Dietary Fuels in Athletic Performance

Focusing on daily nutrition is important for athletes to perform and adapt optimally to exercise training. The major roles of an athlete's daily diet are to supply the substrates needed to cover the energy demands for exercise, to ensure quick recovery between exercise bouts, to optimize adaptations to exercise training, and to stay healthy. The major energy substrates for exercising skeletal muscles are carbohydrate and fat stores. Optimizing the timing and type of energy intake and the amount of dietary macronutrients is essential to ensure peak training and competition performance, and these strategies play important roles in modulating skeletal muscle adaptations to endurance and resistance training. In this review, recent advances in nutritional strategies designed to optimize exercise-induced adaptations in skeletal muscle are discussed, with an emphasis on mechanistic approaches, by describing the physiological mechanisms that provide the basis for different nutrition regimens.

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Pterostilbene Enhances Endurance Capacity via Promoting Skeletal Muscle Adaptations to Exercise Training in Rats

Molecules ◽

10.3390/molecules25010186 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 186 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jiawei Zheng ◽

Wujian Liu ◽

Xiaohui Zhu ◽

Li Ran ◽

Hedong Lang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Skeletal Muscle ◽

Exercise Training ◽

Mitochondrial Biogenesis ◽

C2c12 Myotubes ◽

Endurance Capacity ◽

Muscle Adaptations ◽

Slow Twitch ◽

Slow Twitch Fibers ◽

Skeletal Muscle Adaptations

It has been demonstrated that skeletal muscle adaptions, including muscle fibers transition, angiogenesis, and mitochondrial biogenesis are involved in the regular exercise-induced improvement of endurance capacity and metabolic status. Herein, we investigated the effects of pterostilbene (PST) supplementation on skeletal muscle adaptations to exercise training in rats. Six-week-old male Sprague Dawley rats were randomly divided into a sedentary control group (Sed), an exercise training group (Ex), and exercise training combined with 50 mg/kg PST (Ex + PST) treatment group. After 4 weeks of intervention, an exhaustive running test was performed, and muscle fiber type transformation, angiogenesis, and mitochondrial content in the soleus muscle were measured. Additionally, the effects of PST on muscle fiber transformation, paracrine regulation of angiogenesis, and mitochondrial function were tested in vitro using C2C12 myotubes. In vivo study showed that exercise training resulted in significant increases in time-to-exhaustion, the proportion of slow-twitch fibers, muscular angiogenesis, and mitochondrial biogenesis in rats, and these effects induced by exercise training could be augmented by PST supplementation. Moreover, the in vitro study showed that PST treatment remarkably promoted slow-twitch fibers formation, angiogenic factor expression, and mitochondrial function in C2C12 myotubes. Collectively, our results suggest that PST promotes skeletal muscle adaptations to exercise training thereby enhancing the endurance capacity.

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