Coaches: The Reason Your Team is Losing May Be Not Be Your Practices
Wins and losses are both a part of team sports. Not all losses are devastating to a team, but becoming known for your losing streak can deflate a team’s energy and enthusiasm. Losing the locker room is arguably a coach's toughest challenge, as players might start to mentally check-out or quit altogether.
Many coaches perceive their team’s inability to win as being due to factors such as an ineffective playbook, suboptimal player effort, lack of innate player talent, or simply circumstances, such as biased referees. As such, their responsive strategy becomes introducing more plays in the playbook, longer and more frequent practices, or lecturing players that they “just need to work harder” and they “need to want it [winning] more than the other teams”. All the while, coaches may be missing out on one key factor that they talk nothing about but that players engage in multiple times a day: eating!
Our bodies are like cars. To make a car go, it needs gas. To make our bodies move, we need food. Food is fuel for the body, and for athletes, the type of fuel and timing of that fuel intake makes a significant difference in physical performance.
Unfortunately, many coaches of young athletes believe that it doesn’t matter what a player eats since they’ll just “burn it all off”. That mindset comes from a weight-centric focus on nutrition. However, elite athletic programs have a performance-centric focus on nutrition. What’s the difference?
A weight-centric focus on nutrition emphasizes the calories-in, calories-out approach. This mindset disregards the type and timing of fuel in an athlete’s diet, and instead focuses on an athlete’s ability to burn-off the calories they consume without excess weight gain. This attitude views food as inconsequential and misses out on the advantages an athlete gains by incorporating specific nutrients into their diet.
A performance-centric focus on nutrition emphasizes food as fuel and nutrients as building blocks to enhance athletic output. This approach recognizes nutrition as the key to unlocking athletic potential. Professional and elite collegiate sports programs take advantage of this winning edge, as the majority of their teams have a sports dietitian on staff.
So what exactly does nutrition have to offer when it comes to a winning team? The topic of sports nutrition is bountiful, and here are just a few simple examples.
One way to improve your chances of winning is to have a more conditioned team than your opponents. Typically in team sports, being bigger, faster and stronger has a significant advantage. Factors such as the timing of protein intake for muscle building and the amount of carbohydrate for muscle fueling make all the difference when it comes to endurance and power. Whatsmore, athletes who can recover more quickly are able to become conditioned at a faster rate, given that they can engage in more frequent and better workouts by requiring shorter recovery windows. Knowing how to refuel after exercise will maximize muscle recovery. For example, eating the proper amount of protein and carbohydrates post-exercise has been proven to reduce muscle soreness and increase recovery. Specific nutrients also play a role in decreasing muscle inflammation after exercise, such as omega-3 fatty acids.
Another winning advantage is to be more technically skilled as a team than your opponents. Improving skill in sports takes time, but there is a limited amount of time for team practices. In order to maximize the efficiency of that practice time, your players need to show up to each practice with physical and mental focus. Having sluggish or distracted players wastes precious time for skill building, yet many athletes show up to practice under-fueled. A proper eating timeline with balanced meals can set your athletes up for success when it comes to engagement and energy during practice time.
An additional strategy for winning is simply to keep your team healthy. Player injuries can be a big setback for teams, both by losing the skillset of the individual player and by increasing the burden of work distributed onto the rest of the team. Yet one of the biggest risks for athlete injuries is poor nutrition and under-fueling. Many athletes do not realize that they are simply not eating enough to meet the energy demands of their bodies, and this low energy availability is a major stress on the body. An under-fueled body will ultimately pull nutrients that are missing from an athlete’s diet from the athlete’s muscles and bones, thereby setting the athlete up for sprains, strains, fractures, tears, shin splints, and other painful injuries. Many of the injuries that sideline players can be prevented by ensuring the athlete is meeting all of their energy and nutrient demands through food.
These are only a few of the ways that honing in on sports nutrition for your team can increase the team’s winning potential. Focusing on habits within practice is certainly important, but doing so while neglecting the players’ dietary habits outside of practice results in unlocked potential for your team.
Working with a dietitian is the best way to teach athletes how to properly fuel their bodies for their sport. If you are a coach, parent of a player, or an athlete yourself, schedule a FREE discovery call here to learn more about my nutrition coaching for athletes and athletic programs.