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Healthy Smoothie Recipes

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We often get asked are smoothies healthy?

Smoothies are a big part of the health and fitness routine of top sportsmen and women for good reason. They enable your body to absorb ingredients quickly in abundance to give your body the boost it needs.

We have assessed the top 100 smoothies specifically for football professionals and created a top list to save you researching.

CONTENTS

Healthy Smoothies For Footballers

Pre Training Energy smoothie
Weight Loss & Shape Up smoothie
Injury Prevention smoothie
Mental Strength Smoothie
Muscle performance smoothie
Pushing through tiredness smoothie

Enhance your football fitness by arming your body with the right food at the right time with out recommended healthy smoothie recipes. At Player Scout we have finalised a list of ten smoothie recipes to work around your football training.

Pre-training Energy – Banana & Walnut Booster Smoothie

When to drink:Give your body a boost of energy just before football training or a match with this energising banana and walnut smoothie.

Research shows that eating a banana before or during a workout has just as much benefit as turning up with a sports specific drink such as a protein shake, but is fresh and a lot cheaper.
Bananas have a range of beneficial nutrients such as antioxidants and potassium, and the added walnuts are a super food stacked with protein and healthy-fats for burning calories without running your body low on fuel.

To make:

1 large banana
1/3 cup of walnut pieces
2 cups skimmed milk
1 tablespoon honey
1/4 tablespoon vanilla extract

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 227 calories

Weight Loss & Shape Up – Cocoa & Oat Slimdown Smoothie

When to drink: Help your body loss excess weight to gain the physical physique of a professional footballer. Dairy such as milk helps to regulate appetite, and its protein qualities enable us to build up muscle. A 4 month study carried out in Canada by nutritionists discovered that if a person exercised regularly (such as football training and matches) and also consumed a diet high in dairy that was calorie restricted , they would lose fat and gain 1 ½ lbs in lean body mass, making the Cocoa & Oat captain a force to be reckoned with helping footballers lose weight and prepare their bodies with enough of the right fuel to grow muscles used I training.

To make:

1 small frozen banana sliced and frozen
3/4 cup skimmed milk
1/2 cup (125 mL) plain low-fat yogurt
1/4 cup breakfast oats
1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
A sprinkle of ground cinnamon

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 350 calories

Preventing illness – Vitamin C Blasted Baller Smoothie

When to drink: Drink once a day. This immune system boosting vitamin C concentrated smoothie will protect your body over the winter months of the football season, enabling you to perform at your optimum without being effected by common colds and winter bugs. Packed with fruits high in vitamin C, this smoothie is also very refreshing. Vitamin C helps protect our cells and keep them healthy, and increases our production of collagen. Collagen helps maintain healthy connective tissues thus supporting the structure of tissues and organs including the skin, bones and blood vessels. As vitamin C also increases our ability to absorb iron, it works well with the Ultimate Green Liver Detox for footballers.

To make:

1 grapefruit (peeled and seeded)
1 cup pineapple chunks
1 cup strawberries
1/2 cup low-fat Greek yogurt

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 175 calories

Mental strength – Blueberry & Avocado Brain Food Smoothie

When to drink:Drink once a day. Being a footballer requires you to overcome mental barriers and push through feelings of pressure and be able to focus you mind. This takes a lot of discipline and practise, but is also very reliant on the foods you eat. Drink this smoothie regularly to sharpen your mind and create mental wellness that enables you to challenge mental barriers. Packed with the super food blueberries, this smoothie is great brain food, and also doubles up to look after your heart since blueberries and avocados both contain natural fats that reduce cholesterol and improve cardio health.

To make:
1/2 ripe avocado (peeled and pitted)
1 cups blueberries
Juice from 1/4 lime
1 cups low-fat greek yogurt
1/2 cup skimmed milk

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 285 calories

Optimum Muscle Performance – Built like an Ox Smoothie

When to drink: Daily breakfast for days when you are training and playing. If you are looking for optimum muscle performance, then look no further than the Popeye the Payer Man smoothie. It’s commonly known that spinach will keep you strong, but did you know researchers in Sweden discovered that inorganic nitrate (which spinach is stacked with) enables your muscles to use less oxygen, which improves muscle performance.

To make:

2 big handfuls of fresh spinach
2 frozen bananas
1 cup apple juice
1 sprig of fresh mint

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 200 calories

Pushing through tiredness and pain barriers – Beetroot & Strawberry Stamina Smoothie

When to drink: During weeks of heavy training when your body is tired and you need energy to keep up your performance. Football training can be demanding. 1v1’s, drills, free kicks, penalty strikes all take their toll on your body, and it’s important that your body is able to cope with the level of training and matches required of you. This is when you’re your Beetroot & Strawberry Stamina smoothie will come in really handy. This smoothie will give you that extra push through training due to the beetroot which is high in nitrates and helps keep you fuelled and moving. Studies have even found that nitrates improve how our bodies use oxygen and enables you to exercise by up to 16% more just by having your body filled with high levels of nitrates from foods like beetroot.

To make:

6 beetroot
2 cups coconut water
2 cups strawberries
1 whole lime juiced

Nutritional benefit: Makes 2 servings. Each serving has 145 calories

Liver Detox – Spinach Hydration Smoothie

Being alert and agile on the football pitch can make a footballers career. Agility of the mind and body are critical in adjusting your style of play and direction at a fraction of a seconds notice. Whilst you can train to improve and work on your agility by teaching your mind to help you physically respond in certain game situations at lightening speed, this can be enhanced by preparing your vital organs, so that they function at optimal levels.

This is where the ultimate liver detox smoothie for football fitness comes into action.

This tonic will work directly on your organs and digestive system to improve their functionality, which in turn will have a direct impact on your agility for football.

Don’t be fooled by other green smoothies on health and fitness sites. Most of them focus on the benefit of giving you iron and healthy energy, whilst this recipes aims to detox your liver. By doing this your body will improve in your agility performance since your internal organs will be functioning at optimum levels of responsiveness.

It is also not a smoothie to drink in one sitting. You make this recipe as a tonic green water and drink it throughout the morning up until lunch time in place of water. It’s really cheap to make too so won’t leave your pocket short of change.

To make:

1 cup fresh spinach
6 cups of water
1/4 cucumber
2 sprigs of fresh mint
1 large slice of lemon without the rind

6 Tips for improving your Smoothie

Freeze chopped banana – Many smoothies for football include bananas for the potassium benefits. Rather than add them from fresh, adding frozen banana keeps your smoothie cool and thick
Always add ice as the last ingredient. This enables you to fully blend your other ingredients without completely crushing up all the ice, and by adding ice last prevents the ice from melting too quickly and diluting your smoothie. Some smoothie makers have settings just for crushing ice.
Using frozen fruit such as summer fruits and berries are cheaper to buy than fresh fruit, last longer and are easy to portion out without wasting any ingredients. Plus they help keep your smoothie cool to drink, perfect for training.
Choose fruits that are in season – This will also save you money if you wish to buy fresh fruit. During the summer choose berries like strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, and in the autumn choose fruit like apples, blackberries and plums.
Add your protein powder to your smoothie to get an extra boost of nutrition.
Add a little water – With all smoothies, if you add around a half cup of water to your ingredients, you can thin out the thickness making it easier to drink, and reducing the amount of sugar in each glass. This is because all fruit contains natural sugars.