loading. Shorter runs, such as a 5- or 10-kilometer race, weightlifting, and recreational biking or swimming are not.

Option to Build Bigger Muscles

It is a myth that eating lots of protein and/or taking protein supplements and exercising vigorously will definitely turn you into a big, muscular person.

Building muscle depends on your genes, how hard you train, and whether you get enough calories.

The average American diet has more than enough protein for muscle building. Extra protein is eliminated from the body or stored as fat.

Calcium

What you may not be getting is enough Calcium. No Bones About It, You Need Calcium Everyday. Many people do not get enough of the calcium needed for strong bones and proper muscle function.

Lack of calcium can contribute to stress fractures and the bone disease, osteoporosis.

The best sources of calcium are dairy products, but many other foods such as salmon with bones, sardines, collard greens, and okra also contain calcium. Additionally, some brands of bread, tofu, and orange juice are fortified with calcium.

Eating a varied diet will give you all the vitamins and minerals you need for health and peak performance.

Exceptions include active people who follow strict vegetarian diets, avoid an entire group of foods, or eat less than 1800 calories a day. If you fall into any of these categories, a multivitamin and mineral pill may provide the vitamins and minerals missing in your diet.

Taking large doses of vitamins and minerals will not help your performance and may be bad for your health. Vitamins and minerals do not supply the body with energy and, therefore are not a substitute for carbohydrates.

Super Oxygenated Water

NEW YORK (Reuters health) - There is no scientific evidence to support that drinking "super oxygenated" water enhances athletic performance, researchers from Austria report.

So-called super oxygenated water -- water in which the oxygen content is increased significantly -- are marketed by various companies as a way to improve athletic performance by feeding extra oxygen to the muscles through the blood stream.

To test these claims, a team of researchers from the Medical University of Vienna compared the performance effects of the maximum oxygenated water they could find (180 mg of oxygen per liter) with that of non-treated water from the same source.

Twenty young men were submitted to intense bicycling exercises after having drank either 1.5 liters a day of oxygenated water or the same amount of untreated water, during two weeks.

Parameters such as maximum physical performance and maximum oxygen consumption were measured at the peek of their effort.

Consumption of super oxygenated water had no significant influence on these parameters and the subjects' working capacity did not improve, Dr. Valentin Leibetseder and colleagues report in the International Journal of Sports Medicine.

On the other hand, the authors write, "we did not investigate to what extend the consumption of highly oxygenated water might cause beneficial effects through psychological and mental effects."

The more intense the exercise or sport, the greater the body's nutrient needs. Athletes who participate in endurance sports--those that involve more than one hour of consistent activity—have specific needs because of what they demand from their bodies. For example, athletes lose more electrolytes—such as magnesium, potassium and sodium—through perspiration and must diligently replace them. The wear and tear of intense activity may necessitate increased intake of antioxidants such as vitamin E, which can help protect muscle cells from oxidative damage. Since muscle-tissue breakdown is common during intense exercise, athletes also need more proteins to repair the tissues.

Serious Sports Nutrition