London fruit sellers may want to stock up on New Zealand blueberries after a study found athletes who eat them recover faster from exercise.
Massey School of Sport and Exercise head Associate Professor Steve Stannard worked with University colleagues and the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research on the paper, which has just been published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
Dr Stannard says the findings could help Olympians and other athletes return to peak performance faster after strenuous exercise.
He and his team used a novel method that compared one leg of a participant to the other leg. “We put the study participants on a Biodex machine and had them work the thigh of one leg very hard to damage the muscle,” Dr Stannard says. “They did 300 maximal eccentric contractions, which causes micro-trauma to the muscle’s fibres.”
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