The aerobic and anaerobic energy systems

Original title: Massimo Spattini - Alimentazione e integrazione per lo sport e la performance fisica II edizione ©2021 Edizioni LSWR* – All rights reserved

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Foreword

The fundamental role of nutrition in maintaining and promoting health is certainly not new: just think of the role of fasting and dietary moderation in cultural and religious traditions. To give an example, in the tenth speech of the Book of Grades (late 4th-early 5th century, probably from in a Syriac-speaking community) it says: “Intemperance in relation to food is harmful to the bodies even when they are healthy”. But perhaps the most famous are the sentences of rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known to most as Maimonides (1135-1204), including: “One of the rules of the health regime is also that the attention must be paid to the quality of food “. Maimonides himself then gave advice on the quantity and the method of physical exercise also in relation to nutrition.

In more recent times, the Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro described a similar “integrated” approach to health in his The Discourses and Letters of Louis Cornaro on a Sober and Temperate Life. In which, with the example of himself, he demonstrates by what means a man can keep himself healthy up to his old age, published in 1620. I would like to quote here one of the first sentences of his pamphlet, which I find quite current: “O miserable and unhappy Italy, don’t you see that crapula kills so many of your people every year, that many could not die at neither in the times of very serious plagues, nor from the iron or the fire of many arms”. The role of nutrition and exercise in maintaining and promoting health are therefore ancient concepts. But also searching for the most suitable nutrition for the athlete is nothing new: when Dromeo from Stymphalus won two running races in 484 and 480 BC in Olympia, after a diet based only on meat, the high-protein diet gradually became common, even though it was expensive for an athlete who was not particularly wealthy.

This first “fashion” was followed by many others, always aimed at “maximizing” the performance: for example, Carmides of Sparta, a speed Olympian in 668 BC, declared that he only ate dried figs. And so, from extreme diet to extreme diet, we arrive at the famous supplementation based on brandy and eggs (and strychnine) by Thomas Hicks at the Olympics marathon in St. Louis, in 1904, and also the consumed beer during the stages of the Tour de France in the thirties of the last century. Although, especially in recent years, the science of sports nutrition and related supplementation has evolved, unfortunately we still see preconceived and outdated beliefs (an athlete does not need to eat in a different way, an athlete does not need supplementation, more than 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight are not needed in a sportsperson, etc.) or dangerous leaps forward with respect to science with statements that refer to