Power is the culmination of most of your motor abilities. It’s the ability to produce force efficiently. Power generated properly requires little effort on your part, enabling you to produce and transfer force into the ground or into the water or onto a pedal all day long. Power is not a reflection of muscle size. It’s about the efficiency of your nervous system to coordinate the recruitment of muscles, and about teamwork between muscles to create specific and efficient movements.
If you want to achieve peak performance, you have to take care of your most valuable machinery. If your car requires unleaded fuel to perform best you’re not going to fill it with diesel fuel, are you? It’s crazy that most people take better care of their cars than they do their own bodies. You can replace a car, not a body.
When your body is not properly nourished, it begins a slippery slide of hormonal imbalance, a decrease in energy and an inability to recover efficiently. It begins to eat away at your muscle for energy.
As an endurance athlete, you are eating to perform. You need to be in a constant fueled up state to meet your energy needs. One nutrition cliché is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When it comes to endurance athletes, I don’t agree. I believe the most important meal of the day is before your workout and after your workout. Honestly, I’d feel better if one of my endurance athletes had a slice of pizza for breakfast before they came in to work out instead of nothing at all. At least they got food. Let’s face it, how many of you don’t eat breakfast? Pizza is better than nothing, in my opinion.
Research suggests that those who are fueled before runs or training sessions can go harder and longer. I like the 3-for-3 formula. Eat all three nutrients (fats, carbs and proteins) every three hours for optimal energy and body composition. Your metabolism is like a fire, it is in constant need of fuel. If you let it go for a long time without adding logs, the fire smolders and dies. I recommend that everyone eat frequently, but it’s especially important for endurance athletes, for whom a constant fuel supply is vital.
Greg Popp is co-owner of Core Solutions Fitness Training Center in Westbrook and is a NASM certified personal trainer. To contact Greg visit csifit.com or call 854-5200.