Training / nutrition / recovery tips
Usually I talk about bike repair and safety here but this week I'm thinking about training, so here goes.
I think all endurance athletes fully understand the need to fuel with preferably organic, high-nutrient foods, lean proteins, highly-colored veggies etc. We also understand the need for active recovery to build the muscles that we're developing in training.
One of the keys to repairing the damage done in training and accelerating recovery is ensuring that your body has a healthy supply of antioxidants. Endurance training creates significant stress on the body in the form of free radicals, which are damaging to cellular membranes, antioxidants are responsible for cleaning up these free radicals.
See the full article for ways to get antioxidant's in your regular diet as well as ideas on supplements ->>
Antioxidant basics
While training generally improves health and strengthens the body's immune response, as we approach some point of 'too much' training load the immune response is impaired. This is the first step in what's commonly called 'overreaching'. Overreaching can result in reduced performance, staleness, loss of motivation and minor illness (colds etc). Taken a step farther, chronic overreaching becomes 'overtraining' If an athlete goes too far into overtraining s/he may need to take off months to recover, overtraining has been tied to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
As I stated at the start, the first keys to staying healthy while training hard are proper recovery and good nutrition. How best to obtain these keys is different for every athlete, e.g. whether you are on a vegetarian or vegan diet. Different people find different specific training and recovery methods that work best for them.
I know of two ways to improve your antioxidant levels. The first is to be taking in foods or supplements that hare high in antioxidants. Blueberries seem to be one of the best sources (and frozen wild/orgainc blueberries are affordable year round and make great smoothies!). Many lean meats and most dark-colored vegetables are also high in antioxidants. The second way is to stimulate the body's ability to produce it's own, this can be achieved with phytoestrogens which are available in cashews and other nuts and soy products such as tempeh or tofu and in poultry.
Supplements
No amount of supplements will offer as much help as the right amount of basic fitness and healthy diet. This said, I've found that recovery is faster and I feel better when I add both some basic vitamin supplements and some specific antioxidants.
The thing that seems to work best for me is NAC, aka N-acetyl-L-cysteine, it's a precursor to the antioxidant Glutathione. The most cost effective form I've found for NAC is from Jarrow. I train on a budget and the extremely expensive antioxidant formulas don't seem to offer much bang for your buck.
Always YMMV and do go look on google which will point you to lots of good articles on Cysteine -- the best I've found is at univ. of Maryland.
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