Chapter 10 – Nutrition and Fitness



Chapter 10 – Nutrition and Fitness

Chapter 10 Summary

Getting Started on Lifetime Fitness

The benefits of regular exercise make up an impressive list. Exercise is one of the most effective strategies against multiple chronic health disorders. Despite evidence of the benefits, the majority of Americans are not meeting the recommended guidelines for physical activity.

The Components of Fitness

Improving fitness involves learning about and employing concepts relating to overload, the use-disuse principle, and aerobic and anaerobic exercise. Exercise frequency, intensity, and duration can be increased to improve fitness. Fitness requires a reasonable weight for a person’s height and enough of each of the measurable components of fitness—flexibility, muscle strength, muscle endurance, and cardiovascular endurance—to meet life’s demands. For total fitness, an exercise program that incorporates strength training, stretching, and cardiovascular endurance activity is best. Cardiovascular endurance helps maintain a healthy heart and circulatory system and exercises that promote cardiovascular endurance are the best for making short-term fitness gains and long-term health improvements. Strength training also helps with weight loss by increasing lean muscle mass and thus increasing a person’s basal metabolic rate.

Energy for Exercise

Your energy-producing pathways require the muscle fuels: glucose and fatty acids. Your muscles, and to some extent your liver, supply carbohydrate to your muscles from their carbohydrate supply. The fatty acids come mostly from fat inside the muscles but partly from fat that is released from the body’s fat stores, and the blood delivers these fatty acids to the muscles.

Fuels for Exercise

A diet rich in complex carbohydrate and low in fat not only provides the best balance of nutrients for health but also supports physical activity best. Training can increase the amount of glycogen a muscle can conserve during exercise. Likewise, exercise training improves the body’s ability to deliver fat to working muscles, and trained muscles have an increased ability to use the fat for energy when oxygen is present—sparing the valuable glycogen.

Protein Needs for Fitness

The body of an athlete may use slightly more protein, especially during the initial stages of training. Finally, how well your muscles metabolize fuels for energy depends on your supply of vitamins and minerals.

Knowledge of what fuels muscles use may lead the athletic competitor to consume a diet especially high in complex carbohydrates just before an event. The best choices for the meal before a competitive event are foods that are high in carbohydrate and low in fat, protein, and fiber.

Fluid Needs and Exercise

Sufficient fluid intake is critical to the prevention of heat stroke and to the health and performance of anyone who exercises. Replenishing fluid lost during exercise is easily accomplished by drinking fluid before, during, and after exercise.

Vitamins and Minerals for Exercise

B vitamins to facilitate energy release and antioxidants to curtail the oxidation resulting from increased oxygen use during exercise are both important vitamin classes for athletes. Iron, which is needed to deliver oxygen to working muscles, is an especially important mineral for athletes.

Athletes and Supplements—Help or Hype?

Myths abound concerning fitness and nutrition. However, the scientific evidence to support most of the claims that special ergogenic aids will make an athlete run farther or jump higher is lacking. With common sense and an awareness of fitness components and concepts, people can learn to exercise safely and enjoy its many benefits.

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