10 Reasons You Should Work With A Sports Nutritionist
As an athlete, you are 100% of the power that drives your athletic performance. As such, the most significant investment you can make for your performance is in yourself.
Nutrition has huge potential to help with your athletic development. From supporting your race performance and recovery, maximising the adaptations you get from training, ensuring you stay free of illness and injury (and getting you back to full fitness as fast as possible when the worst does happen) and helping optimise your body composition (If you’re interesting in knowing more about how nutrition can have impact on you as an athlete, check out this blog post here)
Here are ten reasons if you’re an athlete looking to improve your performance, then working with a sports nutritionist (like me) should be a priority…
1. Efficiency
A good nutritionist can help get you to your goals more efficiently than you can on your own, saving you significant time. As a nutritionist, I will always look to identify and focus on the most important, highest-impact strategies first (the long-hanging fruit as such) that will provide you with the greatest return for the least amount of effort, helping you get to where you want to be as quickly and efficiently as possible. I’ve heard countless athletes say after a few months of working with a nutritionist that it’s completely transformed their performance and it’s something they wish they’d done sooner in their careers.
2. Knowledge
I’ve worked in nutrition for over 10 years. As an athlete working with me, you can draw on the knowledge and expertise I’ve gained from thousands of hours of learning and applied experience to help support you. If there are topics I don’t know about, I can get to the right answer pretty quickly through the network I've developed. Through this knowledge, I know about the bigger picture, so as well as having knowledge on specific areas, I also know how to all pieces together, an area which you can only really develop with experience and you certainly won’t get from your own research.
3. Individualised
Working with a professional means that any nutrition interventions are tailored specifically to you as an individual, which helps maximise their effectiveness. From identifying and focusing on your individual needs based on what you are looking to achieve and the challenges you face to designing interventions that are specific to your own individual preferences and circumstances (from what time you train, to your food preferences, to your level of skill in the kitchen), everything will be geared specifically to you rather than relying on some one-size-fits-all approach. Using models of behaviour change, we can also look to identify what are your individual stumbling blocks in making positive change, and look at address these.
4. Clarity
Working with a nutritionist can help give you crystal clear clarity on how you should approach nutrition around your training and racing based on your goals. This removes any guesswork and will free up head space to allow you to focus on other things as you’re not second-guessing yourself.
5. Food-Based Terms
As a nutritionist, I can translate complex scientific nutrition principles into very simple food-based terms, so you know what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat it to maximise your health, performance, training adaptations, and body composition.
6. Problem Solving
A big part of coaching is helping you, the athlete, overcome the challenges you may face with implementing nutrition changes into your lifestyle. Having developed years of applied experience, I know that the problems you face are likely issues I’ve faced with clients before, and therefore, I can effectively work with you to help you solve those problems and get you to where you want to be.
7. Accountability
Throughout my coaching program, a key aspect of benefit to you is the accountability that I provide. Investing in a coach, with regular check-ins and clear tasks to complete will help make nutrition as key focus for you and help drive change.
8. Blind Spots
You may have a good idea of some of the key areas of nutrition you should be focussing on already (i.e. you know you should be fuelling well as an endurance athlete). A good nutritionist can help identify areas of your diet that you may not have been aware of but can have significant impacts, helping ensure you leave no stone unturned in your development as an athlete.
9. Cost
Improving performance as an athlete pretty much always comes with a degree of financial cost. Particularly in sports like cycling and triathlon, where speed can be bought in many forms, from faster, more aerodynamic components to wind tunnel testing. A few months of working with a nutritionist can potentially give you significant performance improvements for relatively little cost, and what you learn from working together are strategies that you can take and benefit from into the rest of your career.
10. Dietary Flexibility
Making positive changes to your nutrition to support your goals doesn’t necessarily mean completely reinventing your current diet or living off a diet of chicken rice and broccoli. In fact theres’s the potential to make significant improvements through relatively modest dietary changes. I can also show you how to make changes without having to remove the foods and drinks you enjoy completely.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but illustrates some of the benefits of working with a qualified, experienced professional when looking to improve your nutrition as an athlete. If you’re an endurance athlete interested in working with a coach to improve your nutrition, I’d love to hear from you. If you take 5-10 minutes to complete the form in the link below, we can schedule a call to discuss how I can help you.
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