Back to the Softball Tips
- Drink a lot of water. You’ve heard that hundreds of time for a good reason: water does wonder to the body. You should always carry a bottle of water with you. As a rule of thumb, try to have at least 7-8 glasses of water a day.
- Coffee increases alertness. Every sports nutritionist will tell you that coffee dehydrates and that it should be consumed in moderation. However, taken in moderation, coffee can help you increase performance because it increases your alertness. Sharp alertness is crucial to react quickly defensively or read the trajectory of a pitch and decide whether or not you want to swing at it when you are at the plate.
- Don’t over do energy drinks like Red Bull; they are quick fixes. Try not to become dependant. They are full of chemicals that your body doesn’t like.
- Go for Sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade. They are designed for athletes and have been engineered not only to hydrate but also to provide real energy (carbohydrates) and replace electrolytes. You should definitely consider taking sports drinks especially if you are going to quite active for more than 90 minutes.
- Never go hungry! Softball requires mental sharpness, alertness and quick judgment to perform. Your brain lives off blood glucose exclusively. Blood glucose is sugar or carbohydrates circulating in your bloodstreams. When you are hungry, your blood glucose is low which means that you have a low functioning brain and reduced mental sharpness, alertness and judgment. This is especially important when you play several games in a day. Make sure to feed yourself on a regular basis.
- Coffee, sodas, juice and tea don’t count! As you know, you need to keep yourself well-hydrated and these drinks won’t do it as they more are likely to do the exact opposite: dehydrate you. To stay well-hydrated, rely on water and sports drinks.
- Feed the machine with appropriate foods! Whatever you put in your mouth is what your body is going to use to repair itself. If you put cheap food in your mouth, your body is going to use cheap food to make new cells. You are literally what you eat! Your body is an amazing athletic machine and it requires high-quality food to function at a high level.
- Eat to be healthy first; then eat to perform. There is no point at using advanced nutritional strategies if your foundation isn’t right. Focus on eating healthy first by developing sound nutritional habits and only then, you can consider using advanced nutritional strategies to boost your performance.
- Create a world-class shopping list. Here are the ten best foods taken from the grocery lists of the world’s best softball players: tomatoes, flaxseed oil, red grapes, nuts, whole grains, salmon (and other fatty fish), blueberries, spinach, green tea, and broccoli.
- Focus on natural whole food, organic if possible. These foods are what your body has been designed to eat and contain all of the essential nutrients that the body needs to grow, repair itself and stay healthy. Don’t buy into the hype of food companies that claims to “engineer” superior food. You can’t outsmart Mother Nature; nothing will ever beat natural, whole food!
- Avoid processed foods as much as possible. Your body is not designed to eat cheap, processed food loaded with chemicals. Processed food is low-quality food. It doesn’t provide your body with all the nutrients it needs even though it’s fast and usually inexpensive. Stay away from it as much as possible.
- Eat a variety of food. You can only get all the nutrients you need by eating a variety of food. Humans are creature of habits and people tend to eat the same thing over and over again. In fact, the average person typically consumes only about 10-12 foods 90% of the time. Even if it’s healthy food, this lack of variety can lead to deficiencies.
- Fresh is best. Nothing can beat fresh food. The fresher it is, the healthier it is.
- Replace coffee with green tea. Green tea – and we are talking about the authentic loose-leaf stuff – is one of the most powerful substances on the planet. It has one of the highest concentrations of antioxidants of any food or beverage. Green tea is a mainstay of the Japanese diet, which may account for their remarkably low incidence of cancer.
- Juice up your performance. The simple act of juicing will take your physical performance to another level. Eight ounces of vegetable juice a day is the simplest, most cost-effective and powerful way to boost your health nutritionally. The best part is that even if you don’t eat all your veggies every day, you can just drink them in five minutes!
- Eat something right after you exercise. You should always eat something within 15-30 minutes of the end of your workouts, practices, and games. Doing so will accelerate your recovery because at that time, your body is starving for energy and nutrients to recover and regenerate itself. Choose high-quality foods. A mix of complex carbohydrates and protein is the ideal.
- Focus on quality proteins. Eat at least one lean, quality protein per day: fish, egg whites, lean ground beef, tofu, or beans. If you do that while avoiding the “simple or refined” carbohydrates like white flour and sugars, your body will highly benefit from it.
- Eat enough. Most athletes don’t eat enough to meet their energy needs. As an active person, you have much greater energy needs than a sedentary person. You have to provide your body with the required energy because if you don’t, you will feel tired and lethargic, your performance will suffer and you are not likely to feel that you get anything out of your training session.
- Eat 5-6 times a day. Eating often throughout the day increases your metabolism, helps build more strength and power, and increases the flow of energy throughout the day. Elite athletes eat small meals throughout the day. The key is not to overeat but to eat smaller meals more often.
- Don’t buy into the supplement hype. More than 90% of nutritional supplements don’t work and are worthless. Quality nutrition will provide you with most, if not all the nutrients that you need to perform at your best. Some supplements might be useful to make-up for specific deficiencies such as calcium or iron. However, in most cases, nutritional supplements are not worth the money.
- Scrutinize foot labels before you buy. This is not a conspiracy, but doesn’t it seem as though food manufacturers are trying to hide things from us? Learn how to read food label and decipher its meaning. Also, if r eading the list of ingredients of a certain food requires contains words that you can’t even pronounce, takes more than five minutes and a magnifying glass to read, something is wrong. Go for foods that are made simply.
- Watch out for the suffix “ose”. Anything with the suffix “ose” means sugars. Instead of writing sugar as an ingredient, food companies try to hide it by using more complex, technical terms to confuse you.
- Minimize simple refined sugars. Simple refined sugars are usually found in processed foods like chocolate, white bread, fries, and so on. You want to focus on ingesting complex sugars which are typically found in fruits, vegetables and whole grain products.
- Use alcohol in moderation. Not only alcohol dehydrates you but it greatly interferes with the body’s ability to perform at an optimal level.
- Always pack healthy food when you go on the road. Sometimes, you will not have access to any healthy food. Your choices might be a hot dog, a bag of chips or a chocolate bar. Fruits, yogurt and granola are just a few examples of healthy food that you can pack up.