Endurance Sports Nutrition

If you’re the highflying types, be sure to be a part of the endurance gang of fitness freaks. If you've decided that you want to increase your aerobic performance, training for an endurance activity is a great way to achieve your goal. Endurance sports nutrition includes all this and more!

Basics of “Endurance Sports Nutrition”
During aerobic or endurance exercises, your body burns a large part of carbohydrates and fats for fuel. With mild to moderate-intensity aerobics, probably a light jog or even a fast walk, the mix of fuel burned is in equal quantities. Once you pick up the speed and increase your pace you'll burn more carbohydrate — almost as much as 80%. Here is why “endurance sports nutrition” comes to the fore. What really goes on in that sophisticated body of yours is that the energy source refers to the glucose circulating in your blood? Generally, if you’d notice at a higher intensity level, especially at the beginning of exercise, it's just not easy for the body to liberate fat for energy, as it is stored in the form of carbohydrates. Utilizing the well-stored fat in the wrong places for a good fuel mixture involves a series of complex chemical reactions that requires oxygen.

As your heart starts pumps in harder and the blood gushes into the tissues, an increased oxygen supply is transported into the cells. This simply means that along with the carbohydrates that are burnt, the fat content in your body can be burned too. The fuel mixture for exercise starts changing, with each repetition. Eventually what really happens is that your oxygen-carrying capacity begins to drop off and your body reverts to using stored carbohydrate for energy. So the more you exercise, the more fat you burn, but this happens only after a sizeable amount of carbohydrate; especially those carbs that are lying dead in your muscles are used and are the last to get burnt. “Endurance sports nutrition” can allow you to burn fat, carbohydrate and allow you through it have controlled dietary options to lose weight at a faster pace. It’s more like eating sensibly!

Another interesting observation is that the amount of carbohydrate stored in muscles (which in scientific terms is nothing but glycogen) is directly related to how much carbohydrate you eat and how well trained you are. So if you avoid starchy foods and limit it to about once every week, as carbohydrates are important you know, you’ll be at a much better position to burn fat. Diets that contain a decent percentage of calories that are burnt from the existing carbohydrates can allow you to burn fat faster. Which means in other words; you use an inverse proportion of the carbohydrate that you eat to the proportion that you burn. This in turn makes you burn fat at a rapid rate! What’s more is that there are certain diets that amount for maximum percentage of carbohydrates in your eating pattern and these actually allow you to gain and increase the amount of glycogen in your body by 60 percent. Isn’t that amazing!

This is possible as the diet amounts for the greatest storage of glycogen in the muscles on a daily basis. The more glycogen you store in your muscles, the longer you can train or work out, but if you have a hypothyroid situation or are low on your metabolism, you’ll take a lot longer to reduce your weight from the wrong corners. In essence, carbohydrates are essential in your body to train or cross train, but like all other things in life they need to be limited to a certain quantity. But if you’re aiming for mass gain or huge muscles, then you need to make sure that your diet should always be high in carbohydrates. In this way you get more strength and energy to comply with the endurance training.

With heavy training, typically the ones that last for 2 hours or more per day, you need to replenish your carbohydrate stores and cover your protein needs. In short take in enough calories to provide adequate energy, and drink plenty of fluids. In case carbohydrates do not suit your system, bear in mind that you have enough protein in your body to help you train better.

Stay well hydrated. Water is the essence of any successful training program, endurance sports included. Heat exhaustion and heat strokes are most likely to occur if you are not careful in this aspect. A minimum of 4-10 ounces of water every 15-20 minutes is recommended. In many cases, endurance training and events, requires one to have a diet comprising of 6-8% carbohydrate. This not only helps in decreasing fatigue but also improves your performance.

For the loading stage, it’s important that carbohydrates are thrown in your body even, say before you are for example gearing up for an event. Good pre-race food choices generally comprise of a combination of some of breads, pancakes, pasta, non-fat or low-fat yogurt and milk, chicken, turkey, egg whites, peanut butter, fruit, fruit juices, and high-carbohydrate liquid meals or supplements. It’s best if you could cling on to carbohydrate chocolate bars instead of extremely sweet foods. Make it a point to have high-fibre foods too along with and high-protein bars. When you train, it is important that you provide your body with adequate nutrition. This would largely depend on the kind of exercise that you do. Heavy workout like the ones that are included in endurance training also demands that you load you body with the right kind of foods. These foods are elements of a successful workout.

Ideally for people wanting to lose weight, over and above the type of exercise that they do, they are required to add in enough amount of protein and go easy on the carbohydrates. Most endurance training is more to do with power exercises. While these are likely to make you extremely exhausted, it is also possible that you might get tired easily, especially as you load in fewer carbohydrates. Making carbohydrates a weekly affair helps a lot during the high-powered workout sessions.