Competition Day Nutrition

– Let’s talk about competition day nutrition. And again I think this is one where people traditionally really struggle. Our nervous system is made up of lots of different bits. Two of those bits are called the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Your sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight response. So you get a shock, and you get this adrenaline rush, you get nervous, you’re anxious, you’re sitting too far this way on the inverted U of arousal levels, so you’re hyper-aroused for a certain skill. It’s really useful, this sympathetic nervous system, if we can use it well, too much, and again you start to get those things like overtraining, adrenal fatigue. Now, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic. That’s, bless you, fight or flight. The parasympathetic, the colloquial name might be rest, and digest. So that gives you some clues as to what these two paths, these two branches, of your nervous system do. This makes you fire up and perform at a high level, this is more your recovery stuff. And you can see how, these are both super important. It’s definitely not one more important than the other. ‘Cause if you only perform all the time, you’ll crash, if you only rest and digest all the time, you won’t be able to perform at all. Both really important. What this does is send blood to the muscles, to the parts of your body, responsible for action, for chasing down that woolly mammoth, to fighting off that saber-toothed tiger. That’s what this is for, for high performance. This allows you to repair your muscles, and to digest food. They’re both super important. Now, who gets a dry mouth before a competition? So they’re about to go into an event, or like an exam at school or a job interview, or you want to ask someone out on a date, or something, maybe you get that dry mouth. The reason that happens is the salivary glands in our mouth, that’s part of our parasympathetic nervous system. Yeah? Because rest and digest, other than chewing with your teeth, the first part of the digestive process is the saliva in your mouth. So the reason that you get a dry mouth, it’s not ’cause you’re dehydrated, because you guys will know well, I’m fine during training, I go and exercise everyday, it’s fine, but then the CrossFit open comes around, why is my mouth suddenly dry? I’ve been drinking the same stuff, it’s not dehydration. Your body is shutting down, the parts of your body responsible for digesting food, including the salivary glands, because you’re firing the sympathetic nervous system. So that can be a sign, that maybe you’re sitting, beyond the ideal performance state, on that arousal verse performance graph. Okay? It’s a good sign that maybe you’re hyper-aroused, we could use some of those strategies and techniques that we talked about during the day in our mental skills training section, to bring that down and to calm yourself down, to come back down into our optimal performance state. So you’re not going to want to feel like eating on competition day. Why do you think that’s the case? ‘Cause you’ve shut this down. ‘Cause competition is all about perform perform perform, and you’re probably not going to be able to recover, I mean you can’t really repair muscles and stuff on competition day, so your body is perform perform perform, I’m anxious, I’m stressed, I’m nervous, going into an event, I’m doing the event, and then I’m thinking about the next event. And you get this cycle of, and that’s where you end up so exhausted at the end of a competition, so knackered, ’cause you’ve just been on this super high sympathetic nervous system activation all day. So, you’re not going to want to feel like eating on competition day. You can go the whole day and not be hungry at all. Because we’re focusing on this, but you need the fuel on that day more than any other day, so you have to force yourself to eat. So on gameday, on your competition day, this isn’t about, I need to make sure that I’m warding off type-2 diabetes in my future, I want to live long and happy. It’s not so much about that on competition day. It’s one of the few times when you’re happy to prioritise your short-term performance over your long-term performance. Because you’re not going to end up pre-diabetic from one day of eating Red Frogs. Okay? It’s not going to happen. But it may help your performance. And if your goal is to maximise your performance on that day, that nutrition needs to be slightly different, slightly higher in carbohydrates, that’s what I think. So, this is a day where the regular nutritional guidelines, health and nutrition guidelines, don’t necessarily apply, because you will change it to fuel your performance. Quite often breakfast will be the only real meal that you eat during that day. Because you’re not going to feel like eating a proper solid meal after that. So if you can have a good-sized breakfast, good solid food, good mixtures of proteins, carbs, and fat, like you would as part of your normal nutrition, maybe a little bit more high energy density carbohydrates. Again the micro-nutrients here aren’t as important. If you normally eat heaps of veggies, maybe the breakfast on competition day, you’d have more oats, or something like that. So you’re just getting more energy and more energy-dense foods coming in. That’s quite often your only real meal so make it a good one. Then post-event, we talked about this 60-30 split of glucose to proteins, for whey protein. So you want to do that immediately after training, again, then after that you can have fruit, the fructose in the fruit, again can help to restore your hepatic glycogen, that sugar stored in your liver, charging your battery, fueling future bouts of exercise. In between events, you’re probably not going to want to have a meal. You’re going to want to just graze on small bits of food. And, as silly as it sounds, you need to change the environment, modify the environment to reduce the barrier to entry to eating. So it takes a bit of effort and willpower, would you believe, to eat an apple. But if you cut that up into little pieces, it takes away a barrier to eating it. Just like with kids, yeah. Fruit in little pieces, they love grapes, not necessarily because of the taste, but because they’re so easy to eat, and they can do it as they’re talking to their mates. This is exactly the same. So make it as easy as possible for you to graze on foods. So that may mean, instead of having cubed sweet potato, you mash sweet potato. So I used to do things like, I’d cook up sweet potato, I’d mash it, so I cooked it really well, I’d mash it, I’d put it in like a sandwich bag, and then I’d cut the corner off, and basically squeeze it into my mouth, like baby food. Because it’s a way that I could get the food in, I didn’t have to chew, which I know sounds stupid, but this sort of stuff isn’t working so well, and it’s just easier for me to get it in. And I’m just forcing it in, I’m not hungry, and I just keep a handful of almonds in my pocket, between events so I could eat them without even thinking about it. Okay? Make it easy to eat, as easy to eat as possible, because you won’t feel like eating. Graze on food between your events.