#617: What Does Effective Athlete Support Look Like in Practice? – Gemma McGuinness

**Danny Lennon** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 617 of the podcast. You're very welcome. My name is Danny Lennon, and today we're going to be looking at a number of the elements that go into effectively supporting athletes in whatever their specific goal may be.
And to go through this topic, I'm going to be talking with Gemma McGuinness, who is a performance nutritionist, is the co-founder of Verus Performance, has been a long time coach at Davey Nutrition and is also a former professional footballer. And so through her experience of not only helping a variety of athletes across many different sports, but also her direct experience of competing at sport at a high level and the types of environments that can support that. And so in this episode, we're going to be focusing very much on the practical application of ideas that practitioners can use in order to help the athletes that they work with. And so if you are supporting them in their nutrition or, as we will talk about, many other areas of their performance that go beyond their direct sport training, let's say, then there is many things that might be useful to bear in mind. And I think even if you are an athlete at whatever level yourself, you can apply many of these ideas directly and be thinking about these and how you can apply them into your goals as an athlete. In the description box of this episode, you can find out more about Gemma and the work that she is doing, as well as finding out more about Sigma Nutrition Premium, which is our membership for those of you who use this podcast as an educational resource. The Premium membership allows you to get detailed study notes for all our episodes, which you can use to go back and revise or to understand concepts more deeply. They'll have discussions around studies that might be mentioned, use graphics, have explanations of key terminology that might have came up in the episode and so on. You also get edited transcripts to our episodes and a Premium exclusive episode of the podcast each month that is only available to members. So if any of that might be interesting to you and you want to get more of your podcast listening, then check out Sigma Nutrition Premium. Like I said, that is linked up in the description box where you are listening right now, or you can just go to sigmanutrition.com.
But without further adieu, let's dive into this conversation between myself and Gemma McGuinness.
A very big welcome to the podcast, to Gemma McGuinness. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and join me.

**Gemma McGuinness** (2:43)
Thank you very much for having me. Really looking forward to the conversation.

**Danny Lennon** (2:45)
As am I, lots of really interesting things to discuss. Many of which I know that you have both spoken really well about, as well as a lot of your writing that I've really enjoyed reading as well.
But before I get to any of that, Gemma, can you give people listening an idea to your work that you currently do, anything you're involved with, your academic background, anything else that might be relevant to what we get into today?

**Gemma McGuinness** (3:08)
Yeah, well, I am a performance nutritionist, and I've just come off the back of my professional football career. So I grew up playing football all my life and played international level.
I got into professional football later on. I had a good experience in terms of the challenges that I know work with athletes to support. More recently now I've gone into the business side of things and developing Verus Performance where I'm working with athletes across multiple sports to help them with pretty much everything outside of their training and their actual sports performance, at the lifestyle side of things and really leaning in on the nutrition and behaviour side to get them prepared as best as possible.

**Danny Lennon** (3:46)
Lots that I want to discuss within that. First, maybe let's start with some nutrition centred things, but as we'll talk about, we can't really isolate them as stuff. And this is one of the things I've really enjoyed, how you've tried to transmit this idea to a number of your athletes of talking about nutrition as part of something that's within a broader system related to their overall performance, as opposed to oftentimes and understandably what we might have in the nutrition industry is a focus not only on the nutrition, but even on nutrient requirements for athletes tend to be a kind of sole front and center focus.
Again, maybe with good reason, but maybe none of the other things get discussed in the amount of detail that would actually be useful to athletes. Can you give, and this might be an overly broad question, but what is that kind of philosophy behind your thinking around where nutrition fits within a broader system that actually be useful to athletes?