The aim of this article should facilitate a foundation from which you
can analyse your own nutritional programme, alongside both your physiological
and psychological development in order to allow you to reach your full potential
From the perspective of a
budding clinical sports nutritionist, I will always look for development and
improvement in the aspect of nutrition to find a potential gain for every
athlete
The saying that working out
is “20% in the gym, 80% in the kitchen” is as true in my eyes as it would have
been decades ago, yet the aspect of nutrition and the substantial role it plays
in elite performance has only been recognised in a serious manner in recent
years
Your nutritional training
and planning should always run in sync with your current phase of training
within your periodisation/ macrocycle e.g. hypertrophy, and should provide you
essentially with the macronutrients and calorific intake to achieve your goals,
with a focus afterwards on nutritional intake to maximise recovery. Just as
your training programme will be constantly adapted and adjusted according to
your goals, so should your diet alongside it. Following the goals and training
programmes of other individuals may not leads to any advances or gains in your
training and performance, especially if the training is sport specific or aimed
towards achieving a different aim.
The first step is an initial
assessment of your diet. With the foundation of a healthy dietary intake, you
will be able to build upon this with the correct supplementation to support you
achieving your goals. Cleaning up your diet will require planning, dedication
and hard work, along with some sacrifices. Although this may seem tough in the
beginning, remember that this is what is required to achieve your maximum
potential. Bad habits will be difficult to change, but once they have been and
you begin to feel the benefits of your new lifestyle you will wonder why you
made those choices in the first place
Take 3 to 4 months to turn your
current diet into a clean programme, optimised to get the most out of your
training. Your main goals, from a long-term point of view, will never be
achieved with a quick fix or scheme, and so shouldn’t be attempted with the new
‘quick fix’ diet or developing a nutritional bad habit.
The other
problem with the thought of “diets” is that during the “diet” period you feel
like you are always missing something or being denied. This is why people often
cheat and fail.
One problem
with what we are asked you to do is that, to succeed, you have you have to pay
a great deal of attention to the detail and some people may view you as boring.
There are a lot of obvious answers to this criticism, but a point that is
commonly missed is that once you have made behavioural changes to your diet you
will have more flexibility in what you can and cannot eat. So after an initial
period of very hard work you will re-enter the real world again, only now you
will be succeeding in it, with what will appear to you and those around you as
very little effort! Success is never boring.
Realism and
Flexibility
When completing an assessment of your overall nutrition, two words must
stay prominent in the your mind – realism and flexibility. Both of these are
crucial components in you achieving your goals, and both go hand in hand in
allowing you to achieve your maximum potential in whatever sporting field you
choose. When analysing your nutritional intake, the realism of what you can do
e.g. food preparation time may be scarce, and so meal preparation can be
arduous, should work alongside the flexibility of your working schedule and
ability to train beside that.
Planning for your sport
Each sport is unique in its own physical and cognitive demands upon the
performer, and so should be treated that way. The nutritional requirements of a
sumo wrestler will be somewhat different to that of a sprint cyclist, for a
whole manner of reasons. Treating athletes as one and the same in terms of
nutritional requirements and intake is illogical, and so you must be realistic in
your dietary demands and plan accordingly.
Analysing your programme
As with any aspect of an athlete’s life, there are no quick fixes, no
shortcuts. You must be realistic with yourself sooner rather than later,
scrutinise and assess what is working and what is not. If it doesn’t work,
ditch it and explore other avenues. Too many people I have spoken to continue
to use techniques that just don’t work for them, yet they hope for massive
changes if they continue. Perseverance is key with all things in life, but if
something is not working for you, research other options and avenues to explore
Your nutritional programme should essentially allow you to achieve the
physical demands and requirements of your sport, and so enable you to perform
optimally. Your programme should always fit into both your short and long term
goals.
Consistency
Consistency is
very important to make progress. If you cheat a little everyday you will make
not be making the progress you hoped for or even no progress at all, but worse
than that you will believe that you have tried really hard and done really
well. When you make no progress you will become disheartened and will want to
give up. Short-term diets and fixes do not work, always think of your long term
goals and base your nutrition on the goals you have set for the long and short
term future. Having these in the forefront of your mind will allow you to make
positive ideas and concise decisions about your progression
Understand why you are
doing what you are doing
Doing something without knowing why you are doing it is like following
the pied piper. In all aspects of your
training you should be inquisitive and ask questions:
- · What benefits can I get from this? How will this help my performance
- · Has this worked with other athletes?
- · Is this relevant to my sport/goals?
- · How realistic is this for my current cycle/ phase of training?
Knowledge is power
When you have the time, read. As much as it may be boring, in the long
run it will benefit you one hundred fold. 2If you do
not understand what you are doing or why you have been asked to change a habit
or behavioural pattern, you are unlikely to succeed. The more you understand
about how your body functions, responds to, and recovers from training and
playing the better chance you have of making continual progress and avoiding
injury. You will gradually see how what you eat affects every facet of your
performance in the gym or on the pitch or anywhere else for that matter. The
way I keep updated with new dietary discoveries, training methods and
developments is through reading
If you follow these fundamentals you will no doubt put yourself in a
good stead for developing and making progress in what sport or exercise you do
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