"A healthy & balanced sports diet is not a guarantee to success,
an inadequate and non adapted diet is a guarantee to failure!"
Most of us eat every day, several times per day even. When being active an adequate diet and an adapted nutrition plan, can make a significant difference to your body & your performance. What you eat will affect how you feel and how you perform. Nutrition has many subtle effects on your well-being and performance. A whole range of essential nutrients must be supplied in the right amounts and at the right times if health and performance are to be optimized. Food and the pleasure as well as the nutrients it provides to you, is a vital part of everyday life. Before we start looking into the details of what an adequate sports diet is, we first want to share with you why exactly adequate sports nutrition, adapted to your personal needs, is important.
A healthy & adequate sports diet is in in the first place required for providing your body with energy. Energy which you need to:
enable you to train harder;
increase the quality of your training;
ensure optimal recovery;
improve your condition, power & speed.
Next to providing your body with energy, a healthy & adequate sports diet is essential for injury prevention. When training regularly what you aim for is fast & optimal recovery, so that you can start fit at your next training session. We train almost every day on our journey to the NYC Marathon. We do not only run, we do many other types of training which supports and helps us to become better runners (more about that later ;-) ) It is of great importance that we avoid muscle damage and destruction. That we avoid injury & illness as much a possible.
Another advantage of a sports diet adapted to your needs is that it will enable you to train harder. An essential role of nutrition is to support consistent training and to enhance the process of adaptation that takes place in every tissue of our bodies in response to each individual training session. It is the sum of these vanishingly small incremental changes that translates into an enhanced performance. Nutrition support is more about promoting those changes rather than simply allowing us to recover more effectively between training sessions and, therefore to train harder.
Last but certainly not least, a diet adapted to your physical activities will help you with your weight and fat percentage management. Sports nutrition must not only be concerned with the identification of your nutritional goals but also with the translation of these goals into an eating strategy that takes account personal preferences, social and cultural issues and a whole range of other factors.
Comments