How can nutrition and recovery strategies affect performance? examines the relationship between performance and nutrition, and recovery strategies. This critical question addresses possibly the most important aspect of sports performance, separating the elite and the amateur or recreational athlete.

When investigating how nutrition affecting performance you need to include liquids, and food. Nutrition itself is also considered a recovery strategy, as taking particular nutrients at particular times helps to speed up recovery after training or performance. The requirements of nutrition for health is often overlooked in this critical question. People often focus so much on performance, that they forget that your performance is affected by your health.

Although supplementation could be considered as a sub-category of nutrition, the HSC PDHPE syllabus has it as its own dot point. This is because supplementation in sport has become a big business, with many non-elite athletes and exercise enthusiasts getting on the band wagon. You particularly need to consider if supplements are beneficial to performance at all, or if they are simply a money making ploy.

Recovery strategies is ht last dot point in How can nutrition and recovery strategies affect performance? There are many different recovery strategies used and all are proposed to speed recovery and aid performance consistency. The HSC Syllabus breaks this dot point into categories for easier navigation and grouping of the wide range of strategies.

There are three (3) dot points under this critical question: