Nutrition for AthletesProper nutrition is an essential part of living a healthy life; this is even truer when considering nutrition for athletes. Athletes who are more active or are engaged in a sport need to have a well-balanced diet. Including the proper nutrition that the body needs will help you stay healthy and energized. Today, obtaining proper nutrition for an athlete is not difficult to achieve; with the help of scientists and nutritionists, there is a wide variety of nutrition plans and nutrition programs to choose from. Without the adequate nutrition, athletes can develop various diseases, and also run the risk of poor performance on the field, court or athletic event.Why is proper nutrition for athletes important?The main reason why athletes should find a nutrition program is so that they can stay healthy and prevent injuries. Recent research reports that injuries are more prevalent during the last 20-30 minutes of a game; this is because during this time the body is more fatigued and the mind becomes less concentrated. A healthy diet can help athletes build endurance not only physically, but mentally as well. Staying focused and energized throughout a game or an event can help prevent injuries.Another important reason to obtain proper nutrition is to enhance your overall performance. Despite of all the training and skills received, the only way for an athlete to reach his or her full potential is by nourishing and fueling the body. By eating healthy meals full of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, athletes can provide their body with the adequate energy source to perform well.What should healthy nutrition for athletes include?Athletes should consider consuming a healthy diet that includes the following;Carbohydrates – Since they provide up to 50% of the energy source, carbohydrates should definitely be on top of the nutrition plan list. The more active a person is the more carbohydrates the body will use. Including proper amounts of carbohydrates in your diet will aid in your performance and strength.Water – As most know, water is necessary for life. Being well-hydrated is crucial for all human beings especially athletes. Becoming even slightly dehydrated can be extremely dangerous while you’re active. Water is needed to regulate your body temperature and protect your health.Fats – Like carbohydrates, fats are also a good source of energy. While fat is typically only used after one hour of performance, an adequate amount of fat should be included in an athlete’s diet. Lack of fat consumption can highly affect your physical activity.Protein – Once carbohydrates and fats have been used, the body will search for proteins as an alternative energy source. When extra protein is consumed, the body stores it as fat and uses it when energy is necessary.Vitamins & Minerals – Riboflavin, thiamin, and niacin are three important vitamins that should be included in an athlete’s nutritional regimen. These vitamins are required in order for the body to produce energy.How can you obtain the proper nutrition?Most people don’t have the time or patience to build their own nutrition plan. That is why special nutrition programs for athletes have been developed. These nutrition plans are made especially to help athletes improve their performance as well as their overall health. Athletes should always be careful to provide their body with the nutrients it needs to succeed.
How You Can Successfully Lose Weight with the Keto Diet
The keto diet has gained popularity in recent years as a way to lose weight and improve health. As with any diet, it can be challenging to stick with long term and many people find it difficult to achieve their goals because of the restrictive nature of the keto diet. If you are considering trying this diet or are already doing so, it may be helpful to know what changes you can make to maximize your chances of success with the keto diet and how to maintain it in the long term.
Why Ketogenic Diets Work?
Ketogenic diets work by inducing a state of ketosis, which is a metabolic process that occurs when your body isn’t getting enough carbohydrates from food. When your body enters ketosis, it burns fat for energy instead of carbohydrates. In fact, studies show that those who adhere to ketogenic diets lose about four times more weight than those who follow low-fat diets.
What Are Macros, and Why They Matter?
Macros, short for macronutrients, are nutrients that your body needs to function properly. For example, carbohydrates are a macronutrient, because our bodies need them to provide energy. There are three main types of macro: carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Setting Up Your Keto Diet
The keto diet is a very low-carb, moderate protein, and high-fat diet that causes your body to burn fat rather than carbs as its primary energy source. The aim of the keto diet is to force your body into ketosis, a state where you are able to burn fat for energy efficiently. Ketosis has been shown in studies to cause weight loss around two times more than other diets.
Staying on Track While Losing Weight
One of the most common mistakes people make while trying to lose weight is not sticking to their diet or exercise routine. This is one of the reasons why many people have difficulty losing weight. In order to avoid making this mistake, it is important that you set specific goals for yourself and create a plan for following them.
Common Misconceptions of Keto Diets
Keto diets have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years because they have been proven to be more effective in weight loss than other types of diets. However, there are still some misconceptions about keto diets that need to be addressed.
They are too hard to follow: This is definitely one of the most common misconceptions about keto diets, but this couldn’t be any further from the truth.
What Supplements Should I Take When Starting A Ketogenic Diet
The ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that forces your body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates for energy. This process produces ketones, which are substances that help in the production of energy. This can lead to many weight loss benefits such as better blood sugar control, reduced hunger and increased levels of energy. To make sure you are getting all of these benefits it is important to take supplements.
Macros, short for macronutrients, are nutrients that your body needs to function properly. For example, carbohydrates are a macronutrient, because our bodies need them to provide energy. There are three main types of macro: carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.