How Much Does A Professional Soccer Player Eat?

During the study course of conducting some soccer-certain investigate for a job I’ve received in the performs, I transpired to come upon a quite intriguing research from 2017 which followed the dietary designs of a handful of experienced soccer gamers from the English Leading League.

This specific examine, released in International Journal of Sport Nourishment and Work out Rate of metabolism, adopted these qualified soccer player’s meal plans in excess of a 7-day period which bundled two match times and five instruction times.

When the study is restricted by a modest sample measurement and minimal observation period, the results are continue to intriguing for those of us who are fascinated by the nutritional patterns of qualified athletes.

Soccer is, of class, my favourite sport and generally a significant passion of mine so placing today’s submit was a no-brainer for me.

In point, you need to anticipate far more soccer-concentrated written content to arrive in the close to long term.

With all that staying reported, I’m likely to provide an overly simplified overview of research success.

Let’s get ideal to it.

Soccer Participant Sample Macros

Values down below are extrapolated averages and rounded for simplicity for the sake of this site publish

Teaching Day

Whole Energy: 3,000

Calories from Extra fat:   900 (100 grams)

Calories from Protein: 800 ( 200 grams)

Calories from Carbohydrate: 1,300 ( 325 grams)  ( ~ 4 g/kg)

Match Working day

Overall Energy: 3,800

Calories from Unwanted fat:   900 (100 grams)

Energy from Protein: 800 ( 200 grams)

Energy from Carbohydrate: 2,100 ( 525 grams)  (~6 g/kg)

Brief Feelings

There are clearly a selection of limits that avoid studying far too deeply into this data, but it is nonetheless pretty neat to look at.

There’s a crystal clear pattern to what is known as periodization of carbohydrate consumption whereby dietary carbohydrate, the most important gasoline supply for soccer, is considerably amplified on match days exactly where presumably a lot additional power will be expended.

Curiously, the regular consumption values in this modest sample of players exhibit that protein and excess fat consumption are inside or above recommended recommendations but that carbohydrate intake may perhaps be considerably less than what is suggested to enhance optimum overall performance/glycogen storage in higher amount athletes which could be as significant as 7-10 g/kg of carbohydrate on times with quite higher power expenditure (match days).

Definitely intriguing, but again we can not read through way too substantially into this confined data and truly this put up is for fascination higher than all else.

Additional to come shortly.

Right until then, those people of you are definitely into the macro-side of nutrition might enjoy the information of my Macro Cookbook For Guys, connected under.

Andy De Santis RD MPH