An important goal of the athlete’s everyday diet is to provide the muscle with substrates to fuel the training programme that will achieve optimal adaptation and performance enhancements. Body fat and carbohydrate stores provide the major sources of exercise fuel; whereas fat sources (plasma free fatty acids derived from adipose tissue and intramuscular triglycerides) are relatively plentiful, carbohydrate sources (plasma glucose derived from the liver or dietary carbohydrate intake, and muscle glycogen stores) are limited (for a review, see Coyle, 1995).
In fact, the availability of carbohydrate as a substrate for the muscle and central nervous system becomes a limiting factor in the performance of prolonged sessions ( 490 min) of submaximal or intermittent high-intensity exercise, and plays a permissive role in the performance of brief high-intensity work. As a result, sports nutrition guidelines have focused on strategies to enhance body carbohydrate availability. Such practices include intake of carbohydrate before and during a workout to provide fuel for that session, as well as intake of carbohydrate after the session and over the day in general to promote refuelling and recovery (for a review, see Hargreaves, 1999).Although other reviews in this issue will discuss strategies for promoting carbohydrate availability before (Hargreaves et al., 2004) and during exercise (Coyle, 2004) in relation to the enhancement of competition performance, these practices should also be integrated into the athlete’s training diet.
The focus of this article, however, is successful refuelling from day to day, to recover between the daily sessions or multiple workouts undertaken in the athlete’s training programme. Strategies to achieve these goals will be particularly important for the serious athlete whose fuel requirements for everyday training are likely to challenge or exceed normal body carbohydrate stores. Key issues related to carbohydrate intake for training and recovery raised in the 1991 position stand on nutrition for sport (Devlin and Williams, 1991) are summarized in Table 1. The aim of this article is to review areas in which these guidelines have been changed or updated.
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