With kids returning to school in the next few weeks, it’s time to start thinking about our student-athletes’ nutrition. Let’s face it, cafeteria food just isn’t going to cut it for any middle- or high-schoolers who participate in sports. Without looking very hard, it’s easy to discover that those athletes need between 3,000 and 5,000 calories a day for most sports. Some (like swimming) require more. While it’s easy to eat 5,000 calories of junk…that’s not the kind of fuel these kids need.
As a parent it’s hard to know what we should be feeding our kids. When my oldest started competitive swimming in 1993 there wasn’t enough information readily available. But I did discover that she was hungry all the time. Because swimming was our first sport, we were lucky. For the most part, swimmers eat very healthy. Sure, they eat some empty calories, but during her in-season she was eating 8,000 calories a day and barely keeping her weight even. A little bit of empty calories didn’t hurt. When my boys came along, their winter sport was wrestling. Talk about the other end of the spectrum! Every calorie had to count because they had to maintain their weight in a very narrow range. Fortunately, we had that good nutritional base from swimming, so it was much easier for us to continue those good habits, rather than to have to switch our food routine entirely.
As I was thinking about the start of the new school year, it hit me that I frequent a lot of different nutritional sites and it would be worthwhile to share them with you. Here are the 10 best sites that I’ve found:
My youngest daughter had the opportunity to attend a week’s training at the Life of an Athlete conference in Lake Placid, so I’ve known about them for a while. They have amazing articles on all things related to teen athletes, and the quality of the articles are first-rate! If you have teen athletes in your house this is a site you should be checking out on a regular basis. This is probably my most highly recommended website regarding teen athletes, and especially nutrition for them.
While MyFitnessPal is a great general website for nutritional and exercise information, it really shines for athletes. Search for Athlete Nutrition and you’ll be served a smorgasbord of awesome articles applicable to both teens and adults.
The title of the website says it all…Educated Sports Parent. I wish there had been a site like this back in 1993 when my oldest daughter started down the road of competitive sports. As each kid came along, they got into competition at various levels, yet the resources that existed were pretty pathetic…or non-existent. This website is an amazing treasure of information on all sorts of topics related to kids’ sports. While it has a ton of info on nutrition, there are so many other categories worth exploring. One of my highest recommended sites!
Sections for parents, kids, and teens. All are written to the audience, so the level of information varies. Articles on Food & Fitness, Eating for Sports, Caffeine, Energy Drinks & Food Bars, and Common Sleep Problems. There are quite a few recipes here as well, but you have to search for them. The Food & Fitness section (under for Teens) is loaded with information. Very good resource.
Search for Teen Athlete Nutrition and scroll down to the section labeled Livestrong.com Search Results. As expected from Livestrong, there are a ton of excellent articles and resources regarding this topic. All are well-written and easily consumed. I finally figured out that the articles with something in parentheses after the article title are actually ads. Once I figured that out I was able to skip them. Honestly, this is one of the best resources out there for teen athlete nutrition!
Search ESPN for Teen Athlete Nutrition and you’ll find a ton of articles from in-season nutritional recommendations to what to eat during the summer. They even have articles on what to eat when sports spectating…applicable to adults as well as teens. Frankly I was astounded at the quality and number of articles. It took a while to just look through all the content, but everything I reviewed was great.
There is a treasure trove of information on this website, but I found it difficult to pick the right search terms. Searching Athlete Nutrition gave me 20 high-quality results, but searching for Teen Athlete only resulted in 5 hits…a couple of which weren’t really useful to me (since they were classroom lesson plans). As I drilled down into various articles I was able to find links to others. This is one of those sites where I could spend days learning about the subject matter.
In particular, the article Sports Nutrition for Youth: A handbook for Coaches was absolutely amazing. It’s a single downloadable resource aimed at coaches, but is appropriate for parents as well. The 125 pages are packed with so much information I’m still learning new things from this resource with every read! It’s good enough that I’m including the direct link here for you…download it today!
Not solely aimed at teens, but the section on Fitness has a lot of info on nutrition and benefits of exercise. The nutrition information is a bit hard to find. The best way is to jump into one article and then follow the links in the Also Suggested section at the top and the More on this Topic after the article. For more general coverage of lots of topics regarding athletes, search for athletes (thanks Captain Obvious LOL). Honestly I learned as much for my myself as I did for my teen athletes from this site.
This is a website that is aimed at teens nor parents. It’s for Master’s Swimmers. The reason I’m including it on this list is that searching for Nutrition brings up some of the best articles I’ve read on the subject. Coupled with several of the other sites that focus more on teens, these articles can serve as a great foundation for what to feed your teen athlete.
As you would expect from WebMD, the articles that arise from searching for Teen Athlete Nutrition are first rate. The only real problem I had was that search returned 9,739 results…which is an awful lot to go through. But honestly I didn’t find any articles that weren’t worth reading.