Nutrition: How we Support Active People & Athletes to Excel for Events and Competition
- Neil Livemore
- May 13
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
A Precision Approach - Developing Nutrition for Competition
Understanding your individual attributes, lifestyle, training and event demands, and all enablers and barriers.
Developing core fundamentals.
Nutrition leading up to the event and the morning of.
Nutrition strategies during the event.
Nutrition strategies for recovery.
Refining Your Nutrition for Key Events and Activities
Whether an elite athlete requiring optimal sports nutrition for competition, a dedicated recreational athlete, or an active business professional preparing for a significant physical challenge – be it a long-distance cycling event, a demanding football match, a Hyrox challenge, or simply a personal fitness goal you've been working towards – nutrition plays a critical role in helping you perform at your best. Effective nutrition isn't just about understanding the science; it's about translating that science into practical, real-food strategies that efficiently integrate into your daily life. Our performance nutritionist specialises in collaborating with you to refine these principles into a precise, individualised plan built around your unique needs. This approach brings together your existing fundamentals, applying evidence-based precision and ensuring it works for you with real food. Our London sports nutritionist provides this expert support, available both in person at our clinic and via comprehensive remote nutrition support for athletes anywhere in the world.
The Foundation: Building Your Daily Nutritional Habits with Real Food
An effective strategy for any key physical event is built upon a strong daily nutritional framework, grounded in a practical food first approach. Before we fine-tune for the specific challenge, we work with you to ensure your fundamental dietary practices consistently support your training, recovery, and overall well-being using foods you enjoy and can easily access. This involves focusing on:
Key Nutrition Components: Ensuring your regular diet is rich in nutrient-dense, whole foods – the quality proteins, complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, and abundant fruits and vegetables essential for energy, recovery, and overall health. We translate these components into practical meal and snack examples.
Quality: Considering key nutritional markers - for example micronutrients, fibre, saturated fats and refined sugars are at a required position on a consistant basis to support daily health, wellbeing and performance.
Macronutrient Daily Targets and Timings: Defining and consistently meeting your daily targets for protein, carbohydrates, and fats. We help you structure these targets into practical meal timings around your training or activity schedule to optimise muscle repair and fuel availability, showing you how this looks on a plate throughout the day.
Hydration: Maintaining optimal hydration as a consistent daily habit using practical strategies like carrying a water bottle and planning fluid intake alongside meals and snacks.
Energy Intake to Support Optimal Health and Function: Ensuring your overall daily energy intake precisely matches your activity levels to support metabolic function and maintain appropriate body weight. We help you understand what this looks like in terms of practical portion sizes and meal frequency for your lifestyle.
An Overview of Considerations in the Days Leading Up to Competition
With your daily nutritional foundation firmly established, the immediate period preceding your key event or activity calls for targeted adjustments to support optimal performance. Each element of your competition nutrition plan is developed and, crucially, tested in training. This phase focuses on the precise manipulation of energy, macronutrients, fluids, and strategic supplements to optimise your body's fuel stores, hydration, and other key physiological factors critical for peak performance in your specific event, while minimising any associated risk.
Individualisation, Practicality & Testing
The specifics of your pre-event strategy – including food choices, macro and energy intake, method of carbohydrate loading, and meal timings – are highly individual. The optimal plan is tailored to your unique attributes, the duration and intensity of your specific event, your personal physiological responses, your preferences and tolerance for different foods. We work together to identify practical, effective strategies that are manageable for you and meet your speicifc needs. Crucially, we'll test this lead-up fuelling strategy during key training sessions and simulated competition scenarios to ensure it works effectively, prevents unwelcome surprises, and guarantees optimal performance and comfort on event day.
Strategies In the Days Leading Up
Having already checked in with your sports nutritionist and ensured you're fully organised, this final phase before your key event is where we make the specific, pre-practised strategic adjustments to achieve optimal performance. Our primary aim here is to help you optimise your body's fuel stores – specifically muscle and liver glycogen – and ensure optimal hydration status, whilst minimising any potential negative issues such as exercise-induced gastrointestinal distress.
The Fuelling Strategy
This often involves implementing a specific targeted carbohydrate loading strategy, typically in the 1-3 days immediately prior to your event. Depending on the event, the goal is usually to achieve specific targets of significantly increased carbohydrate intake during this short window, often alongside a planned reduction in training volume. This focused approach maximises your body's stored carbohydrate energy, providing readily available fuel for sustained effort. We help you translate this into practical, carbohydrate-rich food choices that you are familiar and comfortable with.
Adjusting Energy and Macronutrients
As carbohydrate intake increases during this period, overall energy intake is carefully managed. While total calories often increases, the macronutrient distribution shifts considerably. Protein intake remains important to support muscle, but fat intake is often modified to accommodate the higher carbohydrate volume and help prevent feelings of excessive fullness or digestive sluggishness.
Prioritising Hydration
Alongside fuelling, hydration is crucial in the days leading up to the event. This means developing a strategy for optimal hydration without compromising sleep with unwanted toilet breaks. Depending on your attributes, activity levels during this phase, the environment and your usual sweat losses, we may also implement specific supplements to ensure optimal fluid balance and monitor simple indicators to gauge and maintain adequate hydration
Strategic Supplementation
Carefully integrating evidence-based supplements before, during, and after events to precisely support performance and recovery, always complementing your whole-food nutrition plan.
The Morning of the Event: Final Fuelling for Peak Performance
After building your daily nutritional foundation and optimising your fuel stores in the days leading up, the morning of your event seamlessly continues this strategy. The focus now shifts to restoring optimal fuel stores that would have reduced overnight, optimising hydration, and strategically timing carbohydrates, liquids, and supplements to support digestion and peak performance. It's about executing the final steps to top up energy, achieve peak hydration, settle your stomach, and mentally prepare, all based on strategies tested and refined in training. Throughout this vital phase, your sports nutritionist will be available via video call, phone call, or our smart app, ensuring you have constant support whilst you focus on your pre-event rituals and mental preparation.
Strategic Pre-Event Meal
A meal designed to be carbohydrate-rich, low in fibre and fat, and moderate in protein. We'll specify precise food choices and portions that are familiar to you, easy to digest, and proven not to cause gastrointestinal discomfort, ensuring comfort and sustained energy release.
Final Fuel Top-Ups:
Depending on your individual needs, the duration of your warm-up, or the exact event start time, additional small, easily digestible carbohydrate snacks (e.g., a banana, rice cakes, a sports drink) may be strategically incorporated prior to the start.
Achieving Optimal Hydration
Strategic fluid intake to ensure you begin the event fully hydrated without feeling bloated or needing excessive toilet breaks. We'll advise on specific fluid volumes and timings, incorporating electrolytes if appropriate, based on your individual sweat rate and the expected environmental conditions.
Practicality and Contingency: Your morning-of plan will be highly practical, considering factors like travel to the venue, access to food, and managing pre-race nerves. We'll include ready-to-go options and contingency strategies to minimise stress and ensure you're prepared for any unexpected situations.
During the Event: Maintain Performance and Delay Fatigue
Once the event starts, our focus shifts to precise, real-time strategies to maintain energy, hydration, and focus throughout your challenge. We develop highly individualised plans for on-day fuelling based on your unique physiology, the event's specific demands, and your personal tolerance.
Intra-Event Fuelling: This involves strategic, real-time consumption of carbohydrates to sustain energy levels and prevent fatigue. We'll work with you to determine the optimal type, amount, and timing of carbohydrate sources – from gels and chews to sports drinks and easily digestible real foods – that work best for your stomach and performance needs during the event.
Hydration Strategy: Maintaining optimal hydration is paramount. We develop a precise hydration plan that considers sweat rates, environmental conditions, and fluid availability during your event. This includes specific targets for fluid intake and, where appropriate, the strategic use of electrolytes to prevent dehydration and maintain fluid balance.
Strategic Supplementation: Depending on the event's duration, intensity, and your individual needs, we may incorporate specific, evidence-based supplements that can provide a performance edge or support sustained effort during the event. This is always carefully considered, tested in training, and integrated into your overall fuelling plan.
Rehydrate, Refuel, Repair - Recovery and Adaptation After the Event
Proper nutrition and hydration following your event or significant activity are vital for initiating the recovery process and supporting adaptation. This is where we kick start repair and bring you back to baseline: We focus on practical ways to achieve this.
Macronutrient: Prioritising times consumption of carbohydrates and protein post event to initiate repair and replenis energy stores.
Hydration: Re-establishing optimal fluid and electrolyte balance relevant to your unique sweat rate and losses for effective recovery and function.
Supplementation: Where appropriate, we'll recommend specific, evidence-based targeted supplements tailored to your needs to further support ongoing repair and immune function.
Accelerated Return to Baseline: Our support extends beyond immediate recovery to maintaining quality nutrition and adequate energy intake in the hours and days following your challenge. We provide practical recovery plans to support ongoing physiological restoration, seamlessly integrating this into your return to normal life and training.
Developing a precise nutrition strategy for your key events and activities is about intelligently applying scientific principles to your established daily habits, translated into practical, real-food solutions. It's a collaboration focused entirely on you – understanding your life, your goals, your barriers, and your preferences – to build a sustainable, effective plan that helps you perform at your best when it matters.
Want us to help you excel in your event nutrition?
Use the contact form below to request more information or arrange a free phone call to discuss your needs.
-----------------------------------------
How can we help support your goals?
Individual consultancy
Nutritional support and development process
Assessments
Physiological testing
Team support
Team education
Mentoring
Interested in our primary services?
Use the contact form below to request more information or arrange a free phone call to discuss your needs.
Comments