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The Significance of Vitamin D to Health

7th March, 2013 - Posted by health news - No Comments

In this article I would like to discuss the effects of adequate Vitamin D levels on strength coaching. Vitamin D has lately been recognised as a vitally important nutrient for many areas of overall health and wellbeing including increases in power. I will examine some of the new research as it pertains to strength instruction and conditioning along with other benefits and also how to attain proper Vitamin D levels in your blood.

Vitamin D is somewhat erroneously considered a Vitamin. Recently scientists have accepted that Vitamin D is actually a pro hormone due to its various and far reaching effects on the body. Vitamin D is produced in the skin exactly where ultra violet B (UVB) light activates cholesterol converting it to Vitamin D in your blood. This professional hormone goes via a couple of conversion mechanisms in the liver and the kidneys before it reaches its active form which has direct effect on body tissues.

People have long known that active Vitamin D is responsible for drawing calcium from the gut which is then utilized to develop sturdy bones. Of course as your muscles get stronger through strength training then your bones need to improve their strength proportionately otherwise your new powerful muscles would fracture your weaker bones. However, Vitamin D also has a local impact on the muscles themselves.

Research has shown that adequate levels of Vitamin D enhance Type II muscle fibres during physical exercise. Given that these are the fibres which are most likely to hypertrophy when exposed to resistance and therefore contribute to increased force generation this is a huge advantage in your quest to get strong. Getting better Type II muscle fibres in your quads is definitely one way to improve your squat performance! Research also suggests that optimal Vitamin D levels are crucial for avoiding muscle atrophy when you age. Atrophy, or muscle wasting is clearly not going to help you improve strength via your coaching programme.

Vitamin D has also been proven to enhance insulin sensitivity which while it might not contribute to increases in strength is crucial to keeping body fat levels low which will keep you lean and mean. This is the primary mechanism by way of which Vitamin D has been proven to positively influence the onset of diabetes.

Numerous research studies over the past twenty years have associated optimal Vitamin D levels in the blood with reduced risk for not only hip fractures and heart disease but also other significant health complaints like cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The exact mechanisms of these benefits are still being researched but they are believed to involve the other fat soluble hormones – Vitamin A and Vitamin K2. It is a very exciting time in the scientific research community as more fascinating Vitamin D research is published.

You can get your Vitamin D -1 measured at your local Doctor’s surgery and you want to ideally shoot for blood levels of 30-100 nanograms per millilitre. This will be greater than a lot of conventional Doctor’s will agree with, however, research backs up these facts. You can attain this with a daily 5000 international unit (iu) supplement it is extremely hard to get from food) or ideally you would get it from sensible sun exposure 3-4 times a week. This is also hard to do in the United Kingdom as for most of the year we get nowhere near enough sun exposure due to the high latitude of our location. The alternative to supplements is tanning salons but this comes with its own risk from over exposure to UVB rays.

In conclusion, we’ve looked at what Vitamin D is and how you can achieve optimal levels in your blood. We discussed how recent research has proven how optimal levels of this crucial nutrient, which is in fact a powerful hormone, keeping you lean and also increasing strength levels through its impact on muscle fibres. I really feel that over the following five years there will be considerably more research published about the powerful health and fitness of this under appreciated vitamin, along with all the other fat soluble nutritional vitamins also.