Supplements for Optimal Sports Performance

Abstract

There is an enthusiastic market for the multitude of sports foods and supplements which claim to enhance sports performance. Despite a lengthy history of antipathy towards this industry, many peak sporting bodies and expert groups now support a pragmatic acceptance of the use of products which have passed a risk:benefit analysis of being safe, effective and legal, as well as appropriate to the athlete’s age and maturation in their sport. Sports supplements can be grouped: sports foods which provide a practical form of nutrients to meet sports nutrition goals; medical supplements which may be needed to prevent or correct nutrient deficiencies that occur in athletes, and the larger category of performance supplements which claim either to directly enhance exercise capacity or to support activities that allow the athlete to train hard, recover, achieve physique goals or reduce the risk of illness and injury. Gaining an evidence base for this latter group is challenged by the scarcity of research in relation to the number of products on the market, as well as limitations or poor quality of some of the available studies. While controlled scientific trials and meta-analyses help to provide information about the general use of performance supplements, most high performance athletes are more interested in real-life issues that are hard to encapsulate (e.g. detecting benefits that are meaningful to the outcomes of sporting competition, accounting for the use of several supplements in combination or the use of same supplement over successive events). Strategies to isolate and explain the variability of benefits to individual athletes is also a topic demanding investigation.