The Importance of Vitamin C and Training Benefits
Vitamin C is one of the most important nutrients to consume and is essential for you to even live a healthy life. The most common reason everyone knows about Vitamin C is for boosting the immune system, but this vitamin does much more than that. Let’s take a look at how awesome this nutrient is for both athletes and those that just maintain.
Key Valuable Points for Vitamin C:
- Helps you recover better from intense training programs
- Vitamin C is also an antioxidant
- Required for the repair and growth of your body’s tissues
- Vitamin C supports healthy testosterone levels for men
- Strong immune system booster
- Assists with protein metabolism
The Benefits Received from Vitamin C
Living a healthier life with lower chances of sickness is the main benefit, but there is more to this than that. This is also an antioxidant, which means it helps your body protect itself against free radicals produced through energy conversion of food.
You could also even reduce chances of some damage caused through chemicals. This is why they recommend smokers have a high diet in Vitamin C.
Another type of benefit to look at for Vitamin C is that it helps tissues repair and grow including muscles. Then there is the fact that this nutrient forms a protein called collagen, which assists with your skin and the maintenance of bones and cartilage. This is definitely an important nutrient for athletes to have in their diet.
The Carry Over of Vitamin C for Athletes
The average person is noted to only need around 90mg of Vitamin C daily, but athletes are on a different level. If you train hard for an hour or more several times a week, then you need more than this amount daily. Depending on your activity level, you could need 600mg all the way up to 1,500mg daily.
Some studies even show that intense exercise training may cause oxidative damage to your muscles resulting in the need for an antioxidant. Though this is a hypothesis - it does seem to make sense since workouts cause the need for higher oxidation levels.
Also antioxidants help with muscle recovery and repair after training, which is one of the primary factors for all athletes or those simply working out consistently.
The protein collagen is already important enough, but Vitamin C also assists with protein metabolism i.e. the time period your muscle is recovering and growing. Recovery time is much faster with enough Vitamin C in your diet. Even male athletes need higher consumption for better testosterone production.
Vitamin C is Safe for Most
This vitamin also goes by the name ascorbic acid, so if you see that term being used know it’s still them adding in Vitamin C. The average person is safe to consume this nutrient in higher servings because it is water soluble i.e. you will basically urinate any unused vitamin C within a day’s passing.
