apple cider vinegar and performance

Apple Cider Vinegar & Sports Performance

Apple cider vinegar is made from the juice of fermented apples and is most popularly used in things like salad dressing and food preservatives. It tastes great, but it’s good for more than just adding some flavor to certain dishes.

ACV, as we will be calling it going forward for the sake of convenience and most definitely not laziness, has quite a few health benefits, including things like skin health, immune system boosting, and weight loss.

While the amount of research done on the product and why it works is not exactly extensive, the benefits are most definitely observable, and it can actually be used in a huge variety of different ways that don’t relate to health too.

When it comes to sports performance, your diet is very important and there are a lot of different things you can eat and drink which will enhance your athletic ability, according to Fairfax personal trainers, and allow you to progress further and more quickly.

It can be hard to know what to put into your body that will just help you perform at a higher level and not have any unwanted side effects. But there are quite a few science-backed reasons why ACV could be largely beneficial for sports and exercise and it’s completely safe.

Before we take a look at a couple of the ways in which it can aid you as an athlete, let’s talk a little bit about how much of it you should have in your diet.

Dosage

Well, as we mentioned before, ACV is most commonly used as a way of flavoring other dishes through like salad dressing or other homemade condiments, and that’s a solid way to incorporate it into your diet.

Alternatively, you could just drink it. Have a glass of it every morning, ideally before you do whatever kind of exercise you’ve got planned for that day so that the vinegar is already pumping through your system.

But no matter how you choose to get ACV into your system, you don’t need all that much. Especially not when your body isn’t particularly used to it. A good dosage would be just about 5-10 ml.

So don’t go any higher than that if you are including it in a homemade condiment or seasoning and if you do choose to drink it, mix that small dosage into a full glass of water to ensure that it’s diluted.

It might not seem like all that much, but there can be some unfortunate side effects to having excessive amounts of ACV in your system so keep it under control. Now then, here are a few ways that it should help your performance:

Blood Sugar

When you’re exercising, your body is converting glucose into energy, which is allowing you to maintain your ability to keep going over longer periods of time. The further into your workout you get, the higher your blood sugar spikes which lower your glucose levels.

This is why so many people will drink energy drinks which are quite high in sugar while they’re working out because it gives them that boost of glucose that they need. If your glucose gets too low, you’ll sort of hit a bit of a wall.

ACV is very good for keeping this balanced. Essentially, it will dampen the effect that your exertion is having on your blood sugar and allow for the glucose to be released into your bloodstream more slowly and as such lasting for a longer period of time.

So the gist of that is that ACV can help you to get more out of your workout by ensuring that you can operate at a higher level for longer.

PH Levels

When people are exercising and they start to feel a muscle cramping up, they tend to assume that is some kind of injury or a strain of some sort and while sometimes that is what’s happening, in all likelihood it’s due to your pH balance being off.

Ideally, the human body will maintain a healthy balance of acidity and alkalinity and if you go too far in either direction then it will have a negative effect on your muscles and cause things like aches and tiredness.

If your blood becomes too acidic, it will start to steal key minerals from the parts of your body where they are needed. It will take calcium from your bones or magnesium or potassium from your muscles, leaving them less functional while you work out.

To keep this in check, you need to pump your body with electrolytes to replenish those important minerals, and ACV is full of those. You can rely on your dose of it in the morning to keep your pH balance in check, or you could drink some after a workout to restore the electrolytes you worked off.

Digestion

Might seem like a strange one to include, but digestion is important if you want to get as much benefit out of the exercise as possible. It can sometimes be hard to maintain a healthy gut while ensuring you get all of the necessary nutrients to ensure good results.

Especially if you’re relatively new to doing a lot of exercises, the type of things you’re going to be incorporating into your diet might be a bit of a shock to your system which isn’t used to it. And that can lead to things like constipation and bloating.

But in ACV there are a number of different enzymes and proteins that can help to boost your stomach acid levels, meaning that digestion can run a little bit more smoothly. Food will get through your system more efficiently, preventing these unpleasant and counter-productive sensations.

As beneficial as ACV is, it’s important that you keep in mind the fact that all of this is contingent on the exercise itself. You can put as much helpful stuff into your body as you want and it will do no good if your exercise routine is faulty.

Do some research and figure out the most appropriate kinds of exercises for you and what you hope to achieve. There are lots of workouts that you can do at home which is very convenient, or maybe all you really want to do is run or cycle.

ACV is a great thing to help you along on your journey to fitness, don’t waste the benefits by doing the wrong kinds of exercises.