This video introduces you to the nutrition section where you will learn how to fuel your performance and manage your weight and where all the nutrition-related things and tools you will use are located.
The nutrition program is geared to help you do two things:
1. Determine your personal energy and macronutrient needs based on your body composition goals (fat loss, weight or lean mass gain, or weight maintenance) within the overall context of optimising your training, recovery, and performance.
2. Improve and optimise your daily nutrition and fuelling for training.
The concepts I’m about to teach are dead simple yet powerfully effective, and they will be by far the most important things for you to understand in order to get results with your program.
I know how overwhelming nutrition can be with all the different diets and information out there, but when you stick to the science, it becomes very simple.
The 2 things that matter the most when it comes to fat loss, weight/lean mass gain, or weight maintenance are:
All other diet factors, like the specific types of foods you eat, the vitamins you consume, the timing of your meals, how many fats and carbs you eat, and the supplements you take, are also important for other reasons, but they don’t play nearly as big a role as these two factors.
Your calorie intake determines whether you’re going to gain weight or lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn every day, often termed a “calorie surplus,” you’ll gain weight. Eat fewer calories than you burn every day, termed a “calorie deficit," and you’ll lose weight. This is what’s known as the Law of Thermodynamics. You can disregard everything else, and this will still hold true.
It’s the number of calories you consume rather than the specific types of foods you eat that dictates whether you gain or lose weight. It doesn’t matter how “clean” your diet is; if you’re not in a calorie deficit, you won’t lose weight.
It’s important that you understand that you don’t just want to lose weight. Weight is made up of both fat and muscle. To avoid just ending up “skinny”, you want to lose fat while preserving as much muscle as you can in the process. This is where the next factor, protein intake, comes into play.
The amount of protein you consume will affect how much fat compared to the muscle you lose. If you aren’t eating enough protein every day, more of the weight you lose will be from muscle rather than fat.
So, how does all this apply to you? Well, the problem is that most people:
So, my main goal for you in terms of nutrition is to help you gradually eat the right number of calories and enough protein every day so you can start losing fat while keeping your muscle.
Once you can accomplish the above two objectives consistently, you’re going to experience incredible results. That said, getting to that point will take some time, and I’m going to provide you with information and tools to help get you there. But keep in mind that, at the end of the day, those two goals are all that we're aiming for.
Now, to reach these two objectives, it does mean that you’ll have to start tracking your calories. Not only that, you have to do so accurately; otherwise, it’ll be a waste of time! But trust me, as intimidating as it may sound, doing this will completely open your eyes and be the key to your success. It’s not something you have to do forever, and it’ll get to the point where it takes you just 5 minutes out of your day to do, but it’s going to make all the difference. I’ll show you how to accurately track your calories in an easy, quick, and flexible way.
See the information in the Body Composition chapter for details on how to carry out this process.
Next, we move onto fueling performance with something I call the Max Energy System (MES), which aims to target nutrition for optimal sports performance for all levels of cyclists.
The underlying principle is simple: it's all about the carbs (you thought I forgot about them, didn’t you?
Most people now agree that getting enough carbohydrates in your diet and eating them before, during, and after exercise can help you do better. In fact, carbohydrates don't have to be eaten in order to improve exercise performance. It has been shown that endurance can be increased by just rinsing the mouth with carbohydrate solutions without swallowing. It is also well known that having a lot of glycogen in your muscles when you start working out is an important part of doing better.
A large part of an athlete's ability to train every day depends on how well their muscle glycogen stores are restored. This process needs a lot of carbohydrates in the diet and a lot of time.
To help athletes and others improve their training adaptations and performance, it's important to know how normal changes in muscle glycogen content are affected by training and diet, how long it takes for glycogen stores to be fully restored, how the amount, type, and timing of carbohydrate intake affects glycogen resynthesis, and how other nutrients affect glycogenesis.
This chapter looks at how the latest research on glycogen metabolism in physically active people can be used in real life. This will give you a practical way to improve training adaptations and performance.
See the information in the Fuelling Performance chapter for details on how to carry out this process.
