Performance Eating for Power Training

Performance eating is nutrition with a purpose. The purpose is to amplify and accelerate the training effort. Marty Gallagher’s point is straightforward: power training, hard cardio, and physical transformation all require a nutrition plan that supports the goal instead of fighting it.

How to Eat When You Are Training Your Ass Off

Dinner for one: Arnold above slamming calories back in his Mr. Olympia days.

Performance eating is nutrition with a purpose. The purpose being to amplify and accelerate the training effort. Nutrition can be the athlete’s best friend or worst enemy. Skillfully used, precision eating improves the result derived from training. Just as training is sculpted to aid in the attainment of a specific goal, nutrition should be sculpted to aid the training.

There must be goal clarity before there can be nutritional clarity. Everything grows from the highly defined goal. The athletic elite set highly specific goals into highly specific timeframes. Let’s look at a hypothetical example: if the class reunion is in three months, why not set up a ten-week periodization plan with a goal of shedding 15 pounds of body fat — this while pushing our bench press personal best upward by 25 pounds?

This seems a worthy and motivating goal. Here is how it would lay out for a 200-pound, 40-year-old, moderately in-shape business executive. Commencing this 10-week periodized cycle, the athlete weighs 200 pounds and has a 180-pound strict, paused bench press.

A Periodized Performance Eating Example

Reunion week: this periodized plan was used by one of our acquaintances to get in shape for his 25th anniversary class reunion.

Why Bodybuilders Understand Performance Eating

The world’s most effective dieters are competitive bodybuilders. Even at the local level, amateur bodybuilders, lifetime drug-free bodybuilders, are routinely attaining extremely low body fat percentiles. The procedures they use are generally formulaic and involve the skillful intertwining of disciplined nutrition with hardcore cardio and bar-bending progressive resistance training.

To make the competitive bodybuilder’s quest more difficult, body fat need be stripped and melted without “dieting away” all the hard-earned gym muscle. Muscle cannibalism is no joke. When starved, the body can cannibalize its own muscle tissue. Crash dieters can lose 100 pounds and still stay fat: the body, sensing starvation, may preferentially sacrifice muscle over body fat. Therefore, a man can drop his scale weight from 300 pounds to 200 and still possess an unacceptable body fat percentile.

How does the athlete lose body fat while retaining muscle? Performance eating.

Performance Eating Guide

• Avoid starvation diets: lean protein and fibrous carbohydrates are the backbone of many physique-focused diets. Protein and fiber are commonly used to support muscle retention and training recovery while keeping food quality high. Dietary fat does not affect the body the same way starch carbs do. Bodybuilders often eat starch in combination with protein and fiber because food combining can help moderate the surge normally associated with starch.
• Jettison junk: eliminate dirty calories and empty calories. This means industrial foods, sweets, sugar, pastries, pasta, junk food, fast food, chips, pizza and similar foods that undermine performance nutrition. No one can be considered serious about performance nutrition if the daily menu is built around trash food. Alcohol should also be minimized or eliminated during a serious transformation cycle.
• Protein and fiber carbs: protein and fiber go together like ham and eggs, Mick and Keith, guns and dogs. Muscle is built from amino acids, and fiber carbohydrates are a mainstay in many body-composition plans. Optimally, every serving of protein is eaten with some type of fiber. For a deeper related discussion, see The Minefield of Nutrition.
• Carb-centric or fat-centric: competitive bodybuilders are of one mind on eliminating dirty foods and using ample protein and fiber carbs. Some bodybuilders prefer starch carbs over fat; other bodybuilders prefer dietary fat over starch carbs. Pick one or the other. Bodybuilders learned that they can get ripped augmenting protein and fiber with either fat or starch — not both.
• Meal timing: the classical bodybuilder diet is based on a multiple-feeding strategy wherein the day’s allotment of calories is broken out into smaller amounts. Six 500-calorie meals can be easier on the system than three 1,000-calorie meals. Consuming the day’s calories in smaller chunks eaten at equidistant intervals can make sense. The problem is the pure hassle: six feedings a day equates to 42 feedings per week. For more on this subject, see Make Meal Frequency Part of Your Transformational Arsenal.
• Alternate meal timing: what if you can’t cope with creating 35 to 42 mini-meals per week? The intermittent fasting approach, first postulated by my friend Ori Hofmekler, offers a legitimate alternative. The day’s calories are ingested within a window of time, 2-5 hours long. The foods need be clean and potent. Seek out natural, nutrient-dense foods and deftly prepare them. The smaller window can be effective if the food is potent.
• Supplements: supplemental protein can make sense for trainees who struggle to hit protein targets with regular food alone. A protein shake can provide a convenient serving of protein with minimal preparation. Creatine monohydrate has had staying power in strength circles. Medium-chain triglycerides, or MCTs, provide a high-calorie source of dietary fat and are used by some athletes when fat-centric eating is the chosen route.
• Combine hardcore exercise with hardcore nutrition: exercise is the foundation. Without ass-busting training, bodybuilding-style nutrition becomes just another diet strategy. Expert nutrition underpins the bar-bending lifting and copious cardio. If the eating is precise enough and the exercise intense enough, muscle can be supported while body fat is mobilized and oxidized. Continual monitoring is combined with performance eating and savage training.

Adherence Is the Key

The key to success is adherence. Can you construct and adhere to a realistic and sensible game plan? Can you generate the training consistencies and intensities required? Are you ready to make a serious commitment to disciplined performance eating and supplementing that enhances and accelerates the transformational process?

Success, in every instance, is directly proportional to the trainee’s ability to adhere to the dictates and tenets of the process. It takes radical change to shock the body out of its cocoon of complacency. The body craves homeostasis, the status quo. The body will not undergo a dramatic transformation in response to submaximal efforts: only herculean efforts will suffice.

Intense physical effort needs to be backed up, underpinned, with high performance eating. You don’t put kerosene in your 427 Cobra; you use high-octane racing fuel. You will be surprised how quickly you can muscle-up and lean out once all the interrelated elements are recognized, integrated, locked down and practiced with the requisite consistency and intensity. It really is simple: performance eating need back up power training.

Safety Note for Nutrition and Power Training

Performance eating should be scaled to the athlete’s goals, training load, health profile, recovery capacity and current body composition. Major diet changes, aggressive fat-loss phases, supplement use, or high-intensity training cycles should be approached carefully and, when appropriate, discussed with a qualified professional.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is performance eating?

Performance eating is nutrition with a purpose. In Marty Gallagher’s article, the purpose is to support power training, recovery, body composition, strength work, cardio and adherence to a specific physical goal.

How does performance eating support power training?

Performance eating supports power training by matching food choices, meal timing, protein intake, calories and recovery needs to the training plan. The goal is to make nutrition reinforce hard training instead of undermining it.

Why does goal clarity matter for nutrition?

Goal clarity matters because the nutrition plan must serve the intended outcome. A lifter trying to gain size, a bodybuilder trying to reduce body fat and a business executive preparing for a reunion all need different levels of calories, cardio and training structure.

Why does Marty Gallagher warn against starvation dieting?

Gallagher warns against starvation dieting because aggressive under-eating can lead to poor adherence, poor training performance and unwanted loss of lean tissue. His preferred approach is disciplined performance eating paired with hard training and measurable goals.

What foods does the article emphasize?

The article emphasizes lean protein, fibrous carbohydrates, clean food sources and carefully chosen starch or fat depending on the athlete’s approach. It also argues against dirty calories, junk food and empty calories during serious transformation phases.

Are supplements required for performance eating?

No. Supplements are not the foundation. Gallagher presents supplemental protein, creatine and MCTs as tools some athletes may use, but the foundation remains disciplined eating, hard training, cardio, monitoring and adherence.