Green tea is a popular drink for athletes and exercise enthusiasts, but can it help you reach your fitness goals? Find out whether it is worth drinking green tea for fitness in our latest blog post.
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Whether you’re a committed fitness enthusiast or new to exercise, the right diet can support your efforts to improve your performance.
It’s important to get the basics right, which means eating a good balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats to keep your body fuelled and aid recovery. But once you’ve got that in place, you might decide to go further and look at foods and drinks that can naturally help you get more from exercise.
One herbal tea that is popular with athletes and fitness enthusiasts is green tea. Packed with antioxidants, this healthy drink has a reputation as a superfood and might even help you reach your fitness goals faster.
In this blog post, we’ll look at the benefits of green tea and how it might support you in achieving the results you want from exercise.
1. Helps You Stay Hydrated
Let’s start with the basics. One of the core reasons that green tea is useful for exercise is that it helps you stay hydrated.
Being well-hydrated is vital to achieving your fitness goals. Without enough fluid, our bodies struggle to perform at their best. Proper hydration helps to regulate your body temperature, boosts your energy levels, and helps you avoid cramps.
Of course, most liquids can help with hydration. Green tea is a great option because it is low in calories and free from added sugar and artificial flavourings. Plus, it has other benefits for your workout, as we’ll explore below.
2. Boosts Your Energy
Green tea is a source of caffeine, which is well known for its ability to give us a bolt of energy. When it comes to exercise, that jolt of energy can help our performance, giving us the stamina to continue to move for longer.
Caffeine helps with all sorts of sports and exercise, including endurance activities and strength training. However, all of us react to caffeine differently, and it can cause jitteriness or anxiety in some people.
Fortunately, green tea doesn’t just contain caffeine. It is also a source of L-theanine, an amino acid that helps to calm the mind and provide a sense of focus. The combination of the two helps to provide a longer-lasting, steady burst of energy without the jitteriness of caffeine alone.
3. Enhances Your Metabolism
The caffeine content of green tea doesn’t just provide an energy boost. It also helps to speed up your metabolism, meaning you should burn calories more efficiently.
If weight loss is one of your fitness goals, a faster metabolism may help you reach your target more easily. And the catechins in green tea combine with its caffeine content to help you burn fat faster too.
In turn, having a lower percentage of body fat can help your performance, especially if you prefer endurance sports like cycling or long-distance running.
4. Increases Your Performance
Being able to use fat more efficiently as an energy source isn’t just good news for weight loss. Green tea’s ability to speed up fat oxidation can also help your performance, increasing your endurance and helping you build strength.
5. Gives You a Mental Boost
Any athlete will tell you that achieving your fitness goals depends as much on your mental state as your physical fitness. Fortunately, green tea can help here too.
The L-theanine content in green tea is known to soothe anxiety and help us cope with stress. If your aim is to compete, drinking green tea may help you cope with nerves and keep your head in the game.
L-theanine also enhances focus and concentration, skills which are useful in any form of sport and exercise.
6. Supports Post-Workout Recovery
We’ve seen how green tea can support you during a workout or competition. However, the benefits continue once you’re at rest too.
Green tea contains catechins, a group of compounds that act as antioxidants, helping our bodies to cope with oxidative stress. They also help to reduce inflammation post-workout.
After exercise, green tea can help your muscles recover faster. All those antioxidants help to reduce muscle soreness and stiffness, making it easier to avoid injury and give your best at your next workout.
Choose Your Blend
We love green tea here at NutraTea and it plays a part in many of our herbal tea blends.
When it comes to reaching your fitness goals, we suggest our NutraBoost blend, which contains green tea and other energy-enhancing herbs to give you the boost you need to get moving.
Or, if weight loss is a part of your fitness journey, you could try our NutraTrim blend. As well as green tea, it contains herbs that support the metabolism and encourage fat burning.
