Most student athletes have the same problems as any other LSU student with a full-time job.
LSU senior associate athletic trainer Shelly Mullenix said between classes, weights and practice, it’s often difficult to practice good nutrition.
“Much like the general student population, they’re also handcuffed by finances,” Mullenix said. “Some get scholarships, some don’t. For a lot of the sports they only get partial scholarships, so there’s not a lot of money either.”
Mullenix said students without much money usually turn to fast food. So she’s been enlisted by LSU’s coaches to counsel them away from Burger King and McDonald’s.
Mullenix squeezes in talks to the athletic teams in between teaching classes and her job as the football team’s athletic trainer. The time and tone of the talks depends on the season and the schedule of the teams.
“I handle the talks for all the teams,” Mullenix said. “Some coaches want them more frequently. Some do it once a year.”
Nutrition is an often overlooked part of athletics, but also one of the most important, Mullenix said.
When Mullenix speaks to an athletic team, she emphasizes the importance of planning out the day to get time to eat proper food. Time is the biggest challenge, she said.
“We want to make sure they get 400 or 500 calories at least four to six times a day,” Mullenix said. “We want to keep their energy up so they can perform well on the field and help keep their immune system strong.”
Sometimes it’s tough to get through to athletes who think they don’t need help, Mullenix said. In cases like that, the coaches often refer them to her for one-on-one talks.
“There’s a lot of athletes here that don’t consider nutrition terribly important,” Mullenix said. “They think if they look good, maybe they don’t need the help. But the truth is that everyone needs the nutrition.”
Mullenix also has athletes keep a food diary. She asks them to do a three-day recall of the foods they’ve eaten and what time they ate the food.
The nutrition aspect of being an athlete usually goes unnoticed until something negative happens, like junior offensive lineman Will Blackwell vomiting during in the Georgia game last season, or junior cornerback Patrick Peterson sitting out part of the game against North Carolina with cramps.
Then the training team gets inundated with phone calls.
“We laugh about it, but it’s more annoying than it is funny,” Mullenix said. “All these people come out of the woodwork with products that will help our athletes.”
Products wouldn’t have helped in Blackwell’s case. It wasn’t nutrition, it was nerves.
“That was his first start and his first game,” Mullenix said. “I would say that anxiety had a huge component for him. He hadn’t just come off of eating a huge meal.”
And Peterson wasn’t even cramping, Mullenix said.
“This week we’ve been getting lots of products that will help prevent cramping, when the truth is … he wasn’t really cramping,” Mullenix said. “I’m not sure where all that started or came from.”
Mullenix said you can tell when someone cramps up on the field, because the trainers will intervene and help stretch the players. That didn’t happen with Peterson.
“You can see that plain as day and there wasn’t any of that going on,” Mullenix said.
Peterson simply got fatigued, she continued.
“Basically he ran the length of the field two or three times in a fairly quick succession” Mullenix said. “The body gets taxed on top of the anxiety of being in a game.”
 
 
 
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Contact Katherine Terrell at [email protected]