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Showing posts from March 17, 2019

Making sense of sport nutrition advice

The best fitness routines and training strategies are only beneficial if your body is fueled properly. To help you optimize performance without disrupting health, realistic, effective and simple sports nutrition information, based on sound science, will help your body safely adapt to exercise. Did you know that athletes have unique nutrition needs compared to the inactive?  The interrelated roles of macro (carbs, protein and fat), micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), water and electrolytes significantly impacts your metabolism during exercise. For example, low energy availability (not eating enough) can impair athletic performance as the body is unable to tolerate high quality training sessions and make favorable physiological adaptations to exercise. Reasons for being in a low energy available state often result from intentional restriction of nutrients (ex. dieting, body composition changes), lack of available food or unintentional restriction from not understanding h...

Triathlon Tip Tuesday!

  Trimarni Tathlon Tip - Tune-up Races Athletes often describe races as A (high priority), B (middle priority) or C (low priority). This can be misleading. Does this mean that C races are not as important as A races and you'll only try hard in an A race? Instead, I suggest to look at your races as either key races (one or two a season) and tune-up races. In other words, the key races are your main focus. Everything is leading up to this one (or two) race. You expect to be at your best fitness and everything you've done prior is helping you execute at your best.  All of your other races are still important but they have a different focus and perhaps, different lead-up as it relates to preparation and fitness. A few tips for how to mentally approach a tune-up race: Don't go into the race with expectations or pressure to hit certain goals/numbers. The best part of racing is actually racing - which means staying present and letting the outcome take care of itself.  ...

Meeting your coach's expectations

With only four weeks left until we kick-off our 2019 triathlon season, I have been thinking a lot about the athlete-coach relationship. With nearly five solo, music-free hours of swimbikerun training spread over Saturday for me, let's just say that I had a lot of time with my own thoughts. Coaching is a mutual commitment. The athlete expects the coach to be professional, experienced, encouraging and communicative. But coaches have expectations of their athlete in order to optimize performance, maintain optimal health, to get the most out of the athletic journey and to get the most out of the coaching relationship. When I think about the expectations that my coach has for me, I believe she wants me to be honest, responsive and engaged. I also believe she wants me to stay in good health - never restricting food or compromising sleep, or jeopardizing my ability to perform well in training and recover quickly from training sessions. Instead of trying to impress your coach wit...