Healthy food choices and adequate nutrition nutrient are essential for supporting training and enhancing the physical performance of professional athletes. [1] Macronutrients provide the metabolic substrates necessary for producing the energy required for skeletal muscle contraction and cardiac work, while the micronutrients support the metabolic reactions involved in energy production and gas transport in the circulation. [2] Football is a demanding sport for both aerobic and anaerobic energy. It requires football players to exercise repetitively at high intensities using large muscle groups for periods of several seconds to several minutes for the duration of a match (90 min) or longer. Metabolically, athletes depend to a certain extent on their endogenous glycogen stores in the liver and skeletal muscles. Aside from heredity and training, it has been acknowledged that no single factor plays a greater role in optimizing physical performance than diet. [3] Thus, an adequate nutrient intake is essential to support training and enhance athletic performance.Inadequate nutrition knowledge is likely to lead to unhealthy dietary habits, poor nutrition, and inadequate physical performance. Physical activity, especially in the context of formal training and athletic competition, increases the daily energy requirements which depend on the type, intensity, and duration of the activity. [4] For endurance athletes, the quality of food and/or drink consumed before, during, and after exercise is of great importance. Thus, the proper nutrition knowledge and the practices related to the nature and amount of food/drink consumed and the timing of its consumption are
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.