[p]Why did humankind come up with dietary supplements? Simply because it’s big business, as many people think? Yes, certainly, even very big business, but it’s hard to imagine that the supplement business could be this successful in this field purely for the sake of making money. The reason supplements are still so widespread worldwide, and the business so successful, must lie elsewhere.
The matter is actually very simple: supplements have to work, and they do so while serving a variety of purposes.
So what do people need supplements for? There are several reasons:
1.Certain illnesses in which the body can’t get everything it needs from regular food.
2.The period after treatment, when the body needs to be built back up quickly.
3.They’re simply convenient to use as a meal replacement while on a diet.
4.And of course the biggest area: SPORT.
I personally have little to say on the first two points, but the world of sport is somewhat familiar to me, so I’ll try to share my view on “whether, when and how much?”
SPORT
No athlete can manage without supplements these days. That goes double for elite athletes, because training loads and training volumes are so high that with regular food alone, recovery is not even half as effective as when the right supplements are used alongside it.
But what about the average exerciser or the young athlete: would they need to take supplements too? Why not, but you definitely need to know what, when and how much. There’s no point in just guessing. And no supplement will ever replace proper, balanced nutrition, whether for an elite athlete or a recreational one.
You very often hear athletes say that one supplement doesn’t work for them, while another one is really great. Of course, that’s certainly how it is. This applies especially to people whose daily menu isn’t in sensible balance with their physical activity. Everyone eats differently. Depending on which nutrients they run short of, one supplement gives them a good result, while another has no effect at all or even dampens how they feel and perform.
If you got the regular nutrition of these athletes in order, let them train and go about their business like that for a while, and then added to their menu, say, the product they had earlier complained wasn’t working, each of them would feel the positive effect of the supplement to a greater or lesser degree. The difference comes only from small physiological differences between people.[p]An athlete can’t quite manage this alone, and even less so an average exerciser. Coaches, however, should have a command of the topic here, or be able and willing to steer the athlete toward working with nutrition specialists.
Unfortunately, there are still coaches who know very little about proper nutrition. They’ve learned a thing or two at school, but for some reason they take a rather lukewarm attitude toward a properly designed athlete’s menu.
They try to make up for their lack of knowledge on the subject by recommending random supplements to their students. But as I mentioned, simply guessing may not deliver the results you want.
So how much, and exactly when, is it right to use supplements, assuming your nutrition is all in order?
The best time, and the one the body needs most, is during the training load and immediately after it. At these times the body urgently needs a variety of nutrients. In the first case, so that the body’s performance stays as high as possible throughout the whole period of exertion. In the second, so that the body can start recovering quickly from the training load.
As we know, no recovery takes place without all the necessary nutrients. If you eat regular food right after a workout or competition, the body first has to process it (an extra time cost of a couple of hours). Supplements, on the other hand, are already processed and made ultra-fast to absorb. That is exactly the point that gives supplements their edge. If every day we save about two hours of recovery time, we essentially gain two extra hours in our day. How a dedicated athlete can use that time, think about it yourselves and tell us in the comments.
To finish, a short excerpt from the autobiographical book by Gunde Svan, the former king of cross-country skiing:
“When I went to the Olympic Games for the first time, athletes and journalists from other countries were amazed that I had brought all my food and supplements with me in big boxes. They asked whether I was afraid they wouldn’t serve any food here. I answered something like this: ‘I have trained with very high volumes, and for that I have needed energy of up to 8000 kcal a day. I’m here at the most important competition of my life, and I certainly couldn’t give my best if I tried to fool my body with the hamburgers on offer here.’”
It’s certainly not word for word like that in the book, but the hamburgers and the gist of the story were along those lines.
Author: Marek Kalmus
Come and train! ArtGym
