ABSTRACT
Studies of the effects of nutrition on athletic performance have been directed mainly towards endurance sports. It has been shown that exercise can be maintained for longer when preceded by a high carbohydrate diet (Christensen and Hansen, 1939), and that muscle glycogen depletion is a common antecedent of fatigue during prolonged exercise. Enhancement of pre-exercise muscle glycogen improves both endurance (Bergstrom et al., 1967) and anaerobic (Maughan and Poole, 1981) performance. A recent approach to enhancing carbohydrate intake has been the use of glucose polymers which have favourable gastric emptying characteristics (Foster et al., 1980; Seiple et al., 1984), improve endurance performance (Coyle et al., 1983) and may (Leatt and Jacobs, 1986) or may not (Coyle et al., 1986) slow the rate of muscle glycogen depletion.
