Training Tip #7: Fuel Yourself Accordingly

Nutrition and diet is a huge and complex subject, and certainly something that can’t be tackled in one or even multiple blog posts. We’ll cover a small section of it here and delve a bit deeper in future. For now, the key thing is to highlight the importance of nutrition and how it can make or break your ability to achieve your goals.

Consider the following statement – ‘Good nutrition won’t turn an average athlete into a champion, but poor nutrition could turn a potential champion into an average athlete’

What does that mean for you?

Well unfortunately we can’t all be world beaters, but if you think about it slightly differently, what if that ‘champion athlete’ meant the best possible version of yourself? If you consider it from that perspective, it means that the quality of your diet could prove the difference between being the ‘champion you’ and staying as the ‘average you’. And that’s important.

Good nutrition, like good training, can mean different things to different people depending on a whole host of factors. In general, however, eating to fuel your performance and ensuring your body has enough resources to adapt to every training session and recover from every competition is a good place to start.

So if that means you’re trying to put on muscle, then having consistent protein intake every 2-3 hours throughout the day would be a good place to start and lay a good foundation. Then let’s say you’re involved in a team sport and you have two training sessions per week which you know will be high intensity. You need to ensure that you time your food intake you so have enough carbohydrate availability to allow you to go hard in those sessions, and still have the protein reserves to adapt afterwards.

The example above is a very simple one, and there would be many layers to add and complexities to consider. However, it’s often not the plan which lets people down, but the execution of it. Nutrition requires consistency, which itself requires organisation. If you work long hours and know you won’t be home to prepare your food throughout the day, then make sure you’ve organised yourself to make your meals the evening before, so you can take them with you. Or if your evenings are too busy to cook, spend some time at the weekend making a few batches of nutritious meals and freeze them for when they’re needed.

Planning and organisation is the key to 99% of successful diet and nutrition programs. If you plan ahead, fuel according to your goals, keep it simple and eat foods you enjoy, then you’ll be fine and your training will thank you for it.