If you look at the environments that professional teams have now for food, theyโve come to realize that nutrition is no joke. That is, if you want athletes: to lower injury risk, to improve musculature, to lower body fat levels so that their strength-to-weight ratio is better, and be sufficiently energized so that they can play through the entire competition well. So if youโre a basketball player you can jump as high and as often during the fourth period as you did in the first. All of those things donโt happen unless you have created a nutritional environment that allows it to happen.
Strength-to-Weight Ratio
A lot of sports have different traditions. I used to work with gymnastics. Their tradition was โNo, theyโll get all the energy they need from the air they breathe.โ This is the truth. I was asked by the Olympic Training Center to start working with gymnastics because they were having some trouble and they werenโt really winning medals at the Olympic level. They asked, โCan you work with them?โ I said, โWell, I donโt know anything about gymnastics. Are you sure you want me to? โ They replied, โJust go see if you can come up with some ideas.โ I said, โAll right.โ So I went to the Olympic Training Center and I observed. I met some of the people there and some of the coaches, and I observed something. Theyโre practicing for five and a half hours, no water, nothing to eat, nothing. That was the paradigm in gymnastics.
I looked at that and I spoke to the head coach, who herself was a three-time Olympian. I said, โYou know, coach, you really need to give them some food and beverage here, like every two or three hours, or youโre never going to get better.โ She looked at me like I had just been dropped in from Mars. She looked at me like, โWell, you obviously know nothing about gymnastics. You give them something to eat, theyโre going to get fat. They have to be light. Their strength to weight ratio has to be high. Leave me alone.โ So I called up the Olympic Training Center. I said, โLook. Theyโre really not interested in hearing my recommendations, so I canโt help them.โ They said, โOh, no. Just stick it out. Just keep pushing and see.โ
โOkay. We can do this snacking thing.โ
So I became a pest and I kept pushing it, and finally, they said, โOkay. Weโre going to do this once. Weโre going to give them something to eat and drink in the middle of practice.โ Itโs a five and a half hour practice, so about two and a half hours into the practice I was allowed to give the gymnasts something. I went over to the cafeteria, which at the time was right across the street from the gym. I spoke to the cafeteria lady and I said, โWe need to get some snacks together for the gymnasts.โ She looked at me and she said, โWhat? Theyโre going to let the gymnasts eat?โ I said yes, and she was so happy. She immediately started cutting up fruit and she was just exuberant at the idea. The two of us, at exactly the prescribed time, walked into the middle of the floor where they do the floor routine. I was holding this big bowl of cut up fruit and she was holding a couple of jugs of diluted fruit juice. We went out into the middle of the floor and Iโll never forget this experience. The team captain was a future Olympic medalist. She walked up to me and she said, โWhat are you doing?โ I said, โYouโve been given permission to have something to eat and drink.โ She looked at the coaches and she looked around. All the coaches were standing around with their arms crossed, but they were nodding saying, โYes, you can have something.โ So Iโm holding out this food and these gymnasts are around me. It was very strange. They were shy. This was a new occurrence for them. It was a little bit like wellโฆ have you ever fed goldfish?
Thatโs kind of what I felt, like they were having these little nibbles of food because they knew they wanted it, they knew they needed it, but they were afraid. They ate it and so they gave me 15 minutes for this snack break. Exactly 15 minutes after I walked out onto the floor they said, โOkay, letโs go.โ The head coach, the head technical coach, took this girl, this gymnast who she had been working with for three days to do one vault. She was doing the same vault over and over and over again and hadnโt done it quite right. She took this girl and she said, โOkay, do the vault.โ She was sure because this girl had eaten some food that her doing this vault would give her projectile vomiting, and that would be the end of the discussion and this snacking thing would no longer be an issue. Right?
Somehow, miraculously, I donโt know how this happened because there wasnโt enough time to absorb the food but this girl did the vault perfectly, perfectly. The head coach looked at me and she said, โOkay. We can do this snacking thing.โ We had this rule that the gymnasts would eat every three hours.
When we got to the โ96 Games we had the oldest gymnastics team. We had the tallest gymnastics team. We had the heaviest gymnastics team. We also won the team gold medal at the โ96 Olympics. I attribute a lot of that to several things. One, we were able to keep the gymnasts in the sport longer because they werenโt injuring themselves. They were heavier because they had more musculature, so their strength to weight ratio was better. We had good coaches. We had really good coaches, and we had good gymnasts. Thereโs a lot going on there, but I definitely think changing the nutrition paradigm helped.
Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
A lot of people exercise. They want to lose weight, so they exercise but they donโt eat. They lose weight temporarily, but theyโre losing more muscle than fat. Because theyโve downregulated their ability to burn calories eventually they get the yo-yo effect where weight goes back up. If you just focus on losing fat, change that. The focus needs to be on losing fat AND keeping your musculature. A lot of people will lose 10 pounds of fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle and theyโll go, โOh, Gosh, look, my clothes are fitting better but Iโm the same weight.โ Yeah, exactly. Because muscle takes up a whole lot less space than fat. Itโs more dense. You feel better. You do better. Youโre healthier. Everything is good. You canโt do that with restrictive eating. You have to feed the beast. Otherwise, you lose your muscle.
Weight is the wrong metric for virtually everything itโs ever been used for. The body mass index is the weight to height index. It was developed as a population index. A population index for assessing the prevalence of obesity in a population. Well, foolishly this index made it into individual physician protocols for assessing whether or not an individual is obese. Iโm sorry, but obesity has nothing to do with weight. Nothing. It has to do with fat. Obese people are over-fat. Virtually every athlete I work with using a BMI scale is overweight. Theyโre not obese. Theyโre overweight for their height because theyโre carrying a lot of muscle. Isnโt that nice?
I mean, thatโs a good thing. Thatโs not a bad thing. Thereโs a lot, I think, that we need to look at a little bit more carefully to come up with the right protocols and conclusions. Some of them are obvious. Some of them are less obvious. I mean, this weight thing โฆ I tell my students every time somebody says something about weight kick them in the shins. Do you want to lose bone weight? Do you want to lose water weight? Do you want to lose muscle? What weight do you want to lose? Eventually theyโll say, โOh, I want to lose fat weight.โ Okay, then letโs figure out how to lose fat weight. Because the protocol for doing that is quite different than the starvation protocol for losing weight.
Reposted with permission from Nutritionstudies.org. This article was written by Dan Benardot, excerpted from an interview with CNS and Dan Benardot, PhD, RD, LD, FACSM, Professor Emeritus of Nutrition, and of Kinesiology and Health at Georgia State University.
