Clyde, I've made one pass through your nutrition guide--nice work! It's a guide that will need considerable going over, multiple times with many checks to incorporate it into my head. That's not bad; it's just that it's a very complex subject. You might want to set expectations with clients (athletes) up front that they will need to spend many hours "digesting" it all to really make full use of it. The salt depletion area was very helpful; I'm certain I've suffered from this before: urinating frequently, sleeping difficulty. I never had a clue why, now I do! I'm still at a loss to judge my salt intake though; tracking it would be a real pain. Lloyd
ANSWER: I agree that sports nutrition is complex...that is the reason I teach it and wrote the book. Hydration, because of the complexity of matching electrolyte losses to needs (see "hydration" thread), is one of the toughest topics within sports nutrition. Fortunately, this problem CAN be addressed by getting on a scale before and after your toughest training sessions and keeping track of your fluid losses per hour. My opinion is that in order to best solve a problem, we should do 2 things: Look at the published research (the most unbiased information source we have available to us) and listen to our body (in the case of hydration, that means looking at the scale before and after a workout to see how much weight we lose, which tells us how much we perspired). In other words, look at the data from others and look at the data from ourselves. The process of looking at data (the scientific method) is the best way we know of learning and making positive change based on what we learned. It is my hope that my book shows the athlete how to do this without putting in so much detail that it sounds more like a science project than a book on getting faster. After all, it is the application (getting faster and staying healthy while doing it) that makes all the science worth while.
Comments