Eating To Win
ABC For Athletes

By Mark Heath

Elite competitive sports seem to have lost something of what was once called sportsmanship, in essence, the idea that the most important thing was not winning but participating. Today the only thing that counts is winning, at all costs, and this is reinforced by a society that values fame and celebrity above all. For this reason everyone is looking for ways of creating advantages over their rivals, whether technical, strategic or chemical, but often they overlook the most basic and simple element of performance: diet.  Every athlete ought to know how to eat to win.

Fortunately today most sports trainers know the importance of nutrition to athletic success and the team behind any champion includes nutritionists and dietitians. In sports that involve significant physical exertion diet can actually play as important a role as developing technical ability.
Of course, good technique is especially important, because it is essential to mastering any sport, be it tennis, football, basketball, etc. In all these sports it is essential to be able to control a ball, shoot effectively, use a racquet properly, in other words, be good at all the skills required by the activity.
However, if your physical capacity is not optimum, all the technique in the world will get you nowhere. It has been proven that of two athletes of equal skill, the one in better physical condition always wins. Physical condition is actually just as important in many sports as skill, and in many others, like athletics, it is even more important.
In any case, reaching maximum performance levels in any sport takes a lot of energy, and the key factor in this is diet, as this how we get energy as well as the materials needed for regenerating tissue, recovery and growth.

The Role of Diet
With the exception of the oxygen we get from breathing air, all the essential elements we need for life are obtained from our diet. Our bodies are in constant evolution, the cells continuously breaking down and regenerating over a determined amount of time to build new tissue. The materials to make up our cells are provided by nutrients absorbed from what we eat and drink, so that one way or another, the contents of every mouthful end up forming part of the tissue that makes up our very bodies. Clearly, what we eat is of great significance.
But let’s go back for a moment to athletic performance to see how our diet affects our physical capabilities…
Basically our diets satisfy two main objectives: providing the combustible energy we need to accomplish our daily tasks, and supplying the materials needed for tissue construction. In other words, from what we eat the body extracts the energy we need to stay alive and active, as well as the materials it needs to repair and develop.