SPORTS SUPPLEMENTS AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCERS For the hard-training athletes there can be nothing more frustrating than hitting a barrier to further progress. One minute you are training hard, making progress and then it happens – no matter what you do, how hard you train – progress draws to an abrupt halt. You try pushing harder, training even longer, but the situation gets worse instead of better. Unfortunately this natural human tendency to torture ourselves in order to achieve results, rarely delivers anything other than total physical and mental burn-out. To put it in another way: if you lay asleep at night and were woken up by the sound of a burglar alarm, would you simply yawn, get up, switch it off and go back to sleep? Or would you get up and do something about it? The same is with our bodies. When progress stops it is our body’s internal alarm that rings and it is alerting us that something is wrong and we must take action to put it right. But how? Scientific advancements in the field of sports nutrition and supplements have led to the creation of new and more advanced nutritional aids and enhancers available for all to experiment with and discover their worth on an individual basis. Every living thing is built of cells and life is based on a continuous series of electrochemical changes that take place around them. When an athlete is in hard training the cells are placed under extreme stress and they need to be able to adapt to this demand for growth and increased energy production. When the point is reached where progress draws to an abrupt halt it signifies that the motor units have reached the limit of the adaptive response or level of functional output. This is directly related to the level of metabolism or energy production within the cell. To raise the adaptive response and start to make progress again, better metabolism is required and this demand for a high quality nutrition. Remember the food you eat isn’t just feeding your muscle cells, it is supplying nutrients to skin cells, mucus membranes of the digestive system, the brain and glandular cells, etc. Every minute some 300 million cells or more wear out and die! Most of them are replaced immediately by division, however if the food you are eating is not supplying sufficient nutrition to meet demand, muscle fibres are forced to operate from a partially starved position, that’s when progress stops! Another point to remember is that NO SUPPLEMENT (legal or illegal) can compensate for a poor diet. Everyone needs CALORIES to support growth, repair and energy production and calories should come from whole, unprocessed, unrefined food. Anabolic steroids were fist used in the 1940’s on concentration camp survivors to rebuild muscles and overcome the effects of long-term malnutrition. Steroids help to build wasted muscles and to strengthen and enlarge normal muscles IF THE MUSCLES ARE WORKED HARD and they have numerous side effects. Steroids are hormones naturally secreted by various glands which go directly into the blood stream eventually reaching every tissue and organ. Each hormone has a specific action and the body must make sure that one hormone does not interfere with the action of another. The body also has the ability to partially convert one hormone into another. The body’s hormone regulation is extremely delicate and it can be easily thrown off by randomly adding ergogenically. The issue is far more complex and vast, but this is in a nutshell and in a very basic form and many will have their comments on this delivery. In opinion polls, athletes have been asked if they could take ‘a pill’ that would guarantee them sporting success but would also kill them prematurely, would they take it. THE MAJORITY STATED THEY WOULD INDEED TAKE THE PILL. Modern advances in the field of supplements and sports nutrition are offering alternatives to a more positive and healthy way to enhance your performance. My word of advice is to research and to compare various products and not to base your purchase solely on clever advertising or endorsements or cost, but ultimately before considering supplements make sure your basic nutrition is sound. Alessandra Tumolo – ttlctrl.co.uk
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 09:23:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015