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Performance Nutrition in Football
updated on April 1st, 2024
10 mins read
In modern-day football becoming part of the tiny percentage of players who make it as professional footballers is getting increasingly harder. Extra training sessions, improving your tactical understanding, and working on your mentality are becoming more and more common practices nowadays.
But there are other, often overlooked drivers of peak performance in sports that can give you the competitive edge you need to succeed! Nutrition is one of them! Especially as far too many players still don’t understand the basic principles of optimally fueling your body and how big of an impact it can have on your game!
So keep reading and take another big step towards transforming your life and reaching your goals!
What is Performance Nutrition?
Nutrition essentially can be defined as the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth.
Performance nutrition on the other hand goes beyond that and instead focuses on improving your performance, training and recovery.
Why is performance nutrition so important?
Poor nutritional habits can lead to being under-fueled, resulting in suboptimal performance. Even a seemingly insignificant 2% dehydration can trigger a cascade of events, causing early onset fatigue, reduced muscle strength, and diminished muscle power.
Moreover, nutrition plays a pivotal role in influencing body composition, affecting muscle mass, facilitating recovery, meeting energy demands, and supporting overall health. Nutrition also plays an important role during the recovery from an injury.
What are macronutrients?
Macronutrients are essential nutrients that we require to grow and to survive as human beings.
Essentially there are four macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and alcohol. In this article, we’ll only gonna focus on the 3 fundamentals of them.
Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates are essentially a compound which can be broken down into glycogen. Glycogen is comprised of glucose molecules which essentially is the energy currency of the body.
Some food examples of where you might find carbohydrates include rice, pasta, potatoes, and some other vegetables as well.
Protein
Protein is arguably the most well-recognized and most important of the macronutrients when it comes to performance. Protein essentially is a build-up of amino acids and is fundamental for tissue repair and growth. This is particularly important for building new muscle tissue.
Fats
Fats have had a bad reputation over the years as people often think of pictures of unhealthy foods such as burgers and pizzas.
But there are many other food items such as peanuts, nuts, seeds, cheeses, and dairy products, and all of those within reason, are relatively good for your health.
Fats are crucial for the production of hormones. Now, hormones are chemical signals that instruct the body to perform certain functions. In this case, the ones that are particularly important for us are key growth hormones, such as testosterone, which are essential building blocks for muscles.
How much of the macronutrients do I need?
As always with nutrition, there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as there are many different factors that we need to consider such as your age, your training status, or the time of year (off- or in-season).
Also, dietary requirements (halal, kosher, vegetarian, vegan, …) need to be factored into our consideration when we're thinking about nutrition.
Another important factor is the time distance to your next MatchDay (= MD).
For example:
- MD-1 = 1 Day before matchday
- MD = Matchday
- MD+1 = 1 Day after matchday
So while keeping all those factors in mind, there are numbers we can use as a basis for calculating our optimal macronutrient intake. Those numbers are drawn from a UEFA consensus of top nutritionists worldwide in which they were asked what they feel is the correct amount of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats for elite professional footballers.
And while you might aspire to be a professional footballer one day yourself, you can’t apply the same numbers to your age yet if you’re not 18-30 years old and are training & playing 20+ hours of professional football every week.
How much of each do I need on MD-1 (= 1 Day before matchday)?
Here is an overview of the recommendations for professional footballers, for MD-1:
Carbohydrates: 6 to 8 grams per kilogram of body mass, comprising approximately 50% of a player’s total daily energy intake.
Proteins: 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body mass, comprising approximately 30% of a player’s total daily energy intake.
Fats: At least 20% of a player’s total daily energy intake should come from fat sources.
Let’s visualise these numbers in an example and show you a potential meal plan for a 21-year-old football player who weighs 75kg.
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Why are carbohydrates so high on a match day minus one?
If we think about energy demands and what a player will need the day before a match, he's going to need a lot of glycogen. He will need a lot of energy in his muscles to make sure that he's got enough energy to be able to perform as best.
How much of each do I need on MD (= 1 matchday)?
Carbohydrates: 1 to 4 grams per kilogram of body mass, comprising approximately 50% of a player’s total daily energy intake.
Proteins: 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body mass, comprising approximately 30% of a player’s total daily energy intake.
Fats: At least 20% of a player’s total daily energy intake should come from fat sources.
A. Before the match:
Let’s look again at options for a meal plan for our previous example (21-year-old player; 75kg)
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Now an important factor for the choice of when to each which of these meals is also the time of your kick-off. An important word you should remember here is the glycemic index. This metric simply measures how fast a meal can be digested.
A high glycemic indexed meal can be digested fast and gives you therefore a lot of short-term energy while low glycemic indexed meals provide you more steadily with energy over a longer time.
So if you’re having two meals before your kick-off:
1st meal = low glycemic indexed meal
2nd meal = high glycemic indexed meal
B. During the match
This will very much depend on every individual player and will be based on your environment and personal experience but to give you an example of a strategy that some players use.
During half-time and the last quarter of the match, many players like to consume fast-digesting simple sugars such as dextrose powders/tablets, jellies, or orange slices.
C. After the match
As soon as the game ends, the emphasis has now shifted to recovery, and players are encouraged to rehydrate (= drink lots of water & intake electrolytes).
Some might also drink protein shakes to increase their protein intake and begin synthesizing and building new muscle tissue.
We hope this guide helps you now get a better understanding of performance nutrition and how following these tips & principles can help you gain a competitive edge over other players!
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