photo of Liz Barker
Liz Barker
February 5, 2020
contributing author:
food on a wooden board and some blue trainers

Training hard goes half the way to an athletic body. The other half is reached through a healthy and goal-oriented nutrition. Why focus on training and not your nutrition? If you want to be faster, stronger, more powerful, if you want to lose fat or to build muscle your diet plays a key role.

Don’t separate the two !

A lot of people do not understand the importance, others do not want to know. The fact is though, that one without the another wont get you the best results in fact if one is ignored it may work against the other. Training and nutrition must be in harmony, so that results can be seen. Exercise alone does not lead to what is sought – this applies for muscle building, fat loss and performance in equal measure. Also if the body is not subjected to training and exercise, even a high-quality diet won’t lead to the desired results.

Its complex! The athletic challenge initiates the right processes in the body and the diet provides the necessary nutrients.

All nutrients are important!

To start on a basic level there is a rough differentiation is made between macro and micro-nutrients.

The first macro-nutrients include carbohydrates, proteins and fats. They provide energy to the human body, which is measured in the unit calorie or kilocalorie (kcal).

The second group Micro-nutrient include vitamins, minerals (and trace elements) and physiochemical.

Before food can give you energy and stamina hundreds of chemical reactions take place which involve 28 vitamins and minerals. Without these micro-nutrients the body cant un-lock the potential energy in food. If just one of these nutrients is missing, energy and athletic performance are just not possible.
Although they do not provide energy to the body in the sense macronutrients do, we would not be able to live without them. They fulfill many different functions in the whole body: transport, recovery and conversion of energy is not possible without micronutrients. Often certain nutrients are said to have only bad or only good properties. However the fact is that all macro- and micro-nutrients play important roles in the body and are essential for us and can only work effectively together. That is, why your diet should generally include all substances.

Nutrition goes beyond satisfaction of physical needs and can become an instrument through which so much can be controlled. The more precise quality and quantity of each nutrient are tailored to the needs of the body, the better your body can adapt to external influences and recall performance. This affects not only athletic performance and outer appearance, even thinking and concentrating ability, well-being and health are influenced by what we consume everyday – in short, medium and long term!

2400 years ago a Greek physician Hippocrates summed this up:

‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’