Getting Your Athletes On The Same Page With Nutrition Planning
Most coaches I talk to are overwhelmed by the amount of conflicting advice out there when it comes to sports nutrition. Athletes eat different things at different times. Training loads shift constantly. It is hard to track and even harder to communicate effectively. That is where Rachelle Consiglio The Ultimate Gamechanger In Sports Nutrition comes into play for people who actually work with competitive athletes day to day. The approach is straightforward. It breaks down nutrition into three time windows around training: pre, during, and post. Each window has specific macronutrient targets based on the athlete's body weight and the intensity of the session. Instead of vague advice like "eat healthy," you get exact gram ranges for carbs, protein, and fats. A 180-pound male doing high-intensity interval training gets a completely different pre-workout recommendation than a 130-pound female doing yoga. That specificity is what separates this from generic meal plans you find online. I ran into a real problem early on when I started using this system with a collegiate rowing team. The athletes were all different sizes, weights, and training volumes. One of my guys was sitting at about 200 pounds and his carb needs on heavy training days were roughly 500 grams. When I tried to use a standard calculator, it gave him numbers that made him gain unwanted fat during the off-season. The workaround was simple but took me a while to figure out: I adjusted his calorie target based on his body composition percentage rather than just total body weight. It cut down his surplus by about 400 calories on rest days without affecting his performance on training days. The math changed how he looked and performed within six weeks.
Here is the practical side. You need to know three things about each athlete before you can apply this system correctly. First, their training load for the week. Second, their lean body mass estimate. Third, their sport-specific energy demands. Rowers burn way more per session than swimmers of the same weight because water resistance changes everything. Track sprinters are different again. You cannot just plug numbers into a template and expect it to work. I learned that the hard way with a basketball player who seemed to plateau no matter what I adjusted. The issue was that his training load was fluctuating weekly based on game schedules, and I had been using a flat number instead of scaling it to actual session volume. Once I built a simple spreadsheet that adjusted his macros by session type, his recovery markers improved noticeably within two weeks. Counter-intuitive thing most people miss: The timing window between meals matters less than the total daily intake for most amateur athletes. I see coaches stressing over whether an athlete eats their post-workout shake at exactly 3:30 PM or 3:45 PM. For someone training twice a day or doing weekend tournaments, the anabolic window is not that narrow. What actually moves the needle is hitting your total daily protein and calorie targets consistently. If an athlete is missing 200 grams of protein across the whole day because they are fixated on the timing of one meal, they will underperform regardless of how perfectly they hit the pre-workout window. Another thing nobody talks about enough is the fiber issue. When you push carb intake up to 6 to 8 grams per kilogram of body weight for endurance athletes, digestive problems become almost guaranteed if you do not plan around fiber. I had a distance runner who blew up during a long training run because she loaded up on oats the night before. Plain oats. She thought fiber was good. It was too much fiber right before a three-hour session. The fix was switching her pre-long-run carbs to white rice and dried fruit, which digest much faster. She stopped bonking after that one change.
There are downsides to this system, and I want to be blunt about them. It does not work well for athletes with eating disorders or disordered eating patterns. The rigid structure and the constant weighing of food can trigger unhealthy behaviors in susceptible individuals. If you are working with someone who has a history of orthorexia or anorexia, this framework is the wrong tool. You need a more flexible, relationship-based approach with a clinical dietitian. Also, the system assumes access to a kitchen and decent food options. If your athlete is a traveling competitor with limited food choices at tournaments, the ideal macros become theoretical. In those cases, I recommend a simpler fallback: prioritize protein at every meal, choose whole food carbs over processed ones when available, and hydrate properly. That basic version covers 80 percent of what matters in real-world conditions. The other limitation is adherence. I have found that even well-designed plans fall apart when athletes get busy, stressed, or traveling. A perfect macro breakdown means nothing if the athlete skips three meals in a row because their schedule fell apart. The practical solution is to build a list of quick alternatives for each meal window. Greek yogurt instead of a full breakfast. A protein shake instead of a cooked meal. These backup options keep the numbers close enough to the target without requiring a full kitchen setup. For coaches and trainers looking to implement this, start small. Pick one athlete. Work out their numbers. Track their weight, energy levels, and training performance for three weeks. Adjust from there. Do not roll it out to an entire team on day one. You will miss individual differences and waste time reworking everyone's plan later.
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I use a simple Google Sheet to calculate everything. It takes about five minutes per athlete to set up initially. After that, updating their numbers when their weight changes or their training cycle shifts takes maybe thirty seconds. The system scales reasonably well if you are managing multiple athletes, but it does require discipline in recording actual body weight and training load each week. If you stop tracking, the plan becomes guesswork again, which defeats the whole purpose.
