Researchers Lay Up Diet Tips for Cagers
An international collaboration of sports scientists, including researchers from Westmont College, have developed new nutritional practices that could help NBA players prepare for the upcoming season.
Gregg Afman, Westmont professor of kinesiology, joined researchers at the University of Bath in England to study how sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, and carbohydrate supplements could be useful in countering the physical challenges that face competitive basketball players.
From dribbling, to lay-ups and slam-dunks, basketball requires frequent bursts of intense physical exertion, interspersed with active recovery. It’s thought that better nutritional guidance could improve their performance and offset fatigue over the course of a game.
Afman, the lead author of the study, says they looked at how carbohydrate and sodium bicarbonate may enhance basketball skill during a simulated game.
“We also validated the testing protocol to be a valid measure of the metabolic costs of a basketball game,” he says. “Our results show that within the context of this design, ingestion of carbohydrate and/or sodium bicarbonate shortly before basketball has the potential to offset fatigue and thus improve aspects of performance late in exercise, although both supplements require balanced consideration of individual tolerance prior to competition to minimize acute negative side-effects.”
In a recent research paper, published in the leading International Journal of Sport and Exercise Nutrition, the researchers outline that previous studies about physical performance limitations in basketball focus on lab-based tests, which is not reflective of the challenges of a real game.
“Almost all the nutritional advice available to intermittent or team-sports players in general, and to basketball players in particular, comes from laboratory-based studies using continuous fixed-intensity exercise on a treadmill or cycle ergometer,” says James Betts, senior lecturer in nutrition, metabolism and statistics from the University of Bath. “Through our study we questioned whether it is a fair assumption that these guidelines would truly apply to basketball players during the unique physiological challenges posed in their sport.”
The researchers argue that the current nutritional advice for players also fails to take into account that basketball players are far from average in size and weight. An average player in the NBA towers above most, at 6 foot 7, and weighs more than 220 pounds.
Their study enlisted 27 well-trained male basketball players and monitored their vital stats and performance throughout a game and in high-intensity shuttle runs.
((Watch the protocol in action, filmed at the University of Bath the experimenter in the video is Neal Dinan, one of the study authors.))
Their results showed how consuming carbohydrate shortly before exercise caused hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, during the first quarter and resulted in poorer sprinting ability and lay-up shooting performance. However, sprint times were actually faster in the final quarter when either carbohydrate or sodium bicarbonate had been ingested before exercise, although neither directly resulted in any increased skill from players.
To access a copy of the paper, “Effect of carbohydrate or sodium bicarbonate ingestion on performance during a validated basketball simulation test,” please visit http://opus.bath.ac.uk/39097/.