Functional Sports Nutrition

What do you want from your sports?

1. Improved performance?
2. Quick recovery?
3. Less injuries?
4. Do it naturally?

Then you are right to be looking at your diet and nutritional intake.  
Getting your diet right will give improved outcomes for your both sporting goals and how you feel.

With changes in sports nutrition as a science, improvements have been made in looking above and beyond the basic requirements of energy in/energy out, and increased levels of physical performance and greater results has been seen throughout all sports.  

Sports science is an area that is also evolving, and it is becoming a more multidisciplinary arena, recognising that high level sporting success involves an amalgamation of many factors in an individual athlete, including physical, mental, technical, tactical, strategic, genetic, cultural. All of these factors are interdependant with each other, and optimising the functioning of the mind and the body of an athlete will work towards optimum performance output.
Functional sports nutrition embraces this holistic approach that looks to harness all the indvidual needs of an athlete and is more than just 'sports nutrition'. 
So how is this diifferent from basic established sports nutrition?  
Traditional sports nutrition as a stand alone science adequately looks at the dietary requirements of an athlete in relation to their training and competition needs. 
However,a few things are missing:

1. The requirement to look at the needs of each athlete or sports person as an individual,  with differing lifestyles and different underlying health, and thus the overall demands being placed on that persons physiology.
2. The full nutritional (and non-nutritional) health values of foods being eaten. For example, if you're carb loading, then a serving of sweet potato gives far higher nutritional content than a similar sized serving of bread, although the carbohydrate value will be the same, so the overall benefits to energy output, health balance and physical needs will be much greater from the sweet potato

These factors ARE considered in the Functional sports nutrition approach which is used by Bridget in the MindBody Nutrition clinic.

 
The model of Functional sports nutrition pulls together sports nutrition and nutritional therapy (looking at the full nutritional potential of the diet for health) and integrative medicine to offer the best health and dietary focus for each individual athlete or sports enthusiast.

On hand here in the MindBody clinic we are delighted to offer the services of John Connolly for sports motivation and focus with HypnoSport.