Posted June 16, 2010
Are athletes different? If you’re active enough in your sport to be called an athlete, or if you compete on any level at all, do you need to eat differently?
The answer: you may not need different nutrition, but you do have to give your body what it needs. That may require something different from the regular diet of a non-active person. Any athlete, whether Masters, league or elite, must regard their body as a payoff machine. If you have a good amount of Fiber in your system, but not enough protein to get through a game – you won’t have enough physical energy to compete for very long, though you’ll be just great in the bathroom. Or, let’s say you’re more athletic than an actual athlete, and you plan on a long and leisurely hike on the following morning – do you eat carbs or protein the night before? Should you take supplements before or after a workout or training session?
An athlete’s diet should be specific to the way the body is going to be used. There should also be some attention paid to timing. For example, if you’re running a long race, like a marathon, you want to spend the week before eating a lot of carbs in order to train your Muscles to store carbohydrates better. But they have to be the right kind of carbs; the long storage, slow burning ones. A candy bar will give you a big burst of energy, then let you crash because you’ve burned up all that carb energy fast. A pasta dinner the night before the race will provide slow burning carbs to be used for energy while you run mile after mile.
But if you do a power sport, such as a team game with lots of running and jumping, or sprints on your feet or a bike, you need more protein. Protein provides the Muscles with the nutrients they need to keep working hard and fast. There are a number of ways to get the needed protein to your tissues; the main two methods are eating animals, and taking supplements. There are benefits to both. If you eat high quality creature protein – chicken breasts, tuna fish, turkey legs – your body will absorb these natural protein sources easily. If, on the other hand, you get your protein from supplements, it may not always be in a form your body can fully use. Some imported nutrients may be full of impurities or not high enough in quality to be absorbed by the body. You may have to take different brands of supplements until you find the one that works for you. But to have your body obey your desires in a competition, training session or conditioning workout, it’s best to combine both natural and bottled proteins.
Suppose you know that Creatine will allow your body to work harder for a longer period of time, so you want to feed it to your Muscles. However, a pound of steak contains only about two grams of Creatine, and you want to more of this protein to be absorbed by, and stored in, your muscles for a game the following day. The best way to get it into your muscles is with a combination of a natural source (animal products), Amino acids (essentially predigested proteins that will make Creatine) and a supplement of creatine itself. With the combination, your muscles will absorb more creatine than they would with any one element alone.
This is why experts know that nutritionally, Vitamins And minerals are better absorbed when they are taken with natural sources of the supplement. Eat some fruit and take some Vitamin C at the same time, and more of the pill form of the vitamin will be absorbed.
You can learn a lot of nutritional information from other athletes or from studying nutrition. But the most important thing to remember is that everyone’s body is different, includign yours. You may load up perfectly on carbs and still bonk at mile 19. Or you can stuff yourself with protein and still get tired during a hard hitting game. Maybe you could last long enough to win with a poor diet when you were younger, but your protein needs changed over the years. You think your athletic ability has deteriorated – when in fact, all you need to do is to give your body what it now needs. That’s why it’s a good idea to do what most Olympic level athletes do: keep a food, training and competition diary. If you ate a lot of roma tomatoes for dinner, then did good the next day, write down how you do the next time you eat roma tomatoes. If your diary shows that those tomatoes have a good effect on your athletic ability, you’ll know more about how to feed your body.
Pay attention to your diet, to what you eat and when, and your results will improve more than you ever thought possible.
Wina Sturgeon is the editor of the online magazine Adventure Sports Weekly (adventuresportsweekly.com). For the latest in training and workout information, go to: adventuresportsweekly.com.
© 2010, Adventure Sports Weekly (adventuresportsweekly.com)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Tags: Attention, Bath, Body, Carbohydrate, Energy, Food, Information, Minerals, Vitamins
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