Podcast #9 – Nutrition For Athletes

What’s going on. Y’all. Welcome to the pro day sports performance training, Tulsa podcast. I’m your host, Josh Jackson. Today we’re going to jump into a little bit of a controversial topic. We’re going to be talking about nutrition, I. E. Diets I, what are you eating? Why are you eating it? All right, so with this, I will preface it with, there really isn’t a strong direct answer of this is 100% the right way. I will give my objective opinion on the situation. Being someone who’s been around the nutrition area for a long time and the fitness area for a long time. I feel like I have a decent grasp on the information out there and what somebody should do responsibly when trying to lose weight or perform at the highest level. So I want to start by talking about this for the athletes, and then at the end I’ll go into overall diet, nutrition, all that stuff for the average Joe, per se with a new level of great Sports Performance Training Tulsa options.

So let’s start with the athletes. Let’s talk a little bit about what you should be eating, how you should be eating as an athlete. All right, so I wanna start this with both of these and say that the general things that nutrition has been saying for a long time are true. And by this I mean each your fruits and vegetables, true, your body needs protein. True. I mean you hear things like, okay, leafy greens are amazing. Yes, eat those, do it. That’s great and it’s an awesome practice and you should do that. That’s 100% true. So when we look at nutrition, these things that we’ve heard for a long period of time, a lot of times those things are pretty true, especially when you’re going from a bunch of different sources. There is no study out there that is a truthful study that will tell you vegetables are bad for you.

There isn’t a single one. Okay? And if there is, please let me know because I would love to talk to you about how this person doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Vegetables are not bad for you. Fruit is not bad for you. Now when we talk about overall consumption is when things started to change. So before I get into the more controversial side, which is for the average Joe, let’s talk about for athletes, for athletes, we need to be sure as an athlete that we are getting the proper nutrition in order to perform at our highest level. And yes, nutrition will directly affect performance. Okay. So when, uh, when we are deciding what we eat, when we eat, how we eat, some thought needs to go behind it in the perspective of an athlete. First off, an athlete typically will work out more. We’ll exert more physical energy and will be more active than the average Joe, which means typically they’ll burn more calories than the average Joe.

And so if we’re burning more calories and we’re an athlete that needs to perform at our highest level, then we need to be eating more calories. Now this number, the calories per person directly depends who you are. So if you hear that generally for somebody of this age of this way, you should eat this many calories, I’ll tell you that that is not an exact number. And then that could be very far off. Okay. The only really, really, really accurate way to figure out exactly how many calories you need to be eating is figuring out your exact body fat percentage. Once you figure that out, you go through some mathematics, simple math, but you figure out what are your total calories for the day. You can find videos out there on how to do that. You can also contact us at pro day sports training Tulsa and let us know and we will answer that question for you when it comes to the best Sports Performance Training Tulsa.

Now we will have to go through a little bit of a process to figure out body fat percentage and so on, but we can figure those things out and give you accurate numbers. So contact us pro sports performance training, Tulsa, if you are looking for that information. As an athlete though, we need to be sure that we are re consuming what we’ve lost from each workout. So we need to be consuming post-workout. We need to be sure that we’re getting the nutrients that we need within a day so that way our bodies are healthy. So I’m going to give an example of times when we work out. So let’s take a high school athlete that trains with their sport after school, so you’re going to wake up in the morning as a student athlete throughout the day of school, it’s a little bit tougher to eat, so every athlete should be trying to get some breakfast and get some nutrients in in the morning so that way the body has a good fuel to run off of.

Obviously when lunch comes around and is a crucial, crucial point for the athlete to eat. I knew in high school a lot of people that, and a lot of them were my teammates that wouldn’t eat lunch or they would eat a bag of chips for lunch and what we’re doing there is, let’s say they did eat breakfast. Okay, we ate breakfast at eight in the morning and I’m not going to have practice till four in the afternoon. Lunchtime comes around at noon, so I still have four hours until I work out at a high level and all I had was a bag of chips. I will tell you right now there is very little nutritional value in chips that are going to help you perform better. So now we’re entering this workout at four o’clock with an empty stomach, with a body that’s deprived of nutrients that are deprived of fuel without proper Sports Performance Training Tulsa.

So my performance is going to be subpar. Inevitably there is no question. And so when we look at our whole day and how we’re spilling it out, you need to figure out what times do you work out? How many times a day do you work out? And then we need to be sure that we’re taking the steps to get the nutrition we need for that. So back to the example I need to be eating a big breakfast with nutrients. I need to be getting carbs, fats and proteins, all of which do great for the body. Protein is going to be for your muscle development, muscle healing, all that stuff. Your fats are going to control the hormones in your body and your carbs are going to be your energy level. So they all serve a specific purpose and they’re not just there to make you fat.

They’re there to help your body. There’s a reason that we have to eat. There’s a reason that if we don’t eat, we die and it’s because the things in food are the things we need. And so we have found that those three categories, carbs, fats and proteins, which there’s multiple foods that give you those things. There’s millions of foods that give you those things. All food give you those things. In order to be a calorie, you have to have carbs, fats, or protein unless you’re alcohol. Okay? So when we’re going through this, carbs, fats, and proteins, we need to figure out, am I getting all of these nutrients in in a day to be sure that I’m performing? So in the morning for breakfast, it’s not a bad idea to try to have some carbs, some fat, some protein for lunch, same thing, some carbs, some fat, some protein.

That way my body is even on this nutritional level. It’s not overindulged in any way and I’m ready to perform when it comes to the workout. Now as far as the exact numbers on all of these, again, I can’t give you those without seeing you in person and being able to tell you specifically, here’s what you need for your body to perform, but just knowing that generally, you need all of those, not generally. You do need all of those in order to perform at a high level knowing that you should probably try to get those in so that way you can perform at the high level. Okay, so that’s just in the example, obviously post-workout, let’s go and after that, making sure we’re ready to work out is huge, but then after we’re done working out, our body’s depleted again. Those things that we’ve eaten throughout the day, our body is now using in order to perform and so we’re depleting again, which means that post-workout is crucial that I refuel my body, especially before I go to sleep that night when I use my Sports Performance Training Tulsa.

I need to be sure that I’ve three fueled my body enough so that way when I’m resting, I get the proper recovery. So the next day I can go at it all over again because everyone knows it’s a student athlete. It never stops. You keep grinding and grinding, so we need to be sure that we’re on our a game with all of the nutrition. So I need to be eating in the morning, eating in the afternoon and eating post-workout. I know for myself, I’ll use myself as an example. In high school I would eat a big breakfast. I would eat in between breakfast and lunch. I would always have in my lunch some type of vegetable, usually some hummus of some kind. I would have some chips. Of course you’re a kid. It doesn’t mean don’t eat anything healthy, but I would have chips. I would pack two sandwiches and then I would also pack a yogurt of some kind or something like that.

So I had huge lunches and I would eat that throughout the day. That way I’m prepared and ready to go for my workout. All right. With that, we want to avoid eating. Like really you want to avoid eating a big meal hour and a half, two hours before you work out. Okay. You want to avoid eating? I don’t know. It’s tough. Everybody’s different when using our Sports Performance Training Tulsa. You can eat a little bit before your workout, but you want to avoid eating anything big within an hour of the workout. You don’t want to have a full meal 30 minutes before you go work out or else you’re going to be a little sluggish and a little bit slowed down. So we need to be, if we’re eating anything right out before the workout, it needs to be light. It needs to be something that’s just going to give me energy, helped me out through the workout.

So typically something car based that’s just going to give me that perk of energy that I’m looking for. All right. With all of the nutrition, that’s a pretty basic level. If I find myself working out multiple times a day, then it gets even crazier and we had a podcast a few podcasts ago about workload. When we’re looking at workload and nutrition, they go hand in hand. So I need to be sure that as my workload increases, my nutrition quality in my nutrition frequency increases as well. If you work out once a day, you are going to burn less calories than if you work out twice a day. If we’re talking about the same individual, everybody burns different amounts of calories based on workout. So on. That’s very detailed. We won’t get into that now. But as an app, I need to be sure that I’m eating the things necessary for myself to perform at the highest level.

So if I work out in the morning, end of the evening, after that workout in the morning, I need to be sure that I’m replenishing my carbs and protein. So post-workout, very, very important to get protein in to help our muscles recover. And if I’m going in to do anything for the rest of my day, I really need to be sure that I’m getting carbs and carbs are going to be your main energy force and there’s an app that you have to have an abundance of energy. So be sure that you’re getting carbs and post-workout if you’re needing to perform or if you’re going to school for the rest of the day, you don’t want to be sluggish in school. So get the carbs that you need to get the energy you need to perform at your highest, whether it’s athletic or not. Alright, so for athletes, as our workload increases, our nutrition quality and quantity should increase as well.

I guess saying that your quality should increase isn’t true. You should be eating quality all the time, but you need to be more heightenedly aware as your workload increases is what I’m saying. So if your workload is increasing, you need to be on your a game. All right. I hope that makes sense. I know that’s very brief. We can go into more detail, especially if you want to swing by the gym. I know I’ve said this and I’m going to say it again. Swing by pro day sports performance training Tulsa to get some information on your nutrition. Call us at a time, get something set up. We can get appointments set up where we can explain all of this to you and give you an idea of a safe and proper direction to go it. All right. Okay, moving on. Last, I’m going to close with this, not talking about athletes now, but talking about what’s the right diet plan for the average Joe.

An athlete can be taken into consideration on this as well. Actually, I’m going to go back one step for you because I want to talk about dieting. As an athlete, it is very difficult to build a lot of muscle and lose a lot of weight. You can’t optimally do both of those things at the same time. And so with an athlete, you need to figure out what your goals are and your nutrition should follow. So we, I have athletes that come up to me, they’re female athletes and they’re like, I want to look good in a bikini, but they’re also high level athletes and that’s okay, but you don’t want to sacrifice your nutrition, which could lead to injury. So that way you have some visible abs in a bikini. I know that sucks ladies and I’m sorry, but we need to be sure that we are getting the proper nutrition so we can perform at a high level.

Like I talked about workload and the podcast before this. We need to be sure that we’re not focused on the wrong thing. So if the goal is to be a high level division one athlete, then I need to be sure that I’m giving my body enough proper fuel to make that happen and my focus doesn’t need to be on the how do I lose as much weight as possible through working out at a high level and eating healthy. As long as you’re not overindulging, you’re probably going to burn fat and lose a little bit of weight. If you’re going for maximum muscle build and getting as big as you can, then you might gain a little bit of weight, but that’s okay. There’s always time to lose later on. There’s always different points of your season that you can focus on different things and you can work on slimming down in the off season a little bit, but not in the midst of your high level training and so on.

So it’s all going to change, but we do need to make sure our priorities are straight when we think about exactly what it is that we’re wanting to do with our career. So making sure that our nutrition is in line with what it is that we’re trying to do. And if it’s not, then we’re just setting ourselves up for failure. So before I go into the right diet plan for the average Joe, I’m actually going to, and I apologize for this, I’m going to make that the next podcast I’m going to jump on right after this one’s done. Make another one and post it. So if you’re here to figure out the right diet plan, click on the episode after this one. That’s going to be completely about the right diet plan for the average Joe for everybody. So that way, not only our athletes and our kids can get help, but our parents, our siblings and everything else can get some help.

So in recap, when we’re dealing with nutrition with athletes, we need to be sure that we are getting a high nutritional value diet, which means I’m not eating fast food all the time. It means I’m trying to get my fruits and vegetables and I’m getting a good amount of protein and I’m taking the right steps to be the healthiest I can be. On top of that, we need to figure out what our goals are and if our goal is to be a top level athlete, then I probably don’t need to be so worried about how chiseled my ads are. Unless, unless you’re in a sport that requires you to be slimmer, I know that I’ve talked to gymnast before, that the gymnast need to be a little bit lighter because they need to be doing all kinds of flips and twists in the air and be prepared to do those things and so in less your sports specifically requires it.

Then don’t necessarily be so worried about your overall image of what people see of you, whether it’s in a bikini, swimsuit, whatever it may be. Be more worried about what your goals are and how you’re going to get to those goals. Okay, so proper nutrition. Figure out your goals. Go with those goals and do what you need to do. Be smart. If you have any questions on this, if you want information on this, contact us, let us know. Pro day sports performance training, Tulsa, and we can hook you up with some information to help you be on your way and have a better grasp of what it takes to have a proper diet plan. Thank you all so much for listening to the protest sports performance training, Tulsa podcast. I’m your host Josh, and I’m signing out peace.