The Competitive Edge - Nutrition for Athletes
How can you seperate yourself from the competition?
“Can we truly take an athlete to the next level by improving something as simple as their diet?”
Having the “competitive edge” is everything in sports especially when an athlete is attempting to compete and succeed at the highest levels. The upper echelon of any sport is where the difference between first and last, or a win or a loss, can be measured in milliseconds. As an example, the difference between 1st and 8th place in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic, 50-meter freestyle swimming event was 0.72 seconds! In that event, one second literally separated the top 18 swimmers.
So, the question becomes, how can an athlete differentiate themselves from the competition? As athletes, how can we ensure we are truly reaching our full potential? At the elite level, almost all athletes are implementing a very similar training methodology; the practices and the workouts are close to identical. Therefore, we must widen our scope when attempting to discern what sets these top-tier athletes apart.
As a nutrition coach, I want you to consider this question. Is there a fundamental component of performance, which is so expected in athletes, that it is so often overlooked and therefore neglected?
I believe that the answer is a resounding YES and the answer is found in a proper nutrition protocol.
Nutrition Fuels Athletic Performance
To illustrate this concept, I will use my personal story as an example of what I mean. I began my swimming career in high school, a sport in which most of my teammates had started at the age of 5 or 6. It is safe to say I was extremely late to the game. Yet, as anyone who has tried a new skill knows, you need coaching to succeed; and I received it, a lot of it. I was coached, on the four swimming strokes. I was coached on proper form in the weight room. I was coached on mindset, goal setting, and competition; and this coaching continued throughout my high school and, collegiate careers. The reason for putting the word “coached” in bold is to emphasize that as athletes, we receive a tremendous amount of coaching throughout our athletic careers. Yet, in retrospect, it amazes me that throughout my entire high school and collegiate swimming career, not once was I coached by a nutritionist or dietician.
This revelation is not something that came easily to me. I had been conditioned to believe that if I put in the maximum amount of effort during training, I could achieve any goal I had set for myself. This thought process was reinforced throughout my high school swimming career. I went from someone who had never swam a lap in his life to making the State Championships by junior year. I even decided to swim in college and continued to have lofty aspirations for myself. In fact, I had set the goal of making a national cut time by my senior year. Unfortunately, at my senior year championship swim meet, I would miss the cut-time; for the first time in my life, I would fail. I want to make it clear that my goal was not some wild miscalculation on my part, despite setting lofty goals they were always realistic and achievable. So, I had to figure out what went wrong. I knew I was physically capable of hitting the time, and in my mind, I had done everything in my power to accomplish it. At least that is what I thought. Was it possible that even at the college level, despite years of coaching, a critical component of my training was somehow still missing?
Could it really be this simple?
It took years, for me to look at the situation with clarity. As I began my journey toward becoming a certified nutrition coach, I began to understand how large of an impact what we eat has on our bodies. Not only does it impact our overall health and longevity, but it also has a tremendous influence on our athletic performance.
The underlying issue with my anecdote is that my story is not unique. Many athletes hold the misconception that you can simply outwork the competition; in some cases, this can be true. Training and discipline alone may be enough to progress in high school, possibly even college, and beyond if you are a truly gifted athlete. But consider for a moment, the high school freshman attempting to make the varsity team, the high school senior aiming for a D1 scholarship. What about the triple-A baseball player one season away from the major leagues? Is it possible that if their coaches had designed a nutrition protocol and instructed these athletes on the benefits of a well-designed nutrition plan, they might all have been able to achieve their aspirational goals? That being said, let us not be too quick to blame the coaches. The reality is that many coaches were never taught the intrinsic value of nutrition either, truly making this a systemic problem.
Athletes need to understand that without a sports nutrition component in their training regimen, they simply cannot maximize their performance potential. They might experience incremental progress from year to year, but can we expedite this process? Can we truly take an athlete to the next level by improving something as simple as their diet?
Proper nutrition inherently has a compounding effect on athletes. What athletes put into their bodies has a direct impact on how well they can perform. Athletes and coaches must begin to see the benefits of a well-designed nutrition plan; an athlete will have more energy, recover faster, and consistently be able to train harder than their competition. Day after day, week after week, month after month, they can compete longer, stronger, and faster. Choose whatever adjective you like; the fact remains that a training and nutrition protocol go hand in hand for reaching an athlete’s full potential.
If I had access to this information back then, how much better could my teammates and I have been? This question still lingers in the back of my mind, and I doubt it will ever fully go away. Trust me when I say that you never want to look back and have any regrets as an athlete; because your time as one, unless you are one of the fortunate few who were able to turn their sport into a career, is so fleeting. As the saying goes, you want to know that you left it all out on the field.
If you are an athlete reading this, I want you to promise yourself to never let something as simple as proper nutrition prevent you from achieving your goals.
As a former collegiate athlete, I have both the knowledge and perspective about what it takes to compete and perform at the top level.
If you want to take your performance to the next level, I would love to hear your story, learn about your goals, and see how I can help you achieve them!
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