Parents naturally want the best for their highly active child and often focus on providing them with healthy foods. While healthy food choices are essential, highly active adolescents have increased energy requirements to support their growth, development, and physical activity.

Sometimes, parents may unknowingly provide insufficient energy by limiting certain foods or food groups or emphasising low-calorie options. Consistency in nutrition information is crucial to avoid conflicting messages that may confuse or misguide young athletes.

By aligning their messages, stakeholders can reinforce key principles such as the importance of balanced meals, adequate energy intake, hydration, and the role of macronutrients and micronutrients in supporting performance and overall health. This unified approach ensures that young athletes receive evidence-based nutrition guidance, which fosters their development, performance, and well-being.

Providing appropriate nutrition care is a shared responsibility among coaches, parents, teachers, and athletes themselves.

Collaboration and open communication are vital for consistent and evidence-based nutrition support. This can provide the coaches with confidence and clarity in appropriate messages to deliver to the athletes. Estimating individual energy needs can be challenging due to various factors.

Athletes are encouraged to adjust eating patterns to reflect daily exercise. Heavier training days require more food. Meal Plan: Planning out balanced meals in advance can prevent young athletes from adopting overly restrictive diets. It is important that your child eats a variety of foods and gets appropriate amounts of fat, adequate-protein, and plenty of complex carbohydrates like whole grains, fruits, and veggies.

On extra active days, carbohydrate rich snacks like granola bars, cereal or fruit juice can be helpful to support energy demands. Hydrate: For active kids who struggle to drink enough water, flavored beverages can be a more enjoyable option. Try giving your little athlete fruit-infused water for a naturally sweeter taste.

Recovery is key : Encourage your child to pack their own food in their kit bag before every training session with a carbohydrate rich snack like a granola bar, a water bottle and a source of protein like milk which can help with both hydration and recovery.

Making smoothies with milk, fruit, spinach and peanut butter can aid post exercise recovery with essential nutrients and energy. Praise effort, not performance : Those in competitive youth sports tend to receive a lot of praise for performance and physique. This praise can result in pressure to maintain a high level of performance, and cause young athletes to develop disordered eating habits to meet expectations.

Food First: In an effort to improve performance, athletes of all ages often turn to dietary supplements such as vitamins and minerals, energy drinks and bars, and protein shakes. However, for most young athletes, a varied diet based on whole foods can supply the energy and nutrients needed to enhance performance.

Our goal is to empower athletes to make healthy choices because they know how it will impact their performance, NOT because their coach or parent is telling them what to eat. This is an introduction to healthy eating habits that will serve youth athletes well throughout their entire life.

We encourage parents, coaches, and athletes to embark on this challenge together! The foundation of the program are our printable daily challenges. We believe that focusing on one habit per day is most effective with young athletes.

In addition, by focusing on one habit per day we can take the time to explain the science behind the habit. On each challenge handout we indulge a "Why this is important" and "Tips to Complete the Challenge" section to help athletes find success each day. You can rest assured that the challenges have been carefully crafted by one of the top Nutritionists at the American Coaching Academy.

Keep athletes focused and on track toward achieving their nutrition challenges. Athletes are asked to jot down how they met the challenge on each daily handout. For greater accountability, you can have teammates or parents sign off on each day of the log to verify the athletes commitment.

Our calendar provides a birds-eye view of the 30 Day Challenge. A great tool for parents to post on the fridge during the challenge! The files are delivered in PDF format, so you can download them to your computer, or directly to your mobile device. Print out as many of the daily sports nutrition challenges, calendars, etc.

as you need year after year! If you are not completely satisfied with the challenges, all you have to do is notify us within 60 days of your date of purchase and we will refund your money, in full , with absolutely no questions asked! While population dietary guidelines and nutrient reference values are appropriate for addressing the micronutrient and energy requirements of children and adolescents involved in most sports, those involved in high-intensity sports training programs have higher nutrient and energy requirements.

The basic principles of sports nutrition recommended to adult athletes also apply to younger athletes. Meeting higher nutrient and energy requirements during periods of rapid growth, while also coping with changing body composition and metabolic and hormonal fluctuations, is often challenging for young athletes.

Social and emotional factors, stage of development and maturational timing has a major influence on how individuals view themselves and their sporting achievements.

Childhood and adolescence is a critical time in life to develop long-term food habits and the connections between food, exercise and body image. New practices, beliefs and meanings associated with food may be acquired during this time, such as the adoption of vegetarianism, fad diets and supplement use.

It is also important to recognise that athletic performance development is non-linear, with success at junior competitions not always translating to success as an adult.

Hence, it is important that young athletes develop eating patterns that integrate the unique requirements for sporting success and ensure healthy growth and development. Furthermore, contemporary physical activity guidelines for children and adolescents recognise that sleep, sedentary behaviour and physical activity are behaviours that should not be considered in isolation.

Referred to as hour integrated movement guidelines, these guidelines acknowledge that the whole day matters and individual movement behaviours e.

physical activity, sedentary behaviour, sleep need to be considered in relation to each other when examining their associations with health and developmental outcomes in children AGDoH It is important to also consider the nutrition needs of physically active children and adolescents in this context.

This chapter considers how the physiological response to exercise and the nutritional requirements of children and adolescents participating in sport may differ from adult athletes. Identifying body composition changes during growth, development and maturation is crucial to advising young athletes about expected changes in body composition, nutrient requirements and response to exercise.

In this chapter, children refers to those aged 5—12 years, and adolescents to those aged 13—18 years, according to population categories NHMRC Growth is divided into three additive components: infancy, childhood and puberty Karlberg a , b , Identifying stage of growth and development and changes to body composition during maturation of young athletes is fundamental for the sports dietitian to estimate nutrient requirements and advise Your Access profile is currently affiliated with '[InstitutionA]' and is in the process of switching affiliations to '[InstitutionB]'.

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Why do Athletes Use Dietary Supplements? Shortcuts are easier: Planning, grocery shopping, and meal preparation takes time and effort. However, this is not always the case. Young athletes are also very influenced by personal experiences of friends, peers, coaches, and social media.

Many athletes start taking supplements without consulting a medical professional first. How are Dietary Supplements Regulated? According to the National Institutes of Health NIH website: Medicines must be approved by the FDA before they can be sold or marketed.

Supplements do not require this approval. Supplement companies are responsible for having evidence that their products are safe, and the label claims are truthful and not misleading.

There is no organization that holds the manufacturers of these products responsible for the accuracy of the labels and the contents of their products. Manufacturers must follow good manufacturing practices GMPs to ensure the identity, purity, strength and composition of their products.

What Are The Potential Dangers of Using Dietary Supplements? Supplements tend to suggest an unrealistic, quick-fix, and at times unsafe approach to achieving their nutrition goals. First, talk to your pediatrician or family doctor about your questions or concerns.

Vitamins and minerals are vital nutrients necessary to keep active bodies healthy and functioning optimally. Eating well, hydrating appropriately, sleeping enough, and rest do take more effort to implement. However, they are lifelong skills and will make a longer lasting impact on your sports performance.

Taking dietary supplements is a personal choice between an athlete, their family, and sports medicine team. Not all supplements are bad : Several independent organizations offer third party quality testing and allow products that pass these tests to display a seal of quality assurance.

This seal implies the product tested has a correct ingredient label and does not contain harmful levels of contaminants. However, seals do not guarantee a product is safe or effective as previously explained. Some examples of third party quality testing agencies include NSF Certified For Sport® , Informed Choice , and USP®.

Two final key points to consider: If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. You cannot supplement a poor diet. Where Can I Find More Information?

Consult a Registration Dietitian who specializes in Sports Nutrition. You can make an appointment online with our Sports Dietitian by clicking here. In addition to this article, you can reference more information from the following organizations: Taylor Hooton Foundation US Anti-Doping Association: Supplement National Institutes of Health: Dietary Supplements Fact Sheet National Institutes of Health: Dietary Supplements for Exercise and Athletic Performance.

And third, sportsmanship reveals your true character. I started competing in Modern Pentathlon eight years after my older sister and three-time Olympian, Margaux Isaksen, began competing. I soon realized that people often compared the two of us.

I know that it would have been easy to let our hyper competitive mindset affect our relationship, but instead we decided to support and cheer for each other, regardless of our own performance. My experience of competing against and being compared to my older sister, taught me to focus on how to perform at my best, rather than putting wasted energy into wishing for others to fail.

I believe that sportsmanship reveals true character. Remember, be a fierce competitor, find grace in all your victories and losses. And I hope to see you out there. Maybe what you want is very simple, for everyone to just run in the right direction, score for their own team, to try and try again and again.

Maybe you want your athletes to become all stars. You want them to earn trophies, medals, win titles. You want them to reach the highest height their sport allows. But as every great coach discovers, developing a great athlete means nurturing, nurturing the even greater person within.

Truth is, you have even more influence than you know. You can be both the coach who provides the skills needed to win the game and the coach who helps them learn and succeed beyond the sport, to become all stars wherever they land in the future, and to enjoy their lives more now, because the confidence and courage they find working with you will stay with them when they need it the most.

There are games to be won, lives to change. Coaches have the power to do both. What kind of coach do you want to be? At first glance, dietary supplements look the same. Most vitamins, minerals, fish oil, and other supplements containing nutrients are probably just fine, but supplements are not evaluated or approved by FDA before they are sold.

Although it is rare for vitamins or minerals to be contaminated with drugs, there has been at least one case of a vitamin containing an anabolic steroid.

At the other extreme are products that contain drugs, stimulants, anabolic steroids, or other hormones. Even though these are not technically dietary supplements, many of them are labeled as supplements.

For example, body-building products sometimes contain anabolic steroids or Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators, known as SARMs, or other hormones. Some pre-workout or energy products contain illegal stimulants like DMAA, ephedra, or other amphetamine-like stimulants.

Weight loss products might contain prescription drugs like sibutramine, or hormones, like human chorionic gonadotropin, also known as hCG. All natural or herbal sexual enhancement products might contain hormones or Viagra-like drugs.

After all, two products might look the same, but one might contain just amino acids and other legitimate ingredients, while the other also contains anabolic steroids. Because of this, FDA has issued a warning about certain categories of supplements: body building products, weight loss products, and sexual enhancement products.

Be extremely careful when considering a supplement in one of these categories. We strongly recommend that you avoid products in these categories. Even when FDA tests supplements and finds dangerous ingredients, companies sometimes refuse to recall them. Sometimes, they simply repackage their product and continue selling it under a new name.

You need to do your research and be an informed consumer. The dietary supplement industry is enormous. Supplements that appear to be safe could actually be dangerous products in disguise.

If you use dietary supplements without doing your research, you may be taking serious risks with your health and your career. Skip to content.

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Detox Diets and Cleanses Detox and cleansing diets have gained popularity with claims of cleaning your blood and eliminating harmful toxins from your body. Pre- and Post-Workout Supplements Pre-workout drink mixes that boost energy for increased athletic performance and post-workout protein shakes that promise to help with recovery and build more lean muscle are growing in popularity.

Restrictive Diets There are many popular trending diets that restrict specific foods, such as the Paleo diet eating foods that humans ate when they first roamed the planet and Ketogenic diet reducing carbohydrate intake and replacing it with fat.

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You may be overthinking the types of meals that Is Your Athlete Using Supplements? January 1, Most sport parents have heard their athletes talk about how much they need this or that supplement to perform better, Does My Athlete Need Hydration Supplements?

Coaches Parents. You may have noticed electrolyte drinks and drink mixes popping up on social media, in articles, on podcasts, and in Join Us.

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What Kind of Coach Do You Want to Be?