There is historical evidence that as early as 532 B.C., some people recognized that optimal nutrition was important for athletic performance. For example, Milo of Croton, who won wrestling events at seven straight Olympic Games, consumed each day twenty pounds of bread, twenty pounds of meat and eighteen pints of wine. It is also said that he once carried a four-year-old bull on his shoulders around the stadium at Olympia, killed it with a single day.
Therefore, for many centuries athletes, coaches, trainers, and physicians have passed down many radial ideas on nutrition for optimal athletic performance. Some of the more absurd ideas that held sway for many years include the practice of letting blood with leeches to remove "toxic substances" from the blood and totally restricting water intake to provide "training displine."Most of the "wonder" diets for athletes that have been proposed over the yeast have no sound basis and only serve to make the athlete's life more grueling that it need to be. It is unfortunate that so many coaches and athletes are poorly informed on the nutrition of athletes, because this ignorance makes them susceptible to misleading advertising claims and overblown testimonials from equally uninformed coaches and athletes about the value of some special dietary manipulation.
Nutritional Requirements of Athletes
TotalCaloric Requirments for Athletes
The generally accepted common expression of energy units for human energy intake and expenditure is the large calorie which is the energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius under certain conditions. For most persons the average caloric intake required to maintain body weight during normal daily activities rages between 1700-3000 kcal per day. Athletesrequire an additional 400-2000 kcal (it depends on the type of activities) per day to maintain body weight during training, with athletes such as sprinters and field events specialists requiring a few extra kcal and distance runners, swimmers and cyclists requiring perhaps twice the energy that an average adult needs.
Protain Requirements for Athletes
Some believe that a high protein diet is essential to quality performance. Why?
Reason 1
- some still believe that protein is "energy food" that supplies energy for muscle contraction. This belief may stem from early ideas that muscle was "burned" during exercise and that protein was needed to rebuild this muscle tissue during recovery periods. However, it has been known for many years that protein is not a significant fuel during exercise unless the athlete has been starved. Thus, if a coach provides pre-game steak for athletes because he hopes to improve their fuel reserves, that coach is wasting money. The provision of such meals for psychological benefits, however, may be another matter. If an athlete believes that eating meat makes him or her more "virile," the pre-game steak may be worth the money.
Reason 2; The supplemental protein is supposed to be valuable for building up growing muscles. It is true, of course, that a daily intake of proteins is necessary for building enzymes and tissue cells, including muscle. Proteins are constantly undergoing a dynamic process of being built up and broken down. When proteins are degraded, some of the nitrogen constituents of the protein are lost in the urine. These nitrogenous products can be replaced only by the dietary intake of more protein (the body can not manufacture nitrogen). Consequently, in order to maintain body protein stores, protein must be included in the diet. The important questions are how much protein is needed daily, and to what extent can additional protein be used by the body for building extra muscle tissue?