Nutritional Menu for Sports Athletes

Assignment: Nutritional menu for sports athletes: Pre-Event, During-Event and Post-Event nutrition plan



Nutritional menu for sports athletes: Pre-Event, During-Event and Post-Event nutrition plan

Introduction

Nutrients are vital, not only for survival but for healthy living. Nutrients are those important substances which fulfills the energy need of the body. They are the main source of energy, which increases the efficiency and performance of an individual, if properly consumed. List of major nutrients include fats, minerals, carbohydrates, vitamins and water. The body cannot build these substances itself; consequently, they ought to be extracted from food. (Dalton, 2005)

Nutrition is essential for every human being, but the amount of nutrition intake vary from person to person as per their routine activities, however; a certain amount of nutrition intake is required by sports athletes as they consume more energy than a normal human being. (Cotunga et al. 2005, 323-328) In order to keep balance between energy consumptions and nutrients intake, sports athletes should strictly follow a particular diet plan depending upon the activities they perform. Athletes to keep themselves fit and healthy as per the requirement of the sports do training and exercise, which increases their need for more nutrients intake because of high level of energy consumption.

Having variety of meals in diet plan ensures that the amount of minerals, carbohydrates, vitamins and protein are consumed to perform the activity properly throughout sporting phase. (McArdle et al. 1999, 102)

Nutrients intake assessment:

How to assess the amount of nutrients intake is also a major concern, as every sport demands vary amount of efforts by athletes, which actually determines the replenishment of fluid and water. Extended physical effort that brings considerable sweating over 45 minutes to 90 minutes would require higher amount of fluid intake. Sports like squash that needs entails continuous-high efforts, athletes of such sports would require higher fluid intake. Other sports like soccer, tennis or endurance running in excess of 90 minutes would require similar fluid intake. (Jones 2005, 89-92)

It is of high importance to have a regular fluid intake pre-event (during training/practicing), during event and after the event, to allow body absorb the nutrients it required to maintain and sustain the health as per the demand of the game. Post-event fluid intake is also important, because toping up calories soon after its loss is required to avoid weight loss and performance reduction. Sweat is 99% water and 1% electrolytes, so for extensive workouts and long sporting sessions, sport drinks can be useful in bringing fast carbohydrates. (Wolinsky and Hickson 1994, 26-32) Sports drinks have varying content of carbs, and sport athletes should try various drinks to calculate the efficiency of each one. As different sport drinks possess huge amount of carbs, which can affect fluid absorption of the body and could dehydrate instead of hydrate, such condition would affect the performance of athletes.

It is now clear that intake assessment cannot be done for every athlete as a whole, because every sport requires different amount of energy ...