Sports Drinks

Anyone thinking of using sports or energy drinks such as Lucozade sport, Powerade and Red Bull as part of their training rountine should consider if these are really needed for their fitness goals.

In an age of image and the power of advertising it's easy to think that these drinks are always needed as part of a fitness programme but this isn't always the case.

As we get closer to the London 2012 Olympics, sports drinks such as the above will be advertising their wares, giving the suggestion that because most of  the athletes will be using their products then it's considered healthy and everyone regardless of the amount of exercise they do will benefit.

However these drinks by their very nature are loaded with sugar in the form of glucose, the body's preferred energy source, in order to give the body extra energy to perform exercise.  This is fine if your body uses this sugar for energy but if it isn't converted  into energy due to the exercise not being intense or long enough it will be converted into fat intead and stored on the body.

The body has about 1-1.5 hours of energy levels before it needs to be fed again and so if your work out is around this duration then water is better.  However after this time the body will start to get tried and performance will start to decline, this is when sports drinks will come into their own.

So to recap if your fitness rountine involves performing for longer then 1.5 hours, such as long distance running then sports drinks can be a good thing to use.  However if you are training for less and your main goal is fat loss, avoid these drinks at all costs and stick to water.