The learning process of candidate dieticians by offering nutritional support for amateur bicyclists

Abstract

There are many reports which detail how nutritionists have helped athletes become more aware of nutrition thus improving their performance. Still few reports exist on how the nutritionists themselves have changed while providing athletes with nutritional guidance. The purpose of this study was to observe candidate dietician nutrition instruction for Japanese amateur bicyclists during a one month time period. Ultimately our goal was to look at improvements in our material support for nutritional guidance.

We observed three candidate dieticians. During this study they participated in an extracurricular activity to support blog-based nutrition instruction with a nutritional value calculation and nutritional advice for two amateur cyclists. This instruction had two steps; the first half was basic nutrition education and the latter half was applied nutrition education. We took notes of impression about each instruction. These notes were analyzed with “KJ” methods, which were applied separately to the first half and latter half of the instructions.

The top categories of both the first and second half instruction included a nutritional value calculation, nutritional advice, and the relationship with the subject athletes. The sub categories, however, showed a substantial difference between both instructions, especially in relationship to the athletes. During the first half of the instruction candidate dieticians felt anxious about their relationship with athletes, whereas during the latter half instruction they got to know more about athletes and encouraged them. In conclusion, our results indicated not only that candidate dieticians could improve their techniques of nutritional value calculation and nutritional advice by gaining a lot of experience, but also that they could ease their anxiety of athletes and develop a better relationship with them by going to their races.