Sports Nutrition Tips

Are you an athlete, sports person or just trying to lose weight?

Did you know that what you eat impacts results and performance significantly? “Nutrition cannot substitute for raw talent, training, mental preparation or equipment, but bad nutrition can destroy performance”- Stone foundation, San Francisco, USA.

Meaning, that what you eat could be the difference between being the winner or coming second place.

For the first 20-30 minutes of exercise we are mainly burning the carbohydrates and sugars that we have recently eaten and/or stored in our muscles. Around 30 minutes into exercise we have the potential to really start to burn fat for fuel at a great rate – but the catch is: the lower the intensity the exercise we are doing, (such as walking, slow jogging, etc.) the more we use fat for fuel in combination with carbohydrate. In addition to this, the longer you exercise, the greater your fat burning increases, as long as you don’t go too hard. Although, recent research has suggested that interval training, such as having occasionally spikes in intensity, can boost fat burning further!

Against what many people believe, the higher intensity exercise (around 75-80% of your max) actually switched a person back to burning more carbohydrates within the muscles, not fat stores.

On top of this, many people who exercise regularly or hard are not aware of how to replenish their muscle carbohydrate stores of energy properly, so they can be training hard all week, and then feel exhausted or become prone to injury.

The key to beating this is to eat or drink something containing a small amount of carbohydrates and protein within 20-30 minutes of finishing exercise. This will not put on weight, but will give you more energy for your next training session, your recovery time will be greatly improved and you won’t feel so exhausted.

And to boost fat burning or muscle building more, have a high protein, low carb meal or snack 1 hour after exercise.

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Next week Honor will be talking about how to assists childhood behavioral or learning difficulties through nutrition.