The Fundamentals of Nutrition, Hydration & Performance Fueling

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and human performance scientist. And today, we're going to be using a similar format as we used in the last episode, which is an audience Q&A. So several weeks ago, I asked you all for questions that you had, and we got way more than I anticipated. And so we tackled a lot of them in the previous episode and realized there was still a lot more I wanted to get to, and so we decided to do it again. And today, we're going to be focusing heavily on the nutrition and hydration and recovery type of questions. And so what this is going to look like, I've bucketed a lot of your most common questions into some central themes. I will try to answer them directly, but as I prefer to do, I would like to give you global themes so that you not only understand the answer, but you know why.

2. Dr. Andy Galpin

   What's the concept behind it? And so maybe your question is a little bit different than the one I answer, but my hope is by learning the foundation and the principle behind it, you'll be able to then answer your own specific question or maybe new ones as they come up in your life. So with that said, we're going to tackle five broad categories today. The first one is what I'll call the 90%, and that is the questions that looked and sounded a lot like, "Man, there's so much nutrition information out there. Can you just give me the basics? Can you give me what I have to know? Can you just give me the starter guide?" And things like that. And I'll explain to you why I call it the 90%, but that's what I mean when I say the 90%. After that, there was a whole series of questions related to recovery nutrition, from the hydration, supplements, fueling, and what do I have pre and post and mid-workout and things like that.

3. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So we'll get into that with our second question. The third major bucket is the application. It's not even necessarily the knowledge of nutrition, but it was really more of a coaching question. How do I help people through this process? What do I do first, then second, then third? And again, here I'm not necessarily talking about how many calories or macros, but the actual application of the knowledge and how we can help people be more effective in the implementation. So that came up a lot of times, and I thought it was really practical and something we haven't spent much time on. So we'll get into that at that point. Then from there, and a large theme, particularly amongst close friends, to call out Ian, my friend directly here, but this is related to what we'll call body recomposition. So this is, "I want to gain muscle, but I don't want to put on too much fat," or, "Is it possible to gain muscle while I'm in a caloric deficit?"

4. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And a ton of questions in that category, so we'll go after that as our fourth stop. And the last one is a little bit of a potpourri, a different turn from nutrition, and it's there because it came up often and is one of the most common questions I've ever gotten and continue to get in my career, and that is, what's the difference between all these high-level performers, these pro athletes, these elite musicians and actors and executives, and the rest of us? And so I've got some unique ways to answer that question that you potentially have never heard before, and so we'll get into that as our fifth and final question. So that said, that's our journey. That's what we're signing up for today. If you would like, if you have a particular interest in any one of those questions, you can use the timestamps and hop directly to that. I want to make sure, first and foremost, that you get the answers to the question that you directly asked or are most interested in.

5. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And so use that skill. I would, of course, prefer that you listen to all of it, but minimum, I want you to get the information you're here for as our top priority. So use that feature if you feel so inclined. That said, let's go ahead and jump into our first one, and that's the 90%. And I'll give you fair warning, friends, this one is not short. But we can keep it easily digestible. The 90% to me is a way of saying, look, if you were to examine every nutrition program, every theme, every diet, every eating style, you'll start to realize there's a bunch of common themes. There's eight billion of us, friends. We have tons of different goals and backgrounds and restrictions and limitations. So this is going to create thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of different individual options. So rather than trying to cover a bunch of them, what I like to do and what I have the most joy in is zooming out and saying, "Okay, what is consistent amongst all of them, or many of them, or most of them?"

6. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And one of the things you'll start to realize in this field is many, most, if not even all of them, are hitting the same exact concepts, but they're using wildly different methods. So what I wanted to do in the 90% is to say, look, what are 90% of the good nutritional plans or diets, or however you like to phrase these things, what's consistent among them? And then what are examples of the infinite different methods you could go about achieving them? I typically will describe this in somewhere between 10 and 15 different things, and I'm not going to keep a particular count, though you can do that at home and perhaps tell me how many I landed on. But this is the type of stuff we start to think about. First on our list is food quality. Almost all evidence-based and effective programs are going to have a hedge towards that, and it is typically the top or close to the top of your priority list.

7. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Now, what does food quality mean? It's a very lengthy discussion, but most of us would agree you're going to be spending most of your time, and by the way, you should be recognizing the specificity of my language here. I'm not using always. I probably will never use the word never here. This is why I call it the 90%. What are most diets doing for most people that's mostly effective? So that means in this scenario, most of the time you're choosing higher quality foods. Doesn't mean always. Higher quality foods, most of the time, are single ingredient foods. They're minimally processed. There's plenty of exceptions, of course, and there's a lot of discourse right now about what is actually defined as a quality processed food, because there can be some. Things like cheese and whey protein, these are processed, but they're generally regarded as reasonably high-quality foods. And where no one would argue things like spinach and kale and blueberries are not quality.

8. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So there's some obvious ones, there's some less than obvious ones, and then there's some downright confusing ones that I don't even know how to score, frankly, like yogurt, sauerkraut. They're technically processed. And then, of course, you have chips and highly processed junk foods, and no one's going to argue those are super healthy foods. So we don't need to get lost in that detail right now. But just think of it as mostly whole food ingredients, kind of in their natural state most of the time. And if you do that, the amount of time you are splitting hairs, it's important, it is nuanced, but for right now, we're trying to do the opposite. What are the basics? Number one, eat mostly real whole foods. Number two, you have to account for caloric balance. This does not mean calorie counting is the most or only effective strategy for diet. Those are not the same thing. You need to be aware of caloric intake one way or the other.

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