Nutritional Strategies for Muscle Recovery: Part I

Optimal nutrition plays a vital role in recovery after exercise. Its main goals include replenishing the substrates used during exercise and supporting the repair process after muscle damage so that athletes can continue to achieve training adaptations.

Ensuring adequate energy availability and hydration along with an optimal intake of carbohydrates and proteins is fundamental. This article instead focuses on evidence for nutritional supplements and foods containing potentially useful components that may support athletes' recovery.

Exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) is a transient event caused by exercise to which the body is unaccustomed, or by exercise of long duration or high intensity, including a combination of these factors.

Muscle damage is characterized by a disruption in homeostasis in our muscle fibers, leading to a secondary inflammatory response that causes cellular infiltration in the damaged tissues so that the subsequent tissue repair and remodeling can begin.

Beyond the damage to the myofibers, the extracellular matrix (ECM) of skeletal muscle is also subject to this degradation and remodeling after physical exercise (something histologically observable). There is a marked increase in the circulation of specific collagen amino acids, especially hydroxyproline, in the days following exercise.

There are numerous hypotheses, but the origin and exact mechanisms of exercise-induced muscle damage and the familiar “delayed onset muscle soreness” (DOMS), known in Spanish as “agujetas,” have not yet been fully established.

One of these hypotheses is that this muscle damage is rarely caused by mechanical tension between the sarcomeres, since, if it were, this damage would only occur hours after training and the reality is that it can take even several days to appear and disappear. The most plausible hypothesis is that this muscle damage is mostly caused by biochemical factors and therefore does not immediately cause a loss of strength right after exercise, but rather in the hours and days afterward (Chris Beardsley).

Even so, in this review, it gives us a rather interesting figure for those of you interested in the topic of how this phenomenon occurs and its main causes.

We can see that all these factors can really be found integrated both independently and dependently on each other (welcome to physiology in 3D)

In order not to make the article too long and with the goal of providing some practical information on the subject, there are various supplements that, together with an adequate nutritional base, correct management of training variables, and rest in both quantity and quality, can provide us with certain advantages when it comes to recovering efficiently and quickly.

As the authors emphasize, there is the eternal dilemma between achieving adaptations and recovering quickly with competitive objectives. These aids offer us a hybrid between both, achieving faster recovery in some cases without interfering with later adaptations in exercise. These nutritional factors or supplements are vitamin D, omega 3, creatine monohydrate, beet juice, tart cherry juice, and pomegranate juice whose proper timing and mechanisms of action we will address in a future article.

All of these have one greater evidence compared to other supplements used for the same purpose when it comes to improving recovery in our athlete. Although being completely honest and transparent, not all of them lead to significant changes in recovery or markers that reflect this muscle damage after exercise (we could debate whether these are useful or not when it comes to assessing the impact on recovery).

This is mainly due to the fact that there is a great heterogeneity in the available literature causing a clear difference in the effect size and results of the selected studies. In this case, these are factors such as; supplementation protocol and formulation, training level of the subjects (trained/untrained), age, sex, modality, and training variables…

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Bibliography

• Bongiovanni, T., Genovesi, F., Nemmer, M., Carling, C., Alberti, G., & Howatson, G. (2020). Nutritional interventions for reducing the signs and symptoms of exercise-induced muscle damage and accelerate recovery in athletes: current knowledge, practical application and future perspectives. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 1-32.
  Harty, P. S., Cottet, M. L., Malloy, J. K., & Kerksick, C. M. (2019). Nutritional and supplementation strategies to prevent and attenuate exercise-induced muscle damage: a brief review. Sports medicine-open, 5(1), 1.
• Doma, K., Gahreman, D., & Connor, J. (2020). Fruit supplementation reduces indices of exercise-induced muscle damage: a systematic review and meta-analysis: Fruit supplements reduces muscle damage. European Journal of Sport Science, 1-36.
• Bowtell, J., & Kelly, V. (2019). Fruit-derived polyphenol supplementation for athlete recovery and performance. Sports Medicine, 49(1), 3-23.