Nutritional Supplements - Sports Workout Supplements

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nutrition

Nutrition

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Living the lean and healthy lifestyle should not be boring and the foods on your nutritional program should not be tasteless.

Nutrition is what gives us the raw materials for recuperation, energy, and growth. Without a good diet, your dreams of achieving your ideal body will never be reached.

You can feel full on fewer calories and at the same time lose weight and keep it off long-term. To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, you have to follow an eating plan you can live with for a lifetime. That means no severe restrictions, no extreme hunger and no fads. Check out our new Navy SEALs Workout and our Army Special Forces Workout for a hardcore training plan.

Creatine Helps Build Mass
Creatine is the most popular and commonly used sports supplement available today. There are numerous studies backed by anecdotal evidence that support the efficacy of creatine supplementation. For the majority of the population, including both elite athletes and untrained individuals, creatine supplementation increases fat free mass and improves anaerobic and possibly aerobic performance. While the effectiveness of creatine is well known, the most effective way to take creatine is not known. In order to design an "optimal" cycle for creatine, a number of factors must be considered.

Creatine is used for the resynthesis of ATP. ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is the "power" that drives muscular energetics. When a muscle is required to contract, the bonds in the ATP molecule are split, yielding ADP (adenosine-diphosphate). The energy released by breaking this bond powers the contraction of the muscle. When ATP is depleted within the cell, the cell can no longer contract. There are several methods by which the body rebuilds ATP. The fastest method, without oxygen, is through CP. Creatine phosphate is "split" to yield the phosphate portion of the molecule. This phosphate portion bonds to the ADP, turning it back to ATP. Once CP stores within the cell are depleted, the body must use other methods to replenish ATP.

Supplementation with creatine increases Cr and CP within the muscle, allowing further capacity to regenerate ATP. In other words, the creatine enhances the ability of the muscle to maintain power output during brief periods of high-intensity exercise. The periods are brief because the ability of a cell to store CP is limited, therefore the body will quickly move to other methods of replenishing ATP.

The common mechanism for creatine supplementation is known to be the increase of intramuscular creatine stores. It is known that CP is used to replenish ATP, and that the amount of CP naturally present is well below the maximum amount of CP that the body can store. Increasing dietary creatine allows the maximum amount of CP storage to be reached, which in turn provides more capacity to regenerate ATP. An interesting effect of creatine supplementation appears to be enhanced ability for the muscle to store glycogen.

Glycogen is a form of carbohydrate stored inside the muscle that is used to fuel anaerobic activity (i.e. activity that is too intense to allow the cardiopulmonary system to deliver adequate oxygen). The ATP-CP pathway is used during the initial few seconds that work is performed. The next dominant system uses glycolysis, which requires glycogen to fuel activity. After several seconds to a few minutes, the dominant system becomes the oxidative or cardiovascular system - in other words, aerobic exercise.

Many studies have shown that replenishing glycogen stores may aid recovery and hypertrophy (muscle growth). Bodybuilders use a protocol known as "carb-loading" to supersaturate their muscles with glycogen. Glycogen requires water to enter the muscle cell, therefore having higher glycogen levels means more fat-free mass and larger, fuller muscles.

nutrition