Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes by Youth Football players

You’ve made it into a professional football academy. Congratulations, you are going to receive the highest level of football coaching available at your age in this country. However, what are you doing about the things that affect your performance away from football? Often these lifestyle factors; nutrition, sleep and enjoying time away from football, can be the difference between realising your potential or not making it.

Smith et al (2017) recently said about youth athletes; “Proper nutrition is a fundamental component of athletes’ training and performance plan. Proper nutrition ensures that an individual is amassing the fuels necessary for the energy production needs related to activity and recovery” (1). This statement demonstrates the importance of nutrition for youth footballers. But I think that the responsibility for young footballers goes beyond this. It is not solely a performance issue. Adolescence is a period of intense physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development. The high rates of growth, bone health, sexual maturation and psychosocial development at this time all need to be supported. Nutrition plays a fundamental role in all of these areas. What, therefore, are the three most important nutritional aspects for youth footballers to be aware of?

1. Under fuelling

There are two aspects to under fuelling for youth footballers. One is a health issue and the other is a performance issue. Let’s take the performance aspect first. This could be considered to be fairly straight forward; lack of energy results in slowing down. Intuitively we know that low energy availability means running out of energy towards the end of a game or training that means you can’t keep up with others. This has been proven by the research which shows that a lack of available energy results in slower muscle activation and lower top speeds (2).

Other studies have also demonstrated this result; low energy availability has been found to have a direct impact on sports performance (3). But not only in the obvious way outlined above. Low energy availability can affect bone health making an athlete more susceptible to injury; it has an impact on neuromuscular functioning leading to poorer decision making; continued low blood sugar availability can result in reduced fat free mass meaning a drop in muscle mass when a young footballer is trying to gain muscle mass (3).

In my practice, when food diaries have been reviewed, the trend is that players are not meeting energy requirements, often quite significantly under the amount that research suggests they need. Another problem is that if these athletes are under fuelled, they also do not get the required amounts of micronutrients because of a low consumption of vegetables and a lack of variation in their diets. Research has also demonstrated that adolescent athletes will use supplement products such as protein powders and energy drinks (4) at the expense of nutrient dense real food. Use of such products has the potential to create a combination of low energy and low nutrient status in youth football players.

Recently new research has been undertaken investigating the energy requirements of youth football players. Hannon et al (5) set out to understand the resting metabolic rate (the energy the body requires to maintain homeostasis at rest) of youth athletes so that a more accurate estimate of total energy expenditure can be gained. Measuring energy needs are fraught with difficulties but the research found that previous estimates may have greatly under estimated a youth footballers energy requirements.

In another paper Hannon et al went on to give some practical considerations for youth footballers’ nutritional requirements (6). Some of the challenges faced by this group are around timing; the athlete gets hungry when they are not in a position to have a meal. For example, travelling back home after training and stopping at service stations to get some food. Often due to the repetitive nature of the young football player’s life this practice can become habit. Planning out the food for the week can be essential to avoid emergency refuelling stops

1. Making protein a priority but ignoring carbohydrates

I often hear young athletes say to me that they have protein prior to training or a game “to give them energy”. It’s not surprising based on the way marketing teams choose to advertise their products. Often protein and energy are used together on the packaging. When we look more closely at the macronutrients; protein, carbohydrate and fat, we see that it is carbohydrates and not protein that is a more appropriate macronutrient for energy. Understanding this could be vital for young footballers.

Although we must acknowledge that sports nutrition should always be tailored to the individual because everyone is different; there remains, in the literature, clear evidence that there is an overall need for carbohydrates to fuel football performance. Consistently the evidence shows that during a football match a player’s stores of carbohydrate are depleted and that as these stores deplete fatigue can occur. When these stores are depleted, agility, dribbling performance and shooting accuracy were also compromised. Therefore, if carbohydrates are consumed at the right time and in the right amounts, performance increases (7).

Carbohydrate is also important for recovery. Adequate intake after exercise helps to replenish energy levels and prepares the athlete to go again (8). But there’s more to carbohydrates than just energy provision and more types than just bread, potatoes and rice. Carbohydrates can give a young footballer colour on their plates. That colour provides fibre, helping to keep the player’s gastrointestinal tract healthy and helping to achieve a diverse gut bacteria which is now being linked to improved performance outcomes (9). The colourful vegetables also provide vital nutrients that helps the energy conversion processes. Therefore carbohydrates, although sometimes getting a bad press in the media, social or otherwise, are vital for the performance of football players.

1. Use smart snacking to recover from sessions

Snacking can be a very effective way to add nutrients and calories to a young footballer’s routine. Done well, snacking can be nutritious and give much needed additional calories. On top of this it can be protein packed to help with recovery. Unfortunately, a snack is often a packaged, convenience food high in saturated fat and sugar or a shake out of a tub that doesn’t give vital micro and phytonutrients. It’s important to point out that sugar, in itself, is not the demon that many would like to make out, however, it does need to be eaten at the right times or eaten strategically to have a positive effect and to reduce any possible negatives. Eating high sugar snacks on an empty stomach could be a poor way to get the best out of them, leading to sugar spikes and ultimately energy drops later down the line. Also high protein natural snacks can be a great way to recover from exercise giving the young footballer a natural power-packed alternative to tubs of protein powder.

Another consideration is that pre-packaged snack products often have calorie information all over their packaging. “This snack contains 110 kcals per portion” is a familiar claim but the problem is we have no idea what “a portion” is. Even if we decide to look closer at the nutritional information on the packet, we’ll find that a portion is given in grams. So 25g equals a portion and a portion equals 110 kcals. But what does that mean in practice? Is it a large handful or is it half the pack? And who decides that amount is a portion anyway because with sugary foods once we’ve eaten some its often very difficult to stop with a handful.

If we do eat these high fat, sugary snack foods what we are doing is stealing away an opportunity to nourish our bodies, our brain, our liver, our muscles. I’m not saying that we should never eat these foods – for most people that would be unrealistic – but they are not good options pre or post training or in helping us achieve sporting goals.

A good rule of thumb therefore is to make your snacks as varied and as colourful as possible. That way you are not only adding valuable calories and also vital micronutrients and phytonutrients that will fuel health as well as performance. Here are some examples;

• Mixed Berry & Greek yoghurt smoothie

• Cottage cheese on Oatcakes with beetroot

• Homemade Flapjacks

• Veg sticks and hummus

• Avocado and Goats cheese on rice cakes

• Mixed nuts and seeds, cacao nibs and dried fruit

• Homemade protein balls

In conclusion, young football player nutritional priorities should be: adequate levels of fuelling; appropriate amounts of carbohydrate; and smart protein packed snack choices. This will propel their health and performance, enabling them to sustain energy, ensure muscle repair, strong bone development, and all the demands that a growing body has. These are 3 components that will help the youth footballer reach their potential.

References

1. Smith JW, Holmes ME, McAllister MJ. Erratum to “Nutritional Considerations for Performance in Young Athletes.” J Sports Med. 2017;2017:1–1.

2. Ziegenfuss TN, Kreider RB, Arciero PJ, Antonio J, Kerksick CM, Kalman D, et al. International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrient timing. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2017;14(1):1–21.

3. Logue DM, Madigan SM, Melin A, Delahunt E, Heinen M, Donnell SM, et al. Low Energy Availability in Athletes 2020 : on Sports Performance. Nutrients. 2020;12(835):1–19.

4. Bergeron MF, Mountjoy M, Armstrong N, Chia M, Côté J, Emery CA, et al. International Olympic Committee consensus statement on youth athletic development. Br J Sports Med. 2015;49(13):843–51.

5. Hannon MP, Carney DJ, Floyd S, Parker LJF, McKeown J, Drust B, et al. Cross-sectional comparison of body composition and resting metabolic rate in Premier League academy soccer players: Implications for growth and maturation. J Sports Sci. 2020;38(11–12):1326–34.

6. Hannon MP, Close GL, Morton JP. Energy and Macronutrient Considerations for Young Athletes. Strength Cond J. 2020;Publish Ah(June).

7. Currell K, Conway S, Jeukendrup AE. Carbohydrate ingestion improves performance of a new reliable test of soccer performance. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2009;19(1):34–46.

8. Krustrup P, Ortenblad N, Nielsen J, Nybo L, Gunnarsson TP, Marcello Iaia F, et al. Maximal voluntary contraction force, SR function and glycogen resynthesis during the Wrst 72 h after a high-level competitive soccer game. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2011;111(12):2987–95.

9. De Oliveira EP, Burini RC, Jeukendrup A. Gastrointestinal complaints during exercise: Prevalence, etiology, and nutritional recommendations. Sport Med. 2014;44(SUPPL.1):79–85.