Health before performance?
I read loads of sports nutrition content, articles, text books, journals, studies, blogs, comment and the one aspect that stands out is: Sports nutrition is there to help the athlete perform better. Better results, whatever that might mean for the individual.
But what if we were about to turn that on it’s head?
What if we said that every athlete, regardless of age, ability or event, should focus first on their health and then secondly consider their performance. You’d say we were crazy right? Because every athlete knows they have to battle through the pain barrier otherwise they aren’t working hard enough, right? Wrong! Consider this: The best ergogenic aid (performance enhancer) you have is your health – that’s right better than caffeine, protein or any other latest fad thing.
If you are healthy you perform better. Now what if we had a way of designing your training that actually improved your health and as a by-product of looking after your health, you got better performance results. That would be like a business having a happy workforce while also improving profits. Win win.
Well you can and it’s called Integrative Sports Nutrition. This looks at the athlete as a person first. We focus on aspects that improve the person’s health, starting with digestion. How are you digesting, do you bloat after you eat, have embarrassing wind in bed at night, gurgles and gargles in the stomach all day, loud enough to disturb your colleagues. Integrative Sports Nutrition focuses on this first, improving all aspects on digestion from mouth to… well, you know the other end!
Integrative Sports Nutrition looks at absorption. How are you absorbing nutrients? The well-known phrase says ‘You are what you eat’ but more accurately “you are what you eat, digest and absorb”. Its all well and good putting all the best supplements into your body with protein powders and multi-vits but, if your gut cannot digest and absorb, what’s the point? And this is before we’ve even talked about food and breaking down the vital nutrients held in them.
Everyone knows that when you’re training hard you going to pick up a cold or flu here and there. Training hard compromises your immunity so it’s the price you have to pay. But what if the eating plan/advice made sure that you were doing everything you could to support your body in combatting any viruses it encounters. Again, this starts in the gut where we take in much of the pathogens that could lead to illness. A healthy firing stomach with good levels of hydrochloric acid helps to kill those pathogens causing us problems.
Not everybody knows that exercise contributes to inflammation in the body. Inflammation is the thing we are all trying to avoid more than anything, it seems to be linked to every disease out there, from diabetes to heart disease. And exercise heightens the inflammatory response. Integrative Sports Nutrition looks to balance this out through your diet, introducing anti-inflammatory foods. Inflammation isn’t in itself a bad thing, it’s when it stays switched on for long periods that it can be problematic. The inflammatory response helps our adaptation process to exercise – helps us to come back stronger. It seems that the body responds to a challenge but we have to know when and how to give our body a break also. If our body is continuously fighting on all fronts it never actually gets a chance to come back stronger.
The point is that Integrative Sports Nutrition focuses on all these aspects and much more, putting you in the best position to go out and train your hardest every time. Future Athletes offers a nutritional therapy approach to sports nutrition. Putting you back at the centre of your training.