“Foods to improve the sports performance and recovery of athletes” For greater consumption of fruits and vegetables has been proven to be positively related to muscle strength in adolescents, but they do not exactly need it most. Well the consumption of fruits and vegetables and the risk of weakness in the elderly? Greater consumption of fruits and vegetables is also associated with lower weakness in terms of dose-action, which means that the more fruit is consumed, the less weakness there will be, and the same goes for vegetables, but these are entirely observational studies, which cannot in themselves prove a causal link. What happens when we do research on certain foods? Well, there is no positive effect when taking chia seed oil with regard to the performance of athletes in running, but an effect is found when taking a food supplement with spinach on oxidative stress caused by exercise. And by food supplement with spinach they mean that they just gave it to some people a little fresh raw spinach leaves, 1 gram per kilogram, which makes about a quarter spinach a day for two weeks and then these people had to run a half marathon.
And they found that “chronic daily adding spinach to food ‘, uh, which means just eating a salad, has a mitigating effect on known indicators of oxidative stress and muscle damage. Here’s what happens when you run half marathon without eating spinach: large jump in oxidative stress, levels of malondialdehyde in the blood, which are saved hours or even days later. In the spinach group, before and after 2 weeks eating spinach doesn’t seem to make any difference, but if you put the body under pressure, then you can really notice the difference. Your body will be better able to cope with stress. And if you look at the resulting muscle damage, measured by the outflow of creatine kinase from the muscles (This is an enzyme that needs to be in your muscles, and not to leak into the blood), you start at about 100 and you get to 200 after the half marathon, exactly after 2 hours.
But the next day you will really feel the difference, this delayed inflammation of the muscles, as creatine kinase levels reach 600 before falling again. Well, that’s what the situation without spinach looks like. By taking spinach, similar ones are obtained elevated levels immediately after the race, and this is the next day when spinach really stands out. You do not receive the same inflated levels the next day, and so, for a competing athlete, this faster recovery may allow him to start harder training again sooner.
This is attributed to the anti-inflammatory properties of spinach. It’s the same with blackcurrant juice. After heavy weight lifting the rates of muscle damage rise and remain high, while at the same load, but with drinking berry juice, the levels rise again, but then go back down. But these are just measures of biomarkers for muscle pain. What about the actual pain? If you look at the effect of cherry juice on recovery after prolonged, periodic sprints in football, you will notice the same kind of reduction of biomarkers of inflammation, but more importantly, less muscle pain.
This is the pain that is reported in the days after exercise in the placebo group. In the cherry juice group, the levels were halved. The maximum waves were then measured isometric contractions of the leg muscles, which were understandably at their climax in the days after intense training, but not in the cherry group. They conclude that participants who supplement their diet with cherry concentrate managed to maintain greater functional performance. But this was established by testing how high can jump in a vertical direction. In fact, they didn’t try to see if they played football better. But this study on purple grape juice actually establishes an ergogenic effect for runners who run for fun by improving the time until their exhaustion, in which study people start running on a treadmill and observe how long they can last before collapsing.
After one month of taking a Kool-Aid grape-flavored drink, a type of drink used for placebo control, no change in performance is observed, while in the group with real grape juice there was a stunning improvement of 15% – lasted another 12 minutes. They used juice in the study so they could make it a similar placebo drink, but you can also buy fresh grapes or fresh or frozen cherries, as well as canned ones. I put it in my oatmeal with cocoa and mint leaves for the taste of cherries covered with chocolate. You can try this for a few days before participating in your next big sporting event.
