Nutrition & Hydration @ Meets
For the recent January Kelowna Swim Meet, our pre-meet email had included some tips for Nutrition and Hydration at the event. While none of us are nutritionists or trained in this specifically, through a lot of trial and error we have found some things that work and some that don't. I've copied the information we'd compiled for the email down below if you would like a guideline to meet nutrition/hydration. This won't work the same for everybody, but might be a good place to start if you are looking for some ideas :).
Nutrition & Hydration:
For our experienced meet parents, this may sound familiar, but no matter how many meets that kids attend, nutrition and hydration will never stop being important.
Some pools are warmer than others (think H20), and while we notice it as non-swimmers immediately, the in-and-out of the water often translates to the kids not realizing how much they are sweating/burning throughout the weekend just keeping their systems cool. While some of the smaller Regional kids might not need to hydrate quite as much, a good rule of thumb is a minimum of 2 bottles of water and 1 bottle of some sort of electrolyte throughout each day. For some, this can definitely be higher.
For nutrition, not introducing new/unfamiliar foods the morning of competition is typically an important rule to follow, as is planning out what/when the kids eat. Here are a few common guidelines to follow, keeping in mind I'm not a nutritionist and each kid is different, so this is by no means an exact science:
- Things like dairy or high spice & fiber foods for breakfast can often be a common cause for an upset stomach in warm-up.
- Nerves can make eating & digesting food hard for some kids. Try to pick easily digestible snack options (PB pretzels from costco are a favourite, as are fruit, rice cakes, and granola bars).
- The 4-2-1 hour method is a often a good guideline to follow: 4 hours before racing (think 2 hours before warm-up) eating a good, well balanced meal with carbs and protein. 2 hours before (think before/after warm-up) snacking on smaller, carb-heavy options like those mentioned above. And within an hour of a race, focus on hydration and quick energy sources, like fruit, etc.
We would love to have a nutrition specialist come in to work with us at some point, but if you're looking for some guidelines or ideas, this might be a good place to start. There are also lots of swim-specific groups out of the States who are doing great work with healthy athlete preparation, so finding and following a couple of these groups on Socials could give some more in depth information as well.
Thanks for reading!