Why Sports Nutrition is important for a Sportsperson

Sports nutrition diet plan focuses on good quality, quantity, clean and healthy eating habits all the time. Of course, sports nutrition goes beyond what you eat and also lays crucial importance on diet and exercise plan relation. When, how, and how much you eat is crucial, too. To maximize your workouts, coordinating your meals, timings with your activity levels is very essential.

How much do you know about sports nutrition? What, how and when you eat, can affect your performance and how you feel while you’re exercising. Giving importance on sports nutrition basics can help you make the most of your training routine.

What Is Sports Nutrition plan?

A balanced athlete diet plan should include sufficient calories, correct macronutrients and micro nutrients to optimize athletic performance in tandem with the training programs. Sports nutrition diet plan is the foundation of athlete’s game in which a well-designed diet plan is made that allows athletes to perform and recover at their best. A fitness diet chart gives the right food type, energy, nutrients, and fluids to keep the body well hydrated and energized at peak levels. It may vary day to day, depending on specific energy demands and other aspects of the game.

The Goal of Sports Nutrition

Competitive athletes and fitness freaks turn to sports nutrition to help them

-Maintain their basic health,

-Achieve their fitness and

-Performance goals.

Examples of individual goals could include:

-Gaining lean mass,

-Improving body composition, or

-Enhancing athletic performance, etc.

Sport-specific scenarios require differing healthy diet nutritional programs and the process is different for all the individuals. Studies indicate that the right food type, caloric intake, timing, and sports nutrition supplements are essential and specific to each individual.

The state of training and competitive sport benefiting from sports nutrition are:

Eating for Training/Cricket Performance

The body will use all the macro nutrients as the main energy source, depending on exercise intensity and duration. Inadequate caloric intake can impede exercise, athletic training and performance.

• Carbohydrates are the main fuel source for energy and muscle for an active adult or competitive athlete and the needs in a daily diet can range from 45 to 65 percent of total food intake depending on physical demands.
• Proteins are responsible for muscle growth and recovery in the active person, of which the protein requirements can vary significantly ranging from 0.8g to 2g per kilogram of body weight per day depending on the activity levels.
• Healthy Fats help maintain energy balance, regulate hormones, etc. Approximately 20-30 percent of their total daily caloric intake should be coming from healthy source.

Eating for Competition

The athlete’s goals and the game will determine the best sports nutrition diet plan and fitness diet chart strategy. Pre, during and post-workout meal planning are unique for each athlete and essential for optimal performance. For example, strength athletes strive to increase lean mass, muscle strength and body size for their sport. Endurance athletes focus on reduced body weight/fat for peak body function during their event.

Hydration and Sports Performance:

Adequate hydration and electrolytes are essential for health and athletic performance. We all lose water throughout the day, but athletes lose additional body water (and a significant amount of sodium) sweating during intense workouts. Dehydration is the process of losing body water, and fluid deficits greater than 2 percent of body weight can compromise athletic performance and cognitive function.

All these factors should be taken care of and a customized fitness diet plan along with fitness diet chart should be curated for an athlete depending upon the goal of the person, medical conditions, training patterns etc.  Hence, it is never one plan that suits all diet and exercise regimes.

Fitness may boost kids Brainpower

Study found fitter kids had different white matter, which helps brain regions communicate with each other.

Exercise and brainpower in children may not seem closely related, but a small new study hints that fitness may supercharge kids’ minds.

The finding doesn’t prove that fitness actually makes children smarter, but it provides support for the idea, the researchers said.

“Our work suggests that aerobically fit and physically fit children have improved brain health and superior cognitive [thinking] skills than their less-fit peers,” said study author Laura Chaddock-Heyman, a postdoctoral researcher with the department of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Hopefully, these findings will reinforce the importance of aerobic fitness during development and lead to additional physical activity opportunities in and out of the school environment.”

The researchers launched their study to gain more insight into the connections between fitness and the brain in children. Other research has connected higher levels of fitness to better attention, memory and academic skills, Chaddock-Heyman said.

And two recent studies found that fit kids are more likely to have better language skills and to do better on standardized tests for math and reading.

But there are still mysteries. While moderate exercise boosts brainpower for a few hours — making it a good idea to work out before a test — it’s not clear how fitness affects the brain in the long term, said Bonita Marks, director of the Exercise Science Teaching Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The chronic impact is less certain and, for health, really the key for future research and health management,” she added.

The new study didn’t examine any thinking skills, but instead looked only at the brain’s “white matter,” which helps different brain regions communicate with each other. The researchers scanned the brains of 24 kids aged 9 and 10, and found that white matter was different in the fitter kids, potentially a sign of better-connected brains.

Higher levels of fitness may boost blood flow, increase the size of certain brain areas and improve the structure of white matter, Chaddock-Heyman said.

What do the findings mean in the big picture?

It’s hard to know for sure. Megan Herting, a postdoctoral fellow with the division of research on Children, Youth, and Families at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, pointed out that the kids with lower fitness levels also weighed more, “so it is unclear if it is actually fitness or ‘fatness’ that may be affecting the brain. “Studies show that individuals with obesity have different brains compared to their healthier-weight peers,” she said.

As for the stereotype of the 99-pound weakling nerd, Herting suggested it may be time for a rethink. “These findings do challenge that if you are aerobically fit, you are likely to be dumb. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, we were made to move. So rather than fitness being ‘good’ for the brain and cognition, it is feasible that being sedentary may be ‘bad.’”
The researchers are now working on a study that assigns some kids to take part in exercise programs to see what happens to their brains over time when compared to other kids, Chaddock-Heyman said.

The study appears in the August issue of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

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