What does a sports nutritionist do?
What Does a Sports Nutritionist Do?
Put simply, a Sports Nutritionist optimizes diet to enable athletes to make performance gains and compete at their best.
Sports nutrition doesn’t have to be complex or confusing. There are five key areas, these are nutrition for:
👉️Health and Immunity
👉️Performance and Adaptation
👉️Competition
👉️Recovery and Repair
👉️Weight and Body Composition
Consistency and quality are key to athletic success. The more you can reduce time out of training due to illness, injury, or poor recovery, the more time you can focus on quality training. However, quality training also means fuelling effectively and periodizing the appropriate foods and nutrients so you can meet the demands of every session and optimize training adaptations - often impacted by inadequate nutrition and under-fuelling.
Here’s an example of how a sports nutritionist can help you:
You’ve got an entry for your dream race. It cost close to a month's salary to enter, and it’s taken you 3 years to qualify for this prestigious multi-day event. You trained for 6 months, hired a coach, a hotel, transport, and a training camp - on day 1 you DNF due to (choose A, B, or C)
A. It’s hot. You struggle to keep food down leading to a lack of energy. Your GI issues make you throw up and throw in the towel. At the end of day 1, you feel fatigued and decide not to continue.
B. You struggled in training, you never peaked, and feel like you plateaued early in the season. You struggled to make training adaptations and recovered poorly. At the end of day 1, you feel fatigued and decide to withdraw.
C. You got a bone injury during training and lost valuable training time. In addition, your period stopped and this made you worried that you were overtraining, so you backed off and decided to eat less food so you would not put on excess weight. At the end of day 1, you feel fatigued and decide not to continue.
The aim of a sports nutritionist is to get you to the start line, healthy, fit and in the best shape you can be. These are just some examples of how I can help you perform.
If you need advice, please book a free chat using the link in my bio to ask how I can help.
