It’s well-known that many athletes, especially women athletes and those participating in sports with an aesthetic component, can be chronically energy deficient. A new study suggests that professional cheerleaders also struggle to maintain an optimal balance between energy consumed and energy burned during exercise.
The Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise published the finding, led by researchers at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health and Rollins School of Public Health. The results showed that some study participants had hourly energy balance deficits that were significantly below their estimated energy needs during a typical training day.
“An offensive lineman doesn’t have to worry about what he looks like but appearance matters for professional cheerleaders, and that may affect their food choices,” says Moriah Bellissimo, first author of the study and a graduate student at Rollins. “Some of our study participants reported really low caloric intakes for the amount of physical training they do. Those with the lowest caloric intakes were not eating enough to maintain an optimal body composition of lean mass compared to fat for high-performance athletics.”
“It is not just how much you eat and what you eat but when you eat it that matters,” adds senior author Dan Benardot, professor of practice at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health.
Benardot, who is also an emeritus professor of nutrition at Georgia State University, is an expert in the interrelationship between energy intake, body composition and within-day energy balance, and has worked as a team nutritionist for Olympians and professional athletes.
“The body works in real time,” Benardot says. “If you’re not eating enough and not often enough to avoid low blood sugar and high cortisol, your body adapts to this negative energy balance. Your brain will direct the body to find more energy by breaking down muscle mass to satisfy the need for energy. It sets you up for a downward spiral where you continually have to eat less and less to keep from gaining weight.”
The problem is particularly acute for athletes, especially female athletes and those in aesthetic sports, who deplete lean muscle mass at a faster rate than less active people because of the exercise-associated severe energy balance deficit they achieve. The researchers wanted to investigate whether professional cheerleaders, who may train four hours a day practicing dance routines, faced a similar challenge for real-time energy balance as some other female athletes in aesthetic sports.
“I have a vested interest in human performance and nutrition from a personal standpoint,” says Bellissimo, who was a collegiate athlete for five years before entering the Rollins PhD program for Nutrition and Health Science. “I know that how you are eating makes a difference in how you perform.”
Bellissimo says it was challenging to maintain a proper nutritional balance when she was an undergraduate and master’s student, while also competing in Division I volleyball tournaments. She notes that professional cheerleaders often work full-time jobs on top of training and performing and may find it especially challenging to carefully strategize all of their nutritional needs.
For the current study, the researchers conducted 24-hour dietary and activity surveys with professional cheerleaders during an active training period — including an hour-by-hour assessment of what and how much they ate, and hourly energy expenditures throughout the day. They inputted the data into a software tool called NutriTiming®, developed by Benardot, to calculate each participants’ hourly energy balance — and whether they were exercising at a calorie surplus or deficit.
For female athletes, previous research has shown that sustaining an energy balance of plus or minus 300 calories throughout the day is beneficial to avoid the lean tissue breakdown associated with larger energy deficits.
The body mass and body composition of the study participants was also measured, using a bioelectrical impedance analyzer — which painlessly assesses the density of biological tissue.
The results showed that those participants who spent fewer hours in a negative energy balance had a lower, more optimal, percentage of body fat and those who spent more time within the plus-or-minus zone of 300 calories also had a lower percentage of body fat.
The cheerleader study was small and of short duration, but the finding is consistent with other research on female athletes and other populations, Benardot says.
“Athletes expend energy rapidly,” he adds. “They need to eat frequently, just not too much at a time, so their bodies have enough fuel to burn as they need it.”
It is important to study the nutritional needs of people involved in competitive sports and other intensive exercise, both to help them perform at their maximum level and to maintain their health, Bellissimo says. “Research has shown that chronic energy balance deficits in athletes can lead to hormonal imbalances, and that can have long-term health implications,” she says.
Additional authors of the study include Ashley Licata, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Anita Nucci and Walt Thompson, from Georgia State University.
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