There has been a lot of hype surrounding the topic “Sports Nutrition”, and has risen exponentially throughout the past 5 years.
Singapore has not been spared from this “sports nutrition bug”, and a wide variety of sports nutrition is being offered through the rise of new, up and coming health/nutrition dealers and shops. New brands have also appeared and many brands now pump in more time and effort into research for their sports nutrition products. Scientific literature have also taken a step – up in terms of research, adding to an already vast literature of sports science journal articles and reviews.
Sports nutrition is not what most people perceive it to be.
Simply saying that you consume gels and bars during every single workout and downing a recovery drink after a ride does not define what sports nutrition really is.
In fact, sports nutrition is really just proper nutrition – a basic, well – balanced diet (which everyone should be practicing), catered to meet the special demands and stresses of an athlete.
Training and racing puts a lot of stress on the human body (along with other stresses of life), and an athlete with poor nutrition strategies do not often feel good, whether not sufficiently recovered from a workout, running out of energy all the time, or simply falling sick often.To put it simply, training is a stress implemented onto the body by you, and the body tries to adapt it, which in turn makes you fitter and stronger.
Proper nutrition helps you to be able to stress the body through training and racing, as well as help it in this adaptation process, all while keeping it healthy at the same time. It affects every facet of your life.
Now that you’ve a rough idea of why proper nutrition is so important, you must be asking what sports nutrition is! As aforementioned, sports nutrition is proper nutrition catered to meeting the demands of your sport. Here’s an equation to simplify things:
Proper nutrition = What to eat + How much to eat = Quality + Quantity
Sports nutrition = Proper nutrition + When to eat what
= What to eat +How much to eat + When to eat what
= Quality + Quantity + Timing
Simple to understand? I’ll touch on each of the 3 different aspects of the equation in future articles, so do remember to follow and check back from time to time!
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From now till then, keep training hard and stay away from those chips and fries!!
CrankSMART 