The Fundamentals of Sports Nutrition: Eating to Optimise Performance & Recovery. Talk by Dr Alistair Monteyne, Lecturer in Nutritional Physiology. University of Exeter.
The talk will cover the pillars of contemporary sports nutrition, acting as a sports nutrition 101 for beginners and experienced athletes alike. The focus will be on how we optimally fuel for exercise and how we optimise our recovery afterwards. We will discuss practical strategies to implement this knowledge into your own training, whilst also dealing with some common myths in sports nutrition.
Firstly, we will deal with fuelling and all things carbohydrate. Exercise causes a significant increase in the energy we expend, or the ‘burning of a fuel’, and we need to replace this fuel to perform and to maintain capacity in subsequent exercise. We will cover how to properly fuel ourselves before, during, and after exercise, and the type, timing, and dose of carbohydrate to do so in a variety of situations.
Next, we will explore how we recover after exercise and how we optimise adaptations in response to an exercise stimulus. Here, we will cover all things protein, and its importance for endurance, team, and power athletes alike. We will address the amount, timing and type of protein required to optimise recovery and adaptation, alongside some useful practical strategies to meet these demands. We will also discuss the latest research on protein for those following a plant-based diet, and how protein requirements might change with ageing
Dr Monteyne graduated from Loughborough University in Sport & Exercise Science in 2015, before completing an MSc in Sport & Exercise Nutrition at the same institution. Following this, Alistair took a PhD position in the Nutritional Physiology Research Group (NPG) at the University of Exeter. Alistair was awarded his PhD in 2021, before undertaking post-doctoral training within the NPG and subsequently joining the Department of Public Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Exeter, as a Lecturer in Nutritional Physiology.
Dr. Monteyne is an internationally published scientist exploring the interplay between exercise, nutrition, and skeletal muscle physiology. His research involves conducting nutritional and exercise interventions in human volunteers, combined with detailed and invasive in vivo measurements of human physiology. Dr. Monteyne has expanded his research focus to investigate the effect of energy intake on muscle protein turnover in the context of sarcopenia and obesity, alongside investigating exogenous ketosis in Type II Diabetes.