Summer Eating

Stack Magazine has a great article up at the moment on summer eating. It is put together by James Harris, the sports nutrition coordinator for the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Food is so important because that is how we get the fuel to keep us going.
I recently had the pleasure to work coach McGovern's camp at Dubuque and when getting interviewed by FloWrestling he retold a story of how he learned to eat so he could make weight.
The story was that he and Tom Ryan were cutting weight for a tournament and were 11 pounds up. He wanted to just workout and not eat but Tom Ryan on the other hand went and had breakfast so that he would have the energy to make weight.
There is no doubt about it making weight is not fun. The new rules are helping to control this but as a coach what I see being more important than anything is that you feel good when you compete (or at least the best you can). Putting energy in so you can take the weight off is much more important than having to work twice as hard because you are running on empty.

One tip from the article relates to pre and post workout eating. I went through a period were I got up and the first thing I did every morning was run. On hot days in the Florida summer I would never make it all the way through my five miles. About mile 3 I would be done and have to walk for a while before I could start again.

I talked to a friend about this and I told him I thought I was getting to dehydrated and he told me that would only be part of a problem. The larger issue being that my body was having to try and burn stored fat, which meant it had to start converting the fat and go through a huge process. The heat didn't help but he told me to start eating a power bar before I went to run. Eating these 30 minutes before I left made things a lot easier on me.
Yes, as wrestlers there are times that we have to get ourselves close to the breaking point just so we know how to do it but, in the summer, when I am running to keep my conditioning up and to stay healthy is not the time to break yourself. Save that for the practice room.

"Thirty to 45 minutes before you hit the weight room, grab a 300-calorie pre-workout snack to give your muscles extra energy to burn. To aid recovery, within 20 minutes of training, nosh on a post-workout snack that’s a moderate combo of protein and carbs. Besides replenishing lost energy, it will prepare your body for the next workout."

Check out the article here.
http://www.stackmag.com/TheIssue/ArticleDraw/4423

For more on diet check out that section on CarrWrestling.com