Nutrition and Exercise Reccomendations, Past and Present
Ancient Nutritionists
Frank Katch, William McArdle, Victor Katch and James Freeman did research in 1998 that suggested that the first nutritionists came out of the early Olympics between the years of 776 BC and 393 AD. During this period paidotribes, which were private trainers or coaches, advised their athletes about the importance of food and exercise. One of these early coaches was Melesias. Melesias was one of the most educated nutritionists in his era. He coached 30 wrestling champions (Wolinsky p.8).
They also reported that ancient scrolls and pictures showed that athletes followed plans of exercise, rest, massage, and diet for 10 consecutive months before their competition. The paidotribes would prescribe large amounts of food for boxers and wrestlers. Around 480 BC, Dromeus of Stymphalus, who was an Olympic champion in the long race twice, discovered a new diet of meat. Later, Herodicus of Selymbria modified this diet to change his own health.
Gardiner, an ancient Greek, spoke of the new diet:
The diet of the old athletes had been, like that of most Greek country folk, mainly vegetarian, consisting of figs, fresh cheese from the baskets, porridge, and meal cakes with only occasional meat as a relish, and wine. The frequently repeated statement that the athlete's diet was regulated by the law of the Games, and that he was not allowed to drink wine is entirely groundless. But shortly after the Persian Wars a change took place. A meat diet was introduced by some of the trainers.
The object of the meat diet was to produce the bulk and strength supposed to be necessary for the boxer and the wrestler. In Greece classification by weight was unknown, and in boxing and wrestling the heavyweight has the advantage. Therefore, to produce bulk, the trainer prescribed enormous quantities of meat, which had to be counteracted by excessive exercise. Eating, sleeping, and exercise occupied the athlete's whole time and left little leisure for other pursuits (Wolinsky p.8).
Nutrition in foods and beverages are still important for athletes and exercisers today. A few years ago body builders were the only people to take nutrition seriously (Bevereley 2000). John Anderson and Robert McMurray (1998) wrote that exercise and physical activity damage a person's muscles, tendons and ligaments. These tissues can be repaired quickly. Repair can take from a few minutes to few weeks. Good nutrition helps to aid in the repair of these tissues.
According to the Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review’s article on the female athlete triad, in the past forty years, American women have become increasingly involved in athletics as a result of laws allowing them to participate in sports. (Lebrun and Rumball) For instance, Cathy Rigby won eight Olympic gold medals in gymnastics during the ‘60’s and 70’s when these laws were just coming into effect. (Brunet) Nevertheless, there is an ugly hidden underbelly to the many benefits of women’s increased participation in sports. Many sports have very high standards for body image, which has led to the increasing prevalence of three “separate… but interrelated conditions” collectively known as the female athlete triad. (Lebrun and Rumball) Despite Cathy Rigby’s aforementioned success, an article by Dr. Michael Brunet reveals that she was severely affected by the most well-known of the female athlete triad: the eating disorder. This eventually caused her to suffer cardiac arrest twice. (Brunet) These effects are not limited to elite athletes, however; high school athletes are also affected by the triad, particularly those participating in sports “in which leanness is perceived to optimize performance” or which use “specific weight categories.” (Lebrun) The three components of the triad, osteoporosis, amenorrhea, and disordered eating, are increasingly becoming an unfortunate effect of distorted body image on sports.
Gymnasts are more vulnerable to the onset of distorted eating than other teenagers in society, due to the very nature of what makes for athletic success in the sport. Gymnasts’ bodies have to be young, healthy, petite and muscular, therefore they have to do large amounts of conditioning and eat the proper amounts and type of food. The main factor to gymnasts being vulnerable to distorted eating is because they are at very young ages when they excel in the sport. Gymnastics is structured around young fit bodies, so these athletes are facing a lot of pure pressure and big decisions at young ages. They may start to restrict their diet because, in the sport, it is expected for them to have petite and fit bodies and they are receiving pressure from their coaches and others opinions. A Canadian study of youth gymnasts at an average age of 13.4 years old, reported that 10.5% saw themselves as overweight, 27% were worried about the way they looked and 39% reported dieting behaviors (momsteen.com). When gymnasts restrict their food intake it will not enhance their performance, instead it will harm it because of their weakened bodies condition. They decide to reduce their food intake because of what their body, as a gymnast, is supposed to look like. With the average age of gymnasts being 13.4 years old, they are at the age where it is very easy to feel insecure about their body due to others around them, but it is very unhealthy for high-level gymnasts to not be fueling their body with the proper foods thy need. The sports nature also plays a large role in how far the athletes will go for success. Gymnastics is a very involving sport that requires very long training hours for the young athletes. The proper amount of training hours for the ...
Weight, L. M. & T. D. Noakes. (1987) Is running an analog of anorexia? Medicine and Science in Sport and Exer-cise, 19(3)
In this paper I will be looking at an article called The Over Training Syndrome, which was written in 1994. I will be comparing the information in the article with the content from the week 6 Qualifying Sports Training lecture. This will be done by directly quoting the article, then the lecture and having a short discussion on the quoted point. The four areas of comparison will be; the definition of overtraining, the cause of overtraining, the effects of over training, and the recovery time from overtraining. The goal of this paper is to discuss the advancement in knowledge over the last twenty years in these four points on overtraining.
Regardless of what sport an athlete is participating, once they reach a certain level there is an enormous amount of pressure. When an athlete is depriving himself or herself of food or making themselves puke after in taking food, they can start to go down a path of malnutrition, which will have a huge toll on their performance. Athlete’s battling eating disorders may experience symptoms such as anemia, muscle loss, osteoporosis, electrolyte imbalance, heart problems and hormone changes (Harms, 2012). A large majority of the time, when athletes are dropping weight they are going to end up developing problems such as fatigue, nutrient deficiencies and impaired growth which are only going ...
Claim: Solar power has the potential to become the United States main supply of energy and replace are needs for more conventional and harmful forms of power generation.
Professor Chris Pelling of UCL wrote The Ancient Olympics. In addition, the author is a member of the UCL Department of Greek and Latin. In this article, the author describe and explain how sports were more than a competition in the ancient Greece. His hypothesis was that sports were a way to get honor and power instead of just competing. It represents more than a simple crown of leaves and olive-branch at the Olympics. It gave power, fame and honor to the athlete and their home city. In addition, they were awarded with many material rewards such as money, and women. For instance, the primary method employed in this research consisted
According to Connie Peterson, in her book entitled Athletic Training , “The medical gymastae (trainers) were said to posses ideas of the effect of diet, rest, and exercise on the development of the body. Hippocrates, the “father of modern medicine,” and his student Claudius Galen often advised their patients to exercise in the gymnasia as a means of recovering from their ills” (Peterson 275).
Shakespeare, William. "Henry V." The Norton Shakespeare: Histories. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus. London: Norton, 1997. 726-795.
This is when Ori branded this way of life as “The Warrior Diet” (Hofmekler). Rather than a knockoff version of this warrior lifestyle, it was an update (Hofmekler). Ori added an ideology to the ancient way of living. The ideology that the warrior diet became had numerous presuppositions and the most interesting are the ones that I will cover in this paper. These presuppositions are that fitness is the key to wellbeing in any part of life (Hofmekler). This implies that regardless of the goal, fitness is the means to the end. The next presupposition is that preparing the body to handle excessive stress will help it function under “normal”...
The Pentathlon was the name for the five events in Greek gymnastics: running, jumping, wrestling, discus throwing, and javelin throwing which began with the 18th Olympiad. In the wrestling event, wrestlers were anointed with oil, dusted with powder, and forbidden to bite or gouge one another. Wrestling was looked upon as a weapon-free military exercise. Since there was no weapons wrestlers that competed used their weight and strength as an advantage especially since there were no weight categories. The Javelin was thrown in the same form back in ancient times as it is thrown today. The first recorded Olympic Games had one event, a race, called the stade which is a measure of the distance of the length of the track. By 724 B.C. a two-length race was added and by 700 B.C. there were longer distance races. By 720 B.C., men participated naked, except in the foot race in armor that weighed between fifty to sixty pounds. The outfit included a helmet, greaves, and a shield that helped young men build speed and stamina in preparation for war. The Pentathlon included three running events such as the Stade, the Diaulos, and the Dolichos. The Stade was a 200 yard foot race, was the first and only Olympic event for 13 Games. The dolichos was a variable length foot race averaging twenty stades or four thousand yards for the fifteenth Olympiad. The Diaulos was a four hundred yard foot race that was instituted for the next Olympic Games. The discus was considered by ancient Greeks, an event of rhythm, precision, and finesse of a competitor to throw the discus was as important as his strength. The discus was made of stone, iron, bronze, or lead, and was shaped like a flying saucer. The Sizes were different for the boys' division, since the boys were not expected to throw the same weighted discus as the men. The athletes who competed in the jump event used lead or stone jump weights called halteres shaped like telephone receivers to increase ...
An optimal diet can be defined as the following; a diet that maximizes health and longevity and, therefore, prevents nutrient deficiencies, reduces risks for diet-related chronic diseases, and is composed of foods that are available, safe and palatable (Kudlackova, Babinska & Valachovicova, 2005). With this in mind, one can first inquire which nutrients are lacking from diets comprised highly of meat. On the basis of proteins, plants are much richer in non-essential amino acids in comparison to meat. Other nutrients that are missing from diets that consist largely of meat include; carbohydrates, antioxidative vitamins, minerals, fiber and vitamin C (Kudlackova, Babinska & Valachovicova, 2005).
There are legends surrounding the discovery of magnets. One of the more common ones is that an elderly shepherd named Magnes, was herding his sheep in Magnesia, an area in Northern Greece around 4,000 years ago. While he was herding, the nail in his shoes became stuck on the ground where his sheep were grazing. The rock was supposable named either after him or the area where the stone was discovered. ("Canada Science and Technology Museum.")
When you were young, you may have remembered about trying to make objects stick together or move things, like metal paperclips, just by using a magnet. Back then, you probably thought that magnets’ only exist as play things. But, now that you’re older, you’ve realised that these objects play a significant role in day-to-day life.
I am certain that all have heard of the terms green house gases, fossil fuels, and global warming. Have you ever questioned what will happen if nothing is done about the environmental problems facing the world today? What if I answer you that, we can merely use the power from the sun to power up our entire planet without the use of harmful energy sources, which affect our atmosphere? The power from the sun is what we call solar power. Solar power is the energy that comes from the sun as light and heat energy, and then it is later converted into electrical energy through solar panels (Nelson, 2008). This kind of power is completely free, right? Why should we put a lot of expense on other sources of energy, when there is a complete free and healthy power? It is evident that solar energy is a healthy source of energy, which will help stop global warming all together, but it is economically efficient to switch everything to solar energy. Solar energy is capable of becoming the world's future power supply because, it is renewable, eco-friendly, and extremely efficient when strategically placed.