Football is a sport where each player has a specific position on the pitch, which defines a specific physical condition. We have developed an in vitro experimental method to study glycolysis muscle fibres by its substrate, as while red fibres easily metabolises glucose, it is a bad substrate for white fibres. Our most remarkable result is that muscles totally adapt their metabolism to training, which must to be taken into account in sports performance. We have focused on football, as it is a sport where there are very anaerobic players (goalkeeper and forwarder), very aerobic (midfielder and fullback), and players with an intermediate metabolism (wingers and centre half). Thus, we have developed three training groups, in order to optimize their muscle energy metabolism. Moreover, we have made a review on methods to supercompensate muscle glycogen, which protocol is misunderstood in many specialised-books and scientific papers. However, besides glycogen, red fibres also metabolise fatty acids, which metabolism can be improved using low-glycemic diets and certain dietary supplements such as aspartic acid in order to improve Krebs cycle anaplerosis.

Finally, a research on dietary supplements in order to improve exercise recovery has been made. We have focused on collagen regeneration, as it is the most important protein of extracellular matrix. Mainly glycine and also lysine have been found to improve recovery from exercise, as they are widely spent in collagen synthesis.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by Instituto del Metabolismo Celular.