Journal Article Summary - AFLW Diet Intake in Preseason

With the recent introduction of AFLW, more and more research is being conducted into female athlete's participating in elite ball sports. A recent journal article published in JSAMS looked at the baseline dietary intake data which may help team dieticians and scientists working with AFLW players. They highlighted that AFLW players are not quite meeting the adequate nutritional requirements for the demands of the game. Particularly it is important to periodise nutrition with training demands, which is currently not implemented as well as it could be. One particular difficulty is that females have vastly different nutritional demands to their male counterparts and due to the small amount of current research in this area, dieticians are still finding the most effective nutritional strategies for their players. It was also found here was no difference in the players energy intake on main training days, light training days and recovery days and possibly this energy intake is too low for the demands the women are placed under during a training session (~1900kcal/day) considering how active they are. Many players were not meeting the daily recommendations of carbohydrates, iron and calcium either, which is concerning as iron and calcium are particularly important for females, in particular elite athlete females.

While this study does illuminate that AFLW teams need to work towards better nutritional strategies based on this data, the sample size was only 23 players from one team and only 3 days of data was collected. It would be beneficial to have more longitudinal studies to investigate longer term fluctuations in nutrition of these players.

Jenner, S., Devlin, B., Forsyth, A., & Belski, R. (2019). Dietary intakes of professional Australian football league women’s (AFLW) athletes during a preseason training week. Journal Of Science And Medicine In Sport, 22(11), 1266-1271. doi: 10.1016/j.jsams.2019.06.014