Every high-level athlete knows the importance of diet to enhance their physical performance and abilities. That’s why most well-known athletes have nutritionists or dieticians that plan out their meals and help them learn how to properly fuel their bodies.
However, nutritional counseling and guidance aren’t just for the elite. Anyone interested in athletics or sports can benefit from reexamining their diets and creating an eating plan based on their chosen discipline.
If you’re an athlete looking to take your performance to the next level, planning and following the right diet can help get you there.
What Is Athletic Nutritional Counseling?
Athletic nutritional counseling is a form of diet planning where a nutritionist helps an athlete create an eating plan to maximize their health and athletic performance and speed up recovery times. Nutritional counseling for athletes can affect every part of their training and is often seen as a must for anyone who wants to compete or practice their sport at a high level.
How Can a Nutritionist Help an Athlete Train?
Most people think of nutritionists as the people who help you lose weight in a healthy way, but they’re far more than that. Nutritionists study how the body works, how exercise affects it, and how food can improve your bodily functions and help you become stronger, leaner, and build endurance.
These three aspects are essential to most athletes, and having someone who can help them get on the right eating plan to improve their health while avoiding damaging fad diets can significantly boost their performance.
How Does Diet Affect Athletic Performance?
The most common question for nutritionists is “Can diet really improve athletic performance?” We’ve all grown up learning that we should eat fruits and vegetables and stay away from sugar to be healthy, and that’s true. Similarly, for athletes, there are certain dos and don’ts that can significantly improve or worsen their performance.
One diet may slow an athlete down or deprive their body of nutrients needed to recover quickly. Another could give them long-lasting energy and improve their endurance. Some of the most important aspects of an athlete’s health that may be affected by diet include:
- Muscle mass
- Weight
- Endurance
- Exercise recovery time
- Energy levels
- Focus
- Injury recovery time
Learning to have a healthy relationship with food while following the best diet could help you get to the next level of your athletic abilities.
How Can Athletes Benefit from Nutritional Counseling?
There are many great ways nutritional counseling and following the right diet can help athletes boost their performance and the way their bodies respond to exercise.
Here are just a few of the biggest benefits:
Injury Prevention
High-intensity exercise or training almost every day can put a lot of strain on your body and cause it to lose a lot of essential nutrients. Sweat, repetitive actions, and pushing your limits daily can cause a lot of stress for your body and require more comprehensive nutrition and a higher energy intake. If you don’t improve your diet, you could suffer an injury due to weaker bones or exhausted muscles.
Another often overlooked aspect of injury prevention is hydration. One of the most common deficiencies affecting athletes is under-hydration, which could lead to a decline in physical and mental performance, leading to unnecessary injuries.
Working with a nutritionist can ensure your body gets all the nutrients and water it needs to stay healthy and help you avoid unnecessary injuries.
Injury Recovery
Just as your body needs nutrients to build up muscle and bone strength to prevent injury, a good eating plan can also help you speed up your recovery. By providing your body with the right vitamins, minerals, and amount of energy, you can encourage it to heal faster and help you get back to training in as little time as possible after an injury.
Improve Performance
As discussed earlier, the right types of food can do wonders for your athletic performance. Eating the right balance of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats can improve endurance and muscle strength. Including the right variety of vegetables, fruits, and other nutrient-rich foods can also ensure your body has everything it needs to support your energy output, recovery, and healthy body functioning even when you’re not busy exercising.
However, one of the most important aspects of performance that’s directly related to diet is cognitive functioning. Without the right kind of food, you may lack the motivation or focus to compete or train at a high level. A nutritionist can help you learn how to avoid this.
Ensure a Healthy Relationship with Food
Intense or demanding athletic disciplines can lead to a negative relationship with food, where all sorts of food are seen as “fattening” or “negatively affecting your performance.”
In most cases, food is essential to providing your body with the energy and nutrients it needs to perform at a high level. Working with a nutritionist could help you find balance and develop a healthier relationship with food and your eating plan.
Balance Weight
The ability of your diet to affect your weight and body mass is well known. However, there are so many fad diets and “get thin quick” schemes out there that it can be challenging to find a way to nourish your body while also balancing or maintaining your weight.
By working with a nutritionist, you can design a diet that will help you gain, lose, or maintain your weight in the healthiest way possible while avoiding harmful diet fads made popular by people who may not even follow those diets in the first place.
Manage Medical Conditions Affecting Performance
Chronic illnesses and medical conditions can often affect your ability to train and exert yourself. The most common conditions affecting athletic performance include:
- Diabetes
- Anemia
- Food allergies
- Vitamin or other nutrient deficiencies
- Thyroid disorders
- Irritable bowel syndrome
Although these conditions can be managed with medication, their effects on the body can decrease your energy, endurance, and muscle strength.
By consulting with a nutritionist, you can create a diet that can ensure you get the right nutrients to improve your athletic performance while relieving some of the stress these conditions place on your body.
What Is the Best Diet for Athletic Performance?
There’s no such thing as one diet to fit every athlete or human. That’s why working with a professional nutritionist can help you learn about and better understand performance-based nutrition and how to eat what’s right for your unique energy output, training plan, and personal requirements.
When you work with a nutritionist, you will receive a completely personalized eating plan based on your athletic goals, weight, lifestyle, training times, and the sport you participate in.
How Crystal Run Healthcare Can Help
People often explore the benefits of sports nutrition on their own but find themselves overwhelmed with the amount of information and contradicting theories available. By consulting with an athletic dietitian or sports medicine physician, you can cut through all that information overload to get directly to what you need to do and how to do it.
At Crystal Run Healthcare, we offer access to a world-class team of orthopedic sports medicine specialists and primary care sports medicine specialists who can help you create a training and eating plan to suit your body’s needs and personal goals.
If you are interested in learning more, contact Crystal Run Healthcare at 845-703-6999 or visit Crystal Run Healthcare today.