AN ATHLETE’S APPROACH TO OPTIMAL EATING

A lot of peple have a little vision within which to accomplish something great. This is a gift because the majority of people were not born with the natural skills or talents to even get a chance.

If you're one of the lucky few, you need to take advantage of that privilege. For once its gone, it's gone forever. Don't spend your time, you have the rest of your life to kick back, follow the crowd and be mediocre.

Right now in this moment, while your opportunity is here, why not do everything possible to give yourself the best chance of succeeding ? Why not use every weapon at your disposal to maximize your true athletic potential ?

Expend Your Potential and Diet ary Control

The best weapon is your diet. Sadly, it is the highest unoticed by performance athletes, because the truth is you can perform decently on a suboptimal diet. Look, there is no arguing that given some bullsh*t lists I've seen with a lot of my friends. Do you know what a candy dumping is ?

But you certainly are not maximizing your true potential and performing at your genetic peak with this approach.

Our generation has lost something. We've become a bunch of wimp expecting something for nothing, always looking for that quick fix.

We've lost that ability to strive, to sacrifice, to set goals, to do everything possible to achive them and to never waver in their pursuit.

We will cheat the system and take short cuts any chance we can get; yet we shy away from the day-to-day grind is really necessary to climb to the top. We will take a pill, but won't change our daily habits..

Well before we talk about dietary details, we need to take our time to look at the bigger picture. If we don't solve this dilemma, all subsequent nutrition articles will be insignificant.

Athlete or Average?

Now you consider yourself an ahtlete or an average guy/girl ? You need to decide right now, seriously. The first gets more leeway, sympathy and handholding. The second is a (or femal equivalent) when they show up to a training session with a bagel in hand, sipping on a latte.

Do you have the good fuel to prepare your body to war or do you eat like a child ? Eating a snickers bar while you chat on Facebook ?

A few workout in a week for the average dude then goes and hands out at McDonald's. The athletes lives like on 24/7, wheter their coach is watching over them or not, whether its "tough" and "difficult" or not.

Are you an average dude or an athlete ? There's not a good or bad response. But as a personal trainer, I need to know. Because you talk to guys on the field a lot different than the ones sitting in the stands.

I am very surprised to see guys and girls train like madmen, then go out to eat pizza and ice cream. They have the discipline of a warrior but a crap excuse-maker outside of it.

You're saying you have dreams and want to be the greatest, but your actions says the opposite.

It's How You Live NOT How You Lift

Why eat junk food to increase calories and support your training ? Do you want to follow plans based on marketing material or plans based on science, or common sense ?

What do you think a dietary induced, chronically inflamed body is doing to your ability to recover from your training sessions, or for your nagging knee and shoulder pain?

That pastry sounds like sh*ts and giggles to the average, but its not if you have elite goals.

Insulin sensitivity, cellular integrity and optimal nutrient partitioning can all degenerate over time with a poor diet. What do you think that does to your capacity to put on functional muscle that make you faster and more powerful versus non-functional fat that makes you slower and less explosive ?

Well, you may be able get away with whatever you want nutritionally, but the small percentage who extend their careers into their latter years are the ones who took care of their bodies and followed an informed path right from the beginning.

Live like an athlete if you call yourself an athlete – on the field, in the gyme and in the kitchen.

Easy Start – Better Food Choices

I don't wish this article is just a philosophy or psychology thing. You need to use it.as well.

So how should an athlete nutritionally support their competition and training demands?  Do it through quality, nutrient dense foods that serve a physiological and metabolic purpose.

So hit those high quality animal proteins for the essential amino acids necessary to build lean muscle mass, and for the essential fatty acids and good fats necessary to support optimum hormone production.

We’re talking grass-fed beef, wild fish, free-range poultry, and eggs — all hormone and anti-biotic free, of course.

Don’t eat fast food, salami slices, or candy bars with protein added to it to justify “getting your protein in”. The #5 combo will be waiting for you when you’re trying to grow some chins, not be fast and powerful enough to land that knockout punch on your opponent’s chin.

Include some plant foods like vegetables and whole fruits for a variety of micronutrients and phytonutrients, not a bunch of empty calories combined with randomly shot-gunning a bunch of pills to try and make up for the nutrient deficiencies.

Maybe your mother thinks eating a bowl of cornflakes and chewing on a multivitamin pill is the Athlete’s Way. I don’t.

And carbs? I love Paleo nutrition as a baseline template. It automatically gets rid of many of the problematic compounds in the modern Y2K diet. That’s why 80% of my dietary recommendations are based off of it.

But as a high performance athlete, you can’t follow it all the way down the rabbit hole and end up in some dietary cult. You’re not a sedentary, pre-diabetic, insulin resistant office worker. And you are certainly not a caveman. You’re a modern athlete with modern performance goals.

The game is different. You need to understand a thing or two about exercise physiology, and integrate some modern, researched, Sports Nutrition principles to properly fuel and recover from your training sessions.

Many athletes get caught up in following the universal, dogmatic proclamations of carbophobic academics whose only sport has ever been jogging. But high intensity strength and intermittent sprint sports are fueled by metabolism, which can only run on glucose/glycogen.

That doesn’t mean loading up on bologne sandwiches and fruit roll ups. You want starches without the toxic compounds, potential food allergens, or “anti-nutrients” that can wreck the digestive system, impair nutrient absorption, and leave you tired and lethargic.

So cut the sugar, refined flour, and gluten-based starches. Stick with starchy tubers (yams, sweet potatoes, white potatoes) and white rice to support your training.

Drink some high quality water, not Diet Coke.

Conclusion

I get it. It’s easy to watch highlights of your favorite athlete, or film on your next opponent, or just flip through the pages of Playboy, crank up some AC/DC, and get amped up like a madman to train.

When the adrenaline subsides, and some semblance of a normal human being returns, however, it is a lot harder to get fired up to eat a grass-fed steak and potato instead of pizza and fries. But I believe it’s equally important to your long-term athletic success.

For every one genetically gifted or drug enhanced athlete that can get away with a crappy diet, there are ten that can’t. Everything you put into your body makes a difference. It’s up to you whether that difference is positive or negative.

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