Not promoting Vega but the article is great! Power Up Your Performance with Plant-Based Nutrition By Elizabeth Jarrard, RD LDN The clients you train don’t just eat food, they use it. People who exercise regularly break down cellular and muscular tissue with every workout. The food they eat provides the nutrients that are the foundation of cellular regeneration. As a fitness professional, you are well aware of this, but are you sharing this knowledge with your clients? By giving them the information they need to give their bodies the highest quality building materials, you can, and will make them stronger, and improve your reputation as a fitness professional. Clean Plant-Based Nutrition It’s not just professional athlete to reap the benefits of clean, plant-based nutrition. These principles are made to fit into everyone’s modern schedule—even your workaholic weekend warriors. Who wouldn’t like better sleep, decreased cravings and more energy? I view clean eating as plant-based with a predominant focus on whole, unprocessed foods, free of artificial ingredients, and organic whenever possible. Whole, unprocessed plant-based foods are nutrient dense, full of vitamins, minerals, quality macronutrients, and antioxidants to keep your body healthy. If you can’t pronounce an ingredient—it’s probably should be avoided. Artificial foods, heavily processed foods, and genetically modified foods have the opposite effect of nourishment, causing stress on your body. Look for organic foods, but more importantly, look for local foods that are grown without sprays but may not be certified organic. Your health will benefit from the lack of pesticides and herbicides, plus they support your local economy and help the environment because they’re not shipped from afar. Rebuilding with Plant-based Nutrition Training breaks down muscle tissue, and food (or more specifically, the nutrition in food) provides the materials to rebuild it, so you want to make sure you are refueling with high net-gain nutrition. Your endurance clients in particular are probably loading up on pasta, white bread, and pizza before a long workout or race, and wondering why they feel so sluggish. While the macronutrients (carbs, protein and fats) are important, there is so much more to performance nutrition. First you want to make sure your clients are consuming foods that are easy to digest—that don’t aggravate any food sensitive’s or allergies, and that they are timing their intake with their workout. Second, look at what foods contain the greatest amount of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, antioxidants) per calorie. As you start to pay attention to nutrient density, you swap out refined starch staples, which were low in nutrition yet took a lot of energy to digest, for easily assimilated, less processed, nutrient dense options, such as fruit and pseudograins like quinoa, amaranth, millet and wild rice. The result is greater energy plus a natural desire to eat less. Plant-based foods are extremely nutrient dense, and including more in your clients’ diets will help them to perform better. Focus on the pros, not the cons Assure your clients that clean eating doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I find the best approach as you or your clients transition to eating plant-based is to focus on foods that you’d like to add to your diet (hemp, chia, kale, quinoa, smoothies, etc,) more than to think about foods you’d like to reduce your consumption of (dairy, refined sugars, fast food, etc.). Once you start to include more good foods, they will begin to crowd out the room in your stomach—and your life—for not-so-good foods. Focus on adding one food a day. Perfection is not the goal—constant improvement will get you further. Brendan Brazier—former professional Ironman triathlete and author of the bestselling Thrive series of books— formulated the Vega Sport system to help athletes gain a nutritional advantage following the key principles of plant-based sport nutrition. Vega Sport is the first, complete, all-natural, plant-based sport performance system specifically developed to help athletes perform at their best. Every ingredient in the Vega Sport system is selected for a specific, performance-boosting function while still being dairy, gluten and soy-free. Following the principles of functional fuel and nutrient timing, the Vega Sport system is designed in three sequential stages—Prepare, Sustain, and Recover—to give your body the ideal macronutrients in the ratio it needs to perform at its best. For more tips on using plant-based nutrition to train better, check out Brendan’s FREE online platform Thrive Forward. After you explore some of the video lessons on topics ranging from recovery for strength training recovery to how to eat more sustainable, you can easily share recipes, meal plans and articles with clients.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:38:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015