Are you eating the right food to prepare you for a match?

WITH March having arrived it’s coming up to that time of the year where challenge games are finding themselves creep in to your schedule.

So just like managers who use challenge games to find out what works best for their team, this is your chance to find out the best way to fuel yourself so that you get the most from your body during a game.

That doesn’t mean filling up on a bowl of pasta, tuna and sweetcorn a few hours before your match, it means knowing how to best prepare your body for optimal performance. For me, match day readiness begins as soon as your last training session pre-game finishes.

Push your body hard during training, tap in to your fuel reserves and create a need to reload the body post training.

Rehydrate then get in a healthy mix of proteins and carbs, along with vital vitamins and minerals to allow for efficient recovery.

You aren’t running a marathon so you don’t need to go through any ‘carb loading’ phases, a healthy portion of potatoes, rice, oats and other such carbohydrate sources within your main meals should be more than sufficient to keep the body primed for performance.

On the match day it-self don’t stray too far from the norm. If you usually have an omelette for breakfast, stick with that. There is no need to side step a winning formula and pull the body, and mind, out of a routine it is used to.

If you’re used to having a high protein, highly satisfying breakfast then turn around and have a bowl of wheatbix because you think you should be adding more carbs to your day you reduce the satiety levels of the meal and will more than likely leave yourself feeling hungrier quicker, thus throwing you out of sync further away from what should help you get the most from your body.

The make-up of the final pre-match meal will be down to how you as an individual react to different foods. If I go over the top with carbs it makes me feel sluggish, but others can shovel all the pasta in the world into them and it’ll make them feel like they can go on for hours. This is where you use your challenge games to experiment and find out what works best for you.

For example, measure 100 grams of porridge, top off with your usual nuts, seeds and berries and see how you feel with that. Did you feel as if you had lots of energy? Not enough energy? Sluggish?

Depending on how you feel you increase or decrease the amount of carbs you take in the final pre-match meal until you find the optimal amount of ‘top-up’ fuel you need to perform at your very best!

On top of the solids that go in to fuelling, I can’t overstate the important of hydration levels. One litre for every 25kg of bodyweight on an average day, with an added litre or so on training days to allow for maximum performance levels.

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