Better Recovery with Enzymes: An Athlete’s Missing Link?

When making a supplement shopping list, athletes often have protein powder, amino acids, multivitamins, fish oil, various additional vitamins and minerals, creatine, and more. However, the one thing just about all athletes neglect is enzyme supplements. While there’s nothing “sexy” about enzymes, when it comes to proper recovery, many people (not just athletes) forget just how important digestive enzymes can be.

Related Article: Evozyme 101 — How Digestive Enzymes Work

It is a fact that enzymes are extremely important for digestion and digestive health. Even further, studies have shown that enzymes also play an important role in muscle recovery after high-intensity training, which makes them an effective addition to an athlete’s nutrition and supplementation program.

Enzymes for Athletic Recovery: Here’s What You Need to Know

Athletes focus on their nutrition and supplementation more than anyone else in the world. The physical demand for a marathon runner, professional athlete, or even the avid gym-goer is quite rigorous. Every meal they consume contributes something towards their overall performance as well as their health. Therefore, one of the most effective ways of how an athlete can reach and exceed their goals is to put a focus on digestive enzymes and implementing them into their program.

Nutritional Needs of Athletes 

Often, athletes need to push harder to perform at the highest level in sporting events or even while training. For the extra push, they consume more calories and more food than an average person typically would. The ideal diet for any intensive-training athletes consists of plenty of protein to help them build muscles and avoid muscle breakdown. 

To fuel up the body and improve overall mental and physical performance, carbs and fat are consumed. Protein shakes, a lot of lean meat, and grains are ideal for bulking up or even shredding some unwanted body fat. But these foods could do some damage to our body’s digestive tract. 

Athletes face digestive issues, as well as musculoskeletal damage. After a hard-hitting workout session, muscles develop micro-tears in the fibers and soreness tends to follow shortly after, which can slow down the training progression/process and negatively affect future workouts if not properly taken care of.

Taking all of these factors into account, it can be said that athletes need some special considerations when sorting out their diet – and, more importantly, how they digest and absorb the food they consume. Their dietary routine must focus on a few key things:

• The routine must support the body and the nutrient absorption process to effectively use all of the carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and minerals to help build muscle.
• Assist the body with efficiently recovering post-workout.
• Provide support to maintain and improve muscle strength and performance.

Now that we are aware of the nutritional needs of an athlete, it can be concluded that enzymes must be included in their diet for proper athletic recovery. One of the key roles of enzymes is to help break down carbs, protein, and fat in meals. 

If the body fails to produce enough enzymes, athletes may suffer in terms of muscle recovery as they won’t be getting all the benefits from their meals due to not properly breaking everything down into a usable form that can be absorbed and shuttled out into the body.

Importance of Enzymes for Athletic Recovery

By now, you should be aware of the importance of digestive enzymes for the absorption and breakdown of nutrients. Let’s look at some of their vital functions.

Digestive enzymes are classified as per their substrates. This includes:

• Proteases and peptidases – break down proteins into amino acids.
• Carbohydrates – they break down carbs into sugars.
• Lipases – breaks down fats into the three fatty acids as well as glycerol.
• Nucleases – helps break down nucleic acid into nucleotides.

As a catalyst for various vital functions, enzymes in our body serve important roles, and they must be available when needed. While only a certain amount of enzymes can be produced by the pancreas, it can get challenging trying to maintain the gap between the demand and supply of enzymes. Hence, athletes must obtain enzymes through either the food they eat or by supplementing with digestive enzyme supplements surrounding their meals.

Enzymes take care of many processes when it comes to properly digesting food, maintaining the health of the digestive tract, improving absorption, and ultimately helping enhance performance and recovery. 

It should also be noted that digestive enzymes support the entire digestion process and absorption of nutrients. Without this critical piece of the puzzle, athletes would not be able to digest their food, much of what they eat would get excreted from the body without ever being fully broken down and absorbed, and all of the benefits an athlete would achieve through their nutrition program would suffer. 

Food helps us survive, so it is crucial to ensure that we always have an adequate amount of enzymes to sustain the chemical reactions in our bodies that are required for athletes to improve their health and overall athletic recovery.

Do Enzymes Help to Build Muscle?

In most cases, athletes tend to increase their intake of protein, carbs, and fats to build muscles and avoid the fact that they need to focus on increasing nutrient absorption. Once you eat, you generally aren’t concerned about what happens next, right? Well, that can be detrimental if you require your body to perform and recover optimally, such as in the case of elite athletes.

You can consume plenty of macronutrients for muscle building, but that will not help your body to absorb higher amounts of protein, carbs, or fat it needs. Lack of adequate digestive enzymes can lead to insufficient fueling of the body and can diminish performance and strength. Different digestive enzymes are responsible for the absorption and breakdown of various nutrients. 

To ensure proper nutrient absorption, you must add the right enzyme supplement to your routine. It’s vital. Otherwise, the body will be unable to fully break down the macronutrients it needs and may simply excrete the meal an athlete consumed without truly helping with recovery, muscle repair, and other performance benefits.

Add the Missing Piece to Your Recovery Puzzle 

Are you unsure if you’re digesting your food properly? Do you consume a meal and then feel bloated, gassy, or find the meal goes right through you? If so, you’re probably having digestion issues. That’s where the power of digestive enzymes comes into play.

If you want to get the most out of your nutrition and improve your performance and recovery, you need enzymes in your regimen. And Evogen Nutrition Evozyme helps solve those problems for you.

To perform optimally, fully recover, and live a healthy life, you need to fuel your body. You simply can’t do that if you’re not able to break down and absorb what you’re eating. Why would you want to waste the majority of the food you consume? It’s like not finishing a meal and throwing what’s left in the trash. It just doesn’t make sense, right? 

Evogen Nutrition Evozyme is the missing link, the missing piece of the recovery puzzle you need to maximize your performance and recovery efforts. There are three things Evozyme focuses on – Digestion, Absorption, Utilization. Without them, you’re merely spinning your wheels. 

If you want to maximize every gram of every meal to your physical and mental advantage, you need to give Evogen Nutrition Evozyme a try. Grab a bottle today and feel the difference!