Info from Coaches
Here are a number of tips relating to healthy eating for athletes.
Nutrition is an awful big part in Sport now a days, specifically swimming and although most of you are fit and healthy and have balanced diets there is always something more you can do to better yourself and the way I see it, changing your diet is one of the easiest ways to do so. Think of your body as a finely tuned car, (to give an analogy, a swimmer and a none swimmer, the difference would be like looking at a Ferrari and a Skoda) so you wouldn't put cheap nasty fuel in a Ferrari, otherwise it wouldn't work as well as it should, think of eating food as your fuel, don't eat rubbish, a true saying, you are what you eat!!
Post pool Snacking...
Nutrition After Training, The '30 Minute Window' - Most swimming training uses up a significant amount of the carbohydrate stored in the muscles - called muscle glycogen. These stores must be replenished before the next training session or performance may be inhibited.
The muscles are most receptive to replenishment for the first 30 minutes after exercise. After that it becomes progressively more difficult to achieve optimal muscle glycogen storage.
It is, therefore, very important that about 100 grams of carbohydrate (ideally complex carbohydrate rather than sugars) is ingested immediately after exercise. An apple or a banana is an excellent source, each containing about 50 grams. Other excellent sources of carbohydrate are Nutrigrain Bars, Malt loaf, Fig rolls, Rice cakes and Elevenses bars.
High fat food must be avoided, e.g. Chocolate bars, many dairy products and cakes, as they do not contain the appropriate energy sources for optimal performance.#
Fast Food…
I do not mind people eating fast food as a treat every now and again, but please avoid eating this on a regular basis, and yes, subway is fast food!!!
Drinking…
Please, please, please drink enough, water or juice (weak), you should always be sipping on something every hour, you lose a tremendous amount of fluid whilst swimming and you don't realize, dehydration is very dangerous and can have long term effects, so please keep hydrated, a hydrated swimmer is a happy one J
(older swimmers, alcohol dehydrates you-big time, if you do choose to have a few beers just make sure your hydrated the next day).
You can tell if your hydrated, because you will go to the toilet often, pass a fair amount of water and it will be almost see through in color, if not then you need to drink more!!
Calorie Intake…
Remember you are burning a huge amount of calories, so make sure you take these back on, using healthy options of course, if you don't you can end up with a calorie deficit and all the issues that are related to that, its especially important for girls to eat the correct amount of calories as it could have devastating effects on your body in later life, so keep an eye on it and if you are hungry, listen to your body and eat!!
Protein…
We are going into a weights phase for some of you, protein is important, talk to me about this if you have any queries about muscle gain and mass building (older lads, I will talk to you about supplements) otherwise younger swimmers just try to up your protein intake, such as eating more eggs, tuna, cheese, nuts, and see the food pyramid attached for more ideas!!
General Diet…
As mentioned before you are all finely tuned athletes and you should treat your body accordingly, stick to guidelines such as eating oily fish twice a week not to much red meat, eating 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, but you should really surpass these guidelines and be using that as a minimum. Also whole meal bread is 5x better than white bread, if you don't like this then try 50/50 and go that way.
Attached to the email is a few documents, a food pyramid explaining the importance of certain food stuffs to swimmers in general. And a few recipes of the week, have a look what you think, all te ingrediants are all available from Tesco and have been reviewed by British Swimming and the EIS, so they are good healthy nutritious (and tasty meals).
I will follow up with specific competition nutrition info closer to the time, and if you have any queries, don't hesitate to contact me J