Jordan Sullivan: Fueling for Sports Performance

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and life. Welcome to Perform.
I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today, I'm talking to Jordan Sullivan. Jordan is a dietitian who has worked with many of the best athletes in the world in a variety of sports. He's also a practitioner, having participated and competed in many Jiu-Jitsu, Ultramarathon and other endurance events. Jordan's clients, as I mentioned, are some of the best in the best. You're talking about many UFC world champions, other individuals like Nedd Brockmann, who recently ran a thousand miles in 12 days. So Jordan's knowledge of the practical aspects of fueling for performance are really unparalleled. In this conversation, we talked a lot about the details. How much water, how many grams of carbohydrates, what type of carbohydrates, and as many other details as I could possibly fit in to exactly how do I fuel performance or just getting enough fuel to exercise for people not competing in sports. Jordan did a fantastic job in this conversation outlining how this does change in different scenarios with different goals and populations and people. So while Jordan has spent most of his career with these elite high-profile athletes, he's also been coaching non-athletes for well over a decade. That comes through really clearly in the conversation. So please enjoy this conversation with my friend, Jordan Sullivan. Jordan Sullivan, welcome to the show, man.

**Jordan Sullivan** (1:33)
Andy, thanks for having me.

**Andy Galpin** (1:35)
I've followed your work for a long time. It's in my opinion that no one even is close to rivaling you and your area, so I really appreciate you being here. We're going to cover a lot of areas, we'll globally call like sports performance fueling, but I actually want to start with two things really quickly, and I want to see if you even know what they are. So this is a little bit of a challenge to you. So let me read this one actually that I have written down for you. Okay. Number one, yogurt with berries and honey. Number two meal, chipotle chicken with rice and avocado. Number three, tiramisu dates with oatmeal. Number four, lobster roll. Number five, a sports drink. Number six, lamb rice bowl. Number seven, a banana with honey. All that in one day. Do you know what I'm talking about?

**Jordan Sullivan** (2:25)
I have a good feeling what you're talking about, yeah.

**Andy Galpin** (2:28)
Tell us what that actually is.

**Jordan Sullivan** (2:30)
Yeah. So last weekend, I participated in my first Hyrox competition. And if you don't know, Hyrox is kind of the new age CrossFit. So it's a mix of strength sports and then endurance sports. So the set up is you run eight kilometers as fast as you can, and then you jump in and out of these stations. So yeah, me and my team went down to Melbourne and did that. And that was the the fueling plan going into it.

**Andy Galpin** (2:53)
So you ate all of that in one day prior to competition.

**Jordan Sullivan** (2:57)
Yeah.

**Andy Galpin** (2:58)
We're going to have to go through that in detail. I don't want to know exactly why you ate that, because my guess is you weren't just sort of eating whatever you had in front of you and trying to consume as much food. There was a little bit of intention and strategy with the food items, the calories, the macronutrient split, the time you ate that. All that was very strategic, I assume.

**Jordan Sullivan** (3:16)
Yeah, there were definitely goals behind it. I'll be honest, though, that was my first competition. So a lot of that was just self-experiments.

**Andy Galpin** (3:23)
Of that type of competition.

**Jordan Sullivan** (3:24)
With that type of competition, right? Same as you, Andy. You work with so many different types of athletes. A big one for me is if I'm telling these athletes, hey, go eat this way, and then I'm saying, hey, man, have all this food before you go and compete, I kind of want to know what that feels like, because so many times I've done it, where hey, go eat X amount of carbohydrates before you go do this wrestling class, and it's like, there's no way I'm having two bowls of Cocoa Pops and three sandwiches before I go out there, because what's going to happen? Start rolling, start wrestling around, and so. Going through that is just a bit of self-experiment, but there was a lot of logic behind that, and I think it worked pretty well. We'll go through it.