The composition of the diet is one of the indispensable elements for an athlete if one wants to obtain and maintain a good level of training and achieve certain goals. Whatever level we are referring to, whether we are talking about novice athletes or Olympians, the food component plays a key role, and you should try to set your lifestyle with one eye on taste and one eye on nutrition. Of course, you’re thinking that it’s not a dessert at dinner or a glass of beer now and then that will make you go faster or for longer or shorter, but it’s the sum of everything that leads to the result. As in the most banal of chats among friends, therefore, here is the phrase you will have heard dozens or perhaps hundreds of times:
Balanced nutrition is what makes the difference.
Am I here to contradict you? But I don’t even think about it; in fact, I subscribe to every word of it, because that is indeed the case, and for a good portion of the activities we practice every day, a varied diet without too much fat allows you to have virtually all the energy you need, even to perform routine sports activities. In fact, after some training, our body adapts-our body is a master of adaptation-to the efforts we cyclically put it through and begins to consume fewer calories to do them, until it reaches the lowest possible consumption To perform a certain activity at a certain intensity. If your hour of running used to require 1,000 calories, after a few months of training you may require only 800 calories or even less, depending on your ability to adapt.
ARE WE PERFECT BEINGS?
Unfortunately not, and although our bodies are capable of doing amazing things, there are two major obstacles that are hard to ignore: the
intensity
and the
duration
of athletic effort, which throw everything written so far into disarray. In sports (and beyond), scientific discoveries have made it possible to quantify almost to the gram what it means for our bodies to perform a given athletic act in terms of carbohydrates, protein and minerals lost. Knowing the amount we lose of these elements allows us to reintroduce them even during sports activity, through the use of the infamous
supplements
. You may have heard about it many times, in some cases positively and in other cases, negatively. Some love them and some hate them, but the truth is,
DATA IN HAND
, their use is a great ally for athletes who engage in long-duration activities such as running or biking.
HOW DO SUPPLEMENTS WORK?
There is a small and extremely important premise to be made here :
there is no such thing as a magic potion
. Forget them. Sports supplements do not do miraculous things; their purpose is to provide you with energy support and replenish what you have lost, not to give you something that does not belong to you. That is doping,
sucks
(does it need to be written?) and it’s loser.
The most suitable supplements for athletes who engage in endurance activities such as running and biking are those based on carbohydrates and of branched-chain amino acids (the English acronym is BCAA – Branched Chain Amino Acids), the use of which should be done judiciously and based on personal needs.
The need to supplement the former is easy to see, because anyone, even non-athletes, will have heard that
Carbohydrates are the human body’s main source of energy
. What perhaps not everyone knows, however, is that our body stores–in the liver–a certain amount of spare carbohydrates, to be used when needed (I’m simplifying A LOT). When the sporting activity goes a little long these reserves begin to be used up, and there is a risk that at some point they will run out altogether. Roughly speaking, a trained body can optimize the utilization of carbohydrate reserves up to 30-35 kilometers of running or 120-140 kilometers of biking. Taking a carbohydrate supplement before the reserves disappear altogether allows our body to put energy into the bloodstream immediately, allowing us to continue running or cycling. If you have watched any marathon races on TV, you may have noticed that the elite athletes have at the refreshment stands a bottle with their name on it that often has a candy bar or gel attached. All they do is supplement lost carbohydrates. In their case, the calculation is done very precisely by the nutritionist (or team) following them, but it is not too different from what we amateurs can also do for our own needs.
Then there are the
BCAA
, the branched-chain amino acids. They, too, perform a major energy function for our bodies, providing the basis for building proteins, which are the building blocks used to build muscles, of which they can make up more than 30 percent. With intense exertion, muscles go through microtrauma, ruptures and flaking, needing to be repaired. Scientific studies related to supplementation with BCAAs during endurance activities have grown in recent years, mainly in an attempt to understand whether or not their intake may allow the athlete to reach the finish line with less muscle damage than those who do not use them. Although there are exceptions, in most studies the conclusion reached is that no, use in endurance activities does not decrease muscle microtrauma. What BCAAs do well, on the other hand, is to help our bodies rebuild damaged muscles, especially if taken in the immediate vicinity of the end of exertion (okay, I don’t say as soon as we cross the finish line, but almost), because they pass the gastric barriers more easily and are thus absorbed more quickly, speeding up the cellular readjustment processes and allowing us to resume training at our usual intensity in a shorter time.
IN CONCLUSION.
Each of us is made similarly to all other human beings, yet we are unique. This means that what works for one person may not necessarily work for another. Of course, in general terms we can say that two athletes with the same lifestyle, eating habits, and timing may react the same way toward an X element, but this is not always the case, because in biology 1 + 1 sometimes makes 3 and sometimes makes 1 again, and this also applies to carbohydrate and branched amino acid supplements. The use of one and the other should therefore be calibrated to the needs of each of us, with the help of a nutritionist and a coach, who will be able to direct us toward the right choice.
Bibliografia parziale “Isolated Leucine and Branched-Chain Amino Acid Supplementation for Enhancing Muscular Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review” di Plotkin et al., 2021; “Use of nutritional supplements by elite Japanese track and field athletes” di Tabata et al., 2020; “A 7-day oral supplementation with branched-chain amino acids was ineffective to prevent muscle damage during a marathon” di Areces et al., 2014; “Branched-chain amino acid supplementation during a 100-km ultra-marathon--a randomized controlled trial” di Knechtle et al., 2012.
main image credit: Milijan on DepositPhotos.com