Professional Cycling

Resupplying Nutrition’s,

Lot’s of athletes are known to the fact that you have to use not only water for fluid intake, but also a hypo-tonic solution, or a isotonic one. To keep up nutrition going to your muscle to keep it from depleting its food-chain.

Before we go in to the deep stuff, i’ll explain what isotonic, hypo-tonic and hyper-tonic mean.

Isotonic means an substance that is of equal consistence of the human blood, so to keep it simple your blood has an amount of ingredients per ml, an isotonic drink has the same amount of ingredients as the blood per ml.

Hyper-tonic means that there is a lot more of the same ingredients per ml in comparison to your blood.

hypo-tonic means there are less ingredients per ml fluid in comparison to your blood.

Most of us are familiar with the fact that its unwise to drink only water when you’re in an time consuming exercise like a marathon or say a 200km road trip on your bike. if you only drink water, the balance in your blood disrupts and in the extreme it can lead to life threatening situations. When sweating during an exercise you sweat out water to cool yourself from the generated heat, with all this water there is also a lot of minerals leaving the body, which results in time to a disrupted concentration in the blood. This can lead to nausea and dizziness or even in an seizure in the brain due to a lack of minerals. (water intoxication) to prevent this we have to drink fluids which contain the minerals and energy we loose during the exercise.

These fluids come in three different forms: isotonic, hypo-tone and hyper-tone.

One of the main reasons this is known is because of the grown popularity of the long distance races, marathons, triathlons and of course the iron man. There have been a lot of unexplainable deaths during the first years of these events that have been solved now that we now that the body is sensitive to the refreshments we take during a long-distance race. If you drink more than 3l. an hour and only water, you’re getting to the amount that can become dangerous, especially if its hot and you’re sweating a lot. So everywhere you go these days, there are a lot of stands along the race which have a lot of variations in drinks available.

What are good drinks to bring with you?

There are a lot of commercial products on the market, most known are Aquarius, isostar and AA. They all try to give the drinks nice flavours and ingredients to make your experience as pleasurable as possible.

If you’re not in to the commercial stuff, you can go for the powders that you can dose yourself, heaps of companys offer dehydrated minerals so you can make your own solution, so you can decide if its iso, hypo or hyper-tonic.

Once you have done this, its simple, drink regularly and switch between water and your sportdrink.

Not only will it help you during the excersise but it will also help you recover from it and get you fit for the next one. Not much negative things to think off using it, only make sure you brush your teeth regulary to prevent damage due to the amount of acids and sugars you’re using…….

have fun.

Nutrition is a very complicated and mysterious science. Not so much because researchers and scientists lack understanding about food and what the body does with it. Actually we know more than ever about the relationship between food and human life with new and exciting discoveries being made every day. What makes nutrition, especially sport nutrition, so interesting is that every “body” responds uniquely to what is put into it.

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The Ongoing Vitamin Debate

There is a lot of debate as to the health benefits of supplemental vitamins. To my knowledge, there is no hard scientific evidence that taking vitamins will improve your athletic performance, although there are people out there that will swear to the contrary. However, there is a lot of evidence that vitamin supplements, especially antioxidants, might be really good for your overall health. Since healthier athletes are able to train and compete with more consistency I will go out on a limb and say that taking vitamins, at safe prescribed levels, will help you stay healthy and get more benefit from your training. There is a long list of more important things you need to do to support your training but I will leave those for other discussions. Right now, we’re talking antioxidant vitamins.

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The human body is an amazing and incredibly adaptable combination of mechanical and biological systems that is capable of performing so many different tasks. Sports nutrition researchers are discovering everyday that the body of a trained athlete interacts with food very differently that that of an ordinary person. The tremendous stresses placed on the human body during hard training and competition demand large amounts of fuel and specific nutrients needed to repair the damage and refill the fuel tank before the next session.

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