Food. Your body needs this simple tool to help it to do virtually every single thing that it has to do. From breathing to walking to playing your game, your body depends on food to fuel it.
While water is essential to life, food is essential to performance. Without the right amounts, types and timing for the food you eat, your body will not be able to reach its highest level of performance no matter what you plan to do.
There is no workout that will work for your body more so than the fuel that you give it. It has a direct relation to your performance and therefore is one of the building blocks in successful sports nutrition.
As an athlete, your specific needs are your own, but there is no doubt that if you want to win at physical activity, you need your body to have a balanced diet. You probably have heard this many number of times, but it is the same as day one.
You need to consume a balanced diet of foods to be successful.
The combination of foods will provide your body with all the essential building blocks that it needs. This includes vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Each of these elements plays their own role, one that is crucial to your success.
Think of food as a team effort. You know that you are only as good as your team is, right? When you do not provide all of the right nutrients to your body, to limit them, they can not perform as a team and then the overall whole suffers.
How many times does the star athlete go down in a game and the team crumbles around them? Or, how many times does someone that is a smaller asset and the star can not longer hold the team up? The same is true for food.
The body needs each one of these pieces for the whole to work. The goal that you have is to learn what it needs and how it needs them to get the whole working well.
Over the course of the next chapters, you will better learn what each element plays in the whole race. But, for now, we want to take you back to grade school where you learned what your body needs to sustain a good overall healthy lifestyle.
Lucky for you, this same information will apply to your own health in sports nutrition now.
Eating food is a must, of course, but what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. So, let’s break it all down for you.
Do you remember the food pyramid from school? That is the ideal thing for you to use for your basic sport nutrition education.
While we will tweak it later, this is the overall best thing to use to determine where your level of nutrition stacks up.
Here’s the breakdown for you. But, we want to strongly inform you that what is listed here is the minimum of what your body needs to perform. The more you demand from your body, the more it will need. We will go into more detail on what that will include later.
Your body needs dairy to provide your body with calcium. Proteins, vitamin A, and riboflavin are also found in dairy, making it necessary for good nutrition.
You should consume at least 3 servings per day which is about 8 ounces of liquid or about one and a half ounces of solids.
You will find dairy in milk, yogurt, and cheese. You should limit the amount of fat that comes in from these items though. Low fat products increase the good while decreasing the bad.
Vegetables are ideal. You will get many of your nutrients like vitamins and minerals from vegetables. You need an all around good variety of foods to fit this need.
To balance what you eat, try to eat lots of different colors and look for dark colors for more benefit.
You should have five servings of vegetables per day which is about half of a cup of raw or cooked vegetables, one cup of leafy vegetables or six ounces of juice.
Great choices in vegetables include tomatoes, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts for their high levels of vitamin C. For vitamin C, go with carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, greens, and spinach.
Darker colors, like dark greens, deep reds, oranges and yellows are ideal for a good overall nutritional value.
With meat comes protein, the very building block for muscles. Therefore you need to insure that you get enough protein in your diet to allow you to build your strength. Meats also include iron, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and zinc.
You need to consume three servings per day in meats. This is about three ounces of cooked meats, two eggs, one cup of cooked beans or lentils, or four tablespoons of peanut butter.
Good choices include lean amounts of beef, pork, lamb, poultry, dry peas and beans, peanut butter and eggs.
You will learn that carbohydrates are a necessary building block for energy in the body and many will come from grains. They provide complex carbohydrates that you need including starch and fiber.
Additionally, they contain protein, the B vitamin group and iron.
You need to consume eleven servings of carbohydrates per day. This is about one slice of bread, three or four crackers, half of a coup of cereal, rice or pasta, and one ounce of breakfast cereal.
Good choices for sports nutrition include grains that are whole grain. In this group you find cereals, bread, pasta, and rice. Whole grains are a must.
Fruits are another source of many of your necessary minerals and vitamins. They have vitamin C which is powerful and can be found in your citrus foods.
Additionally, melons, strawberries and blueberries are all great sources. Apricots are great for Vitamin A.
You need to consume four servings per day in fruits which is one whole fruit item like eating a banana or an apple. Half of a grapefruit, six ounces of fruit juice, or a quarter of a cup of dried fruits equals a serving.
When it comes to your fuel intake, you also need to keep in mind that the more that you do, the more that you will need to provide your body in fuel. If you want to go farther in your vehicle, it needs more gas right? The same here is true.
We monitor how much we intake by calorie count. The average person will need to consume about 3000 calories per day. If you are intensely athletic, you should increase this to 5000 calories a day.
But, you must do this in the right manner. That is, you should increase it through eating additions of all food groups that we have mentioned and it should be done with lean foods rather that fatty foods.
Depending on the amount of exercise, practice, competition and physical exertion that you need to put out will ultimately determine the amount of calories you need.
You do not want to eat too many so that you gain weight in fat, but you do want to provide enough for weight gain in muscle as well as for energy use.
In the next chapters, we will break down all the needs that you have and tell you how to balance the carbohydrates, the proteins, the fats and other elements in your diet.
It is important to know when to eat and how these elements of your diet power your diet and your sports abilities.
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