Nutrition should be a very important piece of the puzzle to your athletic success. If it isn’t, then you are doing yourself a disservice. As much preparation should be considered for your nutrition as is considered for your physical training for your particular sport. Nutrition can be such a powerful tool for your athlete. It can help with your energy and recovery for the athlete so you can take maximum advantage of all the hard work you have put into your season and use your athletic skills to the best of your ability.

Here are a few examples of how nutrition is failing you:

  • It’s summer time and you sleep in to the late morning hours. You grab a piece of toast or pop tart (ugh) and go do some training an hour and a half after you have woken up. After a warm-up and 1 set of a drill, you get dizzy and have to stop. You’ve now wasted a training opportunity to get better.
  • One of our athletes couldn’t run a cross country race without throwing up. We altered her nutrition and she didn’t have an issue the rest of the season. She ended up running in the state meet as a freshman.
  • You’re with your buddies before football and you go to UDF and grab some ice cream before conditioning. Then you are wondering why you have to throw up during the drills.

You absolutely have to understand that nutrition is just as important as speed training, shooting 500 shots a day, or practice. You will have some athletes that are just naturally gifted who will do well no matter what they eat. My dad tells a story of this track stud who went to OSU before my dad, but was travelling with them to a meet to run the 440. The guy was drinking the night before, smoking a couple hours prior to the race, and then goes out and wins the race. Obviously, this is an extreme case and we wouldn’t encourage our current athletes to do this, but you get the point.

I always tell my athletes that if you can improve all the areas of your training that you can work at, then the improving sum of the parts will make you a better athlete. This includes nutrition. Ultimately, it boils down to how good of an athlete do you want to be? I have had great athletes who had talent that would train with me early in their athletic careers. They’d get some success, not train with me, and rely on their ability to be better than most of their opponents to carry them.

Now, most of those same athletes got college scholarships, but contributing very little to their teams.

Why? Because the talent pool has increased and by the time they realize they have to do other things to help them be a better athlete it is too late. I don’t care how good of an athlete you are, there is always someone out there who is your equal or better than you. This is what Magic Johnson’s high school coach told him. He didn’t believe it until he met Larry Bird and that inspired both athletes to continue to work hard at their games non-stop. If they can do it, you can too.

The other part of nutrition is supplementation. Should athletes, or any of us in general, take them? I believe that you should take supplemental products and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve met many dieticians who believe a lot of supplements are bunk and that you can get everything that you need from whole foods. I do agree, but that is very hard to do. Very hard and I’m a fitness professional. I’ve tried to do that and one of the only reasons I can succeed is that I own my own company, do some of my work from home, can control when I eat the whole foods, and have time to prepare the foods.

But, most people can’t do that. In fact, they won’t do that.

I need supplements to help me out. And when I say supplements, don’t get carried away here. I’m not talking about the hard core steroids, the fake pills that will help you burn fat, or the borderline narcotics for energy. I’m talking a multi-vitamin, a meal replacement shake or bar, or omega-3’s. Plus some others, I can’t think of right now. But, these supplements are quick to prepare and I can consume them rather quickly. They help me get from one meal to the next. I try to eat a balanced diet anyways and these supplements help to enhance what I’m already doing.

So, if it is tough for me to eat naturally all the time, imagine what it is for other people. Let them give their kids a multi-vitamin or meal replacement drink. My kids take them and they seem fine. What’s the alternative? A pop tart. You seen the ingredients in them – enriched flour, reduced iron, soybean and palm oil (with TBHQ for freshness – what the heck is TBHQ). My point is I’d rather give my athlete a meal replacement bar than some french fries from McDonald’s to quench his/her hunger. That vanilla shake and big mac is going to get you prepped for your athletic contest?

Look, supplements are a billion dollar industry. People are consuming them. Instead of constantly trying to say supplements are bunk, why don’t we find some that are of good quality and help people out. Athletes are taking them, your neighbors are taking them, and I’m taking them. Learn what the benefits are and you might be able to add that component to your athlete’s arsenal. If you live in Columbus, I’m going to be running a nutrition class for athletes once a month. Check it out at http://speedtrainingcolumbus.com.