Performance comes down to endurance and recovery

Performance requires stamina during, and rapid recovery after, exercise or training (exercise with specific performance goals). Stamina, or endurance, applies to the runner on the track as well as the strength athlete trying to get through a long weight-lifting session. Endurance comes from proper fueling of muscle before and during exercise as well as having a fully recovered neuromuscular system. Rapid recovery comes from feeding the body all the things it needs to rebuild: Protein for making new body proteins such as in muscle, dietary fats to recovery membranes (critical for the neurons that signal the muscles to contract), and carbohydrate to fuel the re-building processes. Water is the medium through which all of these things occur. Combining all the things you need in each meal is important. This is because the body does not store nutrients well. Even a lean person has enough fat in their body to run at marathon pace for over a week, but our only protein storage site is muscle tissue, our only carbohydrate storage is blood sugar and glycogen (which starts to run low after several hours), and we have no water storage at all (all our fluids are in use in cells, between cells and in the bloodstream). Thus, to maintain recovery as well performance, the nutrients we can't store well (everything other than fat) needs to come in regularly in the small amounts the body needs. However, fats should be consumed ANY time other types of calories are consumed OTHER than right before, during and after exercise, because fats reduce digstion rate (protein and fiber do this as well) so that (together) fat, protein and fiber work as a team to optimize the slowing down of digestion and therefor increase muscle fueling. The bottom line is that performance depends on recovery (which depends on balanced nutrients entering the body in the amounts they are needed on a regular basis) and endurance (which depends on being recovered and a stable fuel source throughout exercise).