Currently in IB Sports, Exercise, and Health Science (SEHS), instead of taking notes, students are having fun designing their own energy bars. The bars have to be curated to enhance athletic performance in certain activities such as strength training, endurance running, and sprinting. The lab is centered around glycemic index, a ranking system of how quickly a food affects blood glucose concentrations.
This comes after these students have spent the semester studying nutrition and its applications in the field of sports. Some students chose to actually prepare their energy bars for their classmates, earning them extra credit points for the lab.
Senior Ashlyn Farnham created energy bars for endurance athletes, using oats, almond flour, banana, egg whites, peanut butter, and chocolate.
“It has a lot of the low glycemic index foods, so it’ll give you energy for a long time. They’re really high in calories and you have a lot of healthy fats and proteins as well,” said Farnham.
Juniors Courtney Urbanek and Anika Bagal also worked together to create energy bars perfect for endurance athletes before they begin their competition.
Their bars contain “peanut butter, coconut, dark chocolate chips, and a sneaky flaxseed, you can’t taste it but it’s very fibrous and helps with the low glycemic index for endurance athletes, and some orange blossom honey,” noted Urbanek and Bagal.
Other students didn’t have time to make energy bars but certainly enjoyed the creations of their classmates.
“I was gonna make rice crispy treats, but I ran out of time,” said senior Rose Renner.
Other than creating energy bars, SEHS students also recently submitted their Internal Assessments, where they designed their own experiment to see how a type of athletic performance can be influenced by a factor of their choice.
“It was really not that bad, I thought it was gonna be awful,” said Renner in regards to the IA.
The IB test is coming up quickly, taking place on May 2nd and May 3rd. Most students feel ready for the exam but acknowledge that there is a lot of content to review from this year.
IB Sports, Exercise, and Health Science will be offered again during the 2024-2025 school year, so if you’re a freshman or sophomore interested in the science behind sports, it may be a great option for you!
