Creatine for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

So, What is Creatine?

Firstly, creatine is not a steroid, regardless of what some of the things you may have read online might say. It is actually a combination of amino acids and it is found in foods like beef and fish, as well as being naturally produced within the body.

Background

Before speaking about creatine, it is important to first talk about the basics of energy production in the body.

ATP, or Adenosine Triphosphate, is the body’s energy currency, and regardless of where we get our energy from, whether that be carbohydrates, fat, or protein, it must first be used to create ATP, and that ATP is what is used to create the energy, to contract a muscle for example.

There is only a small amount of ATP stored in the body at one time, and it relies on being used and replaced quickly, in order to keep up with the activity being done, so that you can continue to do that activity.

As you may know by now, carbohydrates are the body’s predominant source of fuel in high-intensity activities, such as a football match, for example. This is because carbohydrates, or rather glucose, the broken down form of carbohydrate, can be stored within the muscle in sufficiently high amounts for this type of activity, as well as having the ability to produce ATP at a relatively fast rate.

However, when we go to either extreme of intensity, such as slower, less intense bouts of activity, or short, extremely intense bouts, carbohydrates aren’t always optimal for the job.

The low intensity activity that we go through every day doesn’t need the high energy turnover of carbohydrates, and given that carbohydrate’s energy production is less efficient (less of the energy stored as carbohydrate provides ATP), the body tends to skew its energy source a bit more towards fat.

Fat produces more ATP than Carbohydrates, but it also produces it at a slower rate, hence it would be better used for lower-intensity activities, but wouldn’t be suitable to higher intensity activities, where fat would be unable to replace used ATP at a high enough rate. 

On the other end of the scale, when we look at really short, intense activities, like full-speed sprints, heavy weight-lifting in the gym, and jumping, even carbohydrates can’t replace the used ATP quickly enough.

In this case, the body will turn to what’s known as the phosphocreatine (or creatine phosphate) system, which creates ATP much more quickly than carbohydrates or fat can, but can only keep producing ATP quickly for a short amount of time.

This kind of reminds me of the old Playstation game, “Need for Speed”, where you raced cars and if you needed a quick start or an extra boost to overtake an opponent, you could you the NOZ button and get a short boost, but it only lasted for a few seconds. That’s kind of like the phosphocreatine system.

In sporting terms, this is easily seen by going for a maximal-speed sprint, and observing the point where you begin to slow down. Or, if you go for a few repetitive jumps and observe the point where you are no longer able to jump as high as the first few jumps. 

The creatine phosphate system produces ATP at a rate that is limited partly by the amount of creatine that is present in the body. Without getting too deep into the weeds, when creatine is either created in the body or consumed through the diet/supplements, it joins to a phosphate, to form creatine phosphate. This phosphate molecule can then be used to replace the phosphate in the broken down ATP, to form more ATP.

Don’t worry if I lost you there. All I was really saying was the creatine helps recycle ATP and that allows more ATP (energy) to be produced in these short, intense activities.

Before going on, it is worth noting that these systems don’t work independently. They are all operating at once, in differing amounts. For example, even in a marathon event, typically though of as a lower-intensity activity, a combination of fats and carbohydrates will also still be being used, as well as the phosphocreatine system contributing.

Why Supplement With it?

Although creatine can be produced in the body and consumed through foods like meat and fish, the amounts that we can get in these ways isn’t close to what we can get in supplemental form. Hence, to attain the benefits associated with increased creatine levels in the body, supplementation is recommended.

How Can it Help Athletes?

Creatine has been shown to be beneficial in activities in the 0–10 second range, including sprinting, lifting weights, jumping etc, as well as improving strength and muscle gain. 

This is largely down to the benefits with regards to the phosphocreatine system that I mentioned earlier.

There are other potential benefits, however, specifically for the strength and muscle building aspects.

Firstly, creatine helps hydrate muscle cells. This can lead to increased body weight, which, along with the other benefits of creatine, can lead to improvements in strength, but also gives the appearance of muscle being bigger.

Now, it is worth considering that you may not want extra bodyweight, especially if running speed is something you want to maintain. However, the performance benefit of the extra creatine may outweigh the benefits of the slight increase in body weight. This is something that is going to be very much dependant on the individual, their goals, and how they react to creatine supplementation.

It’s also worth noting that if you are in a fat-loss phase, the increase in bodyweight associated with creatine supplementation may mask your fat-loss progress, by altering the weight you see on the scales. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t supplement with creatine when trying to lose weight, but rather that you should be aware of these potential changes.

Is it Safe?

Despite what some of the media would have you believe, creatine has not been shown to be harmful to health, if taken within the recommended range. It is the most researched sports supplement on the market, and there haven’t been any health problems associated with it. However, it is advised that those with pre-existing kidney conditions should perhaps refrain from supplementing with creatine, due to the lack of research done in that area.

How to Use Creatine

The recommended dose for creatine is 3–5g per day. With creatine, the aim is to saturate the cells with it over time, and therefore it is important to be consistently supplementing daily. 

There are a lot of different creatine supplements out there, but I recommend using a creatine monohydrate. Whilst there are a lot of other types that claim to be superior, none have really shown to be, and since creatine monohydrate is usually the least expensive, I recommend using that.

From what we’ve gone through in this article, you may be thinking that you should be taking it before the type of activities that it improves, but it doesn’t work in this short-term way, in the way that something like caffeine might do. It takes weeks for creatine to saturate the cells. For that reason, the time of day you take it is largely unimportant, so I usually recommend simply taking it at a time where you’ll remember to take it daily, so if you usually have a shake after training, then you can simply mix it in. If you usually take supplements first thing in the morning, then adding in your creatine here could be an easy way to remember to take it.

Do You Need to Load it?

A common question is with regards to whether or not you should load creatine, meaning taking a larger amount than the recommended dose when you start taking it. Whilst this can help saturate the cells more quickly, I usually recommend just taking the standard does from the start, as opposed to loading it. People can sometimes report digestive upset when they take beyond the standard dose. As well as this, if you are going to experience weight-gain in the form of extra water stored in the muscles, this is likely to happen more quickly if you load it, and this may not be ideal. Imagine training one week at 75kg and the next week at 78kg. That’s an extra few kgs to carry around, without having adapted to an increased bodyweight over time. Not that people will always see this drastic of a bodyweight increase, but it’s an example to illustrate the point.

Summary

In summary, creatine is a safe, effective supplement for those who want to improve performance in high-intensity sports and training, as well as those who want to gain muscle and strength. Supplementing with 3–5g per day, over the long-term can lead to these results.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Coffee and Caffeine for Athletic Performance (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

With caffeine being the number one most used drug in the world, coffee is the second most traded commodity worldwide, with 100,000 metric tones being drank every year! (and who can blame us?)

Due to its popularity amongst just about everybody, there is often discussion of coffee in the media, debating back and forth as to whether it is advantageous for health or detrimental.

Before we get into that, however, it is worth starting with what caffeine actually does when we consume it.

How it Works

Adenosine is a neurotransmitter which causes us to become sleepy when it is received by the brain. Adenosine naturally rises as the day goes on, which makes sense, since we obviously want to get more tired towards night-time, when we want to go to sleep. Simply put, adenosine in the brain rises throughout the day, making us more tired as the day goes on.

Note: You may have heard of adenosine, if you’ve previously heard me talking about energy production, with adenosine triphosphate (ATP) being known as the energy currency within the body. 

Anyway, when we consume caffeine, the caffeine, being similar in structure to the adenosine molecules, is received by the same receptors as the adenosine would have been, stopping the adenosine from being received by the brain. This means that the adenosine will not get a chance to tell the brain to become sleepy.

Simply put, the caffeine blocks some of the adenosine from being received by the brain.

Therefore, caffeine can be seen as something that helps you avoid the sleepy feeling, which obviously then leads to the perception of feeling more “awake”.

We do, however, also get the added effect of a temporary increase in dopamine production, which is a reason that we get the slight euphoric feeling when we consume caffeine (and perhaps explains why, as the Instagram memes will tell you, people become a little bit more tolerable after we’ve had out morning cup of coffee) It also seems to improve cognitive skills, affecting memory, decision making and reaction time.

With consistent caffeine consumption, more adenosine receptors are created in the brain, so that eventually the adenosine is getting through to create that sleepy feeling, even with caffeine being consumed. This leads to the need for extra caffeine consumption in order to get the same effect that less caffeine used to create. This is what people usually refer to as building up a caffeine tolerance.

In terms of benefits and considerations, there are a few different aspects related to coffee intake that are worth considering. I’ve divided this discussion up into three topics: Coffee and Health, Coffee and Performance, and Coffee and Body Composition.

Coffee and Health

Coffee, along with most other popular nutrition topics, has gone back and forth in the media in terms of whether it is healthy or unhealthy. 

Previously, it was thought that coffee consumption was a cause of things like osteoporosis, heart disease and cancer. However, that has been shown not to be true, when other lifestyle choices have been taken into account, as well as when caffeine intake is kept to moderate levels. In fact, regular coffee consumption may be slightly protective of some diseases, including some types of cancer.

Caffeine has also been shown to improve mental performance, as well as being correlated with improved mood, and depression being lower in people who drink coffee. 

People are also often concerned with dehydration when it comes to coffee consumption. It is true to say that coffee has a slight diuretic effect on the body, which essentially means it makes you want to urinate. This could be taken to mean that you are excreting extra fluid that you wouldn’t have excreted if you hadn’t had the coffee, which is true.

However, we have also just consumed some extra fluid (from the coffee). It turns out that the extra fluid excreted is generally less than the extra fluid taken in, leading to a slight net hydrating effect.

I would say that this probably changes a bit when we look smaller drinks like an espresso, for example, which provides less fluid, but due to the similar caffeine content, probably provides the same diuretic effect as a larger coffee. In this case, I would hazard a guess at saying this might have a slight dehydrating effect, but this can easily be offset by having an extra glass of water.

Caffeine has a half-life of about 6 hours, meaning that if we were to consume 100mg of caffeine, 6 hours later there would be 50mg in the body. 6 hours later than that there would be 25mg, and so on. This will vary with how quickly the individual metabolises caffeine. With this information, we can see that it’s probably a good idea to have a caffeine cut-off time early in the day, so that there isn’t a lot of caffeine in the body when you are trying to wind down and go to sleep. For this reason, it is probably also worth limiting the amount of coffee you have in a day, since the amount you take in will also have an effect on how much is circulating in the body later in the evening. As you probably know, sleep is hugely important to overall health. Even if the caffeine is not keeping us awake at night, it can still affect the quality of our sleep.

Coffee and Body Composition

When it comes to body composition, the first thing we usually want to talk about is calorie content. In this case, a black coffee has very few calories, but if we start to add other ingredients to it, such as milk, cream, sugar etc, the calories can start to add up. For this reason, whether coffee consumption leads to weight-gain from a calorie point of view, really depends on what other ingredients are being added to it. It is also worth noting that people often feel the need to consume confectionery foods such as chocolate or biscuits with coffee, so if that is the case, then these extras have to be taken into account also. It is also worth mentioning that caffeine is often also found in sugary drinks, and these will also contain extra calories.

On the other hand, coffee does slightly increase the metabolic rate, meaning that you burn slightly more calories in a given time, after consumption of caffeine, but probably not enough to justify that muffin you might have had alongside it. This increase in metabolic rate is the reason that caffeine-rich fat-burners are said to ‘work’, and to a certain extent they do work for this reason. 

However, it is worth treating the consumption of this caffeine in the same way you would the caffeine from coffee, as in, not over-consuming it and limiting your use later in the day, so that it won’t affect sleep quality or quantity. Caffeine also up-regulates fat oxidation, meaning that when you consume coffee, you will burn more fat for energy in the following hours. This doesn’t necessarily mean extra body fat loss. This will still be determined by whether you are in a caloric deficit or not. 

Another aspect of coffee that is related to body composition is its effect on appetite. It isn’t quite clear what causes the appetite suppressing feeling a lot of people claim to get, if it does exist. To my knowledge, there’s no mechanism in terms of it effecting the hunger and satiety hormones ghrelin and leptin, so perhaps it’s more to do with the feeling of enjoying the taste of a cup of coffee leading to decreased desire for other food. 

However, a lot of people seem to claim appetite-suppressing effects, and I would include myself in that bracket, so it may be worth noting. This could help make it easier for people to eat less and therefore lose weight.

Coffee and Performance

Obviously the previously mentioned topics of health and body composition are going to lead into performance. Generally, a healthier body is going to perform better, and a better body composition is usually better for performance, all else equal. 

But apart from that, there are a few other things to discuss as regards caffeine and sports performance. 

Earlier, I mentioned that caffeine increases the rate of fat oxidation. This has been theorised to improve sporting performance, at least when time to exhaustion is the measure of success. 

This is thought to be partly due to the idea that if we can increase fat oxidation (i.e. the amount of fat we are using for fuel), we spare our carbohydrate (glycogen) stores in the body, and therefore the carbohydrate can be saved for later in the event. 

However, in sporting activities where we aren’t going to a point of exhaustion (most sports), this increase in fat oxidation could also be described as a decrease in the ability to use carbohydrate. However, we know that carbohydrate is a more quickly converted fuel source, and is therefore more suited to the high-intensity types of activity that we see in field sports, for example. Regardless of this, caffeine has been shown to improve anaerobic performance, which is a big component of most sports.

This suggests that caffeine’s positive effect on performance is related to more than just the proposed glycogen-sparing effect. Perhaps the central nervous system and hormonal effects are more important in this case.

The mental alertness and reaction time improvement that comes with caffeine consumption could also be a factor in sports where skill is required.

It has also been shown to increase strength, which is obviously good in strength sports, but is also helpful in sports that require an element of gym work.

It’s also worth considering the mood elevation often experienced with caffeine could potentially lead to better training performance and therefore carry-over to better performance in competition. 

In terms of practicality, having 100–400mg of caffeine, or around 1–2 cups of coffee, 30–60 minutes pre-workout, or pre-training, or pre-match would be advised, but again, the amount and timing will depend on the individual. There are other ways of consuming this caffeine, including pre-workout formulae, caffeine tablets or gum, energy gels etc.

Recommendations

Given all of this, I would give a few recommendations:

1. Keep caffeine intake at a level that doesn’t effect your sleep negatively, and have a cut-off time for the same reason.

2. As much as possible, save coffee consumption for times when it is going to benefit you, as you can build up a tolerance if you consume too much, too often.

3. Don’t be afraid of coffee consumption if you enjoy it, if it makes you feel good, you drink it in sensible amounts and it doesn’t negatively effect your health, body composition, and performance.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Supplements for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

There’s a reason that supplementation is one of the final things I focus on with the lads I work with.

It’s because the effect they can have is generally much smaller than getting other elements of nutrition optimised.

With that said, once you’ve gotten the bulk of your nutritional approach in order, appropriate supplements can have their place, allowing you to address deficiencies in your diet or to provide ergogenic (performance-enhancing) aids.

In this article, you’ll find a series of supplements that may be useful to you, depending on your situation.

As an important note, it is recommended to only use supplements that are batch-tested and certified as free from illegal performance-enhancing drugs, so be sure to do your research when it comes to the quality of your supplement provider.

Looking for certification marks like those from ‘Informed Sport’ will help ensure you’re covered here.

Please also note that this list is not exhaustive, so there may be supplements outside of the list that infer benefits.

You also shouldn’t feel the need to use every supplement on the list.

In fact, adding one at a time will allow you to assess any benefits and correctly attribute them to the specific supplement.

Finally, it is recommended to speak with your physician before undertaking any nutritional supplementation intervention.

Protein Powder

Protein, whether from food or supplements, contains the amino acids needed for recovery and growth of muscle tissue, as well as other tissues in the body, making protein essential for the growth and repair of those tissues.

Hitting a sufficiently high protein intake through food alone can be difficult.

In this case, a protein powder, such as whey protein, becomes a high-quality, convenient, versatile source of this protein.

The most popular form of protein powder, whey protein, is actually a by-product of the cheese-making process, and can be seen as much as a food or ingredient as a supplement.

It can be added to meals (e.g. porridge oats or yoghurt) or mixed with a liquid (e.g. water or milk) and drunk as a stand-alone shake in order to increase protein intake.

Various non-dairy protein powders are also available, and can be used for similar purposes.

The serving size is generally around 25g, but this can be increased or decreased to suit your needs.

It is often used as a post-training recovery drink, due to its convenience and the need for protein intake post-training for recovery, which is a worthy use of it, but it can be consumed at any time of day.

Carbohydrate Supplements

Carbohydrate supplements also fall into a category somewhere between food and supplement.

The main source of concentrated carbohydrates throughout history was honey, and this concentrated source of energy (in the form of carbohydrates) was said to have been used by warriors before going into battle as an energy aid.

Scientists have since done many studies on the effects of carbohydrates on exercise performance, and carbohydrate intake before and during intense training and competition has been shown to be beneficial to performance, providing a fast-digesting, dense energy supply when it’s needed most.

This is partly why sports drinks have become so popular, and these can be viewed as a carbohydrate supplement.

However, there are also less expensive methods of garnering the benefits of carbohydrates in a supplemental form.

Glucose, dextrose, maltodextrin, vitargo, and highly branched cyclic dextrin are popular forms of supplemental carbohydrates that can be consumed around training and matches in order to provide that extra supply of energy substrate.

These examples usually come in the form of powders or energy gels, for use in various situations, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Those who are aiming to lose weight, or even some people who are trying to maintain weight, and are struggling with managing general hunger levels might be best served by leaving out or limiting these extra carbohydrate supplements before and during exercise, since the calories therein obviously contribute to one’s daily caloric intake, potentially leading to that person having to cut down their food intake elsewhere.

There are others in this situation who find benefit in having carbohydrates during this time to offset the fact that they are consuming less carbohydrates during the day.

However, even swirling a sugary drink in the mouth and spitting it out has been shown to provide some performance benefits.

Carbohydrate supplementation is not for everyone, as some people experience excessive blood sugar fluctuations during exercise after excessive carbohydrate consumption.

This may also be related to the amounts, and so trial and error will allow individuals to assess this for themselves.

Digestive issues can also occur with large intakes of these supplements, although the gut can be ‘trained’ to handle more over time, so timing and amounts are something to experiment with if you decide to use carbohydrate supplements.

In terms of recommendations, you can start consuming your carbohydrate powder (mixed with water or diluted juice) or energy gel 30 minutes before the workout/session/match, and continue to consume it right through the warm-up, and throughout the activity.

Around 30-60g of carbohydrate per hour of activity in total is recommended for most sports, coming from a sports drink, a mixed drink of water with a carbohydrate powder (with flavour from another source such as diluted juice if needed), an energy gel, or other source, such as jelly sweets. There is more information on this in the intra-training article.

Creatine

Creatine is a collection of a specific set of amino acids, found naturally in foods like fish and meat, and is also naturally created within the body.

It is involved in energy production in activities lasting a short amount of time, where a quick turnover of energy is needed.

This includes activities like sprinting, jumping, and lifting weights.

It is the most researched sports supplement, and no consistent negative side effects have been shown.

Supplementing with creatine monohydrate provides the body with greater stores of creatine than you could reasonably get from food, leading to greater performance in those short, intense activities.

This can lead to improvements in power output, strength, speed, and possibly even endurance activities over time.

Most athletes will benefit from supplementing with creatine for the performance benefits, and it would be of particular benefit to those who are trying to gain muscle and strength.

The recommended daily dose of creatine is 3-5g per day of the creatine monohydrate form.

The creatine stores in the body will become saturated over a period of weeks/months, as opposed to having an immediate effect, so you can take it at any time of day.

However, having it at a time of day that you’ll remember to take it, such as with breakfast, or in your post-workout shake, can improve your likelihood of taking it regularly, and therefore reaping the benefits.

Caffeine

We all know the wakening effect of a cup of coffee on a tired weekday morning, but the benefits of caffeine consumption can also extend to athletic performance, with improved cognition and muscular performance being seen when taken before exercise.

Its effects on wakefulness are caused by caffeine interfering with adenosine (a molecule that signals sleepiness in the brain), and the more performance-enhancing effects are, at least in part, caused by increases in hormones like dopamine and adrenaline.

Caffeine can be used by those who want a bit of a boost before training or matches.

It’s particularly useful for those who don’t usually drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated products, as it is more effective in people who don’t usually use it.

However, regular users can get similar effects by taking an increased dose (within reason).

General supplementation recommendations for exercise performance are 100-400mg, depending on your tolerance, general caffeine use, and subjective feeling when using it.

It’s usually best to start off low and increase the dosage if needed, so that you know what to expect (jitters and increased anxiety can be side effects of excessive caffeine intake, for example).

Supplementation can be in the form of a cup of coffee, or other supplements like caffeine gum, energy drinks, and caffeine pills.

Another issue worth considering is caffeine's effect on sleep.

It takes about 5 hours for half of the caffeine consumed to leave your body, so it is important to monitor how your sleep is affected, particularly for evening training sessions and matches, adjusting the timing and dosage of your intake as needed.

This will vary based on the person, but in general, having a cut-off time for caffeine intake somewhere in the late morning/early afternoon is a good place to start.

With evening training sessions and matches, weighing up the performance benefits vs sleep detriments will be a personal decision, but prioritising the sleep aspect, outside of perhaps those most important matches, is likely to lead to better outcomes over time.

Fish Oil

Omega-3 fatty acids are essential in the human body, meaning that they cannot be created within the human body and need to be consumed through food or supplementation.

They are found, most notably, in oily fish, but given the lack of oily fish that is eaten today, people tend to under-consume these essential fatty acids compared to what is optimal, and doing so can increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and several forms of cancer.

On a lower level, getting sufficient intake of these nutrients can help with recovery and possibly even muscle growth.

Supplementing with fish oils in the form of liquids or capsules can be a convenient and effective method for increasing Omega-3 intake.

Anyone who is seeking optimal health should aim to consume at least 2-3 servings of oily fish per week, but if this isn’t possible or practical, then supplementing daily with fish oils can be a good second option.

The recommended daily dosage of fish oils is 1-2g of combined DHA/EPA per day.

When selecting a fish oil supplement, it’s important to note that this 1-2g recommendation is the combined DHA and EPA amount (usually found on the back of the label), and not the total fish oil amount (usually found on the front of the label).

These can be consumed at any time of day but are generally best consumed with food to aid with their digestion.

Choosing a liquid version over a capsule version is usually less expensive, albeit there is a trade-off of having to taste the liquid.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is known as the sunlight vitamin, due to the fact that our body creates vitamin D when our skin senses sunlight.

It is involved in the absorption of calcium and therefore affects bone health, but it has also been shown to significantly affect other aspects of health such as inflammation, the immune system, and even mood.

Unfortunately for most of us, it’s not practical to get a lot of sunlight, especially in the winter.

Supplementation is recommended for anyone living in a part of the world where it isn’t often sunny, and/or for those who don’t spend much time in the sun.

The recommended daily dosage for vitamin D is 1000-4000IU, which can be taken at any time of day, but should be taken with a source of fat, since it is a fat-soluble vitamin.

For this reason, taking it with a meal, which will also help you to remember to take it each day, can be a good idea.

There is a lot of research showing benefits across various health markers with supplementation of vitamin D, and research continues to show more benefits as time goes on.

It is also relatively inexpensive and readily available.

For these reasons, it is a supplement very worthy of your consideration.

Magnesium & Zinc

These 2 supplements grouped together here, simply because they are most commonly found together in ZMA supplements, which also contain vitamin B6 (surprisingly though, since it doesn’t seem to have much effect).

Magnesium and Zinc can be taken as separate supplements, which is generally a better approach for sourcing quality versions in the quantities that you want.

Athletes, in particular, are often deficient in magnesium and zinc, and bringing levels back up has a combination of effects including enhanced insulin sensitivity, increased testosterone levels, improved mood, better exercise performance, better sleep, and many other benefits.

ZMA supplements are an easy way of getting both Zinc and Magnesium in sufficient doses all in one supplement, but these can be supplemented separately.

Athletes tend to be lower in magnesium and zinc when compared to average populations, as intense training and sweating can deplete levels in the body.

It is recommended for those who are training at a high level, and/or have some other reason to consider themselves at risk of deficiency.

Most ZMA supplements contain the recommended supplemental amounts in each serving, which is about 10-50mg for Zinc, and about 200-400 mg for Magnesium (Magnesium glycinate is a form of magnesium with high bioavailability so is recommended).

Zinc supplementation at the onset of a cold has also been shown to decrease the duration of symptoms, and magnesium supplementation before sleep has been shown to improve sleep quality.

Vitamin C

Vitamin C is involved in the immune system, as well as in regeneration of connective tissue, and it is also an antioxidant.

Supplementation has been shown to decrease the likelihood of getting a cold, for example, as well as the duration of an already present cold.

It is generally quite easy to get the recommended amount of vitamin C through the diet, by consuming plenty of fruits and vegetables like oranges, peppers, and greens.

For this reason, most people probably don’t need to regularly supplement with vitamin C, but it might be worth supplementing with up to 2000mg (spread throughout the day) if you feel a cold coming on, or if you already have one, in an attempt to decrease the length and severity of it.

It can also be worth supplementing at times when you would be at greater risk of getting a cold, like during winter, and/or during a tough training cycle.

Multivitamin

Multivitamins contain many of the recommended daily intakes of various vitamins and minerals.

With a healthy, varied diet, we can get most of these without the need to supplement.

For athletes with particularly high intakes of foods, this ability to hit the recommended intakes can be increased.

However, there is also an argument that athletes need more, due to the demand they are placing on their body.

We see this with the depletion of magnesium/zinc stores, for example.

A multivitamin is by no means essential, but can be a relatively inexpensive means of covering off any potential deficiencies within the diet.

However, taking a multivitamin should never be used as a reason not to maintain a diet filled with a wide variety of healthful foods.

For those who are in a weight-loss phase, and are therefore likely eating less food, it could also be worth supplementing, particularly if the training load remains high.

Another case for supplementation would be for those people who have identified various potential deficiencies in vitamins and minerals that can be rectified by a multivitamin, without the need to buy the various vitamin and mineral supplements separately.

There is a wide range of options when it comes to buying multivitamins, but opting for trusted brands and choosing an option that suits your budget, towards the higher end if possible, is recommended.

Beta-Alanine                        

Beta-Alanine increases the body’s ability to buffer acid build-up in the muscles, particularly in activities that involve repeated bouts of intense activity lasting 60-240 seconds.

For athletes, this can mean delaying the time it takes for the feeling commonly referred to as “Lactic Acid” build-up to occur in the muscles, meaning better performance in training sessions that involve that type of training.

This can also potentially help us get out more reps in the gym, leading to greater strength and muscle gains.

Beta-Alanine is potentially useful for those who have already optimised their overall diet, are training extremely hard, and have the budget to experiment with an additional supplement.

The benefits of Beta-Alanine supplementation occur only after a period of consistent use over a period of weeks, so it’s not necessary to take it directly before a workout or training session.

Supplementation with beta-alanine can lead to a tingling feeling in the skin, which is thought to be harmless, but can be avoided by spreading out the dosage throughout the day, which may also be a more optimal intake in terms of the benefits.

The recommended dosage is 2-5g per day.

Citrulline Malate

Citrulline Malate supplementation increases L-arginine levels in the blood, which increases Nitric Oxide Production, which has the effect of increasing vasodilation (the opening of blood vessels), and therefore increasing blood flow.

This potentially improves the body’s ability to get oxygen, glucose, and other key nutrients to the working muscles whilst also allowing for an improved ability to remove ‘waste products’ from the muscles.

It is beneficial in terms of reducing fatigue, possibly due to its ability to increase the body’s ability to replenish energy substrates (mainly glucose and phosphocreatine).

All that is a long way of saying that it increases blood flow, helping the flow of nutrients and energy to the muscles.

This is a supplement worth considering for those who have already got the rest of their diet on point, and are looking for something that might bring a small percentage of benefit, if the budget allows for it.

It is only likely to show benefit in those who are training hard, and often reaching a point of muscular fatigue.

It is also worth noting that the research is mixed, with some research showing lesser effects than others, so it may be worth experimenting with for yourself.

The recommended dose is 6-8g (6000-8000mg) around an hour before training sessions and/or matches.

Beetroot Juice

500mg of nitrates (from about 500ml of beetroot juice or 1-2 concentrated shots), has been shown to increase exercise performance in both running and cycling time trials, as well as increasing time to exhaustion.

This may have some carry-over into athletic performance, with both fatigue and time to exhaustion being important.

This effect is most likely due to the increase in Nitric Oxide production in the body, leading to increased blood flow and therefore increased ability to provide nutrients and energy to the working muscles.

High-nitrate food like beetroot can be a beneficial addition to your overall diet, so if you enjoy the taste, add them in.

Supplementing with them prior to training/matches could have a slight performance benefit in terms of reducing fatigue, so for those who already have the rest of their diet nailed down, and have the budget for it, it could be worth experimenting with.

The recommended dose of about 500mg of nitrates, 2-3 hours prior to exercise, can be provided by 500ml of beetroot juice, 500g of whole cooked beetroot, or 1-2 shots of concentrated beetroot juice.

Collagen Hydrolysate/Gelatin

Recent research suggests that consuming gelatin (which is coincidentally the main ingredient used in making jelly), also known as collagen hydrolysate, can help with the recovery of joint injuries.

Given the high amount of joint injuries seen in athletes, this can be a useful supplement to have in mind to use when needed.

Gelatin/Collagen Hydrolysate provides the amino acids necessary for the synthesis of new joint tissue.

Given the shortage of blood flow through joint tissue in general, it can be useful to supplement with this shortly before rehab/training sessions where the target joint is going to be used, in order to give the amino acids the best chance of being transported to the recovering area.

Although this is a relatively new field of research, those who have joint injuries or general issues with their joints should consider supplementing.

Note also, that whilst this product will technically provide protein, it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for protein in the diet, since the amino acid profile is not similar to that protein which contributes significantly to muscle gain/muscle recovery.

A 10-15g dose around an hour before an exercise session involving the injured joint has been shown to be effective.

Some vitamin C is required along with the gelatin/collagen hydrolysate for joint tissue synthesis, so it is recommended to consume either some fruit juice or a multivitamin/vitamin C supplement along with it.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Post-Performance Recovery Meal for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

The definition of recovery is, “returning to a normal state of health, mind, or strength.”

In the context of sport and athletic training, that means that after completing a training session, the aim is to get back to the point where you would be able to repeat that same session with equal or greater intensity in the days that follow.

Provided that training is appropriate, this repeated cycle of stimulus followed by recovery will allow the body to adapt accordingly, thereby increasing strength, endurance, muscle size, speed, or whatever other training goal you’re trying to achieve.

This can be seen in the graph below, where the line moves downwards with each training session (signaling fatigue), and then moves upwards between sessions towards the previous baseline (signaling recovery) and beyond it (signaling adaptation).

Issues occur when we don’t allow for adequate recovery and adaptation, where we go into the subsequent sessions under-recovered.

If this is repeated on an ongoing basis, it is likely to lead to fatigue, diminished performance, and often, injury.

THE “RECOVERY WINDOW”

If you’ve ever done a hard training session, you’ll already know that the recovery isn’t done only in the hours after training, and your sore legs the morning after will let you know that.

That is to say that the so-called “recovery window” extends well beyond the hour after a training session, and often into the day or days following it.

However, that period of time immediately after a training session offers you the first opportunity to maximise your recovery for upcoming sessions, and therefore shouldn’t be taken lightly.

There are many aspects of recovery worth touching on, and these will be touched on in other articles, but for this article, the focus will be on the nutritional aspect of the post-performance or post-training meal.

You can break the nutritional approach during this period into 3 “R”s: Rebuild, Refuel, and Rehydrate.

1. Rebuild

During intense physical training, muscle damage can occur.

This muscle damage usually isn’t enough to cause an injury, but after hard training sessions, it can often result in soreness, as well as reduced strength, endurance, and mobility.

This isn’t necessarily a negative thing, and actually may be a factor that signals adaptations in the muscle.

However, if it persists into the next training session, it is usually a sign that you’re not fully recovered.

Previous articles illustrated the role of protein in providing amino acids to the body, and the idea of amino acids being seen as the building blocks of muscle tissue.

In the post-training period, there is an increased demand for these amino acids, given their role in the repair of muscle tissue.

For this reason, consuming protein in the post-training period is advised.

20-40g of protein for a high-quality source is generally enough to stimulate muscle protein synthesis (I.e. the creation of new muscle tissue.)

To put that in context, a few common examples of protein-rich foods include:

• Medium Chicken Breast: 30-40g of protein

• 4 eggs: 24g of protein

• 1 Scoop whey protein: 20-25g of protein

• Medium steak: 60-80g of protein

• Salmon Fillet: 30-40g of protein

• Pot of greek yoghurt: 20g of protein

2. Refuel

Outside of repairing the tissues (such as muscle) damaged in training, being ready for upcoming sessions also involves being properly fuelled.

That fuelling process can start immediately after the previous session.

Previous articles discussed that the main energy source used in high-intensity athletic training and sport is glycogen, which is the stored form of carbohydrates in the body.

Because of this, the more energy is used in these tough training sessions, the more the body’s level of glycogen stores will become depleted.

Starting the refueling process in the post-training period by consuming carbohydrates is important for this reason.

In addition, the body’s ability to store glycogen is increased following exercise, making it an even more important time to start consuming carbohydrates.

This becomes less important if you have a long period of time (2-3 days, for example) between sessions, where you will have a lot more opportunity to consume carbohydrates as part of your daily diet in between sessions.

But for someone who trains most days or even twice a day, consuming carbohydrates post-training becomes more important when it comes to being refueled by the next session.

In the post-training period, general recommendations are to consume 1-1.5g per kg of bodyweight within the hour following the training session (e.g. 80-120g of carbohydrates for an 80kg athlete).

However, this will vary greatly based on the intensity and duration of the session, as well as your overall calorie intake.

For example, someone who is in a fat-loss phase may not want to allot as many calories to the post-training period, and may prefer to spread them out throughout the day, allowing for more enjoyable meals, and therefore better dietary adherence.

And someone who just finished a low-intensity sports skill session will obviously not need as much as someone who just ran 20 miles.

To put the amounts into context, a few common examples of carbohydrate-rich foods include:

• 100g rice (raw weight): 75g of carbohydrates

• 400g potatoes:  68g of carbohydrates

• 100g pasta (raw weight): 75g of carbohydrates

• 2 slices of bread: 25g of carbohydrates

• 1 sports drink: 32g of carbohydrates

• 3 rice cakes: 20g of carbohydrates

• 1 large sweet potato: 30-40g of carbohydrates

3. Rehydrate

Similarly to carbohydrates being depleted as a result of intense training, water and electrolytes can also become depleted, primarily through sweat and breathing out water vapour.

Previous articles outlined the importance of maintaining adequate levels of fluids and electrolytes during training and competitive events.

Again, once these have been depleted, in order to ensure you are ready for the next session, it is important to replenish them by the time the next session comes around.

As with carbohydrates, this can be done throughout the period between sessions, and the importance of the immediate post-training period increases as the time between sessions decreases.

However, even in cases where there is plenty of time between sessions, getting back to a baseline level of hydration as soon as possible after the session is still important.

This is because of the knock-on effects that dehydration can have, including decreased blood flow, negative impact on sleep, and poorer digestion, all of which can have an indirect effect on recovery.

In terms of practical application, you can keep it simple by subtracting your post-training bodyweight from your pre-training bodyweight (you don’t have to do this before and after every session - just enough times to give you an average), aiming to consume that weight in water in the hours following the training session or competitive event.

Electrolytes should also be consumed within this period, which could be in the form of a supplement, and/or salt within your food.

A BONUS “R” - REST

The topic of rest deserves an article in itself, and it will get one, but suffice it to say that any discussion of recovery would be insufficient if it didn’t take into account the idea that the body recovers at rest.

That means that the best post-training meal means very little if you’re constantly stressed, sleeping 5 hours per night, and training so much that the body doesn’t have time to recover in between.

With that said, once those things are addressed, elements like the post-training meal, as discussed above, become a priority.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Intra-Performance Nutrition for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

There are 4 key components involved in optimising nutrition during high-intensity training and competition.

They are:

1. Provide sufficient glucose.

2. Provide sufficient amino acids.

3. Provide sufficient fluids and electrolytes.

4. Do the above whilst minimising digestive upset.

1. Provide sufficient glucose

If you’ve read previous articles, you’ll know by now the importance of carbohydrates when it comes to fuelling high-intensity exercise.

That is, carbohydrates are broken down into glucose, which circulates in the bloodstream to be used to create energy for the body, or to be stored as glycogen for energy at a later time-point.

When it comes to the period of time during training sessions and competition, a lot of the fuelling work will have been done in the days and hours leading up to that point.

So whilst you won’t need to rely on the intra-performance period alone for your fuelling, it is an extra opportunity to replenish some of the carbohydrates that you will be using during the training session or competitive event.

As you can imagine, the importance of replacing the carbohydrates used in that event will increase as the intensity and duration of the event increases.

As an example, someone who is running a marathon, which could take 3-5 hours of consistent output, will benefit more from consuming carbohydrates during that run - and will require more carbohydrates) than a GAA player playing for 60-70 minutes will (even though the GAA player is still likely to benefit).

Athletes engaging in endurance events lasting over 70 minutes can maintain glycogen levels by consuming about 30 grams of carbohydrates every 15 minutes.

However, there is research suggesting that most people can only digest about 1g of carbohydrate per minute (i.e. 60g per hour), particularly during sporting events, where digestive function may be decreased due to less blood flow to the gut.

This can be increased by “training the gut”, through exposing it to higher doses of intra-training carbohydrates over time, and by optimising the sources of those carbohydrates.

For example, combining glucose-based carbohydrate sources with fructose-based sources can increase the digestibility of the overall mixture.

This may be less applicable to field sports, for example, due to the shorter duration.

A GAA, soccer, or rugby player, for example, might benefit from consuming 20-30g of carbohydrate during the warm-up and 20-30g at half-time, with the option of having another 20-30g should the match go to extra time.

A distance runner on the other hand, might aim to consume 30g of carbohydrates every 30 minutes for the duration of the event.

These carbohydrates can come in many forms including sports drink, energy gels, jelly sweets, and carbohydrate powders, each of which have their advantages and disadvantages.

2. Provide sufficient amino acids

Protein is generally seen through the lens of recovery and muscle building, and for good reason.

The amino acids supplied through protein can be seen as the building blocks of muscle tissue, and sufficient intakes of protein allows for the creation of new muscle tissue and the reduction in breakdown of existing muscle tissue.

Amino acids are less well-known for their other functions, such as their role in glycogen replenishment, hydration, and in the creation of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, which are crucially important when it comes to the psychological component of athletic performance.

When it comes to the intra-performance period, in most cases, providing extra aminos acids (or protein) during the event itself is not necessary.

However, as with carbohydrates, increasing the intensity and duration of the event increases the potential need for intra-performance supplementation of protein or amino acids.

That is to say, if you’re not training hard and/or long, there’s no need to even consider intra-performance protein intake.

Additionally, the length of time between the previous protein feeding and the event is important to take into account.

If the previous protein feeding was within an hour or two leading up to the event, it is likely that there will be sufficient amino acids still available during the training session or competitive event.

However, if there is a long delay between the previous protein feeding and the event (e.g. If you’re training first thing in the morning without having had breakfast, or if your schedule meant you weren’t able to eat close to the event), consuming some form of protein or aminos acids intra-performance becomes more beneficial.

If you deem it potentially beneficial to consume protein intra-training, 20-30g of protein in the form of whey or other protein powder is sufficient.

An EAA (essential amino acids) supplement can be used (about 5-10g) in place of a protein powder during activity if digestion of protein powder is problematic for you (which may be the case when the training is sufficiently intense and/or long).

3. Provide sufficient fluids and electrolytes

As with carbohydrates, adequate hydration in the days and hours leading up to your training session, match, or other performance event should put you in a good place.

That is to say, showing up to the event hydrated is probably more important than what you’re going to do during the event.

However, given that you are going to be using and excreting both fluids and electrolytes during the event, replacing those is going to be important when it comes to optimising performance throughout the event.

Otherwise, as internal fluid levels decrease, problems occur with temperature regulation and electrolyte levels, which can lead to issues with blood flow, muscle contractions, and increased perceived exertion.

Providing adequate levels of fluids and electrolytes during exercise can help avert those issues.

The amounts of these required will depend on the intensity of the session, the length of the session, the ambient temperature, and the individual's sweat rate.

A good starting point is around 250ml of water (with electrolytes/salt) every 15 minutes.

Some research suggests that the gut can’t process much more than about 1 litre of water per hour, so limiting your intake to below this level is recommended.

In terms of electrolytes, aiming to consume enough to provide 0.5-1g of sodium per hour (in the form of table/sea salt or an electrolyte supplement - which will also provide other necessary electrolytes) is generally close to optimal for most people.

4. Do the above whilst minimising digestive upset

All the recommendations above mean very little if you’re bending over with stomach cramps during a race or having to run off the pitch to the toilet in the middle of a GAA match.

For that reason, doing the above whilst minimising digestive upset with your intra-performance nutrition is key.

This can generally be done by addressing the quantities of each of the intra-performance ingredients, as outlined in the next section.

THE ULTIMATE HOME-MADE INTRA-PERFORMANCE DRINK

Given all the above, if you have the ability to access a drink bottle/shaker during the training session, run, match, gym session, or other performance event, you can consider making our own intra-performance drink.

Based on the above, this should consist of a carbohydrate powder (30-60g of something like cyclic-dextrin, maltodextrin, or dextrose), electrolytes (enough to provide 0.5-1g of sodium, in the form of supplement or salt), whey protein or an EAA powder (20-30g or 5-10g, if necessary), and 500-1000ml of water. If needed, you could also add a flavoured juice for taste.

In order to minimise digestive upset this drink should be a 7-10% solution, meaning that only 7-10% of the total drink should be made up of the ingredients above with the other 90%+ being made up of water.

You can start sipping on this from the start of the warm-up right through to the end of the event.

If more practical, you can drink half of it before the session, and the other half during breaks.

You could also experiment with the addition of some sugary sweets or energy gels if you need more carbohydrates, which would be of particular importance for something like a marathon, where carrying a sufficiently large bottle/shaker isn’t practical.

With these recommendations, it's important to pay attention to your body's feedback.

More specifically, how do your energy levels feel with differing amounts and timings of these? How is your digestion affected?

Finally, it's important to practice this approach in training sessions before trying them out in matches, races, or other competitive events. This will help avoid any unwanted stomach upsets or energy fluctuations when it matters most!

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Pre-Performance Meal Guide for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

It was 5pm on the day of an under-16 GAA match.

15-year-old me looked through the kitchen cupboards and fridge, trying to put together a pre-match meal.

I must have read somewhere, earlier that week, that carbohydrates were the body’s preferred energy source, and decided that the more of them I could eat, the more energy I would have for that’s night match.

This led to the ‘obvious’ meal choice of two packets of microwaveable Uncle Ben’s basmati rice, with nothing else, except a touch of sweet chilli sauce, for taste.

After chomping through the bulk of the rice, I slumped in the chair, wondering how this feeling of bloated drowsiness would eventually lead to me performing at the top of my game in 2–3 hours.

It didn’t.

With the rice still lodged in my stomach, and still feeling no surge of energy, I sat in the changing rooms before the match, wondering what I’d done wrong.

Needless to say, the game passed me by, and any energy I had was used trying to stop myself from throwing up.

I assume we all have our pre-match or pre-event meal disaster story, and have tried many different combinations of meal timing and meal content.

I hope that this article can shed some light on what we should be thinking about in relation to nutrition leading up to a match.

It’s Not Just About the Pre-match Meal

If we look at the stages of preparation from a nutritional point of view, we can’t overlook the general diet in the weeks and months leading up to the game, so it is worth mentioning that even the most optimal pre-performance meal is not going to make as big a difference as addressing the diet in general.

Doing so will allow you to have optimised your body composition and created good habits.

(More specific recommendations can be found in articles like this one)

It’s also important to remember that the “fuelling” period for a match goes beyond that meal you have a few hours before the match. It’s important to also start thinking about the days that lead up to the match.

1-2 Days Beforehand

You may have heard that carbohydrates are the main energy source used in high-intensity activities, like a football match, for example.

The reason for this is that carbohydrates (or more specifically glycogen) are relatively quickly converted into fuel, and can therefore support the high energy turnover of the muscles when they are working at high intensity.

For that reason, it is important that you have enough carbohydrate stores in the muscles when it comes to the day of a match or other performance event.

The stored form of carbohydrates in the muscle is called glycogen.

In order to increase these glycogen stores, you need to eat sufficient amounts of carbohydrate-rich foods, like potatoes, rice, pasta, oats, etc.

When this is done in the lead-up to a sporting event, it is usually called “Carb-loading”.

If you want to know more about carb-loading, go to read this article, but for now, it’s enough to know that you should likely increase your carbohydrate intake in the 1-2 days leading up to match-day, if maximising performance is the goal.

Performance Day

Obviously your match-day food will be affected by a lot of different elements, including the time of the match or race, whether you’re eating at home or with a team, and even how nervous you are feeling on the day.

The important thing is to control as much as you can, meaning that you should prepare ahead of time, having bought any food that you need in the days beforehand, having planned out what your meals and snacks are going to be, getting out of bed at the right time, etc.

The aim of your performance-day eating is to top up glycogen stores, achieve adequate hydration, and generally feel energetic going into the match.

Outside of the pre-match meal, your game day meals should generally contain some carbohydrates and protein, with moderate-low amounts of fat and fibre, and no foods that you know you don’t digest well, in order to avoid any digestive troubles, and snacks should be mostly carb-based, again, topping up the glycogen stores.

Hydration should also be a priority, sipping on water throughout the day, without going majorly over your usual intake.

The Pre-performance Meal

If you’ve done everything mentioned above, you’ll be in a good spot when it comes to the few hours leading up to the big event, and more specifically, the final pre-performance meal.

According to nutrition expert Dan Garner, there are 4 rules to optimising nutrition before, during, and after high-intensity training that can be equally applied to the pre-performance meal.

They are:

1. Provide sufficient glucose through carbohydrates.

2. Provide sufficient amino acids through protein.

3. Provide sufficient fluids and electrolytes.

4. Do the above whilst minimising digestive upset.

1. Provide sufficient glucose through carbohydrates

Given what has already been discussed, you’ll know by now the importance of carbohydrates when it comes to fuelling high-intensity exercise.

When it comes to the pre-performance meal, a lot of the fuelling work will be done if you have gone through a carb-loading period.

So whilst you won’t need to rely on the pre-performance meal alone for your fuelling, it is an extra opportunity to top-up the glycogen (stored carbohydrate) and increase blood glucose prior to the performance event.

With that said, somewhere in the range of 40-60g of carbohydrate in the pre-performance meal tends to be a good balance between providing this extra fuel, and not being such as big meal as to feel heavy in the stomach.

2. Provide sufficient amino acids through protein

Protein is generally seen through the lens of recovery and muscle building, and for good reason.

The amino acids supplied through protein can be seen as the building blocks of muscle tissue.

When it comes to the pre-performance meal, supplying amino acids (through protein intake) helps reduce the breakdown of muscle protein that might otherwise occur during high-intensity exercise.

Ths effect may be small, but may lead to reduced muscle loss over time and improved recovery afterward in the hours and days after the performance event.

Additionally, they become potentially beneficial to performance during the event because of their involvement in improving hydration and in the creation of neurotransmitters.

Supplying somewhere in the range of 20-40g of protein in the pre-performance meal, similarly to most other meals, is a good place to aim for in order to satisfy these goals.

3. Provide sufficient fluids and electrolytes

As with carbohydrates, adequate hydration in the days leading up to performance day should put you in a good place, but given that fluids and electrolytes are consistently being excreted throughout the day (through sweating and urination, for example), topping up those levels on performance day itself will be important.

Within the pre-performance meal specifically, avoiding either extreme of water intake (very little, or so much that it feels heavy in your stomach) should allow you to maintain normal hydration levels, and sipping on water as you normally would is advised.

Having salt in your pre-performance meal and/or providing electrolytes through supplemental electrolytes added to your water is also advised, given the importance of electrolytes in the process of muscular contraction and the prevention of muscular cramps, among other things.

These hydration recommendations may change and need to be more precise for endurance events for example, but for most sports (GAA, football, hurling, rugby, etc.) these recommendations are sufficient.

4. Do the above whilst minimising digestive upset

All the recommendations above mean very little if you’re bending over with stomach cramps during a race or having to run off the pitch to the toilet in the middle of a match.

For that reason, doing the above whilst minimising digestive upset as a result of the pre-performance meal is key.

This can be done by addressing three key things:

The size of the meal: The above recommendations regarding carbohydrate and protein amounts will help achieve this, but some trial and error will be needed in order to find what size of meal allows you to not feel full but also not feel hungry going into and during the performance event.

The timing of the meal: This will also be based on your own preference and experience, but generally eating your last meal within the realm of 2-4 hours before the performance event is a good place to start, giving you time to digest the meal, but not so long as to feel hungry again. A snack can be added (e.g. rice cakes, toast, fruit (dried or fresh), oat bars) in the hour or two before the event if there’s a long delay between the pre-performance meal and the performance event.

The content of the meal: The meal should be relatively low in fat and fibre, which tend to take longer to digest, and can therefore lead to a feeling of heaviness in the stomach and a delay in getting the appropriate nutrients through the digestive system. They don’t need to be avoided completely but shouldn’t be consumed in excess.

pre-performance meal examples: 

• Seasoned chicken with rice and spinach

• Oats and whey protein with a banana

• Baked potato and turkey mince with a handful of berries

• Sweet potato with lean beef with rocket leaves

• Pasta with chicken and a moderate amount of tomato sauce

  All of these meals should be seasoned to taste for enjoyment and the previously mentioned hydration benefits of salt.

The Pre-Performance Hour

In the 0–60 minutes before the match, which may be before, during, or after the warm-up phase, you may want to take advantage of the chance to get some extra fuel and fluids into the system.

This can be done through a drink and/or snacks like jelly sweets, for example.

Taking this a step further by including specific supplements at this point can be an option too (e.g. Caffiene).

Examples of the type of drinks/snacks/supplements that can be beneficial in this context is discussed in this article on Intra-Performance Nutrition.

In general, a drink containing 300–500g of water, 20–40 grams of fast-acting carbohydrates (sugars), half a teaspoon of salt or an electrolyte tablet, and some flavouring, can be advantageous to consume, in the 0–60 minute period before the match or other performance event (as well as throughout the and/or at halftime/breaks).

This is basically the same makeup as your usual isotonic sports drink, so if you don’t want to put together your own, sipping on a sports drink in the lead-up to the match or other performance event, or having a glucose gel during the warm-up and/or at halftime can be a good strategy.

Your Pre-Match Check-list:

• Plenty of carbohydrate and water in the days leading up to performance day.

• Pre-performance meal containing some carbs, some protein, salt, little fat and fibre.

• Avoid hard-to-digest foods in the pre-performance meal.

• Eat at a time that allows you to not feel hungry or full during the match.

• Consider an intra-performance drink containing some quick-digesting carbohydrates, and some salt/electrolytes.

• Consider supplementing with caffeine and other potential supplements 45-60 mins pre-match for a cognitive and physiological boost.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Carbohydrate-Loading Guide for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

In my experience working with athletes, it sometimes seems that carb-loading is touted as the be-all and end-all when it comes to performance nutrition.

On the other hand, most players have never implemented it in a structured way, beyond maybe having some pasta the night before a match.

And although it clearly isn’t the only thing we should be worried about, it is worth delving into what it is, and where it should or shouldn’t fall into your nutrition plan.

Carbohydrates for Sport

When you’re making those blistering runs up and down the pitch, or doing tackling grids in training, or running a 5k PB, the body needs to create energy quickly and repeatedly to keep up with those demands.

It also generally needs to be able to do that for a sustained period of time.

The optimal fuel source for this job is glycogen - a name given to carbohydrates when stored in the body.

When we eat carbohydrates, they are broken down into glucose, which is circulated around the body, and ultimately stored as glycogen in the muscles.

This glycogen is then available to be converted and used during intense activities, like those we see in heavy training sessions and sporting matches.

The more glycogen you have available in the muscles when it comes to match-day or race-day, the more fuel that is available, and hopefully, the better your performance will be (or at least you won’t be limited by low fuel availability).

What is Carb-Loading?

Carb-loading (or carbo-loading or carbohydrate-loading) is a term that describes a strategy used to increase the amount of glycogen stored within the muscles leading up to a sporting event, by increasing carbohydrate intake in the days leading up to that event.

The original method proposed involved a few days of very low-carbohydrate intake (with a lot of training to deplete glycogen stores), followed by a few days of extremely high carbohydrate intake (and no training).

As you can imagine, however, this was logistically quite difficult.

On match-week or event-week, all you want to do is focus on getting to that day, but here, you’re looking at 7 days of changing your diet, with each of those 7 days being very different from your usual intake, and with the presupposition that you have complete control over your training load.

Sure, if you thought there was no other option and that it was going to turn you into an elite athlete, you’d probably do it, but fortunately, researchers compared an approach of simply increasing carbohydrate intake in the 1-3 days leading up to the event, and found that this was almost just as effective as the approach of going from very low-carb to very high-carb days.

Who Does it Work For?

Most of the research on carb-loading has been done on endurance athletes, who obviously have different demands than field sports for example.

The former involves staying at a relatively steady pace for a long time, whereas the latter involves mostly short, intermittent bursts followed by short recovery periods.

With that said, both of these significantly deplete glycogen stores, particularly at higher intensities and at longer durations.

For that reason, maximising glycogen stores is likely to also be beneficial for field sports like GAA, hurling, soccer, and rugby, and anecdotally, a lot of the clients I’ve worked with have noticed the benefits when implementing a carb-loading approach.

At a very basic level, given that glycogen is the predominant fuel source in high-intensity training and competition, it is likely that performance in these activities will be improved by having sufficient stores to pull from.

With that said, it’s probably not AS necessary for a GAA athlete, for example, as it would be for a long-distance runner, since it’s unlikely that a GAA athlete is going to completely deplete their carbohydrate stores during a match, BUT having high glycogen availability can improve athletic performance even in events where there isn’t a risk of depleting glycogen stores, and it’s better to have the stores there for when they’re needed, also because it tends to be a much better fuel source than fats or muscle protein.

How to Do it

My recommendation would simply be to increase carbohydrate intake in the 1-2 days leading up to match-day.

For some, this may simply be a case of adding in a large portion of carbohydrates to each meal, or adding in a couple of extra high-carb meals/snacks.

For those who want to bring in a bit more accuracy, or already tend to track their food intake, consuming 5-8 grams of carbohydrate per kg body weight (400-640g for an 80kg player) is a good place to aim for.

For those who are new to tracking their food, this can be tracked through the Myfitnesspal or Cronometer apps.

This intake might seem very high for many people, and if that is the case, you can always start at a lower intake and you’re still likely to get some benefits if it’s above your usual intake.

There are also cases where someone with a fat-loss goal may not want to increase their carbohydrate intake as much, since this may increase their calorie intake significantly for the week, potentially decreasing their fat-loss for that week.

That will be an individual decision based on the balance of their fat-loss and performance goals.

On a practical level, the usual sources of carbohydrates (potatoes, rice, pasta, oats, breads, fruits etc.) will be a good idea.

However, I would recommend opting for mostly lower-fibre options, as well as bringing in some higher glycemic options (breakfast cereals, sports drinks, sugary sweets, juices) for reasons outlined in the next section, but also because players often find it difficult to get enough carbohydrates in when they are eating very filling sources.

Avoiding Common Mistakes/Problems

There are a few common problems that tend to come up with carb-loading approaches, and the first thing to mention is that you should practice it beforehand, in the weeks/months leading up to match-day or event-day, so that there are no surprises when it comes to the big day itself.

It’s Not an Excuse to Eat Whatever You Want

Carb-loading shouldn’t be used as an excuse to eat whatever you want.

It shouldn’t be used as an reason to overeat on pizza and pastries the night before a match or event.

Instead, it should be viewed as a strategic approach to improving performance.

Yes, you will be eating more food, but the likelihood is that you will have to make a conscious effort to eat enough and to eat the right types of foods.

For example, optimally, the increase in food intake should be predominantly in the form of carbohydrates, whilst keeping your fat and protein intake relatively constant.

You want extra carbohydrate stores in the muscle, and adding in extra fat intake isn’t necessarily going to help with that, but will provide additional (excessive) calories, on top of the already high levels.

In order to manage this, it is better to opt for carbohydrate-dense sources, like rice, pasta, potatoes, cereals, breads, as opposed to things like pizza, pastries, foods with creamy sauces, and deep-fried foods, which do tend to contain carbohydrates but also contain a lot of fat.

Even some of the foods usually thought of as poor food choices, like breakfast cereals, sugary sweets, and fruit juices can be used here as easy-to-consume sources of almost completely carbohydrates.

Gut Issues

Any major change to the diet is likely to cause gut issues, as the gut tends to adapt to what you feed it over time, and therefore prefer gradual changes to sudden ones.

Even if you were to majorly increase fibre intake (which is generally seen as a good addition to the diet), the gut would struggle to deal with it, and you may experience digestive issues.

In that case, it would be important to gradually increase fibre intake and allow the gut to adapt.

The same can be true for carbohydrate intake.

Asker Jeukendrup coined the term “training the gut”, the idea of allowing your gut to get used to high carbohydrate intake, which will be very important if you plan on using a carbohydrate-loading approach over the long-term.

This can be done by eating a relatively high amount of carbohydrates in general, but also by practicing carbohydrate-loading for important training sessions, or less-important matches and races in the weeks leading up to the the improtant ones.

Gut issues can also occur as a result of eating too much fat, fibre, or protein during the carb-loading process.

It can also be a good idea to opt for fewer whole-grain carbohydrate sources during the carbohydrate-loading period, since these will inevitably have a higher fibre content.

Another, often overlooked, issue is the impact of stress on gut discomfort.

This can be managed somewhat with psychological interventions, but is often unavoidable to some extent, which is why athletes often prefer to have lighter meals on event-day, increasing the importance of having done most of the fuelling up in the previous days, through strategies like the carb-loading approach we’ve gone through here.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Training vs. Rest Day Nutrition for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

Intuitively, it makes sense to eat more food on days you’re training hard vs. days when you’re not training or have sessions that require less energy.

The idea is that you want to provide the body with more fuel for the sessions that need it most.

This is sometimes referred to as ‘calorie-cycling’ or ‘calorie-undulating’.

If you’re someone who is trying to lose body fat, you’ll probably recognise an issue here, and may find yourself asking, “If I increase my calorie intake on each training day, will that get in the way of my fat loss goal?”

Well, if you were to simply increase your intake on training days and not make up for this by decreasing your intake elsewhere, the answer would likely be yes.

However, if you were to make up for the increase on training days by decreasing your intake on non-training days, you’d be able to have more fuel in your body on the days it’s needed most, whilst still maintaining your daily average calorie intake.

As a result, you’d be able to achieve the same fat-loss progress as you would had you kept your intake constant across all days, whilst performing at a higher level.

Defining Your Days

When implementing an approach like this, it’s important to define your days.

If you’re a field sport athlete (GAA, hurling, rugby, soccer, etc.) you can consider ‘training days’ as those days when you’re training intensely and for longer durations, e.g. with a team or doing tough running/cardio-based sessions alone.

You can then count non-training days as those days where you’re not training at all, or those days where you’re doing gym sessions or other similar sessions that, while tough, aren’t going to demand the same energy requirements as those of longer running sessions.

On the flip-side, if you consider strength or muscle gain your main goal, the days you’re in the gym can become your training days, and the days you’re not training in the gym can be considered non-training days.

In exceptional circumstances, you could have 3 different daily intakes (low, medium, and high), but this would be excessive in most cases, without much benefit, so ‘training days’ and ‘non-training days’ is sufficient for most athletes to reap the benefits of this approach.

Should You Use This Approach?

So, should you implement this approach?

The first thing to consider here is the concept of ‘consistency over perfection’.

Specifically, even if you agree that a calorie-cycling approach is technically better, if implementing it leads to you being overwhelmed and inconsistent, a simpler approach of hitting a consistent calorie target, regardless of each day’s training level, is likely to lead to better outcomes.

If in doubt, start with a period of a few weeks where you’re keeping calories constant every day, before moving to this calorie-cycling approach once you’ve built up some consistency.

Another factor that matters when it comes to deciding if this approach is suitable for you is your current body composition goal.

Someone who is in a fat-loss phase is likely to benefit most from calorie-cycling, since it will allow them to be close to a maintenance level of calories on training days (providing adequate calorie intake for the work required), whilst being in a larger calorie deficit on days where they aren’t training, allowing them to see fat-loss over time as a result.

Someone who is currently eating at a maintenance level (where body weight is staying stable across weeks on average), is also likely to benefit, since they will be able to stay at the same weight, whilst having extra calories for fuel on training days.

Someone who is currently eating at a level that has them purposely gaining weight (i.e. they’re eating in a calorie surplus) is not likely to benefit much from this approach, since they’re already eating excess calories that can be used as fuel, both on training and non-training days.

How Much Extra Should You Eat?

Again, there are numerous factors at play here, such as how low your calorie intake currently is and if you’re currently experiencing hunger on a regular basis (since bringing calories even lower on numerous days per week is likely to increase hunger levels).

I’ve found from experience working with athletes, that around a 10% increase on training days tends to be a solid approach.

This figure is by no means fixed in stone, but is based on experience with athletes as well as what logically and logistically makes sense.

Logically, an extremely small difference of say 2% would be unlikely to make any difference in terms of the effects you’re hoping for, and a much larger amount like 25%, for example, would likely lead to excessively low intakes on non-training days.

Increasing your calorie intake on training days by 10% means that if your current daily intake (calculated in previous articles) was 2500 kcal, that would increase to 2750 kcal (2500 + (10% of 2500)) on training days.

You could simply leave it at that, increasing your intake on training days, and leaving your intake at the regular level on non-training days, but that will lead to an overall increase in your daily average calorie intake across the week.

If, however, you wanted to maintain your average daily calorie target for the week, then you need to adjust your non-training day intake downwards in order to even out the average.

If you are training 3 days per week, and therefore eating that new 2750 kcal target 3 days per week, you’ve just added in an extra 750 kcal (250 x 3) to your weekly calorie intake.

In order to ensure your average daily intake for the week remains the same as it was before, you then need to take that extra 750 kcal out of the other 4 days of the week.

That can be done by simply dividing that extra 750 kcal by 4, since there are 4 non-training days: (750 / 4 =187.5 - Call it 190 kcal for ease of maths and practicality), leaving your non-training day intake at about 2310 kcal (2500 - 190) and training day intake at 2750 kcal.

(Note: Don’t worry if that was confusing. There’s a super simple calculation at the end of the article).

Of course, your calorie intake will likely be different than the 2500 kcal in the example above, and you may want to experiment with increasing or decreasing that 10% figure, but hopefully the maths example shows you how you can match it to your needs and goals.

Adjusting Your Macronutrients

In general, any changes in calorie intake on training vs. non-training days should be reflected in carbohydrate intake as opposed to protein or fat (this is why sometimes this approach is called ‘carb-cycling’ rather than ‘calorie-cycling’).

The reason for this is that the body’s protein requirements generally stay the same on a day-to-day basis, as does fat, and recommendations for both of these are generally based on your body weight, whereas the body’s carbohydrate requirements generally change based on your energy output demands.

It also logically makes sense that since carbohydrates are the main energy source used in high-intensity training, you would adjust your intake of them based on the level of high-intensity training you were doing.

There may be exceptions to this, where fat or protein will be also adjusted slightly.

An example of this would be where calorie intake has become so high that it becomes too difficult to get all the extra calories from carbohydrates alone, and increasing fat as well might be a good option.

As a final note, many athletes have achieved their body composition and performance goals whilst keeping their calorie intake consistent through the week, without the need to change for training vs. non-training days, so consider the calorie-cycling approach as an optional extra, if and when it is implementable on a consistent basis for you, and when you’ve already built up consistency in the basics.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

How Many Meals to Eat Each Day as an Athlete (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

The issue of meal frequency is hotly debated in the nutrition world, often without reference to adequate and appropriate science.

On one side, you’ll have proponents of eating 6-8 meals per day referring to ‘stoking the metabolism’, and on the other, you’ll have proponents of intermittent fasting, referring to the increased fat utilisation during an increased fasting period when often only eating 1-2 meals per day within a given window.

Both approaches make sense logically on the surface, in different ways, and people have definitely used these techniques to make huge amounts of progress in different fields.

But the fact that both of these extremes ‘work’ should tell you that there is a deeper principle underlying what determines your progress.

Does it Actually Matter?

Many scientists have studied this area of nutrition and of particular interest here, there have been many studies comparing what happens when two groups of people eat the same number of calories, but one group eats them from fewer meals and one group spreads them out across many meals.

The result in the vast majority of these studies is equal outcomes in weight-loss and fat-loss for both groups, when calories are equal.

The results of these experiments indicate that what determines outcomes in terms of fat-loss is the calories consumed daily rather than the number of meals one consumes.

With that said, when people are allowed to eat freely (not aiming for a calorie target), studies have shown that people who eat fewer meals per day often tend to see more fat-loss.

Think about that for a moment.

Does that contradict the previous paragraph?

When you consider that when people eat fewer meals, they often tend to eat fewer calories, you’ll see that it actually backs up the previous point.

When calories are sufficiently low, fat-loss occurs.

By removing a meal or two out of your daily intake, most people end up automatically reducing their calorie intake, and losing body fat as a result.

It’s also important to point out that for other people, reducing the number of meals they’re consuming can lead to extra levels of hunger during the period between meals, leading to less adherence to the diet, and ultimately less progress as a result.

This leads to the ultimate conclusion that how many meals you eat isn’t as important as most people might presume, at least in terms of fat-loss.

For these reasons, it’s important to assess what meal frequency works for you as an individual from a preference and sustainability point of view.

Ultimately that is the most important factor when it comes to deciding how many meals you should be eating each day.

When it Does Matter

Because of what’s outlined above, you’ll see many coaches and athletes stop there, presuming that’s the end of the story, and that there is no relevance of meal frequency to your athletic goals.

But a closer look at nutritional science (and your own practical experience) will tell you that there are a number of elements to consider.

Appetite Management

As I’m sure you can imagine, eating 2500 kcal from 7 small meals is going to feel subjectively different than eating 2500 kcal from 2 large meals.

That’s not to say one is better than the other.

On one hand, you never have to go for any longer than a couple of hours without food, BUT each individual meal may not be very satisfying/satiating due to the small size.

On the other hand, you get to eat 2 large meals, each of which might be very filling, BUT you end up with prolonged periods of the day where you’re not eating, potentially leading to hunger and the propensity to make poor food choices as a result.

There are pros and cons to both these approaches.

However, what’s going to suit most people is to eat a number of meals somewhere in between these, where you’re able to eat decent-sized meals without going for long periods of not eating.

Given that there is no real advantage (apart from preference perhaps) to having a very small or very large number of meals outside of the normal range, opting for somewhere between 3-5 meals/snacks tends to be a good starting point for most people in terms of keeping hunger minimised and allowing for enjoyable meals.

This tends to make sense for most people’s daily lives also, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and perhaps a snack or two.

Schedule

When it comes to any intervention in your life, it has to work within the framework of your overall existing lifestyle.

For example, if you’re a busy professional working 60 hours a week, your ability to choose when you eat or train is going to be limited in comparison to a student who only has classes for 10 hours of the week.

For that reason alone, a blanket recommendation of a number of meals per day won’t be broadly applicable to everyone.

One person may only have 2-3 opportunities during the day to eat, whereas another might have complete control of their time and be able to eat 5-6 times if he/she wanted to.

Finding a meal timing strategy that fits into your daily schedule will make a big difference to how easy or difficult making the changes feels, and therefore how sustainable your approach will be.

Getting this right will usually involve planning and trial and error, in order to get that number right for you.

Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS)

Muscle Protein Synthesis is the creation (synthesis) of muscle tissue, that occurs when we eat a sufficiently large, high-quality protein source, and/or when we engage in resistance training (lifting weights, for example).

The body is constantly in a state of both breakdown and synthesis of all of its tissues, and muscle is no exception.

For this reason, optimising the synthesis (building) side of that equation is crucially important for your recovery and muscle/strength gain goals.

Logically, it would make sense to aim to ‘spike’ this MPS response as many times as possible per day, so that might lead you to conclude that more meals are better.

However, studies have shown that aiming to do so any more than about 5 times per day doesn’t bring any extra benefit.

The same research also showed that ‘spiking’ the MPS response 3 times per day brought close to the same daily total benefit per day as 5 times per day, when the same total protein intake was consumed for that day.

This leads us to the conclusion that eating 3-5 protein sources per day is optimal for increasing muscle protein synthesis, and therefore helping optimise your recovery and muscle gain.

This obviously isn’t possible if only consuming 1-2 meals per day, and also indicates that eating more than 5 times per day isn’t required, so eating 3-5 protein-containing meals per day is what I recommend to clients.

Eating Around Training and Matches

Getting your nutrition right around training sessions and competitive events can have a big effect on your performance, as well as your recovery and adaptation.

For this reason, both the pre-training and post-training meals should be seen as a key part of any nutritional approach.

If you’re only eating 1-2 meals per day, this may make it more difficult to optimise these meals, since it will require that you eat a lot of food within each of them, and not have any other meals outside of them.

Adjusting your eating schedule to allow you to optimise those meals will likely require eating more than 1-2 meals per day, again, making the 3-5 meals per day target a good one.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Optimising Sleep for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)(GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

There's a spike in car crashes on the last weekend of March every year.

Why?

Because time "springs forward" by an hour, and we all lose an hour of sleep.

That's how important sleep is.

In 2014, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control declared insufficient sleep as a public epidemic.

So with the general population suffering from not getting sleep enough, you can imagine how athletes, who may need even more sleep, can be affected.

"It's Fine, I Can Get Through it"

The problem with lack of sleep isn't just that you feel more tired all day (although you'd think that would be enough to get us to sleep more), it's that it affects your performance, fat-loss, muscle gain, and general health.

Performance

Studies have been done to investigate the differences in the performance outcomes in people who got different amounts of sleep, and people who got less sleep experienced greater perceived exertion (training/workouts felt harder), lower time to exhaustion (they ran out of steam more quickly), and slower reaction times.

As you can imagine, none of this is great for athletes, where these things are crucial.

Fat-loss

Sleep deprivation not only makes us hungrier, but also makes high-calorie, hyper-palatable food, (typically referred to as "junk food") more attractive to us.

More specifically, brain scans show that activity in the reward centres increases more in response to junk food, when someone is sleep deprived.

So whilst sleep doesn't necessarily directly affect fat-loss, it can affect your food choices, which obviously has a major effect on fat-loss.

Muscle Gain

There was a study that compared two groups over a series of weeks: one that slept 5.5 hours per night, and one that slept 8.5 hours per night.

Over the course of the study, the first group experienced 55% more fat gain, and 60% more muscle loss, despite both groups eating the same number of calories.

Muscle gain is dependent on putting a stimulus on the muscle, and then allowing it to recover.

If we skimp on sleep, we reduce both the stimulus and recovery sides of the equation, and majorly sell ourselves short in terms of muscle gain.

Health

Lack of sleep can also have a huge effect on health.

In addition to the aspects already mentioned, also affected are things like memory, inflammation, testosterone levels, growth hormone levels, and immune system function.

Getting sick keeps you out of training, which means less time practicing your skills, getting fitter, getting stronger, and competing in your sport.

How Much Sleep Do We Need?

Studies suggest that the required amount of sleep varies a lot between individuals but 7-9 hours is about right for most people.

Mike Matthews wrote an article on sleep, where he spoke about a technique for finding out how much sleep you need:

Take a 2-week testing period (like a holiday, for example), where you go to sleep at the same time every night, without setting an alarm.

You'll probably sleep a lot in the first few nights, as you catch up on the sleep debt you've built up, but in the second week, you should start to wake up at about the same time each day.

The amount of time that you sleep waking up naturally is likely to be the amount of sleep that is optimal for you.

Tips For Better Sleep

It's not just about the amount of sleep you get. It's also about the quality of that sleep.

There are a few proven ways of improving the quality of your sleep.

1) Sleep in a Cave.

By this, I mean make your room as dark as possible, as quiet as possible, and cool (cool enough that you'd need to put a t-shirt on to be comfortable outside of the bed covers).

2) Avoid Screens

Screens like the T.V., laptops, and your mobile phone emit a type of light referred to as blue light.

The brain recognises this in a similar way to the sun, and since the body's sleep clock (or more technically, circadian rhythm) is partially controlled by exposure to sunlight, the systems that would otherwise be telling your brain it's time to sleep, won't do so, and you may struggle to fall asleep or your quality of sleep may suffer.

That’s not to mention the effect of the stimulation from the type of content you’re likely to be consuming.

Having a cut-off time of one hour before bed can help reduce this issue.

3) Have a Bedtime Routine

Why do some of us have a pre-training or pre-competition routine?

At least in part, it's because we know that that routine puts our body and mind into the right state to undertake the task at hand.

So, we know that routines can affect our mental state.

The same is true when it comes to sleep.

A good sleep routine will put our body and mind in the right state to fall asleep and get into a deep sleep.

Again, this will vary for each person, but generally, it should involve things that progressively relax you.

Some suggestions would be foam rolling, easy stretching/movement, reading a book, drinking caffeine-free tea, writing, chatting with someone, having a bath, etc.

4) Have a Stimulant Cut-Off Time

Caffeine can take about 5 hours for half of it to leave your system, meaning that it could affect your sleep for even longer than that.

For that reason, it is recommended to restrict coffee or other caffeine products after mid-day, in order to optimise sleep.

Nicotine is another stimulant that should be avoided in the evening.

Alcohol can also have an adverse effect on sleep.

Of course, it can initially make you fall asleep more quickly but as time goes on, during sleep it tends to act like a stimulant and hamper your ability to get into a deep sleep.

It's been said recently, that if sleep was a supplement, it would be the best supplement available (and it's free!).

Hopefully, you can now see why that might be the case.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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Hydration for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

Fluid balance: Fluid out vs. Fluid in

When talking about hydration, it’s useful to think in terms of fluid balance, meaning the difference between the fluid that is going out of your body vs. the fluid that you are taking in.

Fluid Out

Sweat

Even the fittest of bodies is surprisingly inefficient in terms of their energy use, and a huge amount of energy is wasted as heat, especially during intense exercise.

It’s critical that we dissipate (or get rid of) this heat, in order to maintain normal body temperature, or else body temperature would rise extremely quickly, affecting vital biological processes, and therefore performance.

When we sweat, the sweat evaporates, and carries the heat energy away from the body, into the air (imagine the steam evaporating from a pot of rice, where the heat energy is being taken away from the rice into the air, which you’ll recognise by the fact that it heats up the room), helping to maintain the body temperature at a safe level.

That is to say, sweating cools us down.

As athletes, we can sweat out litres of water during training sessions and matches, and the amount will depend on various factors, including your physical attributes, activity intensity, length of the activity, and environmental heat and humidity.

Urination

Urination is one of the body’s mechanisms for getting rid of waste products, controlling blood volume and controlling the amount of electrolytes in the body.

These are all tightly regulated, and don’t need a huge amount of conscious effort on your part, apart from the few recommendations I’ll give later around altering fluid consumption.

The amount of fluid that you lose through urination is largely dependent on the amount you drink, as well as being affected by other aspects like electrolyte levels and how much you are sweating.

Other

Fluids are also lost through breathing (the air we breathe out is high in water vapour), and excretion.

These aren’t as relevant to this article, so I won’t go into depth on them, but they are still worth being aware of.

Fluid In

The fluid we take in can be in the form of water and other beverages, as well as some foods, like fruits and vegetables, which tend to have quite high water content.

Consuming sufficient fluids is crucial for athletes, in order to match the fluids being lost through sweat and urination, or we risk seeing the negative effects outlined below.

Negative Effects of Under-Hydration

1. Heart Rate

There was a study done that assessed two groups of athletes in the same running session.

One group consumed water during the session and the other didn’t.

The results showed that heart rate was significantly higher throughout the session in those who didn’t consume water, insinuating that the same exercise session was more strenuous when under-hydrated.

The proposed reason for this is that as you lose fluid, your volume of blood decreases, meaning the blood is more concentrated and thicker, and therefore the heart has to work harder to pump it around the body, as it aims to circulate nutrients and remove waste products.

The more work the heart has to do per each ‘pump’, the more quickly it becomes fatigued, the less able it will be to provide nutrients to the working muscles, and the more performance levels will decrease.

2. Temperature Regulation

As mentioned earlier, sweat helps regulate body temperature by dissipating heat from the body i.e. it cools us down.

When we’re dehydrated, we sweat less, and therefore the body will either increase in temperature to the point of causing harm, or you will be forced to reduce intensity due to the discomfort of overheating.

Either case will result in performance being diminished.

3. Electrolyte Levels

Electrolytes are electrically charged particles, which are involved in carrying electrical impulses around the body, and are involved in the nervous system and contracting muscles, both of which are extremely important for athletes.

They are also involved maintaining hydration levels in and out of the body’s cells.

The main electrolytes include sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, calcium, phosphate, magnesium and others, all with their own functions.

We lose some of these through sweat, and if we don’t replace them and they get too low, we can see issues with muscle cramping, fatigue, and ultimately a downturn in athletic performance, or worse than that, serious health risks.

These are provided through water and other fluids to varying degrees, but including salt in the diet and potentially providing electrolytes through supplementation is required for optimal athletic performance.

The Rare Case of Over-Hydration: Hyponatremia

There have been cases, mainly during long-duration events, where people have had serious health issues, and even died after drinking too much water during the event.

Although they were following wise advice in replacing the water they were losing through sweat, they weren’t also replacing the electrolytes lost through sweat, resulting in the sodium content of the blood becoming diluted, which leads to complications with cell swelling.

This isn’t a likely concern for most athletes, since generally the problem is getting enough fluids in rather than too much, but I use this example to show that there is a limit to how much you should be drinking, so taking multiple litres of water in directly before a match or at half-time or during a long run, for example, isn’t going to be a good idea, and sipping on fluids throughout is a better idea.

I also use it to point out that when you are drinking a lot of water, for example during an intense championship match in the summer heat or during a half-marathon, it’s probably a good idea to add some electrolytes to your water, either in the form of a pinch of salt, or an electrolyte supplement, in order to replace the electrolytes lost through sweat.

Practical Implications

All of this might have you feeling overwhelmed as to what you need to do with this information.

The good news is, the body is extremely good at regulating all of this.

If you drink too much, your body will excrete more.

If you consume too much salt, your body can usually adjust, and so on.

The main thing we have to do is to avoid the extremes.

With that said, performance usually goes down at about 2% water loss, and thirst usually starts between 1-2%, meaning that if you turn up to a training session or match feeling thirsty, you are already selling yourself short, as it is usually difficult to drink enough during the session or match, to match the amount you are losing through sweat and exhalation, resulting in further dehydration and further performance detriment.

General Daily intake

The amount you should drink will depend on a lot of factors, but generally about 1L per 25kg bodyweight (3L for a 75kg athlete) will be a good starting point, along with seasoning your food and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables in order to ensure adequate electrolyte intake.

Urine colour should also be monitored, ensuring regular, clear urinations throughout the day.

During Training/Matches

During matches, training sessions, heavy runs, etc. a good starting point is to simply consume fluids at natural breaks, aiming for 1-2 mouthfuls every 10-15 minutes.

This drink should generally be made up of water, with some electrolytes, and perhaps some carbohydrates (no more than 7% concentration) which can help with the gut’s absorption of the fluid, as well as allowing you to gain the performance benefits associated with carbohydrate supplementation.

This tends to be exactly the composition of most sports drinks, and now you know why.

You can find more info on how to make your own sports drink, and more about intra-training nutrition in this article.

After Training/Matches

After tough training sessions and matches, it’s important to start the rehydration process soon, which should involve sipping on either water or the previously-mentioned drink in the hours following the session.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Athlete Meal Plan Guide (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

A Word on Meal Plans

The concept of meal plans is a contentious one in the nutrition world.

On one hand, a lot of people come to a nutritionist expecting to receive a nutrition plan that they can just follow meal by meal for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, that’s not necessarily going to be the best approach for most people, given the issues with sustainability: Can you imagine eating the same foods every day for the rest of your life? And if not, is a strict meal plan really useful long-term?

With that said, there can be some usefulness in meal plans, in that they give you a structured approach and starting point to what a day of eating could look like in order to hit your specific goals.

However, the trade-off is often that you don’t go through the process of learning the principles of nutrition, leading to a lack of adaptability and flexibility, and ultimately losing out on the potential to manage your nutrition by yourself.

Rather than seeing meal plans as a strict prescription to follow, a better approach would be to see them as rough examples of what your diet might look like - That’s the approach I use with the lads I work with.

Your meals should be made up of foods you enjoy, foods that are accessible to you, and should have an element of adaptability.

The tracking process (as outlined in the previous articles) tends to be a much more flexible and adaptable and sustainable way of approaching nutrition, it spite of its own downsides, including the extra time and care it takes to do it.

After a period of doing this, most people find themselves able to get to a point where they no longer need to track unless they’re going into a specific phase of changing their nutrition.

With all that in mind, you’ll find some example meal plans in this article.

Again, these are examples to give you ideas around what your day of eating might look like, but there are no specific foods that need to be included in your meals, nor foods that aren’t on this that you should avoid.

Spend some time creating your own example meal plan based on your own calorie and macronutrient requirements.

Even then, be completely open to this changing on a daily basis, using the food tracking process to include foods where needed based on what’s going on that day etc.

Also, if using the meal plans provided as examples, feel free to look at those below and above your own calorie targets to get some other ideas for meals you might include, simply adjusting ingredients up or down as needed.

Again, I can’t emphasise enough, following these meal plans strictly is not recommended.

They are simply ideas, and using the food tracking process in order to hit your specific calorie and macronutrient goals is recommended.

How to Plan Your Own Meals

Before looking at the example meal plans laid out, let’s look more generally about planning out your meals.

Given an athletes requirements for protein, fat, and carbohydrates, as well as fibre and micronutrients, you should be aiming to include some element of each of these in each of your meals.

A very simple way of approaching that is to pick 1 or 2 sources of each per meal.

You’ll find examples of each category in the example meals plans outlined.

The amount of each of the foods will depend on your exact calorie and macronutrient requirements, so weighing and tracking your food, at least for a period of time, in order to get an idea of how much you should be eating for your goals, is recommended.

Example Meal Plans

Below, find outlined some examples of what your daily meals might look like.

There are options for various rough calorie intakes.

Exact amounts of each food with their calorie and macro amounts have intentionally not been included in most cases, because the aim is to have enough flexibility to allow you to take aspects of each and adapt them to your needs.

You’ll be able to use those below as rough guides, and through tracking your daily intake and adapting, you’ll be able to get closer to your own specific daily targets.

Remember, these are examples, and there’s no need to think you have to follow them strictly.

It’s about finding a way of eating that works for your preferences while allowing you to hit your daily calorie, macronutrient, and micronutrient needs, and if the examples below help you do that, use them as needed, and if not, don’t.

1750 kcal

Breakfast: 3 poached eggs, spinach, tomatoes, 1 piece of toast

Lunch: Salad with lettuce, sweetcorn, grated carrots, chicken, light salad dressing

Dinner: Seasoned turkey mince with peppers, onions, and rice

Snack: Low-calorie jelly pot

2000 kcal

Breakfast: Porridge with banana and protein powder

Lunch: Bread roll with tuna, sweetcorn, and light mayo

Snack: An orange and grapes

Dinner: Chicken fillet with potatoes and broccoli

2250 kcal

Breakfast: Overnight oats with milk, protein powder, frozen berries, almond butter

Lunch: Baked potato with baked beans and low-fat cheese

Snack: Plain Greek yoghurt

Dinner: Chicken stir-fry with baby corn, mangetout, and rice noodles

2500 kcal

Breakfast: 4-egg omelette with ham, peas, mushrooms, hot sauce, and 2 pieces of toast

Lunch: Wholemeal wrap with chicken, chilli sauce, cheese, lettuce, and an apple

Dinner: Chilli con carne and rice

Snack: 2 rice cakes

2750 kcal

Breakfast: Yoghurt with banana, almonds, granola, and honey

Lunch: Quinoa salad with chicken, peas, baby tomatoes, cashews, raisins

Dinner: Salmon, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and avocado

Meal 4: Chicken Sandwich with lettuce

3000 kcal

Breakfast: Porridge with mixed nuts/seeds, blueberries, banana, protein powder, dark chocolate

Lunch: Pasta Bolognese

Dinner: Homemade chicken curry with rice

Snack: Bowl of cereal with milk

3250 kcal

Breakfast: Smoothie with oats, nuts, frozen berries, banana, protein powder

Lunch: Salmon, peas, sweetcorn, and rice

Snack: Banana and peanut butter on rice cakes

Dinner: Homemade burgers with homemade chips

Snack: Yoghurt with nuts and fruit

3500 kcal

Breakfast: 5 scrambled eggs with 3 pieces of toast, and avocado

Meal 2: Chicken stir-fry with noodles

Meal 3: Fajitas with onions peppers and rice

Meal 4: Protein oat pancakes with dark chocolate and honey

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Hard-Gainer Athlete's Guide to Eating More (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

Anyone who struggles to lose weight will be envious of the person purposely trying to eat more in an effort to gain weight.

But if you’ve ever struggled to eat enough, you’ll likely know that it’s not as easy as eating whatever you want.

You obviously want the food you are eating to be of good quality, and you don’t want to just over-indulge all the time and gain unnecessary fat.

Not to mention, you can feel that you are force-feeding yourself, eating when you don’t feel like eating, all in the name of gaining some muscle and fuelling your performance.

However, there are a few things you can do to make it that bit easier to hit your high food intake targets!

1. Track Your Foods

"What gets measured gets managed", and if you're not tracking your food, you going to struggle to manage and adapt the amount you are eating.

Eating 'more' is hard to quantify without tracking how much you are actually eating.⁣

Using an app like Myfitnesspal or Cronometer, you can track your calorie and macronutrient intake, and therefore you can clearly see if you are actually eating as much as you think, and adjust if needed.

See more on this in this article.

2. Schedule Your Meals

In my experience working with atheltes, those who tend to struggle to gain weight are the same atheltes who tend to deprioritise meals when they're busy.

Scheduling meals allows you to plan ahead, get organised, and ensure you are eating when you're supposed to.⁣

This helps you avoid having to reach for quick, less ideal options on the go, as well as allowing you to plan out meals that allow you to hit your intake targets.

3. Use Liquid Calories

“Liquid calories” are usually less filling than the equivalent calories/macros from solid food, allowing you to get more in, without feeling as full.⁣

Think of apple juice versus an apple.

There are roughly the same amount of calories within a medium glass of apple juice as in 2 apples, yet the apples would fill you up a lot more than the juice.

You can use this knowledge to get more calories in, by including some drinks/smoothies with your meals, and in between meals.

4. Vary Your Food Choices

Eating similar foods consistently isn't a bad idea in general, as it tends to improve consistency within a diet, but when we include more flavours in our meals, we tend to eat more, which is useful for those with that goal.

This is partly why you can still eat dessert even when you feel full.

You can use this tactic to your advantage by including more flavours in your meals, as well as increasing the variety of meals you eat.

5. Include Some Junk Food

Eating 3000+ kcal from the likes of chicken, rice, and broccoli every day can become difficult even for the most dedicated clean eater.

Food can become boring, and fullness can lead to not eating enough.

This is why it can be a good idea to include some foods that you can easily eat and enjoy, that also allow you to hit your calorie/macro intake.

Don't take this as a reason to abandon healthy eating habits, but at the same time, don't be afraid to add in some chocolate or pizza every now and then.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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5 Hunger Hacks for Athletes (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

First thing’s first: If you are in a phase of fat-loss, where you’re likely to be decreasing your food intake, there are probably going to be times when you're hungry, and that isn't neccessarily a bad thing.

Being hungry doesn't necessarily mean you're losing muscle, or causing yourself any other harm.

With that said, if you're always hungry, you're likely to make poorer food choices, and ultimately end up abandoning your nutrition plan, so it’s something we want to manage effectively.

From an evolutionary perspective, hunger is part of the body’s process of motivating us to seek out food, ultimately so that we can survive.

In the parts of the world where most people reading this will be, there is an abundance of food, so we rarely use hunger as our signal to eat.

When, and how much, we eat is usually determined by things like habit, social convention, desire, and convenience.

On the other hand, when you are aiming to lose fat, you will usually be eating slightly less than the body optimally would like, so there is a certain amount of restriction involved, which can lead to hunger.

With that said, there are a few things we can do to try to limit the amount of hunger we feel, which will likely lead to you being more likely to stick to your nutrition plan over the long term.

1. Eat Enough Food

One possible reason that you're struggling with hunger may be that you’re being too extreme in cutting out food, leading to a constant feeling of restriction, and constant hunger between meals.

This often comes from an impatience, and wanting to make progress as quickly as possible.

A situation like this almost always ends up with a weekend blow-out, undoing a lot of the progress from during the week, leaving you wondering why you haven’t been making progress up to this point.

When you start eating an amount of food that allows you to make steady, predictable progress, whilst still enjoying your food and not starving yourself, then that feeling of needing to eat the house down at the weekend goes away, and you make more progress even with (or likely because of) the less extreme approach.

2.  Plan Your Meals

Which of the below options sounds most like you?

1. You go to bed, knowing what you're going to be eating the next day, at what times, and knowing it's going to be exactly what you need to hit your body composition and performance goals.

or

2. You'll worry about it tomorrow, and hopefully be able to get your hands on something decent, but aren't really sure what or when.

I’m sure you’ll agree that it seems obvious which of those are going to get results with your nutrition approach.

But for so many, number 2 is the norm.

Then what happens?

You wait until you're hungry, then go grab the most convenient thing you can find, which often isn't a great choice.

Or, because you feel you can't find anything "healthy", you decide you'll just get something later, or you opt for a protein bar to keep you going.

Ultimately, it's a miserable experience, and you get home and justify eating everything in sight, because you've not eaten all day, or you go out to training hungry and under-fuelled, and have a poor session.

This brings up a deeper point made famous by a former navy seal, Jocko Willink, and that is "discipline = freedom".

It sounds silly at first, but when put into this context, someone who takes option 1 (the more disciplined approach) actually has more freedom to happily go about their day, knowing their nutrition is sorted, because they've been disciplined in planning ahead.

Starting with this might be as simple as making a plan this evening for what you're going to eat tomorrow.

It won't be perfect, but it'll put your mind at ease and you'll be more likely to make better choices.

You can then adapt and change it as the days go on.

3. Alter Your Food Choices

Why are fruits, vegetables, and protein sources praised as the ultimate health foods?

Of course, there are the micronutrients from the fruit and vegetables, and the muscle-building and recovery benefits of the protein.

But more than that, in a world where there is an abundance of hyper-palatable (tasty), calorie-dense foods, these foods can offer more filling/satiating alternatives, which can lead to consuming fewer calories, whilst eating a higher volume of food.

For you, as an athlete, if trying to drop some weight, these micronutrient-, fibre-, and protein-rich foods should be a big part of your diet.

This will help keep you full and satisfied, whilst keeping the diet interesting and allowing you to eat a larger volume of food.

Even if you're trying to increase your calorie intake, you should still aim for adequate intakes of these foods, for their other benefits as mentioned in previous articles.

4. Keep Hydrated

There will be more about hydration in other articles, but amongst the wide range of reasons to keep hydrated is its effect on hunger.

Often, the same symptoms can be seen with dehydration as with hunger (e.g. headache, tiredness, irritability).

So what you perceive as hunger may simply be thirst!

If you mistake this signal, you may end up snacking and adding to your daily food intake, when all you might have needed was a glass of water.

In terms of practical advice, you should aim to drink enough to have regular clear urinations throughout the day.

2.5-3.5L is a good place to aim for, biasing some of that to before and after training.

All fluids (apart from alcoholic drinks) contribute to hydration levels, including tea and coffee, as well as the water found in foods like fruits and vegetables, for example.

5. Get Enough Sleep

Studies have shown that people who hadn't gotten adequate sleep were more hungry and more likely to choose higher-calorie food options.

This obviously isn't ideal for someone trying to reduce their food intake.

Even if you are trying to increase food intake in an attempt to gain muscle, please don't take this as a reason to sleep less.

Studies have also shown the effects of lack of sleep on muscle gain, and the results were not positive, as I’ll go through in other articles.

Finally…

Just because you’re getting your nutrition on point doesn’t mean you should be feeling hungry all the time, and implementing some of these steps may help you reduce the prevalence of hunger, and therefore allow you to enjoy your food, stay on track with your nutrition, and ultimately reach your performance and body composition goals as an athlete.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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The Real Reasons to Eat Your Fruit and Vegetables as an Athlete (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

In today’s nutrition landscape where calories, macros, and fancy supplements are now part of the mainstream conversation, it can be easy to forget about the importance of good old fruits and vegetables.

We all have a vague sense that they’re good for us, and that we should eat them.

But if you don’t concretely know why, it can be difficult to place as much importance on them as you should.

So here are five reasons to consider.

The aim is that once you see how they relate to your physique and performance goals, you’ll start to take your intake of them more seriously if you’re not doing so already.

1. They Help with Digestion

Fruits and vegetables are usually high in fibre, and having sufficient fibre intake is important for digestive function.

But that isn’t limited to your ability to use the toilet (although that’s super important).

To digest food is to break it down, so that we can get the nutrients out of it, to be used in the body.

You can’t get the glucose from complex carbohydrates, or the amino acids from protein, without first breaking them down, for example.

Soluble fibre (from foods like the flesh of apples and pears, berries, oats, beans, nuts, seeds etc.) form a ‘gel’ with the food, which may slow down the movement of food through the digestive system, allowing your body to absorb the nutrients in that food.

On the other side, Insoluble fibre (from foods like fruit skin, leafy vegetables, broccoli, bread, brown rice etc.) provides the food with bulk, accelerating the body’s drive to pass the food through, allowing the removal of the food after we’ve gotten the nutrients from it.

For these reasons, it’s important to get plenty of both types in.

Luckily, most fibre-rich foods, even the ones mentioned above contain some of both forms.

Eating a wide range of fruit and veg, (whilst adding in things like whole grains) can go a long way towards optimising your fibre intake.

As a side note, fibre intake is also associated with controlling cholesterol levels, as well as helping reduce the risk of bowel cancer.

As a general recommendation, 10g of fibre per 1000 kcal consumed is a good place to start, meaning that someone consuming 2500 kcal daily would aim to eat 25g of fibre per day.

2. They Keep You Full

For many athletes, hunger isn’t much of an issue, due to the relatively large calorie intake, but some still struggle with it, particularly when eating less in an effort to lose weight.

Given the fact that most fruits and vegetables are relatively low in calories compared to their volume, including more can mean eating more food volume, without adding a lot of calories, and even reducing calories.

There was a study done where some of the participants ate an apple 15 minutes before a meal, which resulted in them eating less food (fewer calories) than a group that didn’t eat the apple (including the calories from the apple).

This basically meant that eating the apple before the meal and then eating the meal, led to less overall intake than eating the meal alone!

The study also compared apple juice, which didn’t reduce the overall intake, indicating that the fibrous element of the apple probably contributed to the fullness.

And you don’t even need a study to make this point.

You can imagine that if you had a meal of chicken and rice for example, but decided to add a big pile of lettuce and cucumber to the side (basically negligible calories), you probably know without trying it, that it’s going to fill you up more.

3. They Provide Micronutrients (Vitamins and Minerals)

It’s not quite clear whether or not athletes should be recommended to eat more micronutrients than non-athletes.

Some say that the increased demand on the body requires more micronutrition, whilst others say that the usually increased food intake of athletes means that they end up getting more in anyway.

Either way, we can say that athletes shouldn’t be slacking on their micronutrient intake, especially if they’re eating less in order to drop body fat.

There is also some evidence suggesting that athletes are at a greater risk of being deficient in certain specific vitamins and minerals, especially when they restrict their diet in terms of energy (calories), or in terms of specific foods like meat and dairy.

Vitamins are essential nutrients that the body usually cannot produce enough of, and which it needs to get from food.

These include the fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K, and the water-soluble B vitamins and vitamin C.

They facilitate a huge number of varying roles within the body, including energy production, cellular repair, skin health, improving immune system function, among many other things.

Minerals are also crucial to maintaining the overall health and functionality of your body.

These include things like sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, calcium, iron, and zinc, among others.

They are also involved in many functions in the body, including fluid balance, the transmission of signals to muscles, muscle contractions, maintenance of structures like bone, and hormonal regulation.

As you can imagine, optimising these elements can contribute significantly to your ability to train hard and compete.

It would be much too complicated to start trying to find out how much of each vitamin and mineral we are taking in (although a blood test to find out your levels might be an option), so instead, we should follow recommendations around our consumption of certain foods, primarily fruits and vegetables.

We’ve all heard of the 5-a-day recommendation, and its a good place to start, but getting up towards an 8-10 per day mark might be a better place to aim for, given that you are likely to be consuming a lot more food than most people anyway, given your energy demands, and because there may be more demand for micronutrients, given the extra stress on your body.

Consuming red meat 1-2 per week, consuming dairy (where possible), and getting sunlight often (for vitamin D production) can also help ensure adequate micro-nutrition.

A multivitamin can also help, and specific vitamin/mineral supplements can be used to counteract potential deficiencies, but these shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to consuming health-promoting foods.

4. They Help with Hydration

Given that water makes up over 50% of your body, and that water is being removed throughout the day via urination, breathing, and sweating, it is crucial that we are replacing it, by consuming sufficient water.

Doing so allows the body to better regulate its temperature (which is crucial during training), digest food, transport nutrients around the body, lubricate joints, and improve many other biological processes.

As an athlete, where you tend to be training often and hard, and therefore tend to sweat more than non-athletes, it can be difficult to meet your hydration requirements through water alone.

Many fruits and vegetables can help out here.

Some fruits and vegetables are even made up of over 90% water, meaning that whatever volume of that fruit you consume is almost equivalent to consuming that volume of water. e.g. if you eat a piece of watermelon the size of a glass, that is almost the equivalent of drinking a glass of water.

Some fruits/vegetables that are over 90% water are:

• Watermelon

• Cucumber

• Strawberries

• Spinach

• Broccoli

• Melon

Apart from the replacement of fluids, proper hydration also depends on having adequate electrolyte balance.

Electrolytes are salts that are often found in foods and drinks, and they include sodium, potassium, calcium, chloride and magnesium.

They play a key role in the electrical signalling systems in the body that affect the heart, muscles and nerves, and they also help regulate fluid balance in the body.

Recognising this role in helping you contract muscles during athletic events is often a good motivator for athletes to start getting more fruit and veg in.

5. They Keep Your Diet Interesting

At some stage, we’ve probably all been in the habit of eating bland chicken and rice, or plain porridge, or potatoes and meat.

And we can often narrow our range of food down to a set of 2-3 protein sources, and 2-3 carbohydrate sources.

If you’re someone who loves food, that just gets boring after a while, and who can blame you for feeling the need to eat pizza and take-away food all weekend if you’re eating tasteless, boring food all week?

Including fruits and vegetables opens up a huge range of possibilities within your diet.

They’re extremely versatile, meaning there is a range of different ways that they can be prepared and cooked, so soggy broccoli isn’t your only option here.

There are also so many different types of fruit and vegetables, that you’re sure to find some that you like.

And if there are only a small few that you do currently like, start by including more of them!

“What if I Don’t Like Vegetables?”

As a kid, you probably squirmed at the taste of alcohol or coffee.

Yet, most adults have acquired a taste for at least some variations of these over time.

In the same way, you can adapt to enjoying the taste of vegetables by consistently eating them.

In order to improve your ability to enjoy them, try preparing them in a few different ways (frying, roasting, raw etc.) and try adding spices and sauces to them.

You’ll eventually find a variety that you like, and you can then emphasise these within your diet whilst aiming to bring more varieties in over time.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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How to Adjust Your Calorie Intake as an Athlete (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

In other articles, I outlined how to calculate your recommended calorie and macronutrient intake targets for optimising performance and body composition as an athlete.

I also went through how to track your food intake in order to hit those targets.

It’s important to reiterate, however, that these targets are estimates, based on the average requirements for someone of your physical attributes and goals.

Therefore, these figures may need to be adjusted to suit you as an individual.

One method of doing so involves tracking your weekly bodyweight progress, and adjusting your intake based on that, to the point where you’re making the progress you’d like to see.

Whilst bodyweight isn’t the only metric we care about, it is a really useful metric, particularly in a fat-loss or muscle-gain context, since it is accessible - most people have a weighing scale in their house, but not many have a DEXA body fat scanner, for example - and it is a good proxy for body fat and muscle gains over time.

It isn’t the only thing you should track, as outlined below, and if you’re someone who gets obsessive about scale weight when monitoring it, it may be worth leaving out and focussing on the other metrics discussed.

It’s also important to note that as an athlete, you’ll have the added factor of performance levels to take into account.

Any potential performance detriments can generally be avoided (or at least lessened) by taking a slower approach and/or prioritising body composition changes in less competitive times of the year.

Adjusting Based on Progress

When you compare your actual weekly bodyweight progress to your expected bodyweight progress (based on your previous calculations), you can get an idea of whether or not you need to adjust calories.

For example, if you’re aiming to lose 0.5 kg per week, but after 3 weeks, you’ve only lost 0.3kg per week on average, it might be worth considering adjusting your calorie intake downwards to get to that 0.5kg per week average.

There is a bit of nuance required here, however, in that whilst body weight is a great proxy measure for progress in a fat-loss phase, it doesn’t tell the full story.

In the example above, if you set out to lose 0.5kg on average per week but are only losing 0.3kg on average per week, BUT you are seeing a lot of progress visually, are feeling great in training, and are happy with your rate of progress, decreasing calorie intake might not be required at all.

In fact, in this case, it may be better to stick with your current approach, allowing you to keep eating that higher calorie intake whilst being really happy with the progress you’re making.

It’s also worth noting that the difference in these measurements can easily be down to rounding errors and fluctuations, so it’s worth measuring your weight multiple times per week, at the same time of day and in the same conditions, and then taking a weekly average, using that as your progress metric.

The need to change your calorie and macronutrient target is more applicable in cases where your actual progress is very different from your goal.

For example, if you are aiming to lose 0.5kg per week, and weight hasn’t moved at all in 3-4 weeks, or worse yet, you’ve gained weight, that is a good sign that you probably need to change your intake targets.

This concept also applies to those aiming to gain weight.

For example, if you’re aiming to gain 0.3kg per week, and the scales haven’t moved up in 3-4 weeks, it’s probably time to increase your calorie intake.

Again, even in this case, visual changes can be indicative that calorie changes may not be required, but generally, muscle gain is going to be optimally achieved during a phase where your body weight is increasing over time, and fat-loss is likely to be optimised when you’re losing body weight over time.

There are also cases where you may be moving too quickly in the direction you wanted to, and again, adjusting your intake would generally be advised.

In the case of fat-loss, losing weight too quickly can mean that you’re not supplying adequate fuel to allow for optimal performance, and gaining weight too quickly can lead to excess body fat gain.

Other factors, such as visual progress and subjective assessments of the sustainability of current calorie intake levels should be taken into account, but generally, body weight moving faster than recommended tends to lead to diminishing returns over a longer period.

There is a really useful decision tree included at the end of this article to make this super simple for you.

Given the nuances outlined above, it can be very useful to have external support from someone else (like a coach) who can step in when you’re second-guessing yourself.

How Much to Adjust by?

If you’ve deemed it important to adjust your intake based on all of the above, you’ll want to know by how much.

There are a multitude of factors at play here, but from experience working with 1000+ athletes, a 5-10% adjustment is usually sufficient.

E.g. For someone eating 2500 kcal, this would be an adjustment of 125-250 kcal.

This range will depend on various factors, including how far off you are from your goal rate of progress (Is your body weight moving in the right direction, but too slowly, or is your bodyweight moving in the wrong direction?), and where your current hunger levels are (If you’re already hungry often, decreasing by a large amount is likely to lead to increased hunger levels, and potentially a less sustainable approach).

In terms of macronutrients, this change in calories will generally be achieved through a decrease in carbohydrates, rather than fat or protein.

The reason for this is that protein and fat recommendations are generally recommended based on your body weight, as outlined in previous articles, whereas carbohydrate intake recommendations are at least partially based on your fuelling requirements, and therefore have a bit more flexibility when it comes to adjusting them.

However, there may be cases where adjusting only carbohydrates leads to increased difficulty in sustainably adhering to the macronutrient targets, in which case, adjusting fat (or in rarer cases, protein) could be an option.

An example of this would be someone who is in a weight-gain phase while being extremely active, who may require a large calorie intake.

By increasing their intake by increasing carbohydrates alone, they may be needlessly making it more difficult for themselves to hit those high calories targets, compared to if they’d given themselves a bit more flexibility in food choices by increasing the fat content slightly.

On the other end, someone decreasing their food intake might end up decreasing carbohydrates to the point that food volume decreases significantly, meaning they end up being hungrier, in which case, decreasing your fat target could allow for some extra carbohydrates to remain part of the diet whilst still hitting the total calorie target.

Another Option: Adjusting Your Output

In addtion to adjusting the amount of food you are taking in, another option is to increase the amount of energy you are expending.

You may want to do this by introducing some extra running or other cardiovascular work into your week, but if your training load is already high, you may be adding to the stress placed on your body, and therefore reducing your recovery capacity.

In this case, you can increase activity through tracking your daily step-count, using a watch or smartphone to track this, for example.

Once you’ve tracked it for a few days, you can increase your step-count target by 1000-2000 per day, which likely lead to an increase in energy output, and therefore assist in fat-loss, perhaps without decreasing energy intake.

Alternatively, this could be used in conjunction with altering your calorie intake, reaping the combined benefits.

The Decision Tree

The decision tree below illustrates the concepts above in the context of considering adjusting your intake targets based on your progress.

This should be done on a weekly basis, or perhaps a fortnightly basis, using an average of about 4-7 weigh-ins per week (at a similar time of day), in order to even out some of the daily fluctuations that are often seen.

It’s worth noting that there is an element of both a science and an art to this, so a combination of the objective markers (body weight, for example) and subjective markers (visual progress from mirror or progress photos) will be useful, as will the experience you’ll get from going through this process over time.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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How to Track Your Food as an Athlete (GAA, Hurling, Football, Rugby, Golf, Running, Gym, Strength Training)

After reading previous articles about calculating calorie and macronutrient targets, you might ask how, knowing all these numbers, you might go about hitting them.

There are a number of ways of doing so, with varying levels of accuracy and ease of use.

In order to achieve a level of accuracy that is likely to lead to the improvements most people are hoping to see, some level of food tracking, at least for a period of time, can be hugely beneficial.

This generally involves either writing down the food you eat each day or inputting it into an app, in order to assess your nutritional intake on a daily basis, allowing you to adjust it as needed.

There are a multitude of different components of food that you could be looking at, to the point where it has the potential to become confusing.

In this case, we want to balance what is optimal vs. what is sustainable for the period of time that you’re going to be doing it.

With that said, there is a range of options when it comes to what figures you should be paying attention to when tracking your food.

Levels of Tracking

On one end of the food tracking scale, you could opt to simply pay attention to the number of calories you are taking in, disregarding the macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrate) for now.

This approach will likely be better than not tracking at all, but will potentially lead to missing out on the previously mentioned benefits of hitting your macronutrient targets.

That trade-off might be worth it for you if you’re new to the food tracking process and want to get the process started without overcomplicating it.

However, you may want to push things in the direction of optimality by then starting to include a focus on protein along with the calorie target.

This will allow you to move bodyweight in the desired direction whilst likely covering your recovery and muscle-building needs, but may see you missing out on some of the potential fuelling benefits of optimising your carbohydrates and fats intake.

Finally, adding in that element of tracking carbohydrates and fats brings another level of accuracy, allowing you to reap those benefits.

As mentioned previously, how you choose to track, and what figures you choose to pay attention to, depends on a few aspects including what level of nutrition you’re currently at and how much effort you’re willing to put into ensuring your progress.

For a beginner, a good approach is to bring these elements in in a progressive fashion, starting with focussing on hitting your calorie target for the first few weeks, after which you can start to also pay attention to your protein intake for the next few weeks, followed by starting to pay attention to carbohydrate and fat intake once you’ve been consistently hitting your calorie and protein targets for a few weeks.

This means you will be progressing along the way with your body composition and performance, but will also be progressing with your nutritional approach as a whole.

So, the progression of levels of food tracking looks like: Calories only → Calories and protein → Calories, protein, fats, and carbs.

How to Track

Regardless of what metrics you chose to keep an eye on, you’re going to need to track the food that you are eating.

This could be done by writing down the foods you are eating, searching the internet for the calorie and macronutrient contents of them, and adding them up to find your daily total, but technological advances mean that there are now much easier ways of tracking your daily intake and assessing how close you are to your daily targets.

Phone apps like ‘MyFitnessPal’ and ‘Chronometer’ are excellent tools in this regard.

These apps have databases of foods, which allows you to search for specific foods within the app and enter the amount of that food that you’ve eaten.

The app will automatically add that to your total intake for the day, as well as giving you an indication of how many calories and grams of each macronutrient you have left before hitting your daily targets.

Each of the dozens of food tracking apps out there will have their pros and cons, so it’s a good idea to play around with them and see which one best suits your needs and preferences.

Getting Accurate with food tracking

The level of accuracy with which you will be able to hit your goals will also be based on how accurate you are with the data that you enter into the app.

Are You Tracking Everything?

This firstly includes how diligent you are in ensuring that you are tracking every piece of food or drink that you consume.

It can be quite common to underreport food intake consciously or unconsciously, to the extent that even registered dieticians mistakenly underreport their intake in clinical studies!

This underreporting can be a result of simply forgetting to input full meals, but can also include leaving out small snacks, bites, spoonfuls, and drinks of things that you may think are too insignificant to track.

Ultimately, however, these things can add up to substantial differences over the course of a day or week, so it’s important that for optimal accuracy, you track everything you eat and drink.

Are You Tracking the Correct Amounts?

Another cause for inaccuracy is a lack of accuracy in the amounts of the foods that you are tracking.

If you are not weighing the individual ingredients, you can easily be off in terms of how much you’re actually eating.

For example, if you’re tracking ‘1 chicken fillet’, there is likely to be a level of inaccuracy, since chicken fillets vary in size and weight, and therefore calorie and macronutrient content.

Instead, it would be much more accurate to weigh your chicken fillet and enter the amount in grams, giving a true reflection of the calorie and macronutrient content of that food.

Are You Tracking Cooked or Raw?

Another common issue involves weighing food cooked vs. uncooked and tracking it as the other.

Because water is generally added to some foods (think pasta or rice) and taken away from other foods (think vegetables or meat) during the cooking process, it is important to be consistent in tracking the food in the state you actually weighed it.

For example, if you cook a 150g chicken fillet, it might lose 25g of water during the cooking process, and therefore weigh 125g when cooked.

In this case, you’re left with the dilemma of whether to use the 150g figure or the 125g figure.

I generally recommend that clients track food in the raw form, since this isn’t subject to the length of cooking time, in the way that using the cooked weight would be, allowing for more consistency.

But that isn’t always possible, since sometimes you’ll be buying your food already cooked.

For that reason, the main recommendation here is that if you weigh it in the raw form, you track it in the raw form, and if you weigh it in the cooked form, you track it in the cooked form.

This can usually be done quite simply by adding in the word ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’ when searching for the food in your food tracking app.

E.g. Search: “Chicken raw”, and then enter the weight of the chicken fillet when it was raw.

Are You Tracking Food Someone Else Has Cooked?

You may run into some difficulties when you’re not the person cooking your food, or when you’re cooking a large portion of food (for a family meal for example).

In these cases, it will be about doing your best to give a good estimate of the food you’re eating.

It won’t be perfect, but will likely be better than if you hadn’t tracked at all.

Additionally, your ability to accurately estimate your intakes in these cases will be dependent on your previous tracking experience.

You’ll be much better at visually estimating what weight of rice you’re eating, for example, if you’ve weighed and tracked rice dozens of times previously.

Your ability to accurately track your food will improve over time, and more than that, your ability to accurately hit your calorie and macronutrient targets will improve.

This is key aspect of the tracking process, and will allow you to move away from the tracking process when the time is right.

The first few weeks of the tracking process will involve getting used to the app, as well as starting to observe how close or far away you are from the targets set out.

As the weeks go on, you’ll then begin to recognise where you are specifically over or under your targets, and by starting to look at what foods contribute to each of the metrics, you can start increasing or decreasing specific foods within your diet to adjust your intake, allowing you to get closer and closer to the targets over time.

Not only that, but you’ll also start to develop a better instinct for what meals are conducive to your goals, and what a day of eating looks like when it comes to hitting your targets.

Down the line, this will mean that you are able to be pretty close to your targets without needing to track everything to a tee, allowing you to move away from the tracking process as you see fit, and then take up tracking again as and when it is needed to dial in your intake for specific periods of time for specific targets.

This means that whilst food tracking is great for the reasons outlined earlier, it also becomes a means to teach how much you should be eating on an ongoing basis, even without tracking over the long-term.

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Article Written By Conor O’Neill

Conor O’Neill is a Nutritionist, Strength & Conditioning coach, Psychologist, and Author.

He has helped 1000+ everyday athletes to pursue excellence in their physique and performance through optimising their nutrition, training, and psychology.

You can find out more about The Everyday Athlete Program by going to everydayathleteprogram.com/coaching.

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