The importance of eating right in modern sport
They discovered McDonald’s burger boxes, biscuit wrappers and empty fizzy drink bottles as a result.
No wonder companies like Nutritics do so well: that’s a nutrition analytics business which analyses what people are eating, at a basic level, and make recommendations to optimise performance, and so forth.
I chatted to Stephen Nolan of Nutritics recently and it was a rewarding conversation: “We have four different areas we focus on — healthcare, where nutrition is important for diabetics and so on, obviously; we work with the food industry regarding labelling and other matters; education, which is self-explanatory but the sport element is what a lot of people focus on.”
The company examines what athletes take on in terms of food, which is obviously very important for performances, but there’s more to it than that, he says.
“Meal planning is important. A player will expend a certain amount of energy in a game and quite often, they haven’t optimised their nutrition intake before that — we find that maybe six, seven times out of 10, they’ve failed to do so. They’re taking in what they think will help, but if they don’t have the correct nutrition in the last five minutes, that can show up in a little fatigue, a loss of concentration, the split-second that makes all the difference.
“That might sound like common sense — and it is — but you’d be surprised the sports people who prepare for events by skipping breakfast and having two bottles of a sports drink before running out onto the field. Crazy stuff.
“And obviously it’s not just on the day of a game, either. Again, the number of athletes who are very good with their nutrition the day of a game, or the day before and the day of a game — and then it’s two pizzas and six cans of beer afterwards, undoing all the good work.”
Clearly a junior rugby side or a minor hurling team may not have the infrastructure in place to accommodate this kind of cutting-edge approach, but Nolan makes a good point about the competitiveness between senior inter-county teams, for instance.
“Ultimately it’ll come down to an athlete’s level of adherence to the programme. In GAA, for instance, athletes are keen to engage at top inter-county level, and that isn’t the case the further down the line you go.
“That’s a model that applies across a lot of sports science, as you might expect. What we say specifically in a GAA context, to inter-county teams especially, is ‘It’s fine if you don’t want to do this, but some of your competitors are certainly doing it, so if you want to give them an edge...’
“Speaking generally, the GAA isn’t as far along as rugby, say, in terms of sports science and technology, but it’s getting there and there’s some very interesting work in terms of GAA analytics going on.”
Sports science is an area of interest to this columnist, certainly, and my ears pricked up when Nolan referred to potential developments in the field — and not over the next decade or so, either.
“In terms of where sports science will go over the next 12-24 months, as that period rolls out, I think we’ll see some huge developments even in that relatively short space of time. There are companies in the UK and US — and here as well — which are doing huge work.
“I was at a sports science event recently and Haile Gebreselassie, the great runner, was there. He was asked if he could run a two-hour marathon and he said, ‘no, but you guys are going to make me.’”
Great credit is due to Tom McGlinchey, Waterford senior football manager, on steering his side to their first silverware in over three decades, when they beat UCC in the McGrath Cup final last week.
Something McGlinchey said the previous week, which appeared in these pages last weekend, stuck with me.
As we were chatting about football generally, the Déise boss made a salient point about last year’s big game between Kerry and Donegal.
“Take the All-Ireland football final,” said McGlinchey. “I met people after who were saying Michael Murphy had a poor game. But if you were at it, you saw the way Aidan O’Mahony and Paul Murphy played him.
“Without fouling him, they made sure the Donegal lads couldn’t see him — they were around him all the time. You couldn’t see that on television, all you noticed on the telly was that he wasn’t winning the ball. ”
There are a couple of key points there — one is being at a game, which is a good deal more necessary than one might think. When you’re in situ, you can pick out that kind of stuff far easier — the runs off the ball that don’t come off, the blocking of runs off the ball that does come off — but there’s a particular awareness of geometry there that you’d need to be warming a seat for.
It’s also interesting that when we skip over the boilerplate, praise that’s often brayed out for coaches in all sports — ‘a great man for detail’, ‘a hard taskmaster’ — you rarely get a clear instance of how exactly a top coach readies his team to face a serious threat.
Thanks again to Tom McGlinchey for spotting it, and to Eamonn Fitzmaurice for providing it.
By the time you read this, the Super Bowl is over, and the Patriots beat the Seahawks, or the Seahawks beat the Patriots. If you stayed up for it, God bless your synapses this morning. Have another coffee.
The build-up to the game featured a good deal of discussion of ‘deflategate’, a controversy over whether or not the ball was deflated by the New England Patriots in their last victory over the Indianapolis Colts, which made me wonder how balls — rugby, GAA, soccer — are evaluated before combat.
We’ve all seen referees pick up balls and give them a squeeze, but that can’t be too scientific. Just getting the ball, push it with your palms, ‘ah, that’s fine’ — and away we go? Can only be a matter of time before deflategate drifts across the Atlantic, surely?
(I note that Joe Montana waded into the controversy. Joe Montana! Talk about a name from your youth. I spent some time in the Bay Area, where Montana was a kind of saint, and people liked to recall his coolness in the San Francisco 49ers’ first Super Bowl.
With the team losing and time running out, Montana called them into a huddle, called for quiet, paused and said: “Over there behind the benches, about four rows up? See? It’s John Candy!”).
I note that Jonathan Sexton thinks sometimes of his mother or wife watching him as he takes his kicks, their faces concealed behind their hands with worry.
Interesting to learn what consumes the minds of players under extreme pressure, but I was reassured to hear what Ronan O’Gara’s focus sometimes drifted to when in a similar situation: a burger in Hillbilly’s.
As a former junior football place-kicker myself, I’m glad that my reveries of curry and chips from Murphy’s were echoed by the best.
