It's how you show up, every day
Professional athletes are focused on growth, progression, and performance. They can push themselves to achieve physical feats we may have never seen before. If you are someone who plays sport or prioritises their fitness, you can learn from their approach to constant improvement. What we don’t see as much is the behind-the-scenes stuff - how the athletes show up each day to work towards their goal and, and the habits, behaviours and actions that work best to get the most out of their training to reach their personal best. While there is a lot of nutrition information out there, life isn’t that predictable, and the reality is that there will always be changes to your training schedule, the type of training you do, how you feel on the day and what’s going on in life for you now. Planning with practical solutions and focussing on daily habits that support your training brings all the nutrition theory to life.
Importance of Recovery
Plan your recovery; Often simple habits like packing a protein shake into your gym bag the night will ensure you have protein with you as soon as you have finished. This means you can effectively repair muscle damage from that training session with better energy levels and appetite control for the rest of the day. That simple step will then have a flow on effect for the rest of the day rather than trying to have the perfect protein meal at the wrong time and becoming sore and tired.
Plan your fuel
Keeping food in your handbag or desk draw so there is protein and carbohydrate-based snack on hand to have with you 2 hours before training if going to the gym after work. This provides an energy boost to get to the gym rather than skip out and not go at all if you feel tired or hungry. It’s these habits that allow contingencies to fall back on which create consistencies in your fuelling to have consistencies in your training. This level of daily planning and detail sets up systems that make training and fuelling more impactful to reach your outcomes than counting calories, as it considers HOW to fuel not just WHAT you should eat. Every athlete is different and has individual needs. Your success will come in designing habits and behaviours to eat in a way which suits your lifestyle and can also align with your training demands to reach your goals.
