Eating a well-balanced diet coupled with your training program can help you get optimal athletic performance. Right nutrients are a critical part of any exercise program and to enhance your workout outcomes without any harmful side effects. It’s not just professional athletes who benefit from intaking good calories and nutrients, every fitness enthusiast can improve his fitness capabilities. An optimized diet can increase your endurance and strength no matter what fitness level you’re aiming for.
Selecting the right nutrients is not as simple as choosing vegetables over doughnuts. It is better to eat the right types of food at the right times of the day. Healthy eating not only has an impact on our looks but how we feel too. People are widely using different foods as medicines to treat some weaknesses and health issues. Read on to learn about the relation between food and fitness.
What are the fitness foods?
The famous adage, ‘you really are what you eat’ is true to its core. You must have experienced that after eating junk foods for some time you end up feeling more like a cream-filled Twinkie than the lean cut of beef you aspire to. Although eating good foods like bananas, apples, etc would be considered healthy heating but that’s not what we call fitness foods or superfoods. Eating smart foods that can boost your workout is actually what you will call fitness foods. Doing exercise in your workout top and bottom after intaking these superfoods will help you get the desired fitness results quicker than you imagine.
Some power foods to improve your workout efficiency:
- Peanuts
Peanuts are considered the best protein-rich nut of all. These nuts give you quality protein which is important for muscle building. You can intake them as pre-workout foods to get some calories for exercise and as a post-workout diet to repair your muscles and to stoke your body’s muscle-building machinery.
- Oats
Your muscles need carbohydrates and oats are the best sources to provide plenty of carbohydrates. When you eat them before a workout, they give you energy for intense training, and eating oats as post-workout nutrients provide a healthy amount of carbohydrates to replenish depleted glycogen stores.
- Pumpkin Seeds
This power food is a good source of alpha-linolenic acid, a plant form of omega-3 fatty acids that can help fight inflammation, a factor in muscle soreness. These seeds are also good for your heart health.
- Dried Blueberries
This is one of the tastiest fitness foods that is used as an antioxidant-rich alternative to raisins. Using berries as a pre-workout food is very beneficial because they not only fuel your muscles but a little fiber in them provides staying power. Also, using this fitness food as a post-workout diet can help combat oxidative stress in muscles, potentially preventing soreness, inflammation.
Some advantages of intaking superfoods to your fitness:
Good nutrients enhance your endurance level:
Rapidly acting nutrients may provide a quick dose of energy but you would experience a rapid drop in blood sugar after the initial spike. This condition will cause fatigue, which then prompts us to seek out more of those foods to refuel, starting the cycle all over again. To avoid this type of overeating, it’s best to choose complex carbohydrates like whole grains, fruit, beans, and starchy vegetables that are digested more slowly. These energy sources will keep your blood sugar level more consistent which in turn will enhance your endurance level.
Help you combat fatigue & boost your metabolism:
At the end of a hectic day, we often feel tired and need an extra shot of energy for a workout. Drinking a cup of tea or coffee although sometimes serve the purpose but intaking fitness foods will reboot our brains and improve performance. Good nutrients, therefore, control your fatigue, energize your workouts, and keep you on track to look and feel your best.
Build your muscle mass:
Every other fitness rat wishes to build some muscle mass and workout alone cannot get you this. When you are building lean muscles, it increases the resting metabolic rate which burns calories even when we are at rest. So, you need to refuel your body with a post-workout diet to avoid fatigue. And if your intake macronutrients, like a turkey and avocado sandwich on whole wheat or a veggie egg, you will be able to gain muscle mass quickly than you think.