Eat Before, During & After

Eating a lot of food isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, if you’re aware of what you’re eating, you can actually eat a ton of food and stay healthy and lean. It’s all about what you eat, not the total amount. Calories are a good thing if you are getting them from the right foods and the right combination of foods.

The following are some important nutrition tips for volleyball players

1. Eat smaller meals more often. If you eat often, you’ll likely notice a feeling of not being as nearly hungry as usual.

2. Eat more protein and fat. Protein and fat will often make you feel fuller.

3. Eat less carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates. Eating sugary foods will often make you more hungry. Focus on consuming a higher amount of protein and fat, and less carbs. Have a source of protein at every meal and you’ll fill up faster.

4. Eat your biggest meals around your workout. If you eat before, during, and after your volleyball workout, you’ll be using the calories you’re consuming. If you eat immediately after a workout, you’ll do a better job of absorbing the nutrients and calories.

The worst thing you could do is not eat near the time you workout and eat a large meal many hours after your workout. Eating late at night can lead to storing calories as fat.

5. Eat earlier in the day and hardly ever at night. Your liver is depleted of glycogen when you wake up in the morning. You need carbohydrates in the morning to replaced lost glycogen. You need calories right when you wake so don’t skip breakfast.

6. Workout more. Anaerobic exercise will help you with weight loss and volleyball performance. This is exercise that involves intense bouts of exercise, immediately followed by short rest periods. For example, sprint for 30 seconds then rest for a minute. Do a workout like this for 20 minutes twice a week. Do this 3 times a week.

On the other days, do some form of aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is when you exercise at a consistent pace such as jogging for 30 minutes. The focus with aerobic exercise is burning fat while exercising. The focus of anaerobic exercise is building muscle and also burning fat and unwanted calories.

Anaerobic type exercise will allow you to burn calories all day long even when you aren’t working out. Aerobic exercise will burn fat while you work out and help you recover for your next highly intense workout.

Do both types of exercise to help with improving volleyball performance, weight loss and maintaining your desired weight.

7. Workout a lot, play volleyball, and stay active. If you’re really active with workouts and volleyball, then you really can just about get away with eating whatever you want. If you’re active all the time, you won’t have spare time to eat. Stay busy and don’t put yourself in a position where it’s easy to consume unnecessary calories. by Strength and Power for Volleyball