Adenosine triphosphate, also referred to as ATP, is nature’s energy store. Every living organism needs ATP energy in order to carry out the processes that maintain life within that organism, including us humans for whom a continuous energy source is essential for our biochemistry, movement of fluids and the involuntary muscular movements exemplified by our heartbeat, respiration and digestion.

Fast and complete recuperation are two of the most important elements of improving your athletic performance – especially if you run a hard training schedule. Faster recuperation means you don’t fall behind: you can fit more training sessions in, and you’re not out of commission for a week or two after a big event. More complete recuperation means your training sessions will be more productive: you’re body is stronger and more fully healed, ready to push harder. And if you can train harder and more often without suffering the negative consequences of over training, your performance will improve, along with your general well-being.

Recuperation and healing take energy, and as your body diverts its resources to recovery and repairing itself, you may experience an overall drop in daily energy. To enhance your energy for recuperation and performance, you need to recharge and cleanse your cells of metabolic wastes, allowing for the boosting of your energy levels more efficiently and naturally.

What is the best way to promote a healthy inflammatory response? The answer to a healthy inflammatory response is by working with your body’s natural systems. TGF-ß (transforming growth factor beta) is a naturally occurring anti-inflammatory peptide that stimulates the healing process and helps promote a healthy inflammatory response to muscle inflammation. It can be found in …

When you exercise intensely, tiny tears appear in your muscle cell membranes – this is called cellular microtrauma, and basically means your muscle tissue becomes damaged. If your body doesn’t receive the nourishment it needs for muscle repair, you risk sore muscles and recuperation is delayed or remains incomplete.

Outdoor season is often a slow and difficult transition from indoor season. Spring season brings with it the 100 meter hurdles, which has ten hudles, as opposed to indoor season, which is the 55 meters or 60 meters, and only five hurdles. Therefore, my training for outdoor season focuses on speed endurance and focusing on maintaining my rhythm over hurdles 7-10. My straight sprint workouts consist of interval training with 100s, 120, and 150s, with short rest periods between each repetition. My hurdle workouts consist of training over more hurdles.

Your body’s energy is produced through a process known as cellular respiration: this is where your cells use the nutrients you’ve ingested through food, along with the air you breathe, and transform them into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the fuel for the creation of our body’s energy via cellular respiration. For a cell to ‘breathe’ at optimal levels, there are two systems that need to balance each other: the oxidative system and the reductive system.

Glutathione is the body’s master antioxidant that you need to keep you healthy and disease free. Glutathione is not like any other antioxidants. It is the only antioxidant that resides within your cells, which acts as the main regulator. It is the master detoxifier. Your body produces its own glutathione, unfortunately, due to pollution, toxins, poor diet, stress, aging and infections all deplete your glutathione. This leaves you vulnerable to free radicals, oxidative stress from training, and infections that can damage your body. Glutathione is an important antioxidant to help the liver filter waste.

As we saw in part one of this series, once athletes get to a certain level in their training, the strength of their bio-electrical current is what makes the difference for explosive strength and power. But how does this current, created through electron transfer and donation, travel through the body? One of the key answers is through the nervous system: using a form of electrical current (called action potential) the brain communicates via the spinal cord to the muscles, and vice versa. This provides the second key to building maximum strength and power for athletes: a strong, healthy central and autonomic nervous system is vital for optimal athletic performance. Why? There are two main reasons.

Many people get confused between antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, which is quite understandable given that many phytochemicals possess both properties. Most flavanoids, for example are both, although the mechanisms are quite different. Here we shall discuss each and then apply that knowledge to the needs of runners and athletes in general.