At Willow Tree Clinic Ltd our aim is to provide an informative and corrective management and prevention of illness programme. Whether stress, eating the wrong foods or just by having a lack of information, makes you feel like a prisoner in your own body. Huge changes can be made relatively easily to adjust your energy levels, recovery and well being. Here at the Willow Tree Clinic, we pride ourselves on not putting people on unobtainable diets that are just temporary fixes, instead we empower the person holistically to work together with us to find the right solution tailor made to their needs.

Sports Nutrition

To effectively maintain and improve endurance, strength and flexibility, Sports Nutrition is of vital importance in keeping healthy.  High impact and endurance training can have a negative influence on the individuals natural resistance, making the sports person susceptible to a lowered immune system. This requires a need to replace and store essential vitamins, trace elements and minerals.  At the Willow Tree Clinic, we aim to educate and empower the athlete to perform to their very best ability, whilst at the same time ensuring that their body is not robbed of any vital nutrition. Furthermore, understanding the requirements of ATP is another element in this process.  ATP is needed to provide energy for muscle contraction, and because muscle contains only enough ATP to power a few muscle twitches, a persons ATP “storage” is constantly needing to be replenished.  Correct nutrition is therefore, a vital part in this process, ensuring that the athlete has enough ATP to take them further.

Fueling Muscle Contraction

There are three sources of high-energy phosphate to keep the ATP pool filled.

• creatine phosphate
• glycogen
• cellular respiration in the mitochondria of the fibers.

Creatine phosphate

The phosphate group in creatine phosphate is attached by a "high-energy" bond like that in ATP. Creatine phosphate derives its high-energy phosphate from ATP and can donate it back to ADP to form ATP.

Creatine phosphate + ADP ↔ creatine + ATP

The pool of creatine phosphate in the fibre is about 10 times larger than that of ATP and thus serves as a modest reservoir of ATP.