Injury Nutrition for Athletes
After the disappointment of getting injured as an athlete, nutrition is often one of the last things on your mind.
As a result, at best, you end up delaying your recovery process.
At worst, you let the wheels fall off, and come back to sport feeling so out of shape that you have to spend an extra month or two just to get back to where you were before the injury.
Even if you do pay attention to nutrition as part of your rehab process, it can be easy to jump straight to specific supplements, “superfoods”, and other finer details.
These can of course play a part, but in truth, most of the benefit you’ll get from addressing your nutrition in this time will come from doing the fundamentals well.
In this article, I’ll highlight how to implement these fundamentals when you’re injured, and then I’ll go into the more specific elements to consider based on the type of injury.
The Fundamentals
1. Get Your Calorie Intake Right
A lot of athletes respond to injury by accidentally or purposely under-eating.
And it makes sense.
You’re training less, so you require less energy intake for that.
You might even be less hungry.
And you probably also are trying to avoid unnecessary weight-gain.
The issue here, however, is that the body requires energy to support the healing process.
You’ll also want to be providing enough energy to support your rehab-based training, and may even have extra energy needs if you’re on crutches or generally having to get about in more energy-intensive ways.
On the flip-side, “I need to eat as much as possible to recover” or even “I’ll eat as much as I want and get back on track when I’m back training” can lead to a surplus that’s far beyond what you need for recovery.
This can lead to unnecessary weight-gain, and coming back to sport having to focus on getting your body composition right, rather than being able to focus on getting back to training well and competing.
For these reasons, and to keep it simple, I generally recommend aiming to eat in a way that allows you to maintain bodyweight on a week-to-week basis.
That way, you know you’re not compromising injury recovery by being in an energy deficit, but also can be confident that you’re not gaining unnecessary bodyweight.
There are some cases where injury can be seen as an opportunity to address your body composition goals, but generally, I’d recommend avoiding this in the early stages of recovery and with more serious injuries.
It also may be the case that a focus on maintaining bodyweight can lead to some athletes under-eating, in which case, it may be better to disregard focussing on bodyweight, and instead focus on the elements to come.
2. Eat Enough Protein
Protein provides the amino acids required for tissue repair.
This not only includes muscle tissue, but also joint and bone tissue.
It also helps you preserve muscle mass when your training is reduced by the injury.
A useful target for most injured athletes is to aim for around 2g of protein per kg bodyweight per day.
Aiming for that daily target is most important, but it may also be beneficial to focus on distributing it evenly across 3-5 servings of around 25-40g throughout the day, maximising the daily number of opportunities to ‘spike’ muscle protein synthesis.
Examples of roughly 25-40g include:
4 eggs
A chicken breast
200g of Greek yoghurt, with optional extra whey protein.
150g of beef mince
A salmon fillet
3. Focus on Nutrient-Dense and High-Fibre Foods
With a focus on calories and macros, things like fruit, vegetables, and fibre-rich foods often get lost.
In speaking with athletes, I often find this is partly due to not actually knowing why they’re important.
Usually they’re aware of the fact that these things keep you fuller and are ‘healthy’, but what often gets missed is that your body needs vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients to support things like, immune function, collagen formation, bone remodelling, inflammation control, and energy production.
Fibre, particularly given its effects on gut health, also assists in optimising these processes, with the additional benefits of helping with appetite control, digestive health, and the absorption of these beneficial nutrients.
As you can imagine, all of these are crucial to your recovery process.
The easiest way to cover this without overcomplicating it is to aim to 5-10 portions of fruit, veg, and fibre sources per day, and/or aiming for 25-40g of fibre per day.
Finally for this section, there is some research suggesting omega-3 fatty acids can help modulate inflammation and support some aspects related to recovery (e.g. soreness, muscle protein synthesis sensitivity, and muscle function).
This suggests that adding in some oily fish or supplementing with fish oils could be beneficial in the context of injury recovery.
4. Stay Hydrated
Dehydration can lead to reduced blood flow, in this case to the injured area.
That can mean less nutrient supply to the area, and therefore potentially slower healing.
It can also mean lower training quality in our rehab sessions, and poorer recovery off the back of them.
Additionally, continued dehydration could also lead to poorer sleep, digestion, and mood.
To keep it simple, I often advise athletes to simply focus on “drinking to thirst”, whilst potentially adding in some extra fluids around training sessions.
5. Keep Alcohol Intake in Check
Alcohol can interfere with recovery in a few simple ways.
It can reduce sleep quality, make it harder to stick to your nutrition plan, and leave you less consistent with rehab.
It may also increase inflammation and impair muscle protein synthesis, which can make tissue repair slower.
Of course, this depends on how much and how often you’re drinking.
Heavier intakes and binge drinking are much more likely to be an issue, especially if alcohol is close to rehab sessions and/or it disrupts sleep and appetite.
In practice, this “knock-on” effect (worse sleep, poorer food choices, missed rehab) is often a bigger issue than any single direct physiological mechanism on its own.
To keep it simple, if you’re really aiming to prioritise your rehab process, keeping alcohol to a minimum is ideal, though small amounts infrequently are not likely to make a big difference in the big picture.
Injury-Specific Nutrition
1. Bone Injuries
With bone injuries like fractures and stress fractures, our goal is to support the building and remodelling of new bone tissue.
That process is energy- and nutrient-intensive, which means, as previously mentioned, aggressively cutting calories because you’re not training can backfire by limiting the raw materials your body needs to do the job.
In practice, keeping the overall goal as “maintain bodyweight” for most athletes is going to be optimal for this, especially in the early stages of recovery, while putting emphasis on the quality of the diet.
To cover the previously-mentioned basics, keep protein high, stay hydrated, hit your fruit/veg and fibre targets, and manage alcohol intake.
Then in terms of bone injury-specific advice, there are some key micronutrients that are worth focussing on to support bone metabolism.
The big ones to pay attention to are calcium and vitamin D.
Calcium provides the structural mineral for bone, while vitamin D helps with absorption and utilisation.
Other nutrients also support bone repair (e.g. protein, vitamin K, magnesium, vitamin C, zinc, and iron), but calcium and vitamin D are the key starting points.
For calcium, you can include 2-3 servings per day of high-calcium foods (e.g. milk, yoghurt, cheese, fortified plant milks, canned fish with bones, leafy greens) aiming for ~1,000 mg of calcium per day for most adults, which can also be helped through supplementation.
For vitamin D, sunlight exposure can help, but in many locations it’s often not reliable year-round, so a supplement may be useful (e.g. ~1,000–2,000 IU per day for most people, especially in winter).
2. Joint Injuries
Joint, tendon, and ligament injuries tend to be less about “building new tissue from scratch” and more about restoring the quality and capacity of collagen-based connective tissue.
That usually means your rehab training plan becomes the main focus, providing the signal for adaptation, and nutrition becomes the support that determines how well you respond to it.
Again, providing adequate energy and keeping protein intake high remain priorities, as does managing overall health and inflammation through eating plenty of fruit, veg, fibre, and things like omega-3 fatty acids.
Then, when it comes to getting specific with joint injury-nutrition, it’s worth considering supplementing with a collagen supplement.
Collagen is rich in the specific amino acids that support joint tissue synthesis (particularly glycine and proline).
There’s some evidence that pairing collagen with vitamin C before rehab may support collagen synthesis.
A simple, practical approach is 10-15g collagen plus a vitamin C source (e.g. orange juice, kiwi, berries) about 30-60 minutes before a tendon/ligament rehab session.
The timing is thought to be quite important here, since blood flow to the joints is generally low, but is increased during the use of the joint, so getting the collagen in around your rehab may allow for better delivery of the amino acids.
3. Muscle Injuries
Muscle injuries usually involve a period of reduced loading, followed by a gradual rebuild of strength and capacity.
From a nutrition perspective, the goals are to firstly reduce muscle loss during the period of reduced loading, and secondly, to support the muscular repair and recovery during the rehab process.
Again, adequate energy intake is key, but protein becomes especially important.
Aiming for 2g per kg per day (or potentially slightly more) is a solid baseline, and distributing it across the day (3-5 meals of ~25-40g) gives you multiple opportunities to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.
As your rehab process starts to move more towards sport-specific training again, carbohydrate intake starts to become more important in ensuring those sessions are well-fuelled, reducing muscle protein breakdown and improving overall training quality.
This could obviously apply to all injuries, but since rehab of muscle injuries tends to look more like sport earlier than other injuries, I thought it worth mentioning here.
Supplementing with creatine monohydrate (~5g per day) is also worth considering for muscular injuries.
Some research has shown creatine supplementation can help preserve muscle mass, even in times where training load is reduced, and can also increase your ability to progress in the strength training you’re likely to be doing as part of your rehab process.
Summary
To summarise what I’ve gone through, in general I’d recommend that you:
Maintain average weekly bodyweight.
Eat 2g+ per kg of bodyweight per day, spread across 3-5 meals/snacks.
Eat 5–10 portions of fruit, veg, and other fibre sources per day and/or aim for 25–40g fibre/day.
Monitor intake of ‘junk’ foods, and consider increasing anti-inflammatory foods like omega-3s.
Drink to thirst, and add extra around rehab sessions.
Minimise alcohol intake, especially around rehab and sleep.
As rehab becomes more like training, start to look at the finer details around carbohydrate intake and fuelling sessions.
Injury-specific add-ons:
For bone injuries, focus on adequate intake of calcium and vitamin D.
For joint injuries, consider supplementing with collagen/gelatin + vitamin C 30–60 min pre-rehab.
For muscular injuries, consider supplementing with ~5g/day of creatine monohydrate.
Final Thoughts
Injury recovery is rarely about finding one magic bullet.
If you get the fundamentals right, you give your body the best chance to heal quickly, preserve strength and muscle, and support your rehab process.
Then, depending on the injury, you can layer in one or two targeted strategies to get the extra benefits, without overcomplicating it.
Article Written By Conor O’Neill
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