NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition

Book excerpt: NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition provides valuable information and guidelines that address the nutrition needs for the broad range of clientele serviced by strength and conditioning professionals, personal trainers, and sport dietitians. Whether you work with fitness enthusiasts or competitive athletes, this resource will lead you through the key concepts of sport and exercise nutrition so that you can assess an individual’s nutrition status and—if it falls within your scope of practice—develop customized nutrition plans. Developed by the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and subjected to an intensive peer-review process, this authoritative resource offers the latest research and literature review from respected scientists and practitioners with expertise in nutrition, exercise, and sport performance. NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition covers all aspects of food selection, digestion, metabolism, and hydration relevant to sport and exercise performance. This comprehensive resource will help you understand safe and effective ways to improve training and performance through natural nutrition-based ergogenic aids like supplementation and macronutrient intake manipulation. You will also learn guidelines about proper fluid intake to enhance performance and the most important criteria for effectively evaluating the quality of sport drinks and replacement beverages. Finally, cutting-edge findings on nutrient timing based on the type, intensity, and duration of activity will help you understand how to recommend the correct nutrients at the ideal time to achieve optimal performance results. In addition to presenting research relating to sport and exercise nutrition, each chapter includes a professional application section that will help you make the connection between the literature and its practical implementation. Sidebars emphasize important topics, and reproducible forms consisting of a food log, brief athlete nutrition assessment, and goal-setting questionnaire can be copied and shared with your clients. A running glossary keeps key terms at your fingertips, and extensive references within the text offer starting points for your continued study and professional enrichment. Each client and athlete requires a customized diet tailored to the frequency, intensity, duration, and specificity of the training and demands of the sport or activity. With NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition, you will learn how food, sport supplements, and their interactions with a client’s biological systems can enhance exercise and sport performance for optimal training, recovery, and competition. NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition is part of the Science of Strength and Conditioning series. Developed with the expertise of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), this series of texts provides the guidelines for converting scientific research into practical application. The series covers topics such as tests and assessments, program design, nutrition, and special populations.