Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition

The off-season is not the time to be focused on your race weight nor is it the time to look for a diet plan as a restrictive and controlling eating method to assist in weight loss. The off-season provides the best opportunity for you to learn how to create a foundation diet. And for many athletes, a prime opportunity to learn how to plan a healthy diet. By adopting a healthier method of eating in the off-season, you will likely find yourself in better health throughout your more specific phases of training. Ultimately, be creating a style of eating that helps you maintain a healthy weight (every athlete is different), while staying in great health in the off-season, you will be more inclined to maintain your realistic and balanced eating strategies when your training volume and intensity increase. Which, as you know, when training volume and intensity increase, healthy eating habits often get thrown out the window because of lack of energy and time. Yep, every athlete has b...

The start of building a great relationship with food is to eat a variety of food. The more you restrict your diet, whether intentional or unintentional, the greater chance you will lose an appetite for food and perhaps even a general dislike for eating. Expanding your palate by introducing your taste buds to a variety of real food textures, tastes and combinations will foster a great relationship with food (not to mention a mega boost in health and energy) but to start, you must stop the rigid rules about food and to improve the way you view, speak and feel about food. While I have not yet learned to appreciate the taste of raw Brussels Sprouts, I won myself over with my dinner creation last night as I could not stop yumming with every bite. As I was randomly constructing this creation, I had no idea what this dish would taste like when it became a final product. But that's what I love about cooking - new food combinations that will excite my taste buds. That is wh...

As an athlete, you make a lot of daily lifestyle choices which are likely not "normal" compared to your non-athlete counterparts. Your standards for daily exercise and healthy eating are far from the norm. For example, when was the last time you said, "I only ran 90 minutes today, but it was just an easy run" or brought a cooler of foods to a work conference because you enjoy being in control of your portions and how your food is prepared? To reach your athletic goals, you make a lot of daily choices to maximize your performance and many times, to an outsider, your dedication to your athletic lifestyle looks absolutely crazy and unnecessary. But when you surround yourself with your like-minded athlete buddies, you suddenly feel part of the crowd. Your decisions, actions and choices are praised, admired and sometimes needed to "fit in" among your athletic partners. You may even go out of your way on social media to follow nutrition experts who...

Picture Source Not every athlete trains to win a race but most athletes train to maximize the potential of performing well on race day. While your definition of race day success may be to simply complete the race distance and have fun along the way, there are a great number of athletes who pursue the many possible methods of getting the most out of the body through training, in order to meet performance standards on race day. One of those popular methods is metabolically efficiency, which in simple terms, means burning fat in order to preserve carbohydrate stores. As desirable as it sounds to an athlete to become more metabolically efficient, manipulating your diet and fueling strategies in an effort to become a better fat burner is not a requirement to be a better athlete.  The idea of marginal gains lies in the strategy (or method) of trying to gain the 1% competitive advantage. In other words, big successes from a small change.  With lots of confusion on...

There is a lot of information available to athletes on the topics of nutrition, specifically as it relates to how food can change your body composition, improve your health and boost your performance. I think it is safe to assume that most athletes view food as a naturally safe way to boost athletic performance and the diet as a method of changing body composition. But with so much information available to athletes, the topics of eating for health, eating for fuel, eating to change body composition and so forth, can make the simple topic of "diet for athlete" so confusing and overwhelming. Due to information overload, I wouldn't be surprised if you are one of the many athletes who have explored (or tried) a dietary trend or fad at least once a year (likely around January) in an effort to get your diet under control in order to change body composition. The interesting thing about a diet trend is the unique marketing of the dietary strategy which accurately ident...