Performance Nutrition - Orientation

We want to spend our time performing. Roadblocks and rate limters standing in the way of that goal need to be removed and then surpassed. In my performance universe, fueling is a potential roadblock. It needs to be addressed at a high level and removed as an obstacle to performance. Consider this, all things being equal, DIETING without training will not improve your performance. TRAINING without dieting will improve your performance until it does not. Lets take care of diet, so we can keep focusing on moving the needle of performance. This is a BIG ROCKS conversation, treat this as a foundations course. Lets lean into this now.

Nutrition can be broken down into some very simple ideas that are easy to hold.

1. Food

2. Hydration

3. Supplements

For most of us, these three buckets will cover the table in as much detail as we really need. I find that dividing these categories up into very granular subsections makes it needlessly complex for the leigh-man. When our barometer for what works is performan

ce, nutrition simply is not going to move the needle. It can be an item that limits your rate of improvement as we said, but we are gong to lock it in so we it is a non factor.

FOOD

Eat whole, natural, unprocessed fo

ods for every meal, every day of the year. It is good for your recovery, your health in general, and therefor will keep you ready to train and perform. In contrast, processed food is full of ingredients that are bad for your health, lacking ingredients which are good for your health, and lets just be honest, it tastes like shit. Discerning which foods are processed is simple. Ask yourself this question. When did it die? Consider a drive thru burger from a brown paper bag.

The buns - first of all, what even is that? Whatever it is made of wasnt alive in this decade.

The meat - not meat in some cases, definitely not an animal that was alive recently.

The toppins - is that even cheese? If there are vegetebles on that sandwich, its not even 1/4 of a tomato.

In summation, this is not even food. It doesnt contain any of the ingredients we look for in food.

Food should be unprocessed and raw when you buy it. You should cook it. If you are paying someone else to do the cooking, it should be 1 step removed from life. Steamed vegetables, grilled or braised meat, boiled rice, baked potato. Every meal should have a theme - not processed. Dont eat space food, ever.

HYDRATION

Stop drinking alcohol now. Nothing is more toxic to your hydration than alcohol. If you are serious about performance and you drink, like ever, you are a pretender. Full stop. I am not saying you dont throw down, but you are not serious about enhanc

ing your performance. Quitting alcohol is the first and most effective way to improve recovery through diet.

Drink water, like a gallon per day. Stop worrying about adding stuff to it. If you are really concerned about healthy water, never use plastic containers.Filter your tap water before you drink it. Just know that BPA and microplastics are in everything you use, including your phone case, your aluminum cans, your car steering wheel, and your toothbrush. But if you are worried about it in water bottles, by all means use aluminum ones.

Caffeine is dehydrating you. J

ust know that if you crush coffee or energy drinks, it is sucking the water out of your cells through a process called diuresis. Caffeine does this well, other stimulants combined with caffeine are a potent diuretic. No amount of BioSteel or electrolyte mix is going to stop that from happening.

In summary, hydration gets way too much press for what it is. The message here is that drinking water is a must. Drinking other stuff is, in the case of alcohol, a full stop no go, and in other cases optional at best and a distraction at worst.

SUPPLEMENTS

If you have come this far you know what is coming now. Scratch supplements off of your must have list. It is simply not a big rock item. 99% of them are space food. You know, the shit you should never eat ever?

I will concede that supplements, the high quality ones, can fill a role in service of convenience. If you are a busy professional, high quality beef protein powder can serve as a me

al replacement with water. Later on, we will cover supplements in explicit detail (#science). I am, at the time of writing this, not convinced that taking a bunch of supplments will augment performance in folks who are getting after it. The work gets the results, not the pills and powders.

THE RUB

What you eat, how fresh it is, and how well you put water into you body are the big rocks in ergogenics for performance. We will get into the weeds on what is out there for an added boost, to tip the spear of that .001% edge that you may want to pursue after.... erm... steroids.... Regardless, we will walk before we run, in nutrition as in all things.