Why elite athletes use supplements — Report

Elite athletes are increasingly using supplements such as creatine to gain small performance advantages, but sports nutrition experts say the basics of a healthy lifestyle must come first.

Creatine, a natural compound produced by the body and also found in meat and fish, provides muscles with a rapid source of energy. It is particularly useful for short, high-intensity activities such as sprinting.

Nutrition expert Prof. Graeme Close says obtaining sufficient creatine through food alone can be difficult.

“You would need the best part of a kilogram of raw chicken a day to get the amount of creatine you need,” he says, although raw poultry is unsafe because of the risk of harmful bacteria.

According to a report by BBC Sport on Thursday, creatine’s breakthrough in elite sport came in the 1990s.

British athletes were reported to have taken part in a trial involving creatine products during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, helping to fuel wider interest in the supplement.

By the 1996 Olympics, an estimated 80 per cent of athletes were taking creatine. Since then, it has become one of the most established supplements in sports nutrition, with research also exploring its possible cognitive benefits.

Close, who oversaw nutrition for last year’s British and Irish Lions rugby union tour, says supplements should be considered only after athletes have established a strong nutritional foundation.

“Supplements are the ‘final piece of the jigsaw’ rather than a starting point,” he says.

According to Close, athletes who concentrate on the fundamentals are more likely to achieve meaningful results than those who focus too heavily on supplements.

“They’ve really nailed the 99 per-centers,” he says, referring to athletes who get their overall diet right before pursuing smaller performance gains.

Australian cyclist Nicole Frain also believes supplements should play a supporting role.

“I’m a pretty big believer that they are called sport supplements,” she says. “They are there to supplement the things you already do right.”

Frain says athletes should not rely on supplements to solve fundamental problems.

“I don’t think supplements are the answer to fix my problems,” she says, stressing the importance of “eating a balanced diet, training well, sleeping right, recovering well, hydrating – all of those things” before adding supplements.

“There are various reports in the literature of some studies that say maybe up to 90% of athletes take supplements. I often jokingly say that means 10% are lying,” says Prof. Graeme Close, professor of human physiology at Liverpool John Moores University.

“The sports teams that I’ve worked in, I think that’s probably closer to 100% of athletes will be taking some form of supplementation.”

So, what do supplements actually do, and why do athletes take them? In the world of strict liability, where elite athletes are solely responsible for what they put in their bodies, how do they make sure they stay clean?

The message from sports nutrition experts is therefore straightforward: supplements may offer the extra one per cent, but elite performance is built on getting the other 99 per cent right.