Recovery in Sport – the benefits of recovery nutrition

High intensity and endurance training causes the body significant physiological stress, including the loss of muscle proteins and reduced glycogen levels, thus a period of recovery is necessary in order to allow the body to restore these losses. During recovery the body synthesises new proteins; replaces its lost energy stores; rehydrates and rebalances its levels of electrolytes.

Eating the right foods can play a vital role in recovery. Dietary carbohydrates are needed to enhance glycogen re-synthesis and dietary proteins are necessary for rebuilding muscle proteins, both processes being essential for the restoration of performance and muscle function. Thus, in order to maximise recovery and to optimise subsequent performance you should ensure that your nutrition strategy focuses on an optimal diet of both carbohydrate and protein.

Here we look in some detail at the role of nutrition in exercise recovery and why getting your diet right is a vital aspect of the recovery process.

Energy Metabolism in High Intensity Exercise

When you exercise at high intensity your skeletal muscles must rapidly replace ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which is used in all the body processes that demand energy. The generation of ATP in skeletal muscle takes placed by both anaerobic and aerobic processes, which work together. During intense exercise, for instance during a sprint, the high ATP production rate is anaerobic while your organs including your heart are sustained by aerobic metabolism.

Anaerobic production of ATP is maintained by burning phosphocreatine and glycogen which is stored in the muscle and the phosphocreatine is re-synthesised by ongoing aerobic metabolism. When muscles contract they burn glycogen to rapidly produce ATP, though the process also generates lactates and hydrogen ions (Girard, Mendez-Villanueva , & Bishop, 2011).

Aerobic glycogen burning is a much slower process, but it produces far more ATP, in fact twelve times as much. ATP is also produced from fatty acids; however, these processes are too slow to support sprint activity. They do, however, rebuild phosphocreatine during recovery between sprints.

An important role of endurance and high-intensity training is to increases the aerobic capacity of skeletal muscle and this can be supported by the right carbohydrate ingestion regimen. A high-carbohydrate diet along with ingesting carbohydrate during exercise provides the necessary fuel for sustaining these processes (Williams & Rollo, 2015).

Nutrition during recovery

Tests on the effects of carbohydrates on performance following recovery (Nicholas, Green, & Hawkins, 1997) showed that:
• Team players who consumed a normal diet with additional carbohydrate were able to achieve the previous day’s performance level
• But with a normal diet with additional protein to achieve the same energy intake, players were unable to achieve the previous day’s performance level

Also, a more recent study (Erith, Williams, & Stevenson, 2006) showed that when energy and macronutrient matched high glycaemic index or low glycaemic index meals were eaten during the 24-hour recovery period, there were no differences in the performance of the players. This is attributed to the ability of low glycaemic index carbohydrates to increase the rate of fat mobilisation and oxidation, benefiting lower intensity exercise.

Recent research on recovery nutrition (Moore, 2015) has demonstrated that:
• When the recovery time is short (less than eight hours) the eating both of these immediately after exercise is synergistic in that the effect on rebuilding muscle proteins and on glycogen re-synthesis is synergistic, in other words greater than the sum of the individual benefits (Moore, 2015).
• For longer recovery times of between eight and twenty-four hours, eating regular meals containing the right balance of carbohydrates and proteins throughout the day will help restore muscle glycogen fully while sustaining maximum rates of muscle protein synthesis.

Environmental factors also play a part as the rate of muscle glycogen re-synthesis is slower at high ambient temperatures.

Recovery Nutrition Strategy

As we have seen, during recovery the body rebuilds muscle proteins, replaces lost energy stores, and rehydrates while replacing lost electrolytes. All these processes are facilitated by the right nutrition, but how do we go about achieving this?

There is no universal answer as different sports and activity and training levels require different strategies, and the best person to provide detailed guidance is your sports coach, but it is possible to provide some general principles.
1. Timing – you should begin your recovery nutrition within fifteen minutes to an hour after training or competing.
2. Carbohydrates – Within this time you should aim to consume between 0.8 to 1.2 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight.
3. Proteins – you should aim to consume between 0.3 to 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
4. Rehydration – aim to rehydrate sufficiently to restore your body weight to what it was before the exercise or event, making allowance for ongoing fluid loss.
5. Electrolytes – during exercise you will lose both potassium and sodium in your sweat, and you should aim to replace these. Probably the easiest is to rehydrate with electrolyte balanced sports drinks.

Finally

Despite over 50 years of research, we are still learning more about nutrition in sports recovery. A wide range of specialist products have been developed, and there is considerable evidence that these can facilitate the recovery process. Also there are many traditional foods that can be of huge benefit, for instance bananas and chocolate milk. Recently it has even been suggested that “post-exercise glycogen recovery and exercise performance is not significantly different between fast food and sport supplements” (Cramer MJ, 2015), so eating a Big Mac could also help.
The best approach is to talk to your coach, who will certainly be able to help.

Need more information? Why not contact us using the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

References

Cramer MJ. (2015). Post-exercise Glycogen Recovery and Exercise Performance is Not Significantly Different Between Fast Food and Sport Supplements. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise, 448-55.
Erith, S., Williams, C., & Stevenson, E. (2006). The effect of high carbohydrate meals with different glycemic indices on recovery ofperformance during prolonged intermittent high-intensity shuttle running. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab., 16, 393–404.
Girard, O., Mendez-Villanueva , A., & Bishop, D. (2011). Repeated-sprint ability: part I. Factors contributing to fatigue. Sports Med., 673-94.
Moore, D. (2015, July/August). ition to Support Recovery from Endurance Exercise: Optimal Carbohydrate and Protein Replacement. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 14, 294–300.
Nicholas, C., Green, P., & Hawkins, R. (1997). Carbohydrate intake and recovery of intermittent running capacity. Int. J. Sport Nutr., 7, 51–60.
Williams, C., & Rollo, I. (2015). Carbohydrate Nutrition and Team Sport Performance. Sports Med, S13–S22.