Athletes: Follow This Nutrition Schedule Every Day

Not focusing on your nutrition as an athlete is like a race car showing up to a race without fuel in it. That race car could be the best, fastest race car out there, but if it doesn't have fuel in it, it's not going to win the race. Your body is like a race car. Food is the fuel that goes in your body, and you need to show up to your games and events and competitions fueled. So I'm going to give you the first 5 steps that an athlete needs to take to start dialing in their nutrition. I'm Kelsey. I'm a sports nutrition coach, and hundreds of athletes who have been through my program have crushed speed and strength PRs, put on 10 to 15 pounds of lean mass, and ultimately instantly play better from these 5 steps that I'm going to teach you. I could go on all day teaching you guys about why you need nutrition, what it does for your body. I can take you to science class and teach you all the systems and processes and the Krebs cycle and everything, but you don't need to know that. I just need you to understand why nutrition matters for you. Reason number 1, because it's fuel. Taking it back to the car analogy, you gotta show up with a full tank. So in your body, you've got little muscle energy tanks all over. These are called glycogen storages. You don't really need to know that, you just need to think Are my energy tanks full? Great. Are they empty? Got to get some food in me. The way you know if they're empty is if you feel like you're hitting a wall, if you feel like your energy is lagging, if you feel tired all the time, you're not eating enough. You need to have fuel in the tank. Reason number 2 is you got to make sure that you're giving your body the food that it needs to build and repair muscle. To build muscle, you have to tear it apart in order for it to be built back together. So with strength training, you are literally breaking your muscles apart. Growth doesn't happen there. Giving your body food and enough time to recover is where the growth happens. So you gotta make sure that you're giving your body food and time for it to recover. Reason number 3 is your hormones. Every single athlete, male or female, you got hormones in you. You need to make sure that you are fueling your body to have healthy hormones. Unhealthy hormones can lead to stress fractures, injury, inability to play. You gotta keep your hormones healthy. And reason number 4 is your immune system. Basically, fruits and veggies are gonna keep— build your immune system to keep you healthy, and to keep you on that field or the track or the court. So I hope I've sold you a little bit on why that matters. So let's get back to the 5 protocols that you can start to dial this in. Number 1 is Performance Plates. Okay, so Performance Plates is my formula that you can use to putting together a balanced plate every single meal you eat. Ah, turning this around. These are how I want you to be structuring your breakfast, your lunch, your dinner throughout the day. There's 5 key things you need to make sure that you include in your plate in order for it to be balanced and in order for us to fuel immune system, your hormones, your muscles, and your energy tanks. Number 1 is protein. I want a fourth of your plate be filled with protein. Ideally, this is going to be chicken, beef, fish, turkey. Like, any meat is an amazing source of protein. Number 2 is carbohydrates— healthy carbohydrates. This is going to fuel your energy tanks. It's going to be the gas that goes inside those tanks and to make it so you're not hitting walls, so you have all the energy that you need to perform at your best. If you're in high training season, well, at least training 2 to 3 hours a day, You want about half of your plate to be full of carbohydrates. So this is going to look something like rice, potatoes, whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bread. Any healthy carbohydrates, anything with a grain— oatmeal would be a great source as well— is going to be an amazing source of carbs for you to fuel your energy tanks. Number 3 is fats. A little bit of fat goes a long way. We don't need a ton of fats on the plate. Healthy fats is going to be like avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, almonds, cashews, any sort of nut. Like, those are going to help keep your hormones healthy and give your body more energy overall. Throughout the day. Number 4 is 2 colors. Now ideally, I want you to be using a fruit and a vegetable to make up these 2 colors. You want about a cup of each. So this is going to look like filling in one color here, and then you're probably going to have like one color on the side that could be like a fruit bowl, an apple, a banana, something of that sort. So how this could look is protein, steak, carbs— I've got potatoes here and I've got some rice down here— fats— well, I cooked my steak in some olive oil, so that's good with fats for the day. And then color number 1 can be broccoli here, color number 2 can be an apple on the Now I've got my protein, my carbs, my fats, and my colors. The fifth and final thing that you want to make sure that you're doing every meal is that you're drinking fluids. It's not enough to only hydrate during practices and games. You got to make sure that you're staying hydrated throughout the day in order to have peak performance when it matters most in those games and in those practices. So fluids, I would say at least 8 to 12 ounces every meal you're eating. That's, that's going to make it a lot easier for you to hit your hydration goals throughout the day. So this is how you need to structure your plate for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner. At this point, a lot of athletes will be asking me, but how do I know exactly what I need to be eating? How do I know portions sizes. What if you're 5'6" female libero versus a 6'7" basketball center? Obviously you guys are going to need different portion sizes based off your body. That's why in my coaching program we give our athletes personalized meal plans that follow this structure but give them more direction for portion sizes and how much their body needs per meal. So once you have your performance plates dialed in, now we're going to move to snacks. We want about 2 to 3 snacks throughout the day, and ultimately this depends on how much you're training. If you only have 1 hour of practice throughout the day, you may not need 2 to 3 snacks. You may only need one. If you have multiple hours of practices and training throughout the day, you're going to need more snacks because that's going to give you more fuel in your energy tanks to keep those topped off. A typical rule of mine is that every time you're going to train, you have carbs beforehand. So if you have 2 hours of training that day, it would be really awesome to have 2 high-carb snacks. HC is high carb. You want it to be roughly 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates. So if you read a nutrition label, it always tells you on the back like how many carbs per serving is in there. So for instance, Wheat Thins— for a serving of Wheat Thins, which is probably about like 16 Wheat Thins, it's going to be roughly 25 grams of carbohydrates. That would get you part of the way for one of those high-carb snacks. So let's look— one high-carb snack equals 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates. This is what we're focusing on for the high-carb snacks that you will eat pre-training to keep those energy tanks topped off. This can be like an apple plus some crackers. This can be some applesauce plus a granola bar. Ultimately, you just want to mix and match snacks that are high in carbohydrates to get you to this goal right here. So if you're not hitting your protein goal, which roughly an athlete, if you're going— if you have— if you take your weight in pounds, you need about 0.82 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So if you weigh 150 pounds, you're going to multiply that by 0.82 grams, and that's going to give you a good ballpark of how much protein you need to be eating every day. If you're not getting all of that protein through the performance plates, then snacks is a great place to fill in extra protein amounts. So say that you train 2 hours throughout the day, you have 2 high-carb snacks, and then you're gonna have one third snack that's a high protein snack, HPC. This is going to be roughly 15 to 20 grams of protein, just depending on how much you need. So this can be a beef steak, this can be cottage cheese, this can be Greek yogurt. Ultimately, you just want to make sure that this is helping you hit your overall protein goal. All right, so we've got performance plates, we've got snacks, and now we're going to go to step number 3, which is our hydration. I spoke briefly about hydration during the performance plate section, but hydration is really important. You need to make sure you're hydrated. Don't sleep on hydration. You will feel very sucky if you sleep on hydration. A good place to start is take your body weight in pounds. If you're metric system, I'm sorry, you're gonna just have to convert your body— your kilograms to pounds. Use ChatGPT. But body weight in pounds, we want about half of our body weight. We're going to take half of our body weight and that's going to give us the daily ounces that we need. So again, if you weigh 150 pounds, I'm going to chop that in half, so divide it by 2, and that's going to give me 75 ounces of fluids. Now this is the baseline that you need. And by baseline, I mean minimum amount of ounces that you need every single day outside of practice. You need extra ounces during practice and during games because you are sweating and you are losing extra water. So this is the minimum amount— baseline, minimum— the minimum amount of ounces that you need every single day. And then once you hit that number every single day, you can start adding on the practice ounces and fluids. With that, we get very personalized in our coaching programs with this. I'm going to give you a ballpark range to help you guys get started here. It's it's probably going to be per hour of practice between 16 and 24 ounces per hour of working out, right? The reason why there's a big range there is some practices you're going to lose a lot of sweat. Football players, if it is freaking hot outside, you're full pads, you sweat a lot, you might need more than 24 ounces per hour. But if you are like inside, it's a chill lift or shootaround or something like that, you might need less than 16 ounces per hour. It ultimately depends on how much sweat or water you're losing, and usually athletes can be pretty intuitive about the fluids you need during workouts and practices. With this, if you sweat a lot, electrolytes can be a really great option. Those need to be very personalized as well, just because everybody has different sweat rates, they sweat at different amounts, um, there's different electrolytes with different amounts of sodium in them. We'll drop a video on that soon. But a good place for you guys to start is if you sweat decent amount, you could start having like 500 milligrams of sodium. So this would be like a Liquid IV or a Gatorade or a Body Armor IV Flash one, about 500 milligrams. If you don't sweat a lot, or maybe you're a younger athlete, you could probably get away with like 200 to 300 milligrams. And always check with your doctor and stuff too on this, um, but 200 to 300 milligrams would be a good starting place. And honestly, that's just like a normal sports drink. All right, so we got our performance plates, our snacks, our hydration. Moving on to step number 4 is our nutrient timing. I'm gonna be brief about this just because we're gonna drop a whole video on nutrient timing and our Clutch Day protocol and what to eat on game days and stuff like that. But with the nutrient timing, It's just important to not eat things too far away or too close to events that matter. So if you are playing a game, you probably don't want to eat a full performance plate 1 hour before that game because you're going to feel super sucky and heavy. At the same time, as I see athletes eating a breakfast and then not eating the rest of the day for their 6 PM game because they're nervous that they're going to feel too heavy or too sluggish. So a good rule of thumb is called the 4-2-1-0 rule. I'm gonna just teach you the 4 and the 2 and the 1. And we'll jump into the rest of this in another video. 4 hours before the game is when you want to be having about a performance plate. If your game starts at 7 PM, roughly around 3 PM, you're going to have a performance plate. This is going to give you the carbs, fats, protein, all of those good things that you need to stay fueled for the game. 2 hours out, you're going to have a high-carb snack. This is going to top off your energy stores and to make it so it's far enough away for your body to digest it, but close enough for you not to be super hungry during the game. 1 hour before, you're going to take some of these fluids. I would suggest about 16 ounces of your baseline fluids and you're going to drink them here with one of these electrolyte packets. This is going to keep you hydrated and to make sure you have some electrolytes in you leading up into the game. And then during the game, we have a specific protocol that you can be following there. But ultimately, carbs are king during the game. So if you feel like you're always hitting the wall, this and this should really help you. But you could also have some applesauce or honey sticks or a sports drink during the game if you feel like your energy is starting to lag. So we've got our performance plates, our snacks, our hydration, our nutrient timing. And then the fifth and final step that I wanted to talk to you guys about is number 5: keep it simple, baby. A lot of athletes come to me and say, should I do carnivore? Should I take beta alanine? Or, or should I cut out all seed oils or only eat organic? And my answer every single time is keep it simple, guys. There are always going to be things that you can do to level up your nutrition after you've mastered these things. However, These are the building blocks. This is the foundation. Every good house needs an amazing foundation for it to stand the test of time. This is a big part of your foundation, plus getting sleep, guys. You gotta make sure that you're locked in on your— how much you're eating, the right kinds of foods, the right amounts of foods at the right times for your body, keeping snacks and keeping yourself fueled, staying hydrated throughout the day, timing it well for your games and your competitions and your races. This is going to get you 95% of the way there. And then once you've mastered that, you can dive into like the, the more complex things that you hear about nutrition. But I even tell my professional players this, this is going to get us 95% of the way there. Just stay consistent and keep it simple. These 4 things, it can take a lot of trial and error to actually learn how to implement and use. So if you're wanting help, if you want to know exactly what to be eating for your body, you want a personalized meal plan and hydration plan, and to make it easy for you, come join our program. I'm gonna just give it all to you. The link's in the description.