Young athletes, anxious to reach the top of their sport, often try to emulate their elite counterparts. But, as athletes who are still growing, they face additional challenges that fully developed adults in the sport no longer have to deal with. These include supporting their development and setting habits that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. Perhaps one of the most important questions to ask is whether the nutrition needs of junior endurance athletes should be the same as the adults.
There are many factors young athletes need to consider. Not the least of which is the fact that they are still maturing physically, which makes supporting that growth with good nutrition all the more important. All athletes have to balance performance and health when it comes to their nutrition, but many top athletes will often favor performance. But is it the right approach for athletes who are still growing?
In this episode, our hosts tackle the nutrition needs of junior athletes with exercise physiologist Jared Berg, discussing what’s most important for developing athletes, how to guide them to make the right choices, and what roles their parents and coaches can play. We’ll also go down a few rabbit holes—like the concept of longevity vitamins and how berries can help us live longer.
Joining us, we’ll also hear from mental performance coach and retired professional cyclist Brent Bookwalter. He shares more thoughts on the balance of health and performance.
So take some time to think back to your own high school diet, and let’s make you fast!
References:
Ames, B. N. (2018). Prolonging healthy aging: Longevity vitamins and proteins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(43), 10836–10844. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809045115
Loftfield, E., O’Connell, C. P., Abnet, C. C., Graubard, B. I., Liao, L. M., Freeman, L. E. B., … Sinha, R. (2024). Multivitamin Use and Mortality Risk in 3 Prospective US Cohorts. JAMA Network Open, 7(6), e2418729. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.18729
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
Hello and Welcome to Fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor, here with Coach grant hollikey and physiologist Jared Berg. Young Athletes anxious to reach the top of their sport often try to emulate their elite counterparts, but as athletes who are still growing, they face additional challenges that fully developed athletes in the sport no longer have to deal with. These include supporting their development and setting habits that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. Perhaps one of the most important questions is whether these young athletes should be emulating their elite counterparts. When it comes to nutrition, there’s many factors they need to consider, not the least of which is the fact that they are still maturing physically, which makes supporting that growth with good nutrition all the more important. All athletes have to balance performance and health when it comes to their nutrition, but many top athletes will often favor performance. The question is whether that’s the right approach for athletes who are still growing today, our host will dive into this debate, discussing what’s most important for developing athletes’ nutrition, how to guide these young athletes to make the right choices and what role their parents and coaches can play. We’ll also go down a few fun rabbit holes that everyone might find interesting, like the concept of longevity vitamins and how berries can make you live longer. Joining us, we’ll hear from mental performance coach and retired professional cyclist, Brent Bookwalter, so try not to think back too hard about what you ate in high school, and let’s make you fast. Well, Jared, I knew we were going to get you back on the show. I didn’t know we were going to get you back on this quickly, but you heard about this topic, which we’ve been planning, and you’re like, I have
Jared Berg 01:30
to be there. Jump right in. This is mine. I
Trevor Connor 01:33
love it. Can’t wait. Perfect. Excited to have this conversation.
Jared Berg 01:36
I am, yeah. This is Yeah. It’s such a great conversation. Have needed one and lots to talk about good.
Trevor Connor 01:42
So today we are talking about nutrition and development athletes. So, you know, depends on the sport, but we’re really talking kind of your junior athletes, your u 23 so high school level, maybe college level. They’re still growing. They’re getting into sport they want to perform. Obviously, there’s a lot that you can do with nutrition for performance. There’s also a lot that’s important about nutrition when somebody is developing and growing. So we really thought it would be important to talk about, is it different? Is it different from when you’re talking about an adult who’s fully grown? Should you be taking a different approach with a younger athlete like this? And if so, what are the nutrition concerns that we should consider with them? So I thought a good place to start is to just go around the room and ask everybody, what do you think is most important when you’re talking about development athletes like this and their nutrition?
Jared Berg 02:39
I’ll jump right in on that. For sure. I would say for me, what I feel is the most important. It ties in with energy availability or energy balance, but I feel like breakfast just with what I’ve seen among student among student athletes, and pitfalls with maintaining appropriate energy. Breakfast is essential. I can explain why later, but that’s where I’m going.
Grant Holicky 03:09
I’ll piggyback on that. You know, I coach high school swimming for 30 years, only recently stopped, and we’d have these 5am practices and the amount of kids that would not eat before they came and tried to do intense workouts, and how much trouble, how hard it was to not just convince them to eat, but like then to help them through the process of finding what they could eat, what they could stomach, what they could get through. Because you’re not you’re not getting up at three for a 5am practice so you can eat more, right? That just doesn’t work. They’re getting up at 430 they’re getting up at 445 and they’re pounding something on the way to practice. So what can we make that that works? One of the big things for me is snacks. I think that we watch a lot of kids, maybe they get good at breakfast, they get really good at lunch, they get really good at dinner. They’re not good in between. And when they’re in school, there is huge chunks of time between those meals that they need to be fueling that they’re not. And I will use fueling not in the performance context, fueling for life context. So that’s not carbohydrate, that’s everything. You know, we need balanced snacks. We need those things that are easy. They’re accessible. They can get them in their backpack. They can eat whenever they want.
Trevor Connor 04:24
All right, so that’s some good advice. I will admit I probably didn’t word that question very well. I was actually thinking more at a philosophical level. Let’s just talk. Are development athletes different from adults, and if so, what are the main considerations that you should be thinking about when you’re advising development athletes on their nutrition? And let you guys think about so my answer to this is, I think particularly when you are dealing with people who are still growing, who are young, who are creating their habits for life. I think. That healthy nutrition is all the more important. There is nutrition that’s designed for performance. Sometimes performance and health can go hand in hand. Sometimes they don’t. And I do get worried when you see athletes who are in high school, who are young, really focusing on getting every last bit of performance out, really focusing on, potentially nutrition that isn’t great for them, also seeing them sometimes focusing on things that they shouldn’t be doing at all, which always concerns me, and that becomes the habits that they take into the rest of their life. Even though a lot of these athletes, they don’t go pro, this isn’t what becomes their life. It’s just something that they do seriously when they’re younger. So I think considering health is really important.
Jared Berg 05:45
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, if you know and you can establish healthy eating patterns, good balanced nutrition, getting the right macronutrients from Whole Foods, that is really great things to start, you know, eating and to start early, making sure you’re getting all your fruits and vegetables, all the simple things that we that we hear and that we see on the daily. That certainly matters a lot for the the youth, the junior athlete, as far as differences, if we’re going to get a little bit a little bit specific quickly here, yeah, there’s a little bit more calories that the the adolescent, the growing athlete, needs over the adult who maybe weighs the exact same amount at the exact same height with similar muscle mass, right? There’s a couple 100 more calories maybe. So that’s, you know, say, 5% more, and that’s across male and female, so that those are differences a touch more protein needs. You know, it’s not that, it’s not crazy difference, but, but there are some subtle differences, but I do, I do agree it’s an educational opportunity when they’re young, young athletes setting up those good practices, good routine. You know, Grant talked about, a little bit earlier, about the healthy, good, balanced snacks to keep them nourished and good energy throughout the day. I talked a little bit about breakfast and, you know, those are huge opportunities to make sure that they’re set themselves up for the, you know, good learning potential, plus, plus their athletics as they go throughout the, you know, their day and their week. I
Grant Holicky 07:17
think one of the big differences is that something that we have to keep in mind is that most palates don’t fully develop until kids are fairly late into adolescence, and you’re there’s an opportunity there to help develop a palette that is not heavy sugar, that’s onto this fruits and vegetables. So there is something beyond just the habit. And the habit piece is huge, right? Like when you have a kid that’s grown up eating their vegetables and knows why, they’re likely to be an adult that eats their vegetables and knows why. But there is also those opportunities to help a kid, like broccoli, you know, help a kid like some of these foods that have maybe unique tastes to them, but it’s almost more about just introducing them to them. My wife’s a registered dietician, so I have a lot of this input in our daily but kids need this many exposures to a food in order to grow comfortable with it, and that can start really early on, if they don’t get that early on now, they have that many exposures later in life to get comfortable with a food, and that’s likely to happen. You know, if you’re not eating a lot of greenery early in life, why are you going to start at 22 so it is really important that we are talking about fueling for life, not just fueling for sport. That’s
Trevor Connor 08:32
a really good point. Is about the exposure, because I think that’s something that is difficult. Let’s take this outside the sports context with youth. I mean, I remember many times going out to dinner with my brother and sister in law and their kids, and the waiter shows up and says, Hey, do you want the kids menu? And I look at the kids menu and it’s like, mac and cheese, hamburgers, pizza, fingers, there’s no vegetable that you seen anywhere. And I also remember one time having a talk with my older nephew when he was just starting high school and he was complaining about not be able to lose weight, and wanted to talk to me about his nutrition. And I said, Well, tell me what you eat. And he goes, Oh, my friends, tell me I eat healthy. So I go, Well, what do you have at lunch? He goes, Well, typically, I have two slices of pizza, a coke and a Milky Way. Oh,
09:15
there you go. I
Trevor Connor 09:17
found the culprit, and that’s the healthy you’re the healthy one, right? Right, yeah. What are they eating? Yeah. So there is that challenge of, for some reason, we’ve set up our culture a little bit that that’s just what kids eat. Let’s just feed them junk. And if they’re eating at school, how much control do you have over
Jared Berg 09:34
that? Yeah, exactly. It definitely becomes challenging, for sure.
Trevor Connor 09:38
So I brought this up before. I think this is a great place to go to now. Is this question of performance versus health. You’re dealing with a younger athlete. They want to be competitive, they want to raise we don’t know yet if they are going to become a professional, considering how many people actually end up going professional, probably not, but they might have a long competitive life ahead of them. At that age, let’s say 1516, a junior cyclist. How much should we be saying, sacrifice performance for the sake of health versus sacrifice a little bit of healthy nutrition for performance? Or can you you have the best of both worlds? I’m
Jared Berg 10:13
going to go with what I want. Of course, I’m going to go best of both worlds. I feel like that’s not a big ask. We can power ourself with enough carbohydrate from good sources to feel the performances that we want in training, right that we want in racing. And we can get ourselves to recover with enough carbohydrate and good, healthy protein to get ourselves to rebuild muscle and to recover from having, you know, just the breakdown from the efforts, right? So, yeah, I definitely feel like both can happen without, sort of, like a need for, yeah, going crazy into protein powders or supplements or driving it with real sugary soft drinks, or, you know, just carbohydrate at all, cost type mentality?
Grant Holicky 11:03
Yeah, I would echo that. You know, I would almost say it can go so far that healthy lifestyle is probably more important, because there’s just not that many things you need to be doing at 15 and 16 at the level of these guys are racing at other than maybe in training or in racing, right? If we look at a gel, I don’t think anybody’s debating the fact that a gel is not something you just Huck down at two in the afternoon for fun. That is not a good food for you. It’s a sugar bomb. It’s the candy bar. I had an athlete for years that would take marshmallows on his rides because that was a way to get sugar in that wasn’t that much different than gels in blocks and stuff like that, and was dramatically cheaper. But when you think about that as you know the comparison, you wouldn’t ever just think about hucking down three marshmallows in the middle of the day. But it’s not that much different than what you’re doing. I mean, a Snickers bar is not that much different than what you’re doing with some of these bars on the bike. So I think ultimately out the bike, off performance off training, I would always push harder into a healthier, balanced diet, and you know, yeah, okay, maybe there’s some corners we need to cut on the bike and in training with not the greatest food, with bars and gels and things like that, but off the bike, that’s where I think we’re creating habit, and that’s where I think It’s so important to be balanced. But really what you’re saying this is huge for me, like coaching kids for so long, the amount of protein powders and protein recovery crap that showed up on my deck for no good reason, right? Like guys, you’re probably under calorieed, is why you’re not getting stronger and bigger more protein’s not gonna help you with the caloric intake. That’s a little
Trevor Connor 12:38
bit of what I’ve seen. So I remember a few years back, I went to this health symposium. So it was a nutritional health symposium. When I got there, I discovered it was all about the keto diet when I was heading there. But I found out when I got there, what I found interesting, a lot of 20 somethings there, and they had a bunch of tables of people promoting their wares, promoting their products. Probably 50 tables. 49 of them were powders or supplements. Yeah. And I went to the one table that had a real food. They were selling fish products, and just said, Thank you. Thank you for having a real
Jared Berg 13:11
food that I had the same experience at fency Food and Nutrition conference, the big one for registered dietitians. And I was there, and we’re trying all these crazy samples, some, you know, some medical foods, different powders, and different ways of getting people their stuff, gluten free, this, or vegan, vegetarian. And then there was this place that there was one booth that had, I want to say they had apples, berries and bananas. And I’m like, Oh, this is gonna catch on.
Brent Bookwalter 13:43
This is new. I’m like,
Jared Berg 13:45
I’m like, people are gonna love this. And so, yeah, that’s so, so crazy, like all the different things. And, you know, I would echo a little bit of of what Grant was discussing about, there is a time and place for the high energy foods and getting something that’s going to directly affect your ability to step up for your next race, or get into your, um, you have a, you know, an 800 you know, meter swim coming up, or whatever, and you you’re on the pool deck, or you’re, you know, at a track meet, and there’s, there’s crackers, there’s gummies and Gatorades and all kinds of sugars that you look at, You’re like that. Is not the epitome of, like, healthy and athletic or whatever, but it’s needed. You can’t as a coach and as a even as a registered dietitian, I’m not going to be like, Oh, you need to, you know, really improve what you’re eating when you’re at these events, or you’re getting ready for these races, or you’re in training, and there’s a certain point where you just need fuel that’s going to break down, that your body’s going to be comfortable with, and you know, if your GI track is going to tolerate and it’s going to give you the energy you need to feel the performance, right? But that’s there’s a there’s a time and place for that, that’s called races, that’s called meets, and then there’s so many other times of the day, the other 2122 hours of the day that you’re either sleeping. Or eating healthy is really the goal. I
Trevor Connor 15:02
really like where you guys are going, and that’s the, you know, here’s what you use when you’re doing the sport, but let’s focus on the healthy nutrition otherwise elsewhere. Because I do think that is something that you that is becoming a misconception in younger populations. So my niece, she’s 22 she has a boyfriend, and I’m just giving you one example. I can give you a bunch of examples of examples of this, where I’ve seen this in younger populations. Her boyfriend decided he’s going to train for a marathon, so he came to me to talk to me about training and nutrition. And I still remember his comment to me was basically, well, I’m getting serious now, so I know I need to start doing shakes and protein powders and supplements and all these things. And the way he’s talking to me, it’s kind of like normal food doesn’t do it anymore. Now I need to get everything in powder form. Yeah, so he was looking for me to recommend this stuff. I’m like, No, keep eating the natural foods. He’s like, but, but I’m getting serious. And I see that sort of mentality of, you’re not a serious athlete unless you’re taking all this stuff, and I like the mindset of, there is a time and a place, but if you’re a serious athlete, there’s definitely a time and place to be eating healthier, to be eating healthy foods. And this stuff isn’t necessarily healthy,
Grant Holicky 16:12
- And you know, I really think what’s what’s important is, and I’ve said this for years with adult athletes, too, that we’re so quick to jump to the multivitamin, we’re so quick to jump to these things that I don’t know, I don’t want to get on a high horse, and I am not registered dietician. So much of what I’m going through is via my wife or people like Jared and anecdotal, right? What I’ve experienced and what I’ve watched. So I think that’s an important caveat throughout there for me. But so much of what we need we can get if you just walk down the produce aisle. You know, it’s not that simple, but evolution is not going to have us go to a place where we have to buy a supplement off a shelf that’s been manufactured in order to get us what we need. So many of those supplements, and so many of that stuff is about time or perceived time, and I think that’s a really important thing to put out there. And for kids, that is even a harder piece of the puzzle, they feel like they have less time. They feel like they’re more under pressure, and they’re just grabbing things as quickly as they possibly can. And as coaches and as sports, I think we enhance that like you’ve got to get bigger, you’ve got to get stronger, you’ve got to gain weight. Remember that conversation, ad nauseam, with 15 year old boys at the pool? How do I get faster? We’ve got to get a little bit stronger? How do I do that? And really trying to be the voice of reason that says, Eat more, but eat more of all of it. Yeah, well, that’s
Jared Berg 17:42
one thing I’m right on board with. Is like, you end up with leverage when you talk about the student athlete, the junior athlete, because they start taking in more calories. I mean, there’s a they, they’re eat, you know, not, they’re not just taking in, you know, 1800 2000 calories, just because they’re, you know, they’re going to school, sitting around and just coming home. They’re, we’re talking about 2500 3500 calories. Well, that is that much more opportunity to get more micronutrient, bioactive compound, rich fruits and vegetables, right? Some good, healthy grains, a touch of fiber, of course, because you just have that much more food coming into the system. Yeah. So you really, I mean, in essence, shouldn’t have less needs for some of these Band Aid type things like a supplement and such,
Grant Holicky 18:28
because, right, some of the amounts of the essentials that you need doesn’t go up because your caloric intake comes up. It’s just the baseline that you need, right? So that’s a really good point, because we’ll have swimmers. I had swimmers at 1718, that were doing six, seven workouts a week, plus lifting. These were guys that were taking in in that ballpark of five to six, right? They were, they were in huge numbers, and all you need is a little bit of variety, and you’re going to start getting in the things that you need. And I think this is an important piece. I think so often when we talk about athletes, development, athletes, I think we have a lot of coaches and a lot of outside people watching their weight, so to speak, trying to keep kids weights down for whatever reason, whether it’s running, whether it’s cycling, yeah, weight dependent sports, right? And even swimming. I mean, it used to see it makes no sense, but I would see it with parents and peers of female swimmers, particularly because females go through the that progression. I’ve heard
Jared Berg 19:28
about this in women collegiate coaching. Oh my God.
Grant Holicky 19:32
Listen, I was at University of Texas for nationals, I want to say, six years ago, and there was still a scale outside the women’s locker room. This is not that long ago. This is like 2018 2017 That’s That’s horrific, and especially in a sport where, frankly, you’re in water. It is not a weight dependent sport. But what I think we end up with so much of this trend towards people watching calories, to cut them, or to limit where. Is so often they need to be expanding caloric intake. And you know, how do I do this? And one of the hardest things for kids is teaching them these basics. I taught by high school biology. It was incredibly hard to get across food and what it does, and giving them that autonomy and teaching them the basics is a huge step forward. I remember for a while with my swimmers, I would do the Chipotle burrito scale just just to try to teach them total caloric intake. I was never saying, do this, but it was like, You need 5000 calories a day. We’ve gone through it. We’ve gone through it with the registered dietician. We’ve done it. We need that. That’s five Chipotle burritos a day. Guys, what do you put that in? And they’ll be like, well, I can eat two for dinner, like, Yeah, but can you eat one for lunch, one for a snack and one for breakfast? No, that’s not what you’re doing, yeah, and you mentioned it earlier. Sorry. I’ll end my rant, but we need to train ourselves to eat the different foods, to eat enough food, to eat snacks, it’s hard to eat breakfast. Yes,
Jared Berg 20:59
that’s yeah, I can go back to breakfast anytime, for sure.
Trevor Connor 21:03
I’m glad you guys went down the road of talking about the supplements and the multivitamins, because I think that also relates to the caloric intake. If you’re eating empty calories, then it gets really difficult, because your body, when you’re beating it up in sports, your body, doesn’t just need calories, yes, it needs the calories, but it needs a lot of nutrients as well. And if you’re getting the calories and not getting those nutrients, your body needs to be able to recover, your body’s gonna say, I’m still hungry. Yeah, yeah, keep feeding me more. And then it does become a challenge. It becomes difficult, and you’re not recovering as well. And I don’t think a multi
Jared Berg 21:36
getting less nutrient rich foods and covering it and like making up for what the multivitamin is not the way to go.
Trevor Connor 21:42
So when I was managing team Rio Grande, we had this kid on the team. He was 20. We had challenges with him. He went to had a website dedicated to all the dumb things that he did. People would just submit stories of him, I kid you not. He would go to the races. No, just wrap your head around this. This is 2014 he would bring boxes of Count Chocula. Oh,
Grant Holicky 22:08
that’s amazing, yes, but 2014 No, no, no, not good. I mean, we’re just amazing. Where do you find Count Chocula
Trevor Connor 22:15
in 2014 he found a place where they still made it. And he would order it, and would cost him, like, $15 a box, because it’s now a specialty item. I
Grant Holicky 22:28
wonder how old some of those were, like, he needed to check the expiration date on them.
Trevor Connor 22:32
They could have been manufactured in the 70s. They’re still probably good, yeah. But we would talk to him about his nutrition, and he would just go, oh, I can eat whatever I want, I take a multivitamin, so it’s all fine. Oh, brutal. You would just say that, and I wish I’d had it. Then meta analysis just came out about a month ago, looking at the impacts of multivitamins. And yeah, you’re gonna think that it’s saying something that it’s not saying. But what they showed was the people who took the most multivitamins died younger and had higher odds ratio for cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality. Yeah, sounds
Jared Berg 23:07
like they weren’t eating a general healthy diet,
Trevor Connor 23:10
not that the multivitamin was killing them. No, the people who take a lot of multivitamins are tending to compensate for the fact that they’re not eating well,
Grant Holicky 23:17
we see this in car safety all the time. Every time we put in a new layer of car safety, we get the same number of motorist deaths because people are driving more carelessly. They’re driving faster. They make up for what we’re giving them in protection by making other mistakes. And I think you see that in diet, this is very common mentality for humans. It’s probably something Danny Kahneman did a long term study on, I’m guessing, because he studied all that stuff. But you see that, and I think you really do see that progression. And what we’re forgetting with the multivitamin is so many of the vitamins and minerals we need are tied to other things that we get in food, to uptake well, to absorb correctly and to utilize in the right way. There’s a reason there’s vitamin D with calcium, right? And that’s that’s the simplest one. And most of our foods that we rely on some of that absorptive properties. It’s not directly put into our milk, like it is with milk, right? We have to find those things in foods. As
Trevor Connor 24:17
a mental performance coach, Brent Bookwalter has been helping athletes optimize their mental performance, and that includes their mindset to nutrition. He shares his thoughts on what we just talked about, the balance of health and performance.
Brent Bookwalter 24:30
Well, I’ve cringed to see and hear what some of the young phenom juniors and Young Riders are already doing with their nutrition. I think for me, the biggest fundamental that I hype to young riders is fuel the performance, and the performance is not just a race, but it’s training too. Especially for younger riders, you’re still growing, you’re adapting. Your actual physical structure is changing a lot, and to be in a catabolic state where your body is not getting enough energy and macronutrient depth. Is harmful and cringe worthy, and I think, downright dangerous. So I love the story that came out of the Tour de France this year with Johannes Abrahamson, who wrote for uno X. He was in the KLM Jersey, and a lot of people saw for the first couple weeks of the race, and he was in the headlines because he talked about how he gained, I forget what the number was. It was like, I want to say, 20 kilos, huge, huge amount of weight, because he realized when he was young he was too small and he was undernourished. He was not being able to achieve his potential, because he just wasn’t really like following the path of his body type and what he needed to be. So he’s a great example that little lighter is not always better, and health comes first. Health and longevity are strikingly important fundamentals of any potential performance in that you’ve got to be healthy and it’s got to be sustainable if you’re going to keep it going.
Trevor Connor 25:53
So this is a bit of a tangent, but on this topic, something you guys might find very interesting, and this applies to everybody, not just junior athletes. There’s some really fascinating research by Dr Ames, who is a legend in the nutrition world, and he’s been writing lately about longevity, and he has something to say about it, because his most recent paper he published at the age of 95 and he’s still teaching, but he had a really good point about vitamins and minerals, and he basically said, I don’t want to have to keep writing vitamins and minerals, and it’s going to call them all vitamins. Use a broad term. He said, We have survival vitamins and longevity vitamins. So meaning the survival vitamins are, if you aren’t getting enough of this, you’re going to die or be very sick. And he said, so those are your essential vitamins. He said, we identified those a long time ago because they just made people deficient. And they go, Look, they’re getting sick. They need this.
Grant Holicky 26:47
It was really easy to know that you need vitamin C.
Trevor Connor 26:51
But the point he made is, there are a lot of nutrients that are essential to our longevity and long term health that you can’t identify the same way, because you have to make somebody deficient in them for 20 years, and then you see the effect. And that was so one of the arguments he made. And by the way, I’ll put this in the show notes. I’ll put these references to him. The point he makes is we actually don’t know all the vitamins and minerals that we need. There’s probably hundreds that we haven’t even identified yet. So if you’re trying to get it all from a multivitamin, you’re missing out on the things that are going to help you live a longer, healthier life. Hence, those people that rely on a multivitamin didn’t live as long and had higher all cause mortality risk. Yeah,
Jared Berg 27:31
that’s certainly another good perspective on that study that you talked about. Yeah, that, I mean, they had a longevity vitamins or neutral, I would say vitamins, longevity, nutrients that I like to think of, you know, there’s bioactive compounds, or the things in foods, like the anthracyanins, the riboflavin, the flavonoids, yeah, yeah, all those great, really things that you know, like good like the anthocyanins, which are in berries and raspberries and all those Things are really great for a young athlete trying to develop cognitive aptitude that will give them the ability to recall in that, you know, fifth or sixth hour after lunch, right? Yeah. Or it same thing with longevity. They help with cognitive function in older adults that are, you know, maybe predisposed to dementia and other, you know, related cognitive disease. So they’re just, they’re, they’re, yeah, they’re essential for quality of life and function and longevity, but they’re not essential just to keep our bodies moving in that short term, like they’re looking
Grant Holicky 28:36
for them, and especially the adolescents. I mean, you can, I think adolescents can pull off a whole heck of a lot. Young 20 year olds can pull off a heck of a lot. We joke all the time. All of us in this room are getting a little bit older. But what you know, what we could do when we were racing, when we were 2530 years old, I can’t do anymore. I can’t even get close to doing anymore, by the way.
Trevor Connor 28:56
Thank you for telling me how to pronounce ather. Did
Jared Berg 28:58
I even say it right?
Trevor Connor 29:00
I’m sure you did. I’ve been mispronounced. I literally were writing a book, and I just wrote it, oh,
29:05
this
Trevor Connor 29:08
morning, that’s the highlighted. Yeah. No idea how to pronounce that.
Jared Berg 29:12
Yeah, there’s this that, there’s that study that gave, I want to say was maybe, gave six to eight year olds, what was equivalent to maybe a cup or cup and a half of berries. And I think they did it like in a powder, so that way they could have it controlled, or whatever. And they just significantly found that cognitive function, or the ability to recall, was improved by a significant amount against the control group. Wow, yeah, that’s
Trevor Connor 29:40
really cool. Anybody who’s interested, there’s a type of flavonoid that they’ve been doing a lot of research on recently. It’s found in mostly in fruits,
Jared Berg 29:47
yeah, the skin of the berries. Yeah, it’s what gives
Trevor Connor 29:50
the dark color. So your dark reds, purples black. So cherries, blueberries, fruits like that, tend to be high in it. And it’s actually been. Shocking how many of the mechanisms in our body that we know are related to longevity are related to preventing heart disease, cancer, neurodegeneration, it has an impact on so it’s basically yeah for yourself and for your kids. Can’t get enough berries, cherries, fruits like that.
Grant Holicky 30:17
Makes some sense from a hunter gatherer background where we relied a ton on berries. I mean, some of this stuff makes some some basic sense and and I think we rely a little bit too much on technology, and there’s technology and foods too, right? I mean, one little tangent I’d love to throw us on while we’re talking about supplements and talking about these things, as caffeine. We know caffeine is a performance enhancer. We know the benefits of caffeine, but one of the problems with caffeine, with young athletes, is that they intake caffeine in the rest of their lives at such a high rate that they’re losing they’re not going to get the benefits of it in performance, or the amount they have to take in in performance is just off the chart. So I mean, you gonna run into these kind of ethical conundrums over and over again in the development of athletes. Is this the right thing to do? Should we be going down this road? And I remember there was a stretch there where caffeine pills for swimmers were all the craze, and it’s scary because there’s no food, there’s no water that goes in with it and it, man, they would like tweak, and they were off the chart. And they weren’t taking a ridiculous amount. You know, they’re in the ballpark of what’s suggested for performance. But because, and we see this with sugar all the time, if it’s not taken in with fiber, it gets digested a completely different way. There’s some of that same thing with caffeine. So energy drinks, Starbucks, all these things. You’re watching kids bring their tolerance of caffeine way up, and a lot of times they’re exposed to it through sport for the first time, whether they’re just trying to survive going to a 5am practice or getting through a school day, or they’re looking for a performance enhancement. Out of it,
Trevor Connor 32:00
you’re bringing up something that I think is really important for that junior athlete that I hadn’t thought about coming in here, which is this concept of hormesis. And you’re probably going to jump all over this. It’s this idea. It’s a really important term in physiology. It is essential, this idea that too much of something can be bad, but too little of that same thing can be bad. So a great example is sodium. We know if you eat too much sodium in your diet, it’s unhealthy for you. If you don’t get enough, you die. There is a optimal range, and we often forget about that. We get into a either a more is better mentality or a less is better mentality. I just listened to a podcast with a guy who the topic was intermittent fasting, is like, well, I’ve got this so dialed down. I intermittent fast every day. I only eat three hours during a three hour window every day. And I’m like, You’re not fasting, you’re starving, yeah. Or what are you
Jared Berg 32:53
starving and binging?
Grant Holicky 32:54
Yeah, it is essentially starving and binging,
Trevor Connor 32:57
yeah. And you just look at that and go there. There is definitely research showing benefits to intermittent fasting, but what he’s doing is you’re getting out of that hormetic balance now you’re just doing something wrong to your body. And when you’re talking about people who are still growing their bodies are having a hard enough time staying in balance as they’re trying to grow, you do have to be careful with younger athletes, of going to any of these extremes with anything, because you’re getting out of the hormetic balance, and their bodies can’t handle that. No,
Grant Holicky 33:28
- Like they can’t. And I think, you know, it’s so interesting with something like sodium, right? Like the, one of the most basic fundamental things we need sodium for is the sodium potassium pump. It’s what gets things in and out of cells. You can’t function without sodium, but it’s so easy, exactly like you’re saying, Trevor, to go down that road of like, No, we got to get everything out of our diet. And that’s impossible, first thing, but second thing, it’s not safe, yeah,
Jared Berg 33:57
or in the same breath, I mean, with sports marketing and like all the different supplements or drinks, you can have a product that is like pushing you need to have, we need to increase our sodium to these levels in our daily diet. And now we’re talking about, I’ll see diets come through with 4500 milligrams of sodium for no good reason, right? It’s just, and it’s like, you’re not sweating out that much. You’re not. I mean, yes, all you’re doing is, like, push ups for your kidneys and, like, your system. It’s just,
Grant Holicky 34:27
it’s funny, because you see the tie between what people are eating in their normal diets, and if they tend to have a higher sodium diet, they may need more sodium when they’re performing and lower. You know that same balance. But, yeah, it gets taken off the reservation. And, you know, there’s this term, everything in moderation, it’s pretty good to live by. Feel like
Jared Berg 34:49
was a quote by was Christopher Robbins Winnie the Pooh. Too much of a good thing. Isn’t always a good thing. Yeah,
Grant Holicky 34:55
yeah, yeah. And, I mean, I, I’ve been in a place with teenage swimmers, where. Put kids on a milkshake a day plan, just because I know they can’t get in enough calories. And I’ve just been like, Okay, after dinner, have dessert. Just plan on having dessert. Because I do think there’s that other feeling that like no sweets or no sugar is a benefit, and I don’t know that it 100% is right? No,
Trevor Connor 35:21
it’s not. And I think at that age, well, this could be debatable. I’ll say this and jump on it if you disagree. But I think that’s the age where you’re the most prone to more is better. A little bit helps. A lot helps. Oh, I would. I think people in their teens have the hardest time saying, what’s the balance here? Yeah, they don’t. What’s the stop point that
Jared Berg 35:41
natural sort of, like, I guess pragmatic, logistical thinking isn’t maybe as as dialed where they’re more just, like, Yeah, they’ll just, they’ll jump on and they’ll just go excessive. Well, there
Grant Holicky 35:52
definitely is, you know, under development of the prefrontal lobe. And then we can start talking about dude, the pressures through social media and any media right now, or through the roof. I mean, you can, I’m a doctor, so, and the rabbit hole that goes down after that Instagram post is unbelievable. Or the
Jared Berg 36:10
foods that are like, Oh, look what, here’s what I eat in a day. Like, we don’t need to know. Just, just enjoy, enjoy your breakfast, lunch and dinner now, get a couple snacks, and just don’t tell us about it. Well, my
Trevor Connor 36:20
girlfriend’s daughter was telling me about this social media influencer she was following who was on the liver diet. I think, Oh, my God, he was liver. And he was doing all these posts about, you know, these caveman posts where he was like, I raw meat and all this sort of stuff, and saying, you know, he was jacked, like he was a big boy, and everybody was jumping on this. And of course, they found out later he was taking an insane amount of steroids.
Grant Holicky 36:47
Yeah, exactly. She’s righted through that.
Trevor Connor 36:50
This is the problem. Like none of us have seen this. No, it was a 20 year old who told me about this. And you have a whole bunch of people that age who are seeing this ago, I’ve got to eat all liver. Now, listen,
Grant Holicky 37:01
I’m not, I’m not gonna call out any celebrities, but you have movie stars and celebrities that are getting ready for roles, and they like cut with this diet, or they do this, and they do that, and no offense, I’m looking at some of these dudes, especially on screen, going, there’s no way you’re not on drugs. Yeah? Because No, I’m sorry, nobody’s testing for performance.
Trevor Connor 37:23
Sylvester Stallone at an airport with growth hormone, and they were sitting there going, should we arrest him? And they tried to make a scandal out of it, and then he just made a statement, I’m an actor, I’m not an athlete, right? Yeah, I’m not doing anything wrong.
Grant Holicky 37:37
No, he’s doing it for him, yeah? I mean, he’s doing it for what he needs to do it for. Yeah, absolutely. But
Trevor Connor 37:42
you’re absolutely right. You see some of these actors that go from tiny to huge, yeah? And if you think they’re doing that naturally, that’s
Jared Berg 37:50
how he beat Ivan Drago. That was it
Trevor Connor 37:55
amazing they’re both doing he wrote the script.
Jared Berg 37:58
Yeah, that’s right. Ivan Drago did, yeah, exactly. Oh, man.
Trevor Connor 38:03
So this kind of transitions to the next important thing to talk about, which is getting into the mindset of the younger athlete. I think we’re all in agreement here that they should be eating and balanced, that health needs to be a factor. I think they can be doing some of this performance stuff, but they have to understand what healthy nutrition is. But what can you actually get a young athlete to do? Because they are some of the hardest to convince eat healthy. And again, I’ll give you an example. My girlfriend’s 20 year old daughter, we had like, an hour and a half conversation about nutrition, and then she just went out and bought a bunch of gummy bears. I didn’t even ask, and she’s sitting there eating them. She just looks at me and goes, Yeah, I heard everything you said. I just enjoy junk too much. And that was the end of the conversation. Yeah.
Jared Berg 38:46
There you go. Yeah. I go in, you know? I go back into thinking about what the athlete has to do on the daily right? And grant talked a little bit about the morning swim, right? Those swims could be 90 minutes, four and a half, 5000 meters, maybe even a touch longer, right? That takes a little bit of carbohydrate to get through, and so the athlete needs to to to plan accordingly to be able to get to the workout. Well, now you look at the typical thing, which is like a junior athlete with an after school practice, right? Well, if they are, they have practice, and they’re trying to, trying to eat, they’re gonna get all these mixed messages about, like, Well, I had that, and I felt awful. I had this, and I felt, you know, I pizza was a bad choice. Oh, you know, or you know that. So it’s like, they they end up discouraged and, like, left with sort of like, I guess, in disarray on what they can actually tolerate. So, you know, all I can have is, you know, sugary coffee drink or soda and maybe, maybe some noodles or whatnot. So that’s, I feel like, the biggest challenge where, but it’s super important that they are nourished. For that. You know, they have the energy to do that after school, practice or workout, and so I think that’s, that’s kind of why I always go back to breakfast,
Grant Holicky 40:08
yeah, and I think you’re right. I think one of the other things too is I remember this vividly when I was teaching high school, I would have the same kid in an AP Biology class, and the same kid as a swimmer, and I teach them all about nutrition and the AP Biology class, and they get an A on the test, and they retain absolutely none of it. And if I talk to him about nutrition on the pool deck as a swimmer, some of them would retain it all. And I think really, one of the things that gets really important here, I think the kid needs to have autonomy. The development athlete needs to have that autonomy so that they’re making the decisions. If we’re eliminating all sugar from the diet, they’re gonna go find sugar. They have all day to go find sugar, right? If we’re creating a really strict diet at home, they’re gonna find ways around that diet at home, but through a process of education and instruction, and I always tried to put it in the goal talk. So what do you want to do? Well, I want to do these really big, lofty things. Okay, let’s look at all these places in your life. Let’s look at what you’re doing in sport. Let’s look at what you’re doing outside of sport. Let’s look at what you’re doing in your diet. Let’s look at these pieces. This is the low hanging fruit y’all are looking for the micro gains. This is a macro like, just drink enough water, you’re going to perform a million times better. But creating that place for the athlete to look at it and go, Okay, this is important. I see that this is important. They create some of that ownership. They’re a little bit more likely to go down that path. Oh,
Jared Berg 41:39
I think that is a huge, yeah, big, important statement you just made. It’s, you want to educate the the athlete, the student athlete, to be able to effectively fuel and nourish themselves. And we have, I mean, I have, I have some fun experience with that. I’m, I’m a father of 2d, one collegiate athletes. One is a one’s a distance runner, the other is a NCAA triathlete. And I get the, you know, I guess the satisfaction of seeing how they navigate their their nutrition and fueling as they transition from high school athletes into collegiate athletes. And like my daughter, she’s a freshman, and she is trying to figure out, how does she go to the cafe? You know, what does breakfast look like? Well, what does breakfast look like before a swim and then she’s gonna have an afternoon bike that she needs to think about, how much, you know, recovery, nutrition she needs to have after that swim, and what kind of snacks she needs to grab in the store before she, you know, goes back to a class, and what she needs to nibble on before class, before she jumps on that bike. And so it’s really kind of a challenge. But hearing about, you know, things that she’s done, how she’s figured out how to, you know, like what she can grab, what she can tolerate, working as like an athlete who’s doing, you know, three sports in one has been pretty inspiring. Well,
Grant Holicky 42:58
I think one of the really important pieces of this is pick your battles too. Look for the winnable things with an athlete, things that’ll change how they feel pretty quickly, because that’ll help get them on your side, so to speak, right. Find places where they’re gonna find a result. And it’s a winnable I think, with diet, you know, this is something my wife talks about all the time. When she was practicing one on one nutrition, she’d talk about it all the time. We got to get because she’d worked with a lot of my swimmers, and that was a huge benefit. Like, side note, bringing a registered dietitian, somebody who really knows this information inside and out, into the coaching environment, into the training environment. There are very, very few high level athletes that do not have a nutritionist working with them, because it’s such a huge piece of the puzzle, and it’s hard, and it’s hard to know this stuff and learn this stuff, but she would go down these roads of what’s a winnable battle. I can’t make their diet perfect. They can’t stick to a diet. This is a problem for adults, kids. Everybody like right? We want we put the diet up here is the ideal. And when we fail, we give up, you know, make it routine, make it something that’s achievable. And when you find those winnable battles, you can hook that kid in, and now they’re gonna want more. Yeah, and I think that’s really important. I
Trevor Connor 44:14
really liked the way you flipped it around. I mean, I agree completely with Jared what you were saying that, you know, help them build their autonomy, particularly because when they become adults, you’re trying to build good practices, right? So they need that autonomy. But I liked how you flipped it around, of, instead of, I think it’s a losing proposition. If you go to a young athlete and say, I know you want to perform, these things are going to help with performance, but you need to also think about health. Yeah, yeah, that’s not a cell. No, no. So the cell is and like said, I love the way you put this. It’s showing them that eating healthy is actually going to improve performance. So you can use examples like you brought up the all the polyphenols that you find. There’s some 800 polyphenols in in foods you’re not going to supplement your way to them. No, and we’re finding again and again, they help reduce inflammation. They can help with recovery. They can help you train harder, recover quicker, and you’re not going to get them in powder form. So eating healthy is actually going to help you be in a better athlete. Help you to train harder and better.
Jared Berg 45:16
Yeah, and I do feel like you can just if you can establish some some simple, like, attainable strategies, like Graham was talking about, like the winnable battle, if you will, like, if there’s a certain thing that you have a go to that is going to help you recover, you know, within that sort of 15 to 30 minute window after you do a strong or higher intensity or higher volume workout. Employ that, use that. Go to it, and then go on with the rest of your day of good, healthy eating. So I have, you know, a couple athletes I work on nutrition with who are youth endurance mountain bikers racing at, you know, national levels, or doing cyclocross. And I will, you like, they’ll be going out for a three to four hour ride. And I would just make the simple thing of you just need to have a recovery shake or smoothie that covers about, you know, 700 to 900 calories, mostly carbohydrate, a good 10 to 20 grams of protein, you know. So that can be just a banana smoothie with protein, you know, if like some nut butter and some hemp seed or protein powder dumped in it, and that’s going to take care of some calories. That’s going to help you with recovery, and then you just go along with good eating the rest of your day, and that’s a good strategy for recovering. Well,
Grant Holicky 46:34
yeah, big, big note there that majority of that’s carbohydrate. It’s not necessarily all protein, because you’re trying to get the calories in to recover. That’s what you need. I think one of the real big things too here is, is planning and prepping. We used to, you know, overnight oats, or packing the shakes, or those, those things that make your life easier when you get up in the morning. The routine I remember, there was a big stretch when, when I back, when I was at Rally Sport, we had a cafe. I would eat the same thing almost every day for lunch, because I knew it would work. I knew I was getting the right thing. I knew how it would act, and I knew when I could eat it. And it’s not ideal. I like variety. I’d rather be eating variety. But it worked, and it helped me hold this, these balances, and I think that’s that’s really important and and it goes a long way, and planning the morning appropriately. So you’re like, I know I can take five minutes to do this, or I can take 10 minutes, or I did it the night before, so it’s done. Breeze’s favorite trick is make a bunch of breakfast burritos and freeze them and throw them in the microwave, and you got breakfast on the go in two minutes, and they’re not hard to make and they’re not hard to freeze, but, but that type of planning and prep opens the world up, especially for kids, because it’s achievable, right? It’s something they can pull off so often they feel overwhelmed. So
Trevor Connor 48:03
let’s shift gears, and let’s talk about parents and their involvement, whether they can help, whether they’re a hindrance. Look, I will start. We studied this in my public health courses that you see in schools, where they try to introduce a nutrition program, teach kids about diet, try to get them to eat healthier. The people who are the most resistant were the parents, and it was because kids would come home and start telling their parents, what you’re eating isn’t healthy. The parents didn’t want to hear that, and the parents didn’t want to be showing up so they would get angry about these courses. So we could talk about ways parents can help. I think we also need to address the fact that sometimes parents can be the one that are getting in the way the most of their young athletes eating. Well, yeah, I
Jared Berg 48:49
just
Grant Holicky 48:50
the starting point. I’m not going to get heavy into this, but just the starting point. We’ve talked already about how adult nutrition in adolescent development, nutrition are different animals, they’re different things, plus bring in activity level, plus bring in goals, plus bring in development of brain and body. And those things, what you can do that’s effective as a diet as an adult may not be effective, and probably is not effective for an adolescent or developing an athlete to do, and that’s one of the biggest things that I see so often, is what parents are doing at home as a 50 year old. Maybe they’re a competitive master cyclist, great, but a lot of times they’re not, and they’re following diets that work for them to keep them slim or keep them what they perceive as healthy, and then projecting that upon their intermittent
Jared Berg 49:41
fasting. You don’t project that on a junior athlete, no, no. If you’re if you’re on any specific, any specific diet, if
Grant Holicky 49:49
it ends with diet, I probably wouldn’t project no no. You
Jared Berg 49:53
that is nothing that you want to communicate and and sort of use or help your kids a diet. Stopped at all.
Grant Holicky 50:01
I just think that’s an easy thing to miss, and also it like I mentioned earlier, kids are going to find their way around that. They they will find their way around that, and they’ll find their way around that in a way that’s probably destructive.
Jared Berg 50:14
I’ll see a lot of adults, especially adult athletes, with down, regulated metabolisms, they’re able to do more than they really should off of less calories than they should be taking in, right? And you know that, fortunately, juniors and you know, youth athletes are pretty they’re more they’re more robust, and they haven’t suppressed that system enough where they will end up getting the calories from somewhere, say, if they’re own, you know, they’re waking up and having coffee or, you know, soda or donut for breakfast, and that’s it, and then getting through their day, and next thing you know, lunch is bigger and but then they do a workout, and they’re famished after the workout because they didn’t eat a big enough lunch, then they’re gonna end up with Just whatever they can shovel into their body for the next four hours,
Grant Holicky 51:04
which is the issue, right? Yes, and that is what gets scary, yeah.
Jared Berg 51:07
And I think that little scenario that I just mentioned, I feel like, is unfortunately the norm in the problem. Yeah,
Grant Holicky 51:14
I think you’re seeing more and more of it, right? You know, it’s interesting, because when you have young kids, you can watch it if they don’t eat dinner because they’re throwing a fit or something like that, or they don’t need enough, you’ll watch and eat a bigger breakfast the next day. They have to get the calories in somewhere. But you make such a good point that adults, we’re seeing a lot of adults. And again, this is anecdotal. This is from my coaching. This is not me as a scientist, seeing a lot of downragged
Jared Berg 51:41
Yeah, I see it in the lab. I see But testing, and it’s, it’s, it’s very evident of people with just, you know, really high, really high fat metabolism, poor car metabolism and poor power output, is what I see.
Grant Holicky 51:54
But they’re getting by on not much. Yeah, yeah. And a kid can’t so, yeah.
Trevor Connor 51:59
The other thing I’ve seen on the flip side, you know, I’ve worked with athletes where they’re trying to lose some weight, so I ask them, and they want to get healthy, I ask them to do a three day dialog, and invariably, I get the diet log. I do the calculations on what they’re eating, and their diet log shows them eating seven, 800 calories a day, yeah? And this is a 200 pound person, yeah? And they’re saying, Yeah, I’m having problems losing weight. You go, well, you’re eating more than this. I go, No, no, no, that’s what I go. Is that your typical day? Oh, yeah, it’s not. That’s 700 calories. Yeah, you are eating at least 2500 to 3000 calories a day, and they will argue to death. And it’s just I learned very quickly how people will either avoid or just not truly observant of what they’re eating. I think it’s like you said, they’ll they’ll kind of starve themselves, which isn’t healthy, and then they’ll go and make up for it, not even know they make up for it, like they go to Starbucks, buy the double Mocha, whatever that’s 1000 calories and not realize it has ate a whole meal. Well, we
Grant Holicky 53:04
saw that in people’s cheat days, right? You saw this trend of the cheat day through the last decade, I think. And, yeah, I mean, especially when we start getting into that, like starvation, not starvation, but limited, limited, limited, limited, limited, limited, binge. Our bodies are really good at storing Yes, yeah, oh yeah. And it’ll scream, I need that now, because you’re limiting it the rest of the time. And that’s not just that. It’s what we’re used to. This is the evolution. Go back to it like, we’re really good at this for a reason. Food wasn’t always readily available, like, so when you start going through those ebbs and flows, and that’s always, I know the evidence behind intermittent fasting is solid, but that’s always my complaint with intermittent fasting, is that people it’s hard to do, and they crack and they eat too much, and you get through that same thing. And I do think it’s important to kind of note it is possible to be quote, unquote overweight with a very low caloric intake, because your body’s gonna store that food, not give you readily available energy, and save everything that it can, because it feels like it’s in a period of
Jared Berg 54:10
famine. Yeah, when, if you do that with, say, if you’re pregnant, or you’re you know in and around that you know, like you’re the unborn child is it doesn’t know when it’s going to get its next meal, and it will actually not metabolize fat or carbohydrate as well and be more prone to obesity, which is a really interesting, while not crazy, like it just, it’s just like, so just really huge core hope study, core heart studies on that,
Trevor Connor 54:37
going back to The intermittent fasting, you know, the evolutionary explanation behind that is really quite interesting, which is, you look at hunter gatherer societies, there’d be times where you just couldn’t eat, right? Hunt didn’t work. It might be cold and snowy outside. You don’t have animal food, and there’s no plant food available because there’s snow on the ground. So there would be times when they would. Necessarily have to fast, not because they want to, but because they have to. And our bodies are really our evolution was really good at saying, Well, let’s take advantage of a bad situation. Fact is, when you eat food is inflammatory, it is a foreign substance. Your immune system responds to a foreign substance. So whenever you eat, you have an inflammatory response. If you intermittent fast for a certain period of time, inflammation is going to go down, and your body goes great. I’m going to take advantage of that to do some DNA repair, to do some autophagy, to basically do some house cleaning around the house. So there is benefits to having periods of time where you don’t eat, but it can be taken to an extreme. You know, it’s, it’s where you go into starvation mode. But I
Grant Holicky 55:43
also think one of the really important pieces is, is, and you’re gonna agree with this wholeheartedly, they’re eating pretty good food when they’re intermuting fast we if we’re not watching what the intake is. In the intake portions of something like that, and it’s sugar, fructose, you’re storing it. You’re storing it. This is what your body gonna do. So, yeah, you’re not gonna
Jared Berg 56:03
want to use it. You’re gonna you’re gonna slow down. You’re gonna be, like, resistant to get off the couch, and you’re just gonna store that as fat so you can, which
Grant Holicky 56:11
is my normal afternoon. But that is neither here nor there. I’m resistant to getting off the couch, but I so I think the the big point for me, with parents in to take this to a positive place, is parents can have a really positive impact on their kids just by what is the nature of what goes on home, what we’re putting in front of our kids on a regular basis, what they’re watching us do. And there’s a benefit for everybody involved, right? If we’re eating a really good, balanced diet as a parent, the kid’s gonna see that and they they take that. I mean, they’re the long term studies of kids with active parents, and how much more active those kids are later in life, kids with parents with good diets, how much better those diets are in life. We’re teaching them so much during these periods of time that, you know, we want to, as parents, control it and make it the best possible thing for them, but in a lot of cases, it’s just show them, show them what we’re doing, and show them what we’re doing well, and give them the opportunity to come to you and get some of that from you. It’s the same thing that coaching is all
Jared Berg 57:14
about. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, if I feel like the perfect setup is, I mean, I feel blessed because we had the opportunity to do this as a family, but we had breakfast together and we had dinner together, I would say, 80% of the time. And that was, I mean, it was, I feel like that super value, because they, you know, we would all engage in making breakfast together, right? We might engage in doing dinner together. It was mostly, you know, my wife and I, of course, but yeah, but yeah, but, but it was always, but we always ate together. And so they they saw what we were eating, they ate mostly what we’re eating, but not all of it, because, you know, it’s just not you gotta be realistic.
Grant Holicky 57:50
And that’s a reality with kids, too. And I think that’s okay. I mean, the kids menus exist for a reason, because you just
Trevor Connor 57:57
know what your kids screaming at the restaurant. Yeah,
58:00
that’s exactly why. Yeah, 100%
Trevor Connor 58:04
and you put broccoli in front of a kid at a restaurant, and you’re just gonna have somebody crushed
Jared Berg 58:09
those trees, your trees.
Grant Holicky 58:13
Yeah, it’s so important that that togetherness and that piece of the puzzle. And I think what we do. I’ve seen this again, anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of kids tell me, this is what I’m trying to eat, but my parents are eating a completely different meal because they’re doing this diet, or they’re not or they’re eating after we go to bed, or any of those things. It’s really, really hard to a have any regulation of what a kid’s doing, yes, but be not healthy for the parent either. And personally, I just think that’s a big deal. I think healthy parents that are eating well are gonna have healthier kids that are eating well, my
Jared Berg 58:52
kids used to complain. How come we can’t eat like normal families, in front of the TV?
Grant Holicky 58:56
We have one night a week where we do that, we have a movie night. We eat in front of the TV, and it’s generally pretty crappy food, yeah, and I think everything in moderation, right there is that, but that statement Jared of like, why can’t we be a quote, unquote, normal family, is terrifying, and that’s scary.
Trevor Connor 59:15
I am even worse than that. My years of living alone, I just eat while I’m doing whatever I’m doing, right? Like, I literally make a plate of food and just carry it around with me, various
Grant Holicky 59:27
things. Yeah, that’s not what you want to be showing
Jared Berg 59:30
the kid. No, not at all. Not at all. So I
Trevor Connor 59:34
think we’ve talked actually, at a very philosophical level. So I’m going to transition us here. And I know I’ve see you’ve got a big textbook here, Jared, you came in with talk to us about some of the really practical sides. What are some of your recommendations for development athletes in terms of what they should be consuming, how much all that? Yeah.
Jared Berg 59:53
Thanks. Trevor, what I could recommend? You know, when I when I go about the hierarchy of needs for. The youth, Junior athlete, I would first go into energy balance, right, right? We talk about energy balance. We’re talking about total calories. We want to make sure that the athlete is taking in the roughly the same amount of calories that they’re expending on the daily basis. Right? Doesn’t need to be perfect match every day, but if we looked at the average over seven days, over 30 days, that average needs to be pretty on par, or the amount of calories that we’re expending is matching with what we’re giving ourselves, right? So that’s the first, most important. If you’re having a hard time figuring out what that is, you could there are some calculators online where you can actually put in your height and weight as an endurance athlete your age, and it will let you know how many calories and insects and how many calories you need to have to meet your energy needs, right? And you can there’s some that are more specific and more detailed than others, and you know, the more detailed they are, the more accurate they’re going to be, all right? Or you could obviously do metabolic testing with, you know, in a lab like that I have here at fast talk labs, but that’s by the most important. Making sure that you get the energy that you need is going to make sure that you’re not breaking down, you know, the protein in your muscle into carbohydrate so you can feel your body to do your next workout, right? That’s an important thing. You’re not trying to or if you’re not getting enough, yeah, enough carbohydrate you’re not able to get after those workouts and such, but then the next goes into really how much carbohydrate you need, right? And I would say that’s kind of hard to really say exactly, because you don’t always know how many carbohydrates you’re burning, but if you start to think about more in essence, how much protein you need, and then you balance the rest out with carbohydrate, and then a certain little bit can go to fat that can help you start to figure some things out. And so we look at an athlete, and they really need to get at a minimum of, I would say, one gram of protein for every kilogram of body weight. So if the athlete weighs 60 kilograms, they should be getting at least 60 grams of protein, right? There are some athletes who are training harder, more intense, and there is certainly good, you know, supporting evidence that says, hey, we could be getting up to 1.5 to even two grams of protein for every kilogram. All right, so if you are getting that, you know, say you are getting 1.5 and you’re a 60 kilogram athlete, that’s going to mean that you’re getting about a, oh, 90 grams of protein in the day, all right? So that 90 grams times four, you know, just says, you know, close to 400 calories, right? So you need to be getting in the remainder of your actress, or your calories needs to come from carbohydrate or fat, right? So we’re looking about 60% from carbohydrate would be a good way to go, and then another, say 20% from fat. So then we can, you can just sort of subtract those. You know, how many calories need to get from carbohydrate versus fat based off looking how many total calories you’re burning in that day, right? And that would be how I would do the math. And you can calculate it out to grams, or keep it as calories. However, you think the best
Grant Holicky 1:03:13
quick question, I know the answer. But to put this just yeah, what happens to the extra protein grams if you’re, if you’re taking in extra now, like, say, you need 80 kilogram grams a day, and you’re taking in 130 how does the body get rid of those? You can’t store them for later, right?
Jared Berg 1:03:35
No, no, you’re, well, you can store them kind of indirectly for later, right? So what you’re going to do is you’re, if you’re not, say, if you’re eating way more protein than you need, and you’re on, like, I’ll say, a low carb diet, for no real good reason, you would just be basically turning that excess protein into carbohydrate in a process called glyco neogenesis. However, if you’re not needing that carbohydrate, right? If you’re having more than you need, you would turn that carbohydrate into fat, and you would store that as fat. That’s sort of like the hierarchy. Well,
Trevor Connor 1:04:05
I think it’s time to start wrapping it up. Before we do that, we have a forum question for this episode. So please go to the forum and share your thoughts, and I hope both of you can jump on and respond to a few of these. The question is, what are your thoughts on the optimal nutrition for development athletes? Keep it broad, so come and share your thoughts in the overall conversation. But guys, I think it’s time to wrap it up. That was a fun conversation. We definitely went on some big tangents, but they were good ones, so I liked it. So not going to quite say, Let’s just do one minute take homes. But why don’t we each kind of share our wrap it up thoughts. What would you like to finish this up with?
Jared Berg 1:04:41
Yeah, I’ll start off this. We didn’t get into real specifics on, like, you know, how much protein A junior athlete needs, but we did talk about, if they eat enough calories to support their junior athleticism, they’re probably going to do pretty well, right? And if they keep a healthy diet while eating all those calories. Calories, or get a lot of the micronutrients and the bioactive compounds and all the thing that they need to support all their body’s systems. And, you know, like, there’s, yeah, there’s certain things we’ve probably like, hey, what about iron and different athletes, and especially with long endurance cyclists, you know, or runners and you know, or young female athletes that we didn’t really get into, but you know, definitely those things to pay attention, to check on. There’s lots of things to think about. And I do, I do think, you know, seeking and getting professional help, whether through your doctor or registered dietitian, is a is a good move for for anybody and everybody.
Grant Holicky 1:05:35
Yeah, please, please, look for the registered dietician. There’s a lot of nutritionists out there that don’t have an education, and I’m not saying all those people are not good. There’s some that are phenomenal. You can learn a lot of this on your own older but a lot of them are tied into something specifically, typically, and that’s not what we’re looking for. You know, for me, I think one of the big kickers is, don’t worry about perfection. Worry about pretty good. And what I mean by that is I think diet and and I say diet, not as a diet, but the diet. It’s very easy to get into a place where we’re trying to be perfect, and if we’re not perfect, we give up. I think that this is one of those cases that Perfection is the enemy of good enough, and this is one of those places where it’s okay to have a little bit of a treat. It’s okay to, you know, screw up a meal every once in a while, give yourself some grace in this and really look at the big picture and drive forward with it. And that really fits in well with most things in moderation. And that’s really what I’ve preached to kids through the years, is there’s no silver bullet. There’s no special answer here. It’s just kind of just like training. It’s methodical and regular, and some days you’re going to screw it up, and that’s okay, just get back on the plan.
Trevor Connor 1:06:55
That’s pretty much exactly where I was going to go. This whole idea of hermesis is all about balance. It’s about finding the right level. And I would say our adolescence is when we are at our worst in terms of staying in balance, thinking about hermesis, where either more is better or less is better, and kind of go to extremes and all ends. So I think anything we can do with athletes at that level of keeping them in balance, keeping their diet in balance, keeping performance and health in balance, keeping all these different things in balance, sets them up for good habits, and is ultimately going to set them up for being a long term athlete and a better performer. And
Grant Holicky 1:07:34
that’s what we want, huh? We want those long term athletes. I think that’s a really relevant point. I really like that.
Jared Berg 1:07:39
I like that too. Just keep enjoying it for a long time. That
Trevor Connor 1:07:43
was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums, dot fast talklabs.com, or learn from our experts@fasttoclabs.com for Brent Bookwalter grant, hollowkey and Jared Berg. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
