Fueling your body

Thank you for subscribing to Fitness and Nutrition Center’s series on Sports Nutrition. In this series you'll learn:

1. Part 1 - What sports nutrition is
2. Part 2 - Hydrations key
3. Part 3 - Fueling your body
4. Part 4 - Carbohydrates rule
5. Part 5 - The need for protein

Let's go ahead & get started today with "Fueling your body".

Part 3 - Fueling your body
============================
Food.  Your body needs this simple tool to help it to do virtually every single thing that it has to do.  From breathing to walking to playing your game, your body depends on food to fuel it. 

While water is essential to life, food is essential to performance.  Without the right amounts, types and timing for the food you eat, your body will not be able to reach its highest level of performance no matter what you plan to do.

There is no workout that will work for your body more so than the fuel that you give it.  It has a direct relation to your performance and therefore is one of the building blocks in successful sports nutrition.

The Balanced Win

As an athlete, your specific needs are your own, but there is no doubt that if you want to win at physical activity, you need your body to have a balanced diet.  You probably have heard this many number of times, but it is the same as day one. 

You need to consume a balanced diet of foods to be successful.

The combination of foods will provide your body with all the essential building blocks that it needs.  This includes vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins.  Each of these elements plays their own role, one that is crucial to your success.

Think of food as a team effort.   You know that you are only as good as your team is, right?  When you do not provide all of the right nutrients to your body, to limit them, they can not perform as a team and then the overall whole suffers.

How many times does the star athlete go down in a game and the team crumbles around them?  Or, how many times does someone that is a smaller asset and the star can not longer hold the team up?  The same is true for food.

The body needs each one of these pieces for the whole to work.  The goal that you have is to learn what it needs and how it needs them to get the whole working well.

Over the course of the next chapters, you will better learn what each element plays in the whole race.  But, for now, we want to take you back to grade school where you learned what your body needs to sustain a good overall healthy lifestyle. 

Lucky for you, this same information will apply to your own health in sports nutrition now.

Next time we'll be discussing a little about "Carbohydrates rule".

For more information about this part of What sports nutrition is, please refer to our definitive guide to sports nutrition by signing up for our email updates (see top right of sidebar on my blog). Once you've done that email me (webmaster[at]healthybiz2000.com) and I will immediately send you the guide in PDF format (if you prefer MS Word let me know).