Ergogenic Aids for the Athlete

Specialist performance nutritionist and ergogenics expert, Matt Lovell, leads this week with his lecture on how to support sports performance by nurturing an athlete’s body systems, plus live workshop interaction.

Lecture content

Week 1 begins with a detailed exploration of the ergogenics concept, including an understanding of how body systems health is fundamental to athletic performance. Topics include:

• Setting the scene for performance goals: Defining ergogenic aids in a sporting context, how to assess and track an athlete, the building of resilience to training stressors, and strategies for actioning ergogenics.
• A systems biology view of performance: Understanding how functional health underpins performance, gastrointestinal, immune and endocrine health in sport, and the importance of recovery and inflammation management as an ergogenic tool.
• Nutritional support of body systems: Supporting the energetic demands of training and competition, the anabolic-catabolic dynamic including mTOR and AMPK, body composition, metabolic flexibility, muscle protein synthesis, and power-to-weight ratio optimisation.
• Supporting lifestyle and training practices: Auxiliary performance-supporting strategies, including sleep management, training principles (avoiding overtraining), recovery optimisation, and injury prevention.

Sporting superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo would not still be performing at the top level in their late 30s if they had a ‘performance at all costs’ attitude. Your host Paul K Ehren, Masters bodybuilding champion and integrative strength and conditioning specialist, shares his health, performance, and longevity lecture, plus live workshop interaction.

Lecture content

Week 2 delves more into the wider environment within which an athlete lives and trains (their ‘ecosystem’), incorporating a big picture view of health and performance, and how we can support that as practitioners. Topics include:

• Practitioners as ergogenic aids: Understanding the pivotal role of practitioner-client relationships in athletic performance, developing our own therapeutic tool sets, and building a network of ergogenic support.
• The athlete’s ecosystem: Knowing your client wholly, elite versus recreational athlete needs, demands of particular sports, and supporting an athlete’s lifestyle.
• Performance and health: Understanding what performance means to different clients, personalised nutrition needs, longevity of athletic career and life.
• Dual role of supplements: A review of supplements that have ergogenic potential in sport, which also support health, best value for money considerations, and patterns of compliance.
• Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), and alternatives: A review of PEDs that might commonly be seen in practice, with commentary on safer nutrition alternatives.