It's a hard knock life: The beach volleyball diet

For the casual fan, beach volleyball is an immensely entertaining fast paced game featuring amazing athletic ability.  To the untrained eye, it may seem like the toughest part of the game is all the physical training that gets put into it to compete at a high level.  And then you get home, starved for anything to fill the bottomless pit that is your stomach.  If you aren't trying to eat everything in site after a long day of playing, then you aren't trying hard enough.

Of all of the tuck jumps, all of the sprints, all of the wall sits, plyos, and crunches, nothing is as tough as maintaining a healthy diet as a beach volleyball player in my opinion.  Beach volleyball offers a perfect storm of conditions that leads to extremely high amounts of calories burned.

1) You have high temperature conditions and direct exposure to the sun.
2) Added resistance, in the form of sand, inhibiting your every move.
3) Short bursts of explosive movements and sprints

Put it all together and you are burning roughly 1000-1200 calories in 2 hours of game play.  For an average day of 6 games at about 20 minutes a game would give you this number if you are in the 150 lb to 170 lb range.  If you weigh more, and play longer, it won't be rare to exceed 2000 or even 3000 calories in one day.  I also bike to and from the beach, a 20 mile total, (with about 15-20 lbs of gear on my back) each time I play, with a round trip time of roughly an hour and a half.  That round trip too burns around 1000 calories. as I usually bike at a feverish pace, not only as a warm up as I go to the beach but also so that I can get ahead of the oblivious motorists and keep them aware to watch for bicyclists like myself.

Here are some of the sources I checked with to estimate how many calorie you burn while playing.
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/calories_burned.asp
http://calories-burned.findthedata.org/q/562/30/How-many-calories-do-you-burn-Volleyball-beach
http://www.healthdiscovery.net/links/calculators/calorie_calculator.htm
http://www.livestrong.com/article/449512-how-many-calories-are-lost-in-volleyball/

At the end of the day my body could be running a tab upwards of 4000 calories burned (it is definitely not out of the ordinary for me to spend 5, 6, or even 7+ hours at the beach, granted that not every minute spent was actually playing.  Some time is spent waiting for the next game, as well as breaks in between).  So when you put it in those terms, eating multiple burritos, boxes of cereal, bags of chips, and tons of fruit juices may seem totally justified, but as my impeccable youth has worn off, I have heeded the advice that has been spat at me for years and years:  You can easily waste all the effort you put into a workout if you don't eat right.

The problem with "eating right" is that the FDA, and the major food corporations (as well as any other major corporation that contributes to the pollution of the environment of the food we eat), are making it increasingly difficult to just grab items off the shelf without having to look multiple times at the nutrition label and ingredients list.  Additives, added "natural" and artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and the ever present risk of GMO's, make a healthy diet look like trying to walk through a mine field with a blindfold on.  So you must do your own research, look up ingredients, ask the Google machine, "what are the benefits of _____", "what are the health risks of _______", "what are healthy alternatives to ________".  As we now live in a world of information, ignorance has increasingly become a choice.

I have finally started (and trust me I'm only at the beginning of this transformation), my new path to an improved diet.  My recommendations for you would be to start small.  Start with the 1 or 2 most unhealthy things you consume off the top of your head without having to do any research.  We all have our vices, and the uber-rich landscape of sugar filled products should give you plenty to pick from whether it be cookies, ice cream, pop (or for those of you who refer to it as "soda"), candy, or "snacky" foods, just cut them out cold turkey.

After that, do your research.  Find the next 1 or 2 worst items in your diet that you probably didn't think were that bad.  A friend recently posted this on facebook, and it is a great read that should not only enlighten but it also gives good recommendations for alternatives.

8 Foods The People Think Are Healthy (But Aren't)

As I like to say in reference to my training, "You gotta break down to build up".  So now that you've cut back, what are you going to replace those foods with?  Believe it or not this is the easy part.  Well, picking what foods to insert into your diet that is.  You already know what you should be eating.  You know that section of the store you've been ignoring, the vegetables?  Yeah, there's your answer.  Becoming a recently converted vegetarian about a year ago, has been a huge boost to my health.  I now look at it not so much as "not eating meat", but simply "eating vegetables".  Between meat and carbs, the average American diet probably only has room for about 5-10% vegetables, but adding this you diet will fuel you body with natural sugars and fiber, antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, vitamins and amino acids for recovery, as well as protein.  That's right, there's protein in vegetables, all be it lower amounts that is often "incomplete", but it comes fat and cholesterol free.

Now back to the dilema.  After burning so many calories, how do we even come close to breaking even, or just under without eating junk food?  Well the first few hours after a workout are the most important ones.  This is when you are most vulnerable, on the verge of passing out, willing to fight a small child for an ice cream cone if it were the last one available.  Not only that but I've found in the following article that eating carbs after a workout interferes with you body's ability to burn fat and produce its own natural HGH.

Post-Workout Foods That Promote Slimness

Here is another great share I found on facebook that I'll plan to use to my advantage post workouts and playing, to stave off rabid hunger.

After all hunger is simply the transmission of your brain telling you that you need to eat because the volume within your stomach has been unoccupied for a long time.  Fill it up, and your brain shuts up.

Still we need to keep on muscle while keeping fat to a minimum.  So let me introduce you to your new best friends:  quinoa and chia seeds.  They are similar to rice or other grains but are complete proteins that also expand when ingested.  Couscous also contains protein but isn't complete so you will need to fill in the gaps of the amino acids you are missing, but is an easy to make cheap alternative.

I'm sure that you thought this was going to be just another health rant, but this is really just the beginning of having a well rounded diet to help give you the most bang for your buck when you workout or play.  You still need to get essential fatty acids (or EFA's), drink plenty of water, get lots of magnesium as it helps fuel over 300 bodily processes every day it it becomes depleted as you take in more vitamin D (which you get plenty of from the sun), as well as adequate rest for your tired body.  Once you do this on a consistent basis, only then are you going to start looking like a "freak athlete" on the beach, but this road to greatness is filled with lots of temptation and years of poor eating habits haven't made it any easier.


Final note:  If you ever need help assembling your diet, I highly recommend using this site...

http://nutritiondata.self.com/

It gives you all the info you need with great graphical visualizations to help you comprehend the effectiveness or lack thereof for different foods, and how you can fix that.