5 Tips to Ensuring that your Teenage Athlete gets Enough Nutrition

The teenage years are one of the most challenging phases of life. It’s the time when a person’s body needs as much nutrients as it can get.


Those nutritional needs become even more acute with teenage athletes due to their overly active lifestyle. That’s why you need to ensure that your teenage athlete always gets enough nutrients for them to keep going.

Football player; image source: pexels.com

To help you with this, here are 5 tips to ensuring that your teenage athlete gets enough and the right kind of nutrition.

1. Give them more carbohydrates

As an athlete, your teenager’s body needs uses lots of energy. That’s why you need to feed them on foods that can replace this energy as quickly as it is used up, so as keep them going.

Keep your teenage athlete child loaded up on carbohydrates, especially before they start a game. For best results, feed your teenage child on high carbs foods such as cereals and pasta.

2. Buy them protein shakes

Proteins don’t give energy, but they are great for building muscles. While the average human needs about 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of their body weight, the average athlete needs more. Without this, they would experience muscle loss.

A protein shake; image source: greatist.com

To help your teenage athlete maintain a healthy muscle mass, buy them protein shakes. This way, you would be in a position to measure how much proteins they receive relative to their body weight. This can help them maintain a healthy boy mass, for maximum performance in their athletic endeavors.

3. Hire for them a nutritionist

While you may want to give your teenage athlete the best nutrition possible, it might not be easy if you don’t have a background in nutrition.

That’s why to give them the best, hire a nutritionist. You don’t have to go for an overly expensive one, if you don’t have the means to do so. You can find one online, and hire them on a contractual basis. This way, you are guaranteed that whatever your teenage child is eating, they are getting the best nutritional value out of it.

4. Give them multivitamins

Teenagers on the whole require more nutrients than adults. This need is even higher on teenage athletes.

That’s why you need to give your teenage athlete multivitamins that can allow them get the micro-nutrients that they won’t get from eating normal foods. The best vitamins for athletic teens come from plants, and are gluten free. This is what you should look out, if you want to give your teenage athlete, enough and good nutrients from multivitamins.

5. Feed them on leafy vegetables

Research shows that leafy vegetables have high contents of nitrates, which can help improve an athlete’s performance.

To enhance the athletic capabilities of your teenager, ensure that they have a healthy dose of leafy vegetables every day. Unlike fats and proteins, there is no limit on the quantity of leafy vegetables that a teenage athlete can take.


You can give them as much of them as you can, in combination with the other nutrients discussed above.

About author:
This article was contributed to healthiack.com by a guest author.


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