The Summer is the Most Important Time to Prepare for the Next Football Season

Summer is here.  It is time to hit the pool, have some barbecues and play some serious amount of golf.  Yet, for a football player, that wants to improve his game, the summer is the season to make changes in their body type.  The time that a player gives to football during the summer will impact how he will play in the fall.  Summer football camps will give a player the knowledge and teach him the drills to improve through practice.  The weight room should be an everyday location for a football player looking to get an edge before the upcoming season. 

Yet, one of the best things that a football player can do is to change their nutritional habits.  Diet is the fuel that one puts into their body.  Diet is also something that someone can’t change overnight.  If you are drinking carbonation, and eating very fatty fried foods, it will take some time for your body to clear these items out of your system. 

A football player should think of their body like a mini factory.  There is a simple saying of “garbage in-garbage out.”  The saying means that if starts with garbage as the raw product, you will get garbage in a different form as the final product.  If a factory is using sub-par materials they will produce sub-par products.  Just as if a football player eats a poor diet then they will have poorer performance when they call upon their bodies to perform. 

A simple addition to any football player’s summer time nutritional regime is an increase in protein.  A simple formula for how much protein a football player in training should intake a day is: half of your bodyweight in grams of protein.  Meaning if you weigh 240 pounds, then you should be taking in at least 120 grams of protein a day. 

Why is it important to have such a high amount of protein in your diet?  Protein is the building blocks of muscle.  Even when you aren’t working out, your body is still working to build up or deconstruct your muscle fibers.  If your body doesn’t have a ready amount of protein in your system, then it will be harder for your body to construct the muscle fibers.  Protein is also almost never turned into fat cells by your body, so players don’t have to worry about taking large amounts of protein.  A protein supplement is the easiest way to get that large amount of protein into their body each day.

It is also important for football players to get the best protein supplement.  A football player should use whey protein over soy.  Whey protein gives you more grams per serving, compared to soy, and whey is easier for most people to digest and metabolize in contrast to a soy based protein.  Players should also look for isolated whey proteins instead of a concentrated whey protein.  Isolated whey protein supplements have 90% pure protein and don’t have the fats or carbohydrates that other supplement mixtures contain. 

The summer is the time that All-American football players build their body.  If you’re a football player and you aren’t working on your nutrition, your competition is doing it and going to have an advantage over you.