Female Athlete Nutrition

There are many female athletes who are not following the right diet chart and thus are suffering from the problems of poor nutrition. It should be remembered that female athletes also need the right amount of nutrition for health benefits and avoid the underlying symptoms like repeated injuries, tiredness, performance plateaus or decreases, burn-out, and other related health problems.

The female athletes should diet more aggressively as compared to their non-sporting counterparts but here diet refers to a healthy and nutritious diet chart, which is prescribed to improve their performance. There are many female athletic athletes who want to lose weight to improve their performance, but this should not be done at the cost of a poor diet as this would decrease their ability to perform properly.

Basically the ideal diet for the women athletes depends on the kind of sport that they indulge in and also considers their regular exercise patterns and workout strategies. This also depends on their weight and consists of percentages of various food types proportional to that weight. A female athlete should measure her weight in pounds and divide it by 2.2 so that she can get her weight in kilograms. Once this is done, she should multiply this number by 10 to get the number of grams of carbohydrates in her diet.

According to this she should consume about 70% of carbs in the daily calories and contrary to the prior ideas of low carb and high protein diet, this is a much better option for such women. The body of the athlete also requires more energy and the human body uses the carbs as the major source of fuel. Along with this the protein grams need to be measure and this should be woman's kilograms times 1.

Hence about 10-15% of calories should come from protein in their diet and some athletes can also raise this to 20-25%. The remaining percentage of about 20-30% of her calories should be fat. Also the women athletes who eat 1200 calories per day should only need iron or calcium supplements as a back-up. This diet should be sufficient to get all her nutrients in by eating a variety of foods along these lines.

There are many women athletes who suffer from iron deficiencies and for such women the need of supplements is essential. It has been seen that the daily requirement of iron for girls is 18 mg and if menstruation increases, then the iron intake needs. Iron deficiency or inadequate iron can lead to anemia and this is common in young female athletes. Thus they should consume iron-rich foods along with dietary supplements, and vitamin C that helps in iron absorption.

Another vital nutrient here is calcium which all female athletes should consume and most of them fall short of the required calcium requirement. Hence this often leads to stress fractures and put them at risk for other diseases. Very low fat diets should be avoided and leads to low energy and performance along with deficiencies of iron, zinc and magnesium along with lack of various other forms of nutrients.

• John Palsson
• 24/04/2009, 8:59 AM
• 0 Comments