Nutrient Timing for Athletes – how the right types of sugar can help you

This will be the first of several posts from the same blog article. Offers great advice for those open water swimmers and athletes looking for alternate and healthful food energy sources beyond Gu's, maltodextrins and energy drinks.

Print Friendly

First things first, a carbohydrate is a sugar is a carbohydrate. The term carbohydrate refers to organic compounds with only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms and sugar, or sucrose, is just one of many. Each has their own distinct structure, hormonal response and health impact, but for the point of this discussion it is important to remember that:

1. Refined sugar and excess fructose are highly inflammatory, which from an athletic point of view is the enemy to recovery and subsequent performance.
2. Excess carbohydrate consumption can inhibit our body’s ability to burn fat, which is the limiting factor in endurance events.

And because I know you’re now curious, to increase your fat burning ability and therefore your endurance capacity:

1. Make refined sugar free eating a priority.
2. Reduce your fructose intake.
3. Rely less on starchy processed carbohydrates. Fact. You definitely don’t need to be following our traditional (and now almost obsolete) food pyramid, or guidelines of up to ten times your body weight in grams per day (i.e. 10g/kg BW/day). I promise.
4. Train on an empty stomach a couple of times a week. More on this to come.

Carbohydrates: friend or foe?

A day-to-day intake heavily reliant on starchy carbohydrates (e.g. breads, rice, cereals, potatoes, sugary sports drinks and lollies) will not only limit your fat burning ability, but may also result in an inadequate protein intake and a diet lacking in many essential trace nutrients, vitamins and minerals. This most certainly will have a negative effect on your recovery and performance.

To increase performance and recovery however, the right types of carbohydrates can be extremely beneficial. Here’s why:

Firstly, carbohydrates are more oxygen-efficient than fat. Put simply, more energy is produced from the same amount of oxygen when carbohydrates are broken down. Why is this important? Oxygen availability is limited and determined by your own individual maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max). The consumption of carbohydrates during exercise of extended duration therefore, tops up your individual supply and acts to extend performance. Without this, your body will simply run of fuel and eventually come to a complete stop, otherwise known as “hitting the wall”.

Secondly, carbohydrates are the only macronutrient that can also be broken down rapidly without oxygen, to provide large amounts of extra energy during intense exercise. This anaerobic metabolism is vital to maximal performance for bouts between fifteen seconds and three minutes in duration. It is for this reason that athletes such as sprinters and weight lifters should consume carbohydrates prior to exercise, in order to supply adequate fuel for the following exercise effort.

Lastly, carbohydrates act to optimise muscle and liver glycogen stores (basically the carbohydrate you eat stored in your body) and enhance recovery from longer training sessions and endurance events. So the key to carbohydrate intkae is nutrient timing – when you eat them and why.

Reprinted from:
THE NATURAL NUTRITIONIST

'Swim Lessons' - Teaching Life through swimming

My passion, open water swimming at the English Channel level. Come join me.

Healthy Nutrition - What 2000 Calories Looks Like

Heart healthy nutrition for athletes (of any age) is a subject often not spoken about at the family dinner table, the team locker room, or often by coaches until you reach perhaps the elite level and even then selectively or at best incorrectly.  

Coupled with ninja marketing campaigns from babyhood ranging from outright miss-information to subliminal marketing, these messages cross the airwaves and internet bombarding our kids, teens and families. 

So for starters lets begin with some basics:

Becoming self aware to achieve Ones Goals

Developing awareness of ones capabilities begins when you step outside your comfort zone. Doing this however takes small steps to be successful and repeatable. Prepare well for each step.

Stressed kids eat even when they’re full - Lack of Resilience ?

For all you One Stroke at a Time readers, This insightful article touches on some points parents might consider for resilience building skills for yourself and your kids. 

It suggests one of the factors driving obese kids could be a lack of underlying social and emotional resilience, leading to an inability to properly cope with and manage day-to-day life stress's, eating not for fuel but for comfort. I suppose many of us parents could learn from this as well with the side benefit of heart healthy living. Enjoy the commentary...

PENN STATE / JOHNS HOPKINS (US) — Children who overreact to stressful situations will eat even if they’re not hungry, raising their risk of becoming overweight or obese, a new study shows.

Children whose cortisol levels stayed high after being exposed to a stressor had the highest BMIs and consumed the greatest number of calories in the absence of hunger. (Credit:iStockphoto)

“Our results suggest that some children who are at risk of becoming obese can be identified by their biological response to a stressor,” says Lori Francis, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. “Ultimately, the goal is to help children manage stress in ways that promote health and reduce the risks associated with an over- or under-reactive stress response.”

For a new study published in the journal Appetite, Francis and her colleagues, Elizabeth Susman, professor of biobehavioral health, and Douglas Granger, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research at Johns Hopkins University, recruited 43 children ages 5- to 9-years-old and their parents.

Straight from the Source

Read the original study

DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2012.11.008

To examine the children’s reactions to a stressor, the team used the Trier Social Stress Test for Children, which consists of a five-minute anticipation period followed by a 10-minute stress period.

During the stress period, the children were asked to deliver a speech and perform a mathematics task. The team measured the children’s responses to these stressors by comparing the cortisol content of their saliva before and after the procedure.

The researchers also measured the extent to which the children ate after saying they were not hungry using a protocol known as the Free Access Procedure. The team provided the children with lunch, asked them to indicate their hunger level and then gave them free access to generous portions of 10 snack foods, along with a variety of toys and activities. The children were told they could play or eat while the researchers were out of the room.

The team found that, on average, the children consumed 250 kilocalories of the snack foods during the Free Access Procedure, with some consuming small amounts (20 kilocalories) and others consuming large amounts (700 kilocalories).

“We found that older kids, ages 8 to 11, who exhibited greater cortisol release over the course of the procedure had significantly higher body-mass indices [BMI] and consumed significantly more calories in the absence of hunger than kids whose cortisol levels rose only slightly in response to the stressor,” Francis says.

“We also found that kids whose cortisol levels stayed high—in other words, they had low recovery—had the highest BMIs and consumed the greatest number of calories in the absence of hunger.”

The study suggests that children who have poor responses to stressors already are or are at risk of becoming overweight or obese. In her future work, she plans to examine whether children who live in chronically stressful environments are more susceptible to eating in the absence of hunger and, thus, becoming overweight or obese, Francis says.

“It is possible that such factors as living in poverty, in violent environments, or in homes where food is not always available may increase eating in the absence of hunger and, therefore, increase children’s risk of becoming obese.”

The Children, Youth and Families Consortium at Penn State and the National Institutes of Health provided funding for this research.

Source: Penn State

The Daily News of Open Water Swimming: The Only Two People In History To Do The Farallons...

The Daily News of Open Water Swimming: The Only Two People In History To Do The Farallons...: What is so cool about this video is how the only two men in history - Ted Erikson and Stewart Evans - helped each other, pushed each other...

Cold Water Swimming Affects

Cold water immersion diuresis (urination) is common to cold water swimmers and is the strong desire to pee after (and sometimes during) swimming in cold water.

Marathon swimming requires one to overcome this 'societal faux pas' as a matter of time in the water but as the article points out, it is critical in replenishing liquids (hydration) and nutrients for fuel.



As we have now discussed many times, swimming in cold water leads to peripheral vasoconstriction, by the cold of the water leaching away the heat of the blood vessels closer to the surface. The blood vessels constrict resulting in reduction of blood flow in the body’s extremities to conserve heat in the cold.

This reduction in blood flow to the periphery therefore actually leads to a quick increase in blood pressure. The body attempts to compensate for this increase in arterial blood pressure by relieving itself of liquid elsewhere. The easiest, quickest and least costly expenditure from a metabolic (energetic) point of view is urine. So you will often find as cold swimmers do, that walking into cold water even before you are fully immersed, you will develop a sudden urge to urinate caused by this blood pressure increase. And during a swim liquid also builds up in the bladder but without practice, they are unable to urinate in really cold water while swimming, many swimmers, even very experienced cold water swimmers will have to stop or momentarily pause to urinate.

When you exit the water the demand to urinate can reach quite powerful levels as the muscles finally relax.

A consequence of this increased urination often forgotten is mild dehydration. Marathon swimmers in cold water, such as the English Channel are taking most of their food as liquid carbohydrates. The volume of water needed or used is generally close to one litre an hour, and because of cold diuresis, more of the liquid processed by the kidney, instead of being absorbed back as is normal, goes to the bladder. Part of this mechanism is that the cold suppresses the production of ADH, aka vasopressin, the anti-diuretic hormone that suppresses diuresis (urination). The swimmer urinates more, so the swimmer needs more liquid to compensate for the mild dehydration. And you have a self-sustaining cycle as long as the swimmer is immersed in tolerable cold water.

This article was reprinted from Lone Swimmer, a great resource.