A quick guide to nutrition
You can train with as much intensity as you like but if you neglect your diet, you are going nowhere.
Boxing training is hard and it exacts great demands on your body. To fulfill these demands you must make sure that you are taking on board the necessary nutritional requirements. Your diet must give you the fuel for your workouts and replenish afterwards. A good diet will help you to train to your utmost, increase performance levels and improve your overall health.
The accepted thinking to achieving a functional and healthy diet is to change your eating habits for good. The word ‘diet’ is often misused. We are not looking at calorie reduction to lose weight, we are looking at giving ourselves the platform to achieve and live healthy, productive lives.
The building blocks of your diet are carbohydrates, proteins and fats.
Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates (or carbs as they often called) are your bodies main source of fuel. If you think of yourself as an engine, carbs are your four star unleaded.
There are two kinds of carbs - complex and simple and your body needs both:
Complex carbs (or starchy carbs) provide slow releasing energy. As structurally they are complex it takes longer for your body to absorb them. This means you are getting a gradual hit of fuel. Try and take on board the majority of your complex carbs in the first half of the day and taper them off later. There's little point in storing energy at night time before bed as you will not be using it. Unused carbs are stored as fat!
Examples of complex carbs:
- Oatmeal
- whole grain cereals
- porridge and bran
- vegetables
- beans and pulses
- brown rice
- brown bread
- brown pasta
Think of simple carbs as sugars. Nature provides us with good, nutritional sugars in the form of fruit. We humans take this and 'refine' them. Put simply, refining them involves taking the good stuff out and replacing it with rubbish. So we need to be consuming our simple carbs as natural sugars.
Examples of healthy, simple carbs:
- Fruit
- Vegetables
Protein
If carbs are the petrol for your engine then protein is the oil. Athletes need protein to repair and rebuild muscle that is broken down during workouts.
Examples of healthy, lean protein
- Chicken/turkey breast
- Fish (haddock, cod, salmon, tuna etc.)
- Sellfish
- Eggs
- Low fat dairy products (milk, cheese, natural yoghurt, cottage cheese)
- Lean red meat
- brown bread
- brown pasta
Fats
Aren't you supposed to avoid fats? Well, there are good and bad fats. Your common garden-variety bad fats are the obvious ones - Saturated fats, to be found in your local chippy and greasy spoon. However, your body needs dietary fat to make tissue and vital biochemicals. What we are looking for are natural fats:
Examples of natural fats:
Natural peanut butter, oily fish (mackerel, sardines, kippers) nuts, seeds, olive oil, flaxseed oil, olives.
So, you could take on board your portion of natural fat as one of your proteins - Having a portion of oily fish kills two birds with one stone. Alternately, you could have a scoop of natural peanut butter before bed or add flaxseed oil to one of your dishes.
Putting it all together
Try to eat 5-6 smaller meals rather than the traditional 3 square meals. There’s a good reason for this. Our bodies have a clever little quirk called ‘starvation mode’. When your body senses it is not getting enough fuel it goes into an efficiency mode by slowing your metabolism down, protecting and storing it’s fat stores and feeding from lean muscle stocks to gain the calories it needs. So skipping meals will not make you leaner, in fact it will have the opposite effect.
To avoid this we will try and eat approximately every 3 hours. Doing so will keep your metabolism burning fat and all of that lovely, hard-earned gym muscle will remain untouched. Think of your metabolism as a fire. If you dump a big shovel-full of damp coal on it, it will go out. However, if you keep it burning with small bundles of flammable kindling at regular intervals you will soon have a roaring blaze. This is exactly what we are going to do with your metabolism. Eating regularly also stabilises your blood sugar levels (which will keep you alert) and maintains a steady flow of amino acids to your muscle cells (which will aid muscle development).
These meals should contain the right balance of carbohydrate and protein, with a little natural fat. As an easy guide, your meal should contain twice as many carbs as protein. When putting together your meals, start with a complex carbohydrate, such as potato, wholemeal bread or brown rice. Then include vegetables/salad. Finish off the meal with a piece of fruit to kill of those sweet tooth cravings. You are now getting the just the right balance.
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