Sports Nutrition: Extracting precious seconds

The Olympic and Paralympic Games are such a festival and celebration of athletic prowess, skill and human potential. Athletes showcase years of focus, dedication and training; some sessions good and others bad, to be decided by margins of victory that are incredibly narrow. The perseverance of picking yourself up and trying again, for it all to come down to a millisecond, a millimetre or one judges decision, inspires us all.

I speak like I know it, but I cannot claim any great athletic ability. Our talents lie in being a strong member of the support crew; careers dedicated helping both recreational active people and elite athletes (young and mature) eat the right foods at the right time. Effective training is the cornerstone of competition performances, and proper nutrition helps our clients train hard and train well. It also helps them feel better all week after completing lots of exercise.  Know that investing in great nutrition understanding and habits enhances not only athletic performance, but also improves productivity in work, studies and family life. This principle applies universally, not just in sport. Even if you are not an elite athlete, nutrition has a valuable role to play for you too. 

New Zealand has a strong sporting culture, we embrace and enjoy sports and exercise, indoor and out. We are very talented, and we enjoy sports and exercise to spend time with friends. A great example is our rural & local communities socialising around the netball court, cricket pitch or rugby field. The good news is that whether you are an Olympian, a Paralympian, a weekend warrior or a gym goer, there are some nutrition tips to help you get the best out of your body – in both sport and in life.

There are three key points to emphasise in sports nutrition:

1. Eating well around training delivers is more beneficial than just focusing on competition nutrition. Great training sessions enable great performances, making your training nutrition crucial.
2. Timing of food and fluids around exercise is essential.
3. If you don’t have the right food with you, you won’t be eating it. Pack your food and fluids with your gear.

Sportspeople commit hours to training so that they get better at their sport, and to feel better when taking part and for the rest of their day. Training aims to create ‘adaptations’ within the body – changes in how the body works to help it deal with the stress of exercise. Exercise is a stressor, and a good one. These exercise-driven adaptations makes us healthier and enhances our resilience to other stressors. The adaptation process makes us stronger, faster, and able to concentrate for longer.  Examples of some of those training adaptations are listed in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Examples of Training Adaptations to exercise

Good sports nutrition advice helps you make food choices that support your body to improve itself in response to exercise. To adapt effectively, we need to refuel, rebuild, rehydrate, and rest. We need to get essential nutrients from our diet to do that. The human body is adaptable and resilient, and sometimes it feels like you can feed it whatever you want and it will keep delivering. However, consistently poor food choices over time eventually impact health, performance, cognition and concentration; and can leading to lifestyle related diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and dementia.

For sportspeople, we think “from the inside out”. What stresses is the athlete placing on their body? What nutrients do all those cells in their body need to restore themselves, function well and adapt to that stress? And where do we get those nutrients from? We must clearly understand exercise physiology and biochemistry to grasp the demands being placed on them, and a great understanding of the food supply to know where to get those nutrients from and when our athletes should eat them. This level of detail requires nutrition advice to be individualised, tailored to each athlete and their training schedule.

Eating well before training maximises the benefits from the time you invest in exercise. Starting a session tired or dehydrated can limit your training.  Drinking and eating properly during exercise can help sustain your best training effort for longer. Eating well after training provides you with the nutrients you need to replenish, recovery and cement the improvements you want. Different types of exercise stress the body in different ways, hence require different nutrients. Most types of exercise burn carbohydrate, making carbohydrate the go-to nutrient – preferably from fruit and wholegrain sources like brown rice, wholemeal pasta, wholegrain bread and wholegrain muesli. This not only fuels your body effectively but also helps train your taste buds to enjoy the best foods for a long, healthy life.

Antioxidants, found in fruit, vegetables, tea, shellfish and nuts are also beneficial after nearly all types of exercise. It is best to get antioxidants from food, as high dose antioxidant supplements can have the opposite effect and compromise, rather than support, your adaptations to exercise. This is another reason why we promote a food-first approach in sports nutrition.

The timing of when to eat depends on the gap between exercise sessions. With 12 hours or more between sessions, eating sufficient carbohydrate intake throughout the rest of your day is usually enough to restore fuel stores before your next session, without needing to extra immediately after training. Having said that, if you typically would eat a meal or healthy snack soon after you finish that training, you could shift that to within 40-60mins of your workout if you want.  

When you have two exercise sessions 4-8 hours apart, consume a carbohydrate rich snack with some fluids within 40-60 mins of the first session to optimise refuelling and rehydration ahead of the next one.   Adding protein to a snack or meal following resistance exercise will help your muscle fibres repair and rebuild too.

Good snack ideas are listed in Table 2, but remember, every individuals needs are different!

Table 2: Post-exercise recovery snack ideas

Of course, you can't reap the benefits of great nutrition unless you have the food with you! Many athletes stumble at this hurdle by forgetting to pack food and fluids to take with them. Hours later they are so hungry that they walk into a shop and want to eat everything in there. These poor food choices then compromise the adaptation to and benefits of that training. Don’t let that happen to you!

If you want more advice on how to eat around your exercise, no matter what kind of activity you enjoy and to what extent, feel free to email us at info@fuelmypotential.com or visit www.fuelmypotential.com. Our team, with over 30 years combined experience,has supported thousands of active and athlete clients adapt their nutrition strategies to feel better in sport, study work and life.

After all, it’s all about feeling great all day every day! Let us help you, you won’t regret it.