What is “Sports Nutrition”?

Sports nutrition (or sports dietetics) is a relatively new and rapidly progressing field within clinical and experimental pharmacology and dietetics (Venkatraman J.T., Pendergast D.R., 2002). By now, it has become a separate science. The goals of sports nutrition include the development, study, and practical implementation of sports nutrition products to enhance adaptation to super-intensive physical loads, accelerate recovery, and maintain the health of athletes. One of the main tasks of this discipline is to identify and correct factors that limit the physical performance of athletes.

In light of the improvement and tightening of doping control, it is crucial that sports nutrition products and dietary supplements (DS) or food additives (FA), widely used in sports, do not contain substances on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Prohibited List while still providing a significant positive effect.

Currently, the training system in sports, especially in elite sports, is characterized by exceptionally high training and competitive loads accompanied by a high level of emotional stress. It is quite natural that such high loads are a powerful factor in mobilizing the functional reserves of the body, stimulating intensive adaptation processes, increasing endurance, strength, speed abilities, and, of course, improving sports results. In this context, a vital role in enhancing physical performance, preventing fatigue, and accelerating recovery after physical exertion belongs to rational nutrition and specialized means of nutritional support when their application is justified.

Therefore, modern high-performance sports are characterized by an increasing role of dietary factors in the system of means and methods that ensure the high work capacity of an athlete throughout their career. Changes in the structure of the training process have required special attention to questions of organizing nutrition during different stages of the annual training cycle and during competitions. The introduction of two- and three-session training days significantly changed the nutrition regimen of high-level athletes, and the improvement of training methods led to a considerable increase in energy expenditures. Identifying the features of metabolism in the process of nutrient assimilation at the cellular and subcellular levels has made it possible to determine the athlete’s needs for individual components of the diet, establish their optimal ratios necessary for increasing physical performance, accelerating adaptation to loads, and counteracting the negative effects of external factors on recovery processes.

There arose the necessity to adequately compensate for the expended energy by increasing the energy value of the diet. This, in turn, led to the creation of specialized nutrition for athletes, the development of high-nutrient products, as well as dietary (biologically active) food supplements as essential nutritional factors that enhance the physical and psychological readiness of athletes (Busquets-Cortés C. et al., 2016). Thus, in contemporary sports medicine and practice, pharmacology and dietetics merged, giving rise to a new science—sports nutrition (Dmitriev A.V., Kalinchev A.A., 2017). It is still very young, but, in our view, its significance for athlete preparation practice, including the improvement of competitive performance and the longevity of athletes while maintaining their health and quality of life, is difficult to overestimate.

In its most general sense, nutrition (from the English word “nutrition”) can be defined as a science that studies food, food products, nutrients, their interaction, and their role in health. Additionally, nutrition is a science that studies questions closely related to various aspects of nutrition: the composition of food, the process of food consumption, the interaction of different types of food, the influence of various products on the body; in this interpretation, nutrition is also directly related to the hygiene of nutrition (Close G.L. et al., 2016).

One of the essential directions in the development of nutrition is sports nutrition, which deals with the optimization of individualized nutrition during physical exertion. In other words, it is the science of the peculiarities of nutrition during physical exertion (Budgett R., 2016). Sports nutrition covers all aspects of the influence of food (nutrition) and its components—nutrients in isolated form or in the form of specialized functional products and food additives—on the health and quality of life of people actively engaged in sports or recreational physical culture. It also studies the processes through which an athlete’s body consumes, absorbs, transports, utilizes all components of the diet, and excretes metabolic products (Berlett B.S., Levine R.L., 2014).

This material is based on the monograph “Basics of Sports Nutrition” (Dmitriev A.V., Gunina L.M.).