Ditch the protein supplement!
Learn to eat organic. Learn how many calories you burn in a day and then design your nutrition around this value.
The quickest way to understand a player’s physique or response to a training session is in the overall energy levels, amount of fatigue in the activity and the recovery time post a gruelling session. In these three areas, I use food to enhance energy levels, prevent fatigue and enable faster recovery.
Food is the main fuel that allows an athlete to battle on. When food does not meet the requirement of energy expenditure, an athlete will tap into fat as well as muscle reserves in the body. Depending on the intensity of the training, the last few meals, the mental state of an athlete and the genes in relationship to metabolism, the athlete may either burn more fat, or in extreme cases, muscle in the session.
With training ranging from four to eight hours per day for most sports, eating within the training span is crucial to recovery. What to eat and when are more important than how much to eat of that food. For example, having a beetroot three hours before a rigorous session will benefit an athlete immensely due to vasodilation which allows for better exercise performance. Eating two to three beetroots may be the key, but having them at any time of the day may not deliver the desired results for performance.
When athletes visit me at the Qua Nutrition signature clinics for their sports nutrition plans, their first question is usually, “Which are the best Protein foods?” Somehow, in the last decade, protein has become the poster boy for an athlete’s beall and endall of nutrition. Protein supplements have become a fashion statement. Never mind that you do not know how many calories you burn in a day and how much of carbohydrates you need to replenish yourself, not to mention the good essential fats. Everyone is clamouring for a protein boost!
I would like to ask athletes to ditch the protein suppplement, till such time they understand which foods are crucial to powering their body for sustaining energy levels rather than just muscle building.
In fact, in an athlete the RDA (recommended dietary allowance) of a man or woman would increase triplefold in most cases. Now, focusing on protein, 1.■gm per kg bodyweight may be the right answer. A 70kg athlete may require 5,000 calories a day as an example. If I give the athlete 70kgs x 1.■gm of protein, that is 126gm of protein per day. This 126gm gives only 500 calories. So only 10 per cent of the energy and/or muscle retaining/building requirements! So over 90 per cent focus is on carbohydrates and fats. If you get this picture, then don’t put all your eggs in the protein basket!!! Focus on carbs. Rely on fats.
Below is my list of three foods that I believe are crucial to a player’s performance and I have designed it to benefit both veg and nonveg athletes. This list is best advised for a beginner. When you are elite, you would want to customise this list based on your calories, blood tests that will look for deficiencies or damages, food allergy tests to ascertain whether a certain food recommended by me actually heals or does harm to your body and finally nutrition gene tests to figure out the best fits for foods in this hectic regime.
Lentils, or masoor dal, has the highest antioxidant factor (total antioxidant capacity, or TAC, is the measure of the amount of free radicals scavenged by a test solution be