Football is a popular sports branch with a big following in the world, including Indonesia. Unfortunately, Indonesia is still poor in making achievements in the sports. Data from FIFA 2015 ranked Indonesia at the 165th internationally and 33rd in Asia. Even today the nation has not been able to go through to the World Cup ranks.
Lecturer in Nutrition Department of Faculty of Medicine UGM, Mirza Hapsari Sakti Titis P, S.Gz., RD, MPH., said there were various factors affecting one to make achievements, one of those is nutrition intake. But, nutrition as one element that affects one’s performance is often being ignored by athletes, coaches, or policy stakeholders in Indonesia. Nutrition related issues are still found among Indonesian athletes, in the form of anthropometry, biochemical, clinical, and food intake, so continual improvement needs to be done.
“Various nutrition issues have happened that led to non-optimum performance of athletes, thus affecting their achievement,” she said on Tuesday (23/5) during her doctoral programme promotion at Faculty of Medicine UGM.
Defending her dissertation titled Effectivity of Nutrition Management for Athletes toward Nutrition Status Improvement as a Support to Performance, Mirza described that the right and sustainable nutrition therapy along with continual monitoring and evaluation will become the key to success to nutrition management. With this, best result can be achieved in the form of sustained athlete’s performance. Monitoring and education for behaviour change to alter the diet needs to be done so that the athlete can independently meet the right nutrition intake.
The research done on as many as 126 athletes at Athletes Dorm of Ragunan, Sports Ministry, and SSB ASIFA Malang from January - June 2016 resulted that nutrition service monitoring for three months can improve height, ectomorph, and frequency of heart beat. But the nutrition program that is given has not effectively improved fluid intake. This is because there is not special intervention being made to meet fluid intake in the research groups.
Mirza mentioned that effective nutrition programme would improve all aspects of anthropometry, such as height, weight, mass of muscles, fat percentage, endomorph, and ectomorph, somatotype, hydration status, food and fluid intake.
“So, monitoring of nutrition for athletes needs to be done by policy stakeholders,” she said.