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Carbohydrate for Endurance Athletes in Competition: Assessing Knowledge and Nutritional Practices
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Dissertation
Carbohydrate for Endurance Athletes in Competition: Assessing Knowledge and Nutritional Practices
2021
Overview
A key role of a practicing sports dietitian working with competitive endurance athletes is to translate complex information, educate and support athletes to make nutritional changes to their dietary behaviour for improved performance outcomes. Current carbohydrate (CHO) guidelines based upon a wealth of literature demonstrate clear performance benefits when endurance athletes compete with optimal CHO availability. Despite this strong scientific evidence and sports nutrition guidelines recommending CHO intakes to enhance endurance sports performance, a clear mismatch still exists between current guidelines and practice amongst endurance athletes as evidenced in the Literature Review (Chapter 2). With this in mind, the aim of this Professional Doctorate thesis was to investigate whether athletes fail to consume optimal CHO in competition because they were unaware and lack knowledge of the current CHO guidelines, have difficulties with translating knowledge into practice, have personal beliefs or are exposed to external factors which influence their dietary intake within competition.To systematically assess CHO knowledge, we first needed to develop a tool and methodology to do so. Thus, the aim of Study 1 (Chapter 3) was to develop and validate a CHO specific nutrition knowledge assessment tool, based upon contemporary carbohydrate guidelines. The Carbohydrate for Endurance Athletes in Competition Questionnaire (CEAC-Q) consists of 25 questions divided into 5 subsections: CHO metabolism, loading, pre-race meal, during race and recovery with each subsection worth 20 points resulting in a total maximum possible score of 100. A between-groups analysis of variance assessed construct validity between the general population (GenP; n = 67), endurance athletes (EA; n = 145), and registered sports dietitians/nutritionists (SDN; n = 60) with expected increasing levels of knowledge respectively. As expected, there was increasing level of knowledge between populations with a significant difference in CEAC-Q total and subsection scores (mean ±SD) observed between all pairwise comparisons; GenP (17 ±20 %, 3 ±5), EA (46 ±19 %, 9 ±5) and SDN (76 ±10 %, p = < 0.001, 15 ±4 %, p = 0.001), respectively. The CEAC-Q took athletes an average 10:36 ±07:45 minutes to complete online. These data demonstrate that CEAC-Q is a new psychometrically valid, practical and time-efficient tool for practitioners to assess athletes’knowledge of CHO for competition in less than 10 minutes, allowing for quick and accurate identification of knowledge gaps to nutrition strategies to optimise performance.Having developed a suitable CHO knowledge assessment tool in Study 1 (Chapter 3), the aim of Study 2 (Chapter 4) was to assess current knowledge levels and identify knowledge gaps on an international cohort of EA. The CEAC-Q was completed online by EA (n = 1016) actively competing in endurance sporting events (cycling, triathlon and running) with mean CEAC-Q total and subsection scores of 50 ±20% and 10 ±5, respectively. Multiple regression determined that years of competitive experience, competitive level and a sports nutritionist influence were positively related to CEAC-Q scores. Clear knowledge gaps transpired where correct knowledge of current CHO guidelines was shown by 28% (n = 284) for CHO loading, 45% (n = 457) for the pre-competition meal, 48% (n = 487) for during competition lasting >2.5 h and 29% (n = 296) for post-competition recovery. The CEAC-Q identified common gaps in knowledge of CHO guidelines that require further education that may partially explain why athletes fail to meet them within competition.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
9798358408920
