An overall high quality diet focused on whole grain carbohydrates, lean protein, healthy fats, fruits and vegetables is important to ensure your athlete has what he needs to be healthy and be successful on the football field. However, while on the field, what your athlete needs to keep going is fairly simple – fluid with sodium to maintain hydration and carbohydrate to supply additional fuel to the muscles and brain. But sometimes it can be confusing to know exactly how to combine beverages and foods to meet both his hydration and fueling needs. The following post will provide some tips to help support your athlete without distracting him from the practice or game.

• Properly formulated sports drinks are designed to take the guesswork out of hydration and fuel for most athletes. A 20 oz bottle of Gatorade Thirst Quencher®contains the water and sodium needed for hydration and 35 g carbohydrate.  The amount of Gatorade versus water an athlete should drink depends on their sweat rate, but incorporating some sports drink into their routine when they will be playing for more than 60 minutes will help make sure they are getting some fuel and sodium as compared to plain water.
• If your athlete has a high sweat rate and loses a lot of fluid, getting all of his water from a sports drink might overdo the carbohydrate. In this case, you could use a lower-calorie sports drink like G2® to meet his higher fluid needs while keeping the carbs in the right range.
• Maybe your athlete just likes to drink water, or doesn’t have a way to bring a sports drink to practice cold.  Instead of drinking it, he could eat his carbohydrate shortly before practice and have an additional “snack” during a break or at halftime of a game. Products like sports chews, including the Gatorade Energy Chews®, provide the same “quick” carbohydrates as sports drinks and some sodium and are easy to keep in a gym bag. Foods like pretzels are also a good option to get carbs and a little sodium. Either way, it is important to eat these foods with water to support hydration and fueling.
• Other carbohydrate-rich foods include fruit or bagels, but they don’t have much sodium.  A beverage like Propel Electrolyte Water® is a good match with these foods since it has the same amount of electrolytes as Gatorade Thirst Quencher but no calories.

Example

There are many combinations of foods and fluids to meet your football player’s needs.  Ultimately he must like what he consumes on the field, and the choices should be practical and convenient.  Here are some example combinations for a player with a fairly typical sweat rate (34 oz/h) to consume per hour of practice or during a game that will put him in the 30-60 g/h carbohydrate range.

• 34 oz Gatorade Thirst Quencher = 60 g carbohydrate, 468 mg sodium
• 20 oz Gatorade Thirst Quencher, 14 oz water = 35 g carbohydrate, 275 mg sodium
• 34 oz G2 plus 1 package Gatorade Energy Chews = 44 g carbohydrate, 558 mg sodium
• 34 oz Water plus 2 packages Gatorade Energy Chews = 48 g carbohydrate, 180 mg sodium
• 24 oz Propel Electrolyte Water, 10 oz water, 2 packages Gatorade Energy Chews = 48 g carbohydrate, 500 mg sodium
• 24 oz Propel Electrolyte Water, 10 oz water, 1 medium apple, 1 medium banana = ~50 g carbohydrate, ~500 mg sodium

How do I know how much fluid, sodium, and carbohydrate my athlete needs?

Carbohydrate: 30-60 g/h, when practicing or competing for longer than 1 hour

Sodium: Highly variable, depends on sweat sodium losses.  No way to predict without measuring sodium loss, but if you can see sodium on your athletes’ clothes, he likely is a “salty sweater”

Fluid:  Again highly variable, but can be measured based on body weight losses.  Other posts in this series have gone into detail on determining sweat rate.  Overall, athletes should drink enough fluid to avoid losing more than ~2% of their body weight.

Provided by Gatorade Sport Science Institute

Kimberly Stein, PhD is a senior principal scientist at the Gatorade Sport Science Institute. She has a background in exercise physiology and sports nutrition and played collegiate basketball and softball. Stein is passionate about sports nutrition and enjoys helping athletes understand why proper fueling is so important for their performance.