Low protein, high protein, low carb, high carb…what is the best thing for you?! Well, that depends. Today we are going to dive into the world of performance vs physique nutrition, where do we draw the line & how that line has been blurred in the body building & strength world
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Mary:
Okay. So today we’re actually talking about, so we will touch on this idea of what a high protein diet is versus a high carb diet. What the Olympic committee, the IOC, recommends for like you would say high carb or just carb requirements. But we’re mainly going to talk about what is the difference between sports nutrition and physique nutrition, because there is a huge difference. And for the most part, those lines are completely blurred. We don’t see a line. There is no line.
Kristin:
Yeah. You and I see a line, but the general public does not tend to notice the line. I think a lot of strength athletes don’t even notice the line because it’s confusing because we’re talking about building muscle in physique and we care about building muscle in performance nutrition as well. Both groups of people are in the gym, working their butt off, like working hard, right?
Mary:
This podcast is no hate to anyone who does physique nutrition or someone who does sports nutrition.
Kristin:
Oh, no.
Mary:
And we want to make that very clear, but because they have such different goals, they might seem similar, but they’re different. Their approach has to be different with sports nutrition, and people who want to follow sports nutrition, because their goal is to get strong as fuck, but we want to get strong as possible. And then for physique nutrition, their goal is to build their body. So they have a lot, a lot of hypertrophy work, not necessarily focused on strength. Yes, they get stronger, but their goal is to just increase muscle size and build their body whereas strength athletes are interested in building strength. The body usually comes along secondary, but it’s even different from a physique athlete’s body. So very different.
Kirstin:
The body of a strength athlete is a by-product of the training for their sport. Whereas in physique, how your body appears is what you’re really working towards. And so…
Mary:
The strength is a byproduct.
Kristin:
The strength is a by-product of the goals that they have. Absolutely. So, the approaches are often very different and people are really, really unaware of that. And I think I run into athletes all the time that are following recommendations for people that are more physique than performance.
And no, this is not to say that a strength athlete can’t have a great physique, whatever you want to consider a great physique for yourself. Everyone has a different definition. You can, if you want to be lean as a strength athlete, you can be. But if your main goal is to be strong, to build your total, you probably want to be following a different set of guidelines than someone who’s training mainly for physique, even though you’re doing similar things in the gym.
This was born out of us talking about protein, because protein is one of the first places where we see this difference, right? We see, for instance, I have people going through an eight week program in my app right now that’s all about performance nutrition. They are learning the ins and the outs of performance nutrition, the science of performance nutrition, how to apply it to their lives as an athlete. And I knew that this was going to happen because I’ve run similar programs before. Mary and I have run similar programs before. People are like, wow, this feels like low protein. It’s not low protein. It’s not. And when we really dive into it, they’re following physique-based recommendations as opposed to performance-based recommendations. We’re just flipping that. So, that’s where a lot of this came from in terms of the differences is where we see the first difference is protein intake amounts.
Mary:
Well, and for physique nutrition, it’s born from this idea – and you guys have all heard this – is the one gram per pound of body weight. So if you are a 200 pound person, 200 grams of protein is what you need. More is better in the physique world. If you want more, more, more and more.
Kristin:
Right, we’re going to get to that.
Mary:
We’ll totally get into that. But in the strength world, we don’t want all of our calories coming from protein so we need to switch things up so we can have energy to train. Kristin, you put this in such a good way a couple of weeks ago, about how, you know, for….I’m going to botch it so correct me but how physique nutrition is all about doing the most with the least amount of food and performance nutrition is about doing the most with the most amount of food.
Kristin:
Yeah. So, physique nutrition, I got this from Sean Arndt, who is the past president of the International Society of Sports Nutrition of which Mary and I are both members and certified through. He actually said this in a seminar that I was on, he was talking about how physique nutrition is about how little you can get away with eating, how little can you eat and meet your goals? Because a lot of it is about staying really lean, but also packing on muscle. And so a lot of times there will be a lot of dieting cycles and massing cycles in physique nutrition. But a lot of it comes down to what’s the least amount you can get away with consuming.
In performance nutrition, it’s about what’s the most you can get away with eating and doing without like, in terms of training too. So, how much can you eat? How much can you train without having undesirable effects? Which may be potentially putting on body fat, if you’re not wanting to put on body fat or over-training. So, it’s how much, what’s the maximum amount you can do without having ill effects? And physique is what’s the least you can do without having ill effects.
Mary:
Right. So that right there shows exactly how different these goals are, right? Nothing wrong with either of them. Each person who’s pursuing each different goal is following a certain path, but it gets so construed about what are the recommendations for each, which is why we want to talk about this. Because this, like I said, no hit on aesthetic nutrition, no hit on physique nutrition. You do you boo, love to see it. We love to see the determination. We just have to make sure that we’re on the right path so we can get the most out of the goals we’re trying achieve.
Kristin:
100%. Yeah and I think that this is really true. If you’re reading, if you’re reading research or you’re following people on Instagram, or you’re reading blogs, you need to understand where that person’s coming from because you might read their recommendations and it might say like, “Oh yes, this sounds exactly like what I need to be doing.” But when you really dive into it, potentially, they’re talking about physique sports as opposed to performance sports. It’s really, really important to keep in mind who their audience is, who they are speaking to, and where they’re coming from. Always look into that when you’re following someone or you see a post on Instagram and you’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. Make sure to do a little bit of background research on that person and what world they’re working in, because there’s a lot of overlap and it can get really confusing.
Mary:
Yeah. Like if you follow Kristen and I, you know that we are strength athlete based. And so our recommendations, if they land on the page of someone who’s a physique athlete, they probably shouldn’t follow them because they’re not for them. And vice versa. If you’re a strength athlete and someone who specializes in physique nutrition, that advice is probably not for you, even though it’s great advice for people who follow physique nutrition.
Kristin:
You just need to make sure that you are following the right set of guidelines.
Mary:
Correct.
Kristin:
It’s kind of like, what country are you driving in? Do you drive on the right? Or do you drive on the left? It’s important to know.
Mary:
It’s very important to know, although I think there are consequences of driving on the wrong side of the road that are worse.
Kristin:
I don’t know, if you crash and burn as a performance athlete and your following physique nutrition, that can be, it can actually be really harmful to your health.
Mary:
It can, good point.
Kristin:
But probably not like head-on collision and die.
Mary:
Right, right, right.
Kristin:
Okay. So let’s get into, let’s talk about protein first, because that’s where a lot of this information comes from. One thing that you need to understand about protein is it is not a fuel source for the body. It is important, very, very important in all processes of the body so I’m by no means saying that protein is not important. It is very important, but it is not a fuel source.
So the problem comes in if you are consuming more protein than what is required for your goals, you are taking away from calories that you could be using for food that does provide you with energy, much needed energy as a performance athlete, which would be carbs and fats. So that’s number one, the first thing because we will see in physique nutrition that, particularly during periods of dieting, they’ll put their protein really high. Whereas in performance sports, we might have it a little bit lower. We’re on the lower end of the spectrum for sports because we want to have all of this energy available for training, which is going to come…
Mary:
And as you can imagine with physique nutrition, when you’re dieting, the last thing you want to do is lose any muscle mass so you’re going to make sure that you’re feeding your body lots of protein to not lose that muscle mass.
Kristin:
Yes. Correct. Exactly. So, right because when you’re dieting, everybody is going to lose some muscle when they’re dieting. It’s a matter of how much in the way that we can try to mitigate some of it is by putting protein really high. You’re still probably going to lose a little bit. So there’s a sweet spot. The RDA, the recommended daily allowance of protein, is what I would consider low. It’s 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. I don’t think that there’s really any athlete out there who’s consuming that little protein. That would be very low.
And then, and then the recommendation for strength athletes for protein is 1.4 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. So somewhere in that range. If you’re an athlete who’s 40 or over, you have a impaired ability to digest protein. That’s just something that happens as we age. It’s also harder to build muscle as we age. So, being at the higher end of that would probably be a good idea if you’re 40 or over. But then there’s some research on like even higher than that, right Mary?
Mary:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s some research on things that are even higher than that. So you’re probably wondering how do we know that if we put our protein really high, it doesn’t add any extra benefits? Well, there are studies where they take protein and they put it incredibly high. We’re talking 2.3 to 3.1 grams per kilogram of fat free mass, so a lot of weight. How much would that be for a 150-pound person?
Kristin:
Well, now you made me convert that to kilos. First, I’m doing the math. So 68 kilos, a 68-kilo lifter. Okay. At 3.1?
Mary:
Grams. Iit says for fat free mass. S
Kristin:
Oh so that’s fat. So 200.
Mary:
So 200 grams of protein for a 150-pound person. And that’s not taking into consideration the fat free mass portion. That’s just like straight up weight. So let’s say they have 68 kilograms of lean body weight, right? That’s how much protein they would need. They took that and they compared that to someone who was eating the recommended amount of 2.3 or lower, and they found that there was no difference in terms of body composition in a year long study, between the people who ate a shitload of protein and the people who ate the recommended amount. That tells us that that extra protein did nothing for them. It did not add any benefit in terms of muscle size, in terms of body composition. It did not change anything.
Kristin:
So let’s say that person was eating 2 grams per kilogram, which is the high end of the recommendations for strength athletes. It would be 136 grams of protein. So, if they were instead eating 200, that’s 64 grams of protein difference. That’s 256 calories that you could have had for fuel, but instead had for protein. It’s not that it’s necessarily wasted, it’s just not really a fuel source. Your body can sort of use it for fuel. It’s not its preferred fuel source. If you were to put that over to your carbohydrates though, can you imagine how good you would feel in training? I mean that’s…
Mary:
Oh my gosh. I know. 60 grams pre-training is like, that’s what I do. That’s how much I eat before I go train. And so they even did some studies on strength and if the strength increased and the strength does not, the strength does not change if you have more protein versus less protein. So, there is no added benefit in eating that much protein. The only circumstance that having that much protein might benefit you is if you are in a caloric deficit and you are an aesthetic or physique nutrition athlete.
Kristin:
Right. And that’s not to say that if you’re falling, if you’re in the 1.4 to 2 grams per kilogram for protein as a performance athlete and you are in a caloric deficit, that’s not saying that you’re necessarily going to lose muscle. In fact, that’s the range that I have all of my athletes in when we do DEXA scans before and after cuts, they don’t lose very much muscle, if any at all.
Sometimes some of that is genetics, right? Some people will lose more muscle than other people, but for the most part, there’s not a lot of muscle mass loss in my clients that do DEXA scans before and after. So, if any, I have many that build muscle and I have many that it’s the same and that’s falling in that 1.4 to 2 grams per kilogram range. Now I do not recommend being below 1.4 grams per kilogram. As a strength athlete.
Mary:
But it’s also like, you have to keep in mind too, sorry going back to the cut thing, your athletes go through a slow cut, right? For the most part.
Kristin:
That is why.
Mary:
That is why, so we can preserve that muscle. You preserve that muscle by feeding protein and continually stimulating the muscle through training and trying to take away as little as possible to see a change. Now, if you go through a big crash diet where you take away all your food and you’re starving for a few weeks, you will lose muscle faster. And that is because as Kristin said, your body doesn’t prefer it, but it will use muscle protein. It will use protein as a fuel source if it has to.
Kristin:
I’m going to pick on my co-coach at Fiercely Fueled, Brit. She just made an Instagram post about this. So it’s like no secret, but she decided that she just did a meet recently and she’s not going to be competing again for a while and she decided she was like, “You know, I kind of gained weight over the pandemic. Things were really chaotic. I would like to do a cut.” And she said, “But I kind of want to go aggressive because I just want to get it over and done with.” So, I set her up on a cut and I did not even do what’s recommended in the physique world, which is a loss of body, weight loss of like 1% per week is pretty standard in the physique world. I do not ever do that much for performance athletes because your training is going to suffer horrendously.
Mary:
What’s the most that you do?
Kristin:
I like to keep it between 0.4 and 0.6. So half the speed of physique. But Brit wanted to go aggressive and she was like, let’s maybe try for 1%. And when I did the math, I was like, I’m not doing that to you. It was going to end up being like under a hundred grams of carbs a day. And she’s still training, she’s not training in meet prep or anything, so we did 0.8% of her body weight loss per week is what the goal is. That’s what her calories are set at. And she hates life right now. She hates it so bad. She’s like, “This is awful. I will never do this to an athlete. This is so horrible.” And I was like, yeah, I know it’s really bad and that’s not even the recommended speed for physique athletes. It’s intense. And so we’ve got her proteins set in the recommended amounts for strength athletes. I’ve got her carbs as high as possible and it’s still maybe like, I think 120 grams of carbs. I know it’s bad. It’s bad. And she was like, “Now I get it. I knew this from studying.” Right? She knows this, but now she really knows it. Like she gets it. She understands now why we don’t do this to performance athletes. Cause it’s terrible. So, any of you that have come to me wanting to cut like a ridiculous amount of weight for a meet, and I’m like, we’re not doing that, now you know why. I have had that conversation with many athletes.
Mary:
Yeah. And so that let’s jump quickly into, so that falls into the category of the low carb diet, which is defined by the International Society of Sports Nutrition. So they say that a low carb diet – and this might shock some of you we’ve talked about this before – is less than 200 grams. And for so many of you, I know that when you see 200 grams, you think, “Oh my gosh, that is so much, so many carbs. How am I going to eat all that? Like I’m used to eating like 150 grams of carbs a day.” But I promise you, once you go over 200, you’ll never want to go back.
Kristin:
Oh my gosh.
Mary:
It’s the best life. But you know, that is what is perpetuated by a lot of physique nutritionists because it’s this balance of well, we need more protein, so we’re going to take that away from carbs and fats. And so you end up in this low, low carb diet.
Kristin:
I just had a conversation with one of my clients that I want to bring up because I had never in my life considered this perspective. And I think it’s really, really, really important for nutritionists as well as athletes to understand this perspective. We’re doing a reverse diet with her. She had done a cut, we’re reversing out of it, increasing her calories over time while maintaining her body weight. And so we’re increasing carbs, right? Because I kept the protein where I would always have it. It was the carbs that were lower. So, as we’re increasing them, she just discussed, she brought up some concerns with increasing the carbs and was it going to cause her to gain body fat? And I was like, carbs do not cause you to gain body fat. There’s no macronutrient in and of itself that will cause you to gain weight or gain body fat. Eating in a caloric surplus will cause you to gain body fat. So if you’re eating more calories than what you burn in a day.
So, she said, “I’m so glad that you mentioned that because I just always see carbs and fats, primarily carbs are the macronutrient that is manipulated the most to lose weight. I just thought that meant that carbs make you gain weight. If you’re going to reduce them to lose weight, then they must cause you to gain weight if they’re high.”
Not true. It’s just one of the variables that we can manipulate and tends to be one of the most easy to manipulate. But I had never considered that perspective before and I just loved that she brought that up.
Mary:
Yeah, no, that’s very interesting. And then when we think of how we set these things, we set protein for a reason, right? The amount that we set, we set fats for a reason too at the amount that we set and that’s usually between 25 to 30% of your total caloric intake.
Kristin:
Right. Cause if we go lower than that for too long, you’re going to run into some hormonal problems.
Mary:
Right. Exactly. And so yes, we can manipulate fat, but that leaves carbs is the one that we can really kind of up and down and turn around. But just like you said, it is not the one that makes you gain or lose fat. It’s eating in a caloric surplus and I think it’s also important to say over an extended period of time. If you eat in a caloric surplus one day and it’s not like 3,500 calories, extra calories in one day, you’re not going to gain fat magically overnight. Right? It’s a sustained thing over time.
Kristin:
Right because the clock doesn’t start over at 24 hours, right? Like you can even look at your calories more on like a weekly average, really. And that’s how people ruin their success, their goals, whatever they’re working towards on the weekend because they might…if they’re dieting and potentially be in a deficit all week, but then be in a surplus on the weekend and it averages out to being in maintenance. So it’s not like the clock magically starts over with your calories at 24 hours. It’s just a good way for nutritionists to kind of look at things as a whole and say, “Okay, if we’re doing this daily, then this is what it’s going to add up to weekly and monthly.”
Mary:
Right/ So that also, keep in mind too, the IOC, the international Olympic committee has carb requirements for athletes. And for an athlete who has low to light intensity or skill-based activities, that recommendation is between 3 and 5 grams per kilogram. The other one that’s moderate exercise, which they say is about an hour a day, which is probably most of you, they recommend – are you ready – 5 to 7 grams per kilogram per day. How much is that for our 68 kilogram person?
Kristin:
All right. So the low end for the 68 kilo lifter is going to be 340 grams of carbs. The high end is 476 grams of carbs.
Mary:
Yeah. So,that is from the International Olympic Committee, right? The IOC. They’re the, and that’s from a panelist of experts that are saying, “Hey, listen, you need carbs for energy.” These carbs are going to help you perform and recover because we have to, this is where I think – and Kristen and I preach about this all the time – it’s not just performance nutrition, it’s recovering nutrition. Carbs, and fats and protein all work in your performance and all work in your recovery. And you need them for both.
Kristin:
Yes. 100%. I couldn’t have stated that better. They are important for both. That’s what people will ask me. They’re like, “If I had to cut out either my pre-training meal or like my pre-training carbs or my post-training carbs, which one should I cut out?” And I’m like, “Well do you want your performance to suffer? Or do you want your recovery to suffer? Because one of them is suffering. You can’t cut either of them.” I’m sorry, you can’t do it. You can’t cut out pre or post training carbs. You need them both. They both have very distinct and different goals.
Performance nutrition is also recovery nutrition and you guys are going to hear us start saying that a lot because we’re really starting to realize that as sports nutritionists, if we are not talking about recovery, we are missing a huge part of an athlete’s life that we can make a huge difference in.
So carbohydrates, if you guys did the math for yourself on the IOC guidelines, that’s a lot of carbohydrates. I’m going to venture to guess that most of you don’t consume that much, but that just goes to show you how important they are and know that what we just talked about that as long as you’re not putting yourself into a caloric surplus, you’re not going to gain weight by eating that much carbs.
Now I would say that if you’re at 7 grams per kilogram, that’s a lot of carbohydrates. You’re probably going to have a lot of room for fat because if we’re going to have our protein between 1.4 and 2 grams per kilogram, and if we’re going to have our carbs at 7 grams per kilogram, and you figure out how many calories you need in a day, that probably doesn’t leave very much for fats and fats are important. I think we don’t talk about them as much in sports nutrition because we don’t manipulate them that much, we do manipulate them particularly in a deficit, but we kind of just leave them alone for the most part because they’re really important for hormone health and for brain health.
Mary:
Yeah. Yup. And but also I want to say, some people do reverse themselves up to being able to eat 400 grams of carbs and have an adequate amount of fat and protein.
Kristin:
Oh, I’ve worked with female athletes that are around 75 kilos eating 400 to 450 grams of carbs. Absolutely. It happens.
Mary:
Yeah. So, it’s not impossible, but Kristin’s right. Like if we were just to start you off the bat, most of you would not be up there. That doesn’t mean it’s a goal you could strive for guys, change your whole perspective!! Just reverse your way up to like so much food as possible!!
Okay. So moving on, what are we moving on to?
Kristin:
We can talk a little bit about fats, like what is considered a low fat diet versus a high fat diet? A low fat diet is defined as anything that’s under 30% of your intake from fat. I know that there are nutrition programs out there that have people on a lot less fat than that. In fact, I do in a caloric deficit for most of my athletes, I go lower than that. I absolutely will. It’s for a short period of time. It’s not forever. If it’s going to be a really long cut and fats are going to be low, we’re definitely keeping an eye on several metrics to make sure that they’re staying healthy. If you are soloing it on your own with your nutrition, I would not go much lower than that for very long.
Mary:
Yeah. Don’t push it.
Kristin:
It can take a year for some of these things to show up, by the way.
Mary:
But I know that so many of you have been dieting or following some type of diet for years and years and years, successfully or not. You know, you may unintentionally be in that deficit and not really even think too much about it. But it’s something that you really need to take into consideration because the ultimate goal is for you to achieve your strength goals, if you can achieve your aesthetic goals great but it’s also to be a healthy person. And if your fats are kept low in the low fat diet range for a long period of time, you’re not going to be that healthy person and everything else suffers, including your performance in your recovery, everything, your hormones.
Kristin.
Yep. So there’s research out there to show that for men in a low fat diet for a long period of time, that it reduces their testosterone production, which as we know for men, that’s very, very important in their strength gains. So, essentially you can be hindering your strength gains.
Now there’s not the equivalent research in women.
Mary:
Shocker.
Kristin:
Right? Performance nutrition and women is not something that’s studied that much. They study dieting for women.
Mary:
So much dieting. So much diet.
Kristin:
They don’t really study performance nutrition in women though, that is changing. It is changing, but there’s not a lot. There’s not a lot.
Mary:
And so a lot of these…I’m currently, if any of you know who Dr. Stacy Sims is, I’m currently going through her Women are Not Small Men course. And it’s like the first couple episodes she makes it very clear like, Hey, all of these recommendations are mostly based off of collegiate men and why some of them might actually be important for us to follow, they don’t directly apply to us even at their best because they’re not women.
Kristin:
Great. Because women are not small men. That’s a genius name. I love it. Right. So then the flip side of that is that a high fat diet is considered over 50% of your caloric intake, which again, I do not recommend for strength athletes to be in a high fat diet because carbohydrates are our body’s preferred fuel source. So, your body can use fat as energy, it takes a little bit extra work for your body to break down fat into glucose. I think that it’s not a great strategy to be in a high fat, lower carbohydrate diet if your goal is performance.
Mary:
Right. And remember, so if we, if you have 50% calories from fat, 20-ish percent, 25% will probably be coming from protein, that leaves 25 to 30% coming from carbs.
Kristin:
That’s not very much.
Mary:
No tank you!
Kristin:
I don’t want that. I am not going to go in and do a heavy squat workout with that low carbs, just it’s not happening.
Mary:
Then let’s talk about a branch off of the high-fat diet, which is the keto diet, which I promise we will get into a full research of the keto diet eventually. But the ketogenic diet, according to the International Society of Sports Nutrition is defined by anything under 50 grams of carbs per day. That’s not per meal that’s per day BTW, or 10% of overall calories coming from carbs. 10%.
The thing that is interesting though is it says to keep protein, moderate, which is between 1.2 to 1.5 grams per kilogram, which most ketogenic diets don’t do that, at least by what I can just see. It seems that they really perpetuate eating a lot, a lot of protein, and that’s not what the definition is. So, that’s interesting. And then fat will be between 60 and 80% of all your diets.
Kristin:
Right. You know, if you want to do a ketogenic diet as a performance athlete, we’re not hating on you, but it’s not a good strategy. And every single time we talk about this on Instagram, we lose followers because people just don’t like it and they think that we’re hating on their religion or something.
Mary:
We’re not.
Kristin:
We’re not, but the science does not support it.
Mary:
Right. Ketogenic diet is a diet. Sport nutrition is not a diet. So, if you’re using the ketogenic diet and you’re trying to make it fit, if you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole, it’s not going to fit. If you use the ketogenic diet to lose weight, fine. You do, you. You enjoy that life. You enjoy that group. But it’s a diet and sports nutrition is not a diet. You can’t take something like the ketogenic diet and make it a sports nutrition diet.
Kristin:
Well, there are, I do know many people who just follow keto principles and they’re not dieting. They’re just eating at maintenance. They do it for health reasons or because they like it or whatever. I mean, I don’t care why they do it. It’s not up to me to make that decision. But, and there is some research that’s coming out on ultra endurance athletes in ketogenic diet. It might actually be helpful, or not harmful. This is kind of new and emerging research that’s coming out on that. There is no research in strength sports that show that a ketogenic diet is favorable to just like around 50% of your calories coming from carbohydrates. That’s like around the range of 40 to 60%.
Mary:
There was one study that came out that said, the title was “Ketogenic diet is…” something like this, “Ketogenic diet is good for strength athletes in weight loss phase or does it impair performance?” But when you looked at the data, when you looked at the research, that was a false claim in their research, the athletes lost lean body mass and had a decrease in overall strength.
Kristin:
Yeah, that was a very misleading title.
Mary:
This, and again, this goes back to, if you’re just reading the title and abstract, you’re missing out on all the information.
Kristin:
Yes. If you want to get into the evidence and really read this stuff, you’ve got to read the full article and if you’re not used to doing it, it’s hard. It’s boring. You’re not going to know some of the words, but the more you read it, the more you’ll start to understand.
I will admit that there are some articles… I’m the type of person who sits around and reads research on my couch in front of my fireplace at night. Like, I am a nerd. I love to do that. And there are some that are very difficult for me to read even, and I do this all of the time. I’m trained in reading research. And there are some, I’m just like, “Oh, this is dryyyy.” But that’s how you learn.
So read the stuff, don’t just follow an abstract and say, “Oh, this is what it said. This is what I should do,” because you need to know who the participants were. If they were untrained males, then it might not apply to you.
Mary:
It’d be interesting to know, but it might not apply to you.
Kristin:
This is also true – if you see a post on Instagram and they reference some research, go look it up. Go look up that research and read it for yourself and see if it actually applies to you. Because a lot of times it won’t, and sometimes it will. And sometimes it’s great, but don’t just take what you see on Instagram posts at face value without doing some research. If it’s evidence-based because you need to know who the participants were.
Mary:
Start there. When you see a title that looks interesting and like it could apply to you, go immediately and see who it was on. If it wasn’t on female strength athletes, you can still read it, enjoy it, understand it. But keep that in the back of your mind, keep it with a grain of salt.
Kristin:
Right. Don’t necessarily change your whole nutrition philosophy based on one article.
Mary:
Or an article that’s about weight loss and you’re a performance athlete.
Kirstin.
No, yeah. That too.
Mary:
That happens a lot. Right. So like, “look at this study!!!” And you’re like, eh, but it was on obese individuals on a diet.
Kristin:
Or when they use words such as “low” or “high,” do the math! Do the math because a lot of times they’ll give you a breakdown of whatever grams per kilogram or whatever. Do the math and see, does that actually fit what I think it’s fitting? Cause we just did a podcast episode on something very similar to this and found that the words they were using did not fit the math equation.
Mary:
They were saying high fat or moderate fat, I think. And it came out to be like 4 grams for an 80-kilo male lifter. That is not a lot of fat. This is why also Kristin and I do not like this “high, low, moderate.” It’s so subjective.
Kristin:
Hate those words.
Mary:
And no one has a, there’s not like one definition, right.? You just heard us say like, well, it could be this, it could be this, it could be this there’s different definitions of that one thing. And so this is why we like to use “grams per kilogram” or well, that’s the main one that we use.
Kristin:
Or sometimes percentage, but I think grams per kilogram is far more accurate, but sometimes the research, we cite things in the way that the research cites things. So sometimes they’ll cite things as overall percentages. Although, I’m seeing more and more grams per kilogram, if we’re talking about anything, right? Like a supplement, if we’re talking about you know, food intake.
All right. Off our research soap box. Did we cover everything we wanted to cover with diet physique versus performance? So, let’s just recap a little bit.
The biggest differences between physique nutrition and performance nutrition are protein intake amounts and carbohydrate intake amounts. And as someone who’s really focusing on your physique, you may have higher protein than a performance athlete, and you may have lower carbohydrates, and then vice versa. So the performance athletes, if your protein falls in the 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilogram, you are in a very good range. And then, you know, you’ll probably have a lot more room for carbohydrates if you are in that range than someone who’s higher. And that has this specific purpose of fueling your training and your recovery.
Mary:
Yup. And remember sports performance nutrition is not a diet. The goal is not to have you losing body fat. It is to increase your performance and your recovery, to optimize your performance and recovery.
Kristin:
Let’s say though, if you are in a body fat category where maybe for health reasons, you want to decrease your body fat, or you want to change weight classes, you can follow sports performance guidelines in a caloric deficit. That’s what I do. That’s what I do with my athletes. That is how we do cuts because performance still matters, right? It’s not, when you show up to your meet, you’re not getting on the stage in a bikini. You still have to get a high total. So, we follow those guidelines even in a weight cut. But also, it’s important to note that significant body recomposition can occur when you’re eating at maintenance and following sports performance nutrition.
Mary:
And it usually happens.
Kristin:
Right, it usually happens. It’s just that these changes to your body are a by-product of fueling yourself and training hard.
Mary:
And you likely won’t see the huge, drastic transformation that we see in diets that are 12-week diets or whatever. You will see a huge drastic change in your body over an extended period of time, but it’s not going to be in that shortened window that most people follow.
Kristin:
And for some reason, I find that a lot of people think that eating for performance means that they’re going to gain weight. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that. If that is the goal, that can be done. It doesn’t necessarily…
Mary:
You can change the math to fit the goal.
Kristin:
Exactly. Exactly. You can maintain your body weight. Now, I will say if you’re a very lean athlete and you are training really hard and particularly if you are newer to training [if you’ve been training under five years] your body weights probably going to go up because you’re going to put on muscle because there’s no body recomposition to occur when you’re already very, very lean. So it might, for some people, I guess it might mean a slight weight gain, but it’s not, we’re not talking about putting on body fat or anything like that. It’s not eating for performance is not massing. It can be if you want it to be, but that’s not the definition of it.
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