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Sports nutrition is a branch of nutrition and dietetics that focuses on athletes and people who practice elite-level sports. Since these people have nutritional needs beyond those of the general population, there is a figure of sports nutritionist to help them achieve their goals.
In this post we talk with Dr. José Francisco Tornero, director of the Máster en Entrenamiento y Nutrición Deportiva, about sports nutrition and the importance of nutrition for athletes. If you’re interested in this area, you should be aware that we offer the Master's in Sports Training entirely in English too.
Sports nutrition, like any other discipline that in the sports sector, is still a discipline which is oriented to a specific topic. What sports nutrition tries to address is the optimisation of processes either through diet or through ergogenic aids to complement and thus help the performance of athletes.
It should be said that you don't always have to talk about performance in athletes. The sports concept is already encompassing any other type of subject that ultimately has a certain goal or objective, in this case, sports.
It could be the person who wants to start running and wants to do their first 10K or the guy who wants to run a 2:30 marathon. Both subjects, in the sports field, have a goal or a sports strategy and sports nutrition will be involved in helping or optimising the processes related to food and supplements.
There are three aspects that are basic in relation to the performance of an athlete. These are: training, psychology, and nutrition. I see it as a pyramid, in which both training and nutrition are the base, and at the top we have psychology.
Nutrition is absolutely essential because, just as training is individualised for the athlete, nutrition must also be. This nutrition is individualised to the processes: metabolism, training, conditions and situations of the athlete as well as the goals they have in mind.
When we are talking about sports nutrition, we are talking about the fact that we are in a pre-season period - knowing the subject's fat percentage and the other conditions. From there, a nutritional intervention strategy can be carried out that is analysed during the season, adjusting and optimising individually.
An analogy that I really like is that a Ferrari does not consume 95 unleaded gasoline. It can, but its performance would not be the same. It has to be unleaded 100 or 98. That is, much higher quality fuel. It's much more expensive to maintain, obviously. The same can be applied to athletes. They have special fuel needs - in this case their higher quality feeds, supplements, and much more specific characteristics than others.
It is possible to speak perfectly not only of when the discipline of sports nutrition began but also of when sports medicine or sports training began. And it is since we realised the need for individualisation. The need for private medical care within the sports field, individualisation in training methods, the need to have one's own psychologist, and in this case the understanding of the athlete’s nutritional needs to obtain a sporting goal.
If we talk about time periods, we can say that from 2010 is when the profile of the nutritionist began to see much more weight in the sports field. In parallel, there was also a boom in the figure of the personal sports trainer, the physio, and other team members.
Between 2010 and 2016 is when players and athletes really realised that they needed their psychologist, they needed their doctor, they needed their personal trainer, and they needed their nutritionist beyond what the team offers them.
When we talk about the typical functions of a sports nutritionist, I don't like to talk only about nutrition but about the three aspects: psychology, training and nutrition. The main mission of the sports nutritionist is to individualise and understand the personal and individual characteristics of the athlete.
In the area of nutrition, we talk about how the subject is morphologically, structurally, speaking in terms of body composition. More and more we see football players and athletes who have not only specific nutritional needs but also intolerances, allergies that further complicate and require greater professionalism and specialisation by nutritionists to be able to individualise these diets and nutritional interventions with these players.
The skills that a sports nutritionist must have are essentially the same as any person who works in the sports field, be it as a psychologist or physical trainer. Apart from having a wide range of knowledge, some of the keys are the human factor and emotional intelligence.
The player has a nutritionist on their team but is looking for something outside. They do it because they seek the individual, they seek to feel cared for, they seek to feel loved. When they have an intolerance or when they feels like eating something else, they wants their nutritionist to be there and to give them an effective, fast alternative adapted to their needs. They wants the nutritionist to be able to put themselves in their shoes and understand their personal situation.