Is exam stress quietly under-fuelling student-athletes?

It’s 1am. There’s a 3,000-word essay due on Friday and a cup semi-final on Saturday. Dinner was a meal deal eaten over a keyboard. Breakfast will be a coffee, if it happens at all.

Anyone who has trained while studying knows that week, whether they play in a university squad, sit A-levels at an academy, or are chasing a degree alongside a sporting career. Coaches plan pre-season down to the last sprint, and nutrition plans cover match day, recovery and the off-season. Exam season rarely gets a plan, even though it lands in the middle of the competitive calendar every year.

It should. Compared with other students, athletes report more stress from having too many responsibilities and from not getting enough sleep (Wilson & Pritchard, 2005). Their biggest pressure is time, more than the difficulty of the work (Lopes Dos Santos et al., 2020). When time runs out, food is usually the first thing to go.

What does the research say?

Stress changes what we eat

Hill et al. (2022) pooled 54 studies covering almost 120,000 adults. Under stress, people ate more unhealthy food and less healthy food. The effect was small, but exam season lasts weeks, and small daily shifts add up.

Worry about the ones eating less

“Stress eating” suggests someone working through a packet of biscuits. Barker et al. (2015) found something more useful. Tracking male university students through exams, they saw that two-thirds barely changed their diet and a couple ate far more. A larger group went the other way: they ate roughly 620 kcal less per day, including 28 g less protein.

For an athlete who is still training, a drop like that has a name. Low energy availability (LEA) means too little energy is left over, after training, to keep the body running properly. The IOC’s consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) makes clear that LEA can be unintentional, for example when intake simply fails to keep up with what training burns (Mountjoy et al., 2023). The consequences it lists include a poorer response to training, reduced concentration and a higher risk of injury. One bad week won’t cause REDs. Exam season, though, comes round at least twice a year, and under-fuelling that nobody notices is the hardest kind to fix.

Exams are a high-risk window

Hamlin et al. (2019) followed young elite university athletes across an academic year. Stress peaked around exams, while energy and sleep fell. Higher academic stress, lower mood and shorter sleep each predicted injury or illness. One study cited in Lopes Dos Santos et al.’s (2020) review found athletes were about 1.8 times more likely to be ill or injured during exam weeks.

What we don’t know yet

Nobody has yet tracked student-athletes’ diets through an exam period with performance measured alongside. The eating data comes from students in general, and the injury data from athletes. Read together, they still point one way: stress cuts intake in some people, under-fuelling blunts training and recovery, and exam weeks already leave athletes more likely to break down. Food is the one link in that chain an athlete can control.

What does this mean for the athlete?

Eat to a timetable when appetite disappears. Some students eat noticeably less during exams (Barker et al., 2015), so hunger is not a reliable guide. Put three meals and two snacks into the revision schedule as fixed points, the same way you would a lecture.

Drink it if you can’t face chewing it. Liquid options digest quickly and suit days when nerves or a chaotic timetable get in the way (Thomas et al., 2016). A pint of semi-skimmed milk gives about 20 g of protein, which sits within the 15–25 g recommended after training. Blend in a banana and oats and you have carbohydrate too, in two minutes.

Fuel the session, not the clock. When revision runs into training, have a carbohydrate-based snack one to two hours before, well inside the one-to-four-hour window recommended for pre-exercise fuel (Thomas et al., 2016). Toast with honey, a banana, rice cakes or a bowl of cereal all work. Arriving at training on an empty tank because the library ran late is where the energy gap starts.

Batch-cook before exams start. Two or three freezable meals, such as chilli, bolognese or a pasta bake, turn a proper dinner into a few minutes in the microwave. It’s usually cheaper than a takeaway, too.

Put a curfew on caffeine. Caffeine cuts total sleep by around 45 minutes, and a regular coffee should be finished at least nine hours before bed; for a pre-workout-strength dose, it’s over 13 hours (Gardiner et al., 2023). The late energy drink buys an hour of revision and charges it to your sleep, and in Hamlin’s data, shorter sleep predicted injury.

Coaches and practitioners: put exam dates in the plan. Treat exam blocks like a period of fixture congestion. Adjust the load, ask what athletes are actually eating, and watch for warning signs listed in the IOC REDs statement: more days lost to illness or injury, low mood, poor concentration and, in female athletes, missed periods (Mountjoy et al., 2023).

Exam stress won’t wreck every student-athlete’s diet. For the ones who quietly start eating less, it can mean training on empty in the very weeks they’re most likely to get ill or injured. Plan for exam season the way you would for any big fixture, and it stops catching people out.

References

Barker, M. E., Blain, R. J., & Russell, J. M. (2015). The influence of academic examinations on energy and nutrient intake in male university students. Nutrition Journal, 14, 88. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-015-0088-y

Gardiner, C., Weakley, J., Burke, L. M., Roach, G. D., Sargent, C., Maniar, N., Townshend, A., & Halson, S. L. (2023). The effect of caffeine on subsequent sleep: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 69, 101764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2023.101764

Hamlin, M. J., Wilkes, D., Elliot, C. A., Lizamore, C. A., & Kathiravel, Y. (2019). Monitoring training loads and perceived stress in young elite university athletes. Frontiers in Physiology, 10, 34. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00034

Hill, D., Conner, M., Clancy, F., Moss, R., Wilding, S., Bristow, M., & O’Connor, D. B. (2022). Stress and eating behaviours in healthy adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 16(2), 280–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2021.1923406

Lopes Dos Santos, M., Uftring, M., Stahl, C. A., Lockie, R. G., Alvar, B., Mann, J. B., & Dawes, J. J. (2020). Stress in academic and athletic performance in collegiate athletes: A narrative review of sources and monitoring strategies. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2, 42. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2020.00042

Mountjoy, M., Ackerman, K. E., Bailey, D. M., Burke, L. M., Constantini, N., Hackney, A. C., Heikura, I. A., Melin, A., Pensgaard, A. M., Stellingwerff, T., Sundgot-Borgen, J. K., Torstveit, M. K., Jacobsen, A. U., Verhagen, E., Budgett, R., Engebretsen, L., & Erdener, U. (2023). 2023 International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(17), 1073–1098. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994

Thomas, D. T., Erdman, K. A., & Burke, L. M. (2016). American College of Sports Medicine joint position statement: Nutrition and athletic performance. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 48(3), 543–568. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000000852

Wilson, G., & Pritchard, M. (2005). Comparing sources of stress in college student athletes and non-athletes. Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology, 7(1), 1–8.

About Priyanka

Priyanka Soni is a Registered Associate Nutritionist (AfN) with an MSc in Human Nutrition from London Metropolitan University and more than three years’ experience in workplace wellness nutrition. Her research looks at how stress shapes what people eat, from emotional eating to ultra-processed food intake. She writes about turning nutrition science into advice that still works when life gets busy, exam week included.

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