"Foods to Improve Athletic Performance and Recovery"
Higher fruit and vegetable consumption was found
to be positively associated with muscle power in adolescents,
but that’s not who really needs it.
What about the consumption of fruit and vegetables
and risk of frailty in the elderly?
Higher fruit and vegetable consumption
was associated with lower frailty as well,
in a dose-response manner,
meaning more fruit less frailty, and more vegetables too,
but these were all observational studies,
which can’t alone prove cause-and-effect.
What happens when you put foods to the test?
Well, no positive influence ingesting chia seed oil
on human running performance,
but there was an effect found for spinach supplementation
on exercise-induced oxidation stress.
And by spinach supplementation, they meant they just gave some guys
some fresh raw spinach leaves, one gram per kilo,
so like a quarter of a bunch a day for two weeks
and then they had them run a half marathon.
And, they found that “chronic daily
oral supplementation of spinach,”
uh meaning like eating a salad,
has alleviating effects on known markers
of oxidative stress and muscle damage,
Here’s what happens when you run
a half marathon without spinach:
a big spike in oxidative stress, blood malondealdehyde levels,
that stay up hours or even days later.
In the spinach group, the before and after 2 weeks
of spinach doesn’t seem to make much of a difference,
but put the body under pressure,
and then you can really see the difference.
Your body is better able to deal with the stress.
And, if you look at the resulting muscle damage,
as measured by creatine kinase leakage from your muscles
(that's an enzyme that should be in your muscles,
not leaking out into your blood),
you start out at about 100
and go up to 200 after the half marathon,
right after, 2 hours later.
But it’s the next day where you really feel it,
that delayed onset muscle soreness,
with CK levels reaching 600 before coming back down.
Okay, that’s without spinach, though.
On spinach, you get a similar
immediate post-race bump,
but it’s that next day where spinach really shines.
You don’t get that same next-day spike,
and so, for a competitive athlete, that quicker recovery
may get you back training harder sooner.
They attribute this to the anti- inflammatory effects of spinach.
Same with black currant juice.
After some hardcore weight lifting,
muscle damage indicators go up and stay up,
whereas the same lifting drinking berries,
and it goes up, but comes right back down.
But these were just measures of a biomarker of muscle soreness.
What about actual soreness?
If you look at the effects of tart cherry juice
on recovery following prolonged, intermittent
sprints in soccer players,
you see the same kind of reduction
in biomarkers of inflammation,
but more importantly, less resulting muscle soreness.
Here’s the soreness reported in the days
afterwards in the placebo group.
Only about half in the cherry group.
Then, they measured maximum voluntary
isometric contractions of the leg muscles,
which understandably took a hit
in the days after the intense workout,
but not in the cherry group.
They conclude that participants supplemented with a
tart cherry concentrate were able
to maintain greater functional performance.
But, that was testing like how high
can you vertically jump.
They didn’t actually see if they played soccer any better.
But, this study on purple grape juice
actually showed an ergogenic effect
in recreational runners by promoting
increased time to exhaustion,
where you ramp people up on a treadmill
and see how long they can go before collapsing.
After a month of drinking a grape Kool-Aid
type placebo control drink,
no real change in performance,
but a whopping 15% improvement in the real grape group–
hung on for another 12 minutes.
They used juice, so they could make
a matched placebo control drink,
but you can buy concord grapes fresh, or tart cherries fresh, frozen,
or water-packed in a can.
I mix them with oatmeal, cocoa, and mint leaves
for a chocolate-covered- cherry type sensation.
You may want to try that for a few days
before participating in your next big sporting event.