When trying to gain a competitive edge on the pitch or track, many players search for the best supplements for athletes. While there is no magic pill, finding clean, performance-enhancing supplements can significantly improve your recovery, speed, and raw power. Here is our expert guide from Atlas High Performance Centre to the only sports nutrition supplements you actually need.

Remember: Supplements are meant to supplement a solid nutrition foundation - not replace it. There are only a handful of performance supplements that genuinely move the needle. Here is your starting lineup.

To be fit - "of a suitable quality, standard, or type to meet the required purpose" . So, before we can think about getting fitter, we must first define the required purpose effectively.

As a strength and conditioning coach & sport scientist, I'm well aware that people perceive my main role within a sports team or with a client is to improve 'fitness'. While this is true, the term fitness itself means so much more. Very rarely do people specify which part of fitness they want to improve or how they are going to do it. Getting stronger, faster, leaner, more powerful could also classify as getting fitter. For the most part though, and it's going to make up the majority of this article, we'll be talking about the commonly thought about 'fit'. Being able to run further, being able to run faster for longer, being able to do something for longer before being tired, also known as 'work capacity'. What is it, how do we define it properly but most importantly, how can we train it properly.

Although it is one of the most extensively researched supplements on the market, it still gets a lot of hate. There are numerous myths and fallacies surrounding creatine and most of which are untrue.

Over the next couple of days we are going to explore what really matters when it comes to nutrition. By the end of this series, everything will be a lot clearer and you will finally be able to structure your own nutrition regardless of your goal.

​Below is the different elements of structuring a nutrition programme for an individual, ranked in order of importance from most to least. The most important at the bottom and the least at the top. How many people have you known to ask about what supplements they should be taking, without ever having thought about the important things that precede it. Unless those things are in place and taken care of, then supplements are pretty much null....

When it comes to macronutrients, protein is king. The role of protein in the ​diet is critical for both health and sports performance related reasons, reasons for which do not get discussed enough in the media unfortunately. One of the main reasons for ingesting protein is to stimulate a process called muscle protein synthesis (MPS), which is responsible for the construction of new muscle fibres. It achieves this, along with a whole host of other things but for simplicity of reading and understanding I am going to right this in respect to building muscle.