The Fundamentals of Nutrition, Hydration & Performance Fueling

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
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've 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. What's the concept behind it? And so maybe your question is a little bit different from 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 kind of 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. 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 and second and 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 implementation. So that came up a lot of times when 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, in 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 in too much fat. Or is it possible to gain muscle while I'm in a caloric deficit? 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 term 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. 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 just feel so inclined. That said, let's go ahead and jump into our first one. And that's the 90%. I'll give you a fair warning, friends. This one is not short. But we can keep it easily digestible. The 90% to me is the 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 8 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 most joy in is zooming out and saying, okay, what is consistent amongst all of them or many of them or most of them? And one of the things you 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.