Lifestyle & Nutrition - The Parent's Responsibility
Lifestyle & Nutrition.
The coaches can only do so much on the poolside to improve performance. We may only see a child for 3 hours per week. After the work put in at practice and training sessions, the next biggest factor that affects performance is lifestyle and diet. This is largely in the domain of parents.
If the swimmers lifestyle outside the pool is not healthy it will affect performance in the pool. Adequate sleep and a good diet that supports swim training are essential. It is not healthy or good from a performance point of view for swimmers to be under/overweight or under recovered through lack of sleep, or over recovered through lack of training!.
Part of training to be an athlete is understanding the need for a good, energy giving, low fat diet that improves the ability to work in training and allows the body to refuel and repair and rebuild.
