Spotting The Signs Of Poor Nutrition For Athletes

Athletic performance and nutrition are highly integrated factors. When it comes to performing your best on the ground, your diet plays a vital role. Athletes often find themselves underperforming even after rigorous sessions of training and practice. Well, the answer to this can be poor nutrition. More than ever, the importance of consuming a healthy diet has been increasing. The nutrients that you supply to your body decide your physical performance and recovery times. Tremendous stress, fatigue, and metabolic waste are accumulated during exercise or training. Therefore, a balanced, nutritious, and wholesome diet is necessary to recover your body from all these factors.

Let’s spot the signs of poor nutrition for athletes and understand its impact on recovery and performance.

• Frequent Injury – During strength training, your muscles break down, leading to microscopic tears in your muscles. These muscles need a protein-rich, nutritious diet to recover and build up again. Failing to supply the muscles with proper nutrition and training without recovery is the straightforward cause of frequent injury.
  Besides, frequent injuries are also caused by decreased endurance, which is again a cause of poor nutrition. Carbohydrates are the powerhouse of energy. Lack of carbs in the diet makes athletes feel less energetic and turn down their performance. Therefore, low energy and rigorous workouts are the recipe for injury.
• Illness – Athletes undergo intense training sessions that exert enormous metabolic demands on their bodies. To suffice these metabolic demands, the body needs significant energy. When these demands are not met, the immunity is negatively impacted and becomes a cause of illness in sports athletes.
  Additionally, physical workouts release stress hormones in our body. These hormones further push the body’s energy stores for growth. However, if these stress hormones are produced in abundance, they may impair your immunity.
  Therefore, nutrition high in protein, carbs, fats, and vitamins is essential to maintain immunity and gut health and avoid any susceptible illness.
• Overtraining Syndrome/Decreased Performance – A condition where physical performance is massively impacted in spite of heavy workouts and which causes prolonged durations of fatigue, mood changes, sleep disorders, and other physiological factors is called the overtraining syndrome.
  Although numerous factors contribute to the overtraining syndrome, poor nutrition is still a considerable one. When the body is not fueled with the necessary nutrients, it can take months to recover from overtraining syndrome fatigue. Furthermore, oxidative and inflammatory stress is a result of overtraining. These can be reduced by sufficient intake of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids, respectively.
• Poor bone health – Sports athletes require robust bone health to resist the injuries and sustain them during games and training. However, poor bone health can be a clear sign of an incomplete diet that lacks essential nutrients like calcium, phosphorous, and other micronutrients.
  Therefore, the absence of these nutrients can make your bones vulnerable to fractures as the bone leach out calcium and turn brittle.