The Fundamentals of a Performance Lifestyle

The fitness world is ever-changing and a lot of the messaging would have you believe that you need all sorts of expensive gear and access to ice baths to nail your performance lifestyle. While these may support recovery, there are a few practices that are fundamental to your performance and are a good place to start if you want to see a progression in your overall fitness and well-being.

Day to Day Nutrition

Regardless of your ability or level, the lead-up to any main race or competition will involve an increase in training load and intensity. To ensure adaptation and progression through this time, the way you manage your nutrition needs to be thought about. Doing it well not only allows the individual to have sufficient energy to complete their training sessions but also ensures the appropriate levels of hormones necessary for optimal performance.

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There are two key focuses: firstly, ensuring carbohydrate availability; and secondly, considering recovery. This means planning and does not mean simply having carbohydrates in the snack or meal before a training session, but rather ensuring regular and adequate intake of carbs to try to prevent glycogen stores from becoming depleted over a training cycle. Depleted stores lead to a higher risk of injury and illness.

For those training 1-3 hours a day, this would look like 6-10g of carbohydrate per kilogram bodyweight spread throughout the day.

Ideally, you will be eating carbohydrates from complex sources such as potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, and grains at meals, and then some more easily digestible forms such as milk, fruit yogurts, and flapjacks as snacks.

When it comes to recovery, the focus is on aiming for both carbohydrates and protein. We tend to work on a principle of 1.2g of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight, and 0.4g of protein per kilogram of body weight within 30 minutes of finishing a training session. Ideally, this would be something that is easily digestible such as flavored milk with a banana or a bar, followed up closely with a balanced meal such as eggs on toast, chicken and rice, or baked potato with beans and cheese.

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Immunity

Avoiding sickness is key to enabling consistent training. However, balancing immunity with higher training loads, full-time work and family life can make this a very challenging scenario.

Some key tips to stay on top of your immunity include:

• Stay hydrated: saliva is the first line of defense, so use electrolytes during the summer months, and maybe if you plan on doing a lot of indoor training during the winter months

• Maintaining Vitamin D levels above 75 nmol/L - which may mean taking Vitamin D supplements, especially through winter months (September to April).

• Ensuring appropriate iron levels, including ferritin stores of above 50ug/L

• Starting a course of probiotics 12 weeks out from competition - studies have shown this helps to reduce the risk of upper respiratory tract infections in athletes, (Lagowaska et al. 2021).

• Sleep: Aim for a minimum of 8 hours a night to support your immunity. While there is a temptation to reduce sleep to fit in extra training, in the long run, this approach does not pay off and usually ends up in disruption to training.

Monitoring

The final piece of the puzzle is monitoring. To understand how we are responding and adapting to training, keeping a close eye on recovery, immune, hormonal, and stress biomarkers ensures that we can adjust nutritional strategies accordingly.

When I am working with elite athletes I will do this fairly regularly, usually after high training volume blocks or big races.

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For most of us who are physically active, I would recommend a once-a-year personal check-up as a minimum to test markers such as Vitamin D, Ferritin, thyroid function, CPK, cortisol, and reproductive hormones.

In addition, doing a daily monitoring score around readiness to train, fatigue scores, and how a training session feels are all imperative to ensure that the training load is managed appropriately and adequate rest is also scheduled.