Dear Coaches,
This week we're uncovering the chef secret that's sabotaging your menu orders, spotlighting the top jobs in performance nutrition, and revealing why ready to drink drinks could solve your biggest fuelling headache.
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EXPERT OPINION
The Cocker Spaniel Effect
Dr. David Dunne reveals a challenge every practitioner faces in his recent Hexis webinar.
We're closer to true personalisation than ever before. But there's a piece of the puzzle still missing.
Match day plus two. 90-minute pitch session. You pull the consensus statement: 4.5g/kg of carbohydrate. Player A weighs 75kg. That's 338g of carbs.
You've followed best practice. Applied the science. Done everything the literature recommends.
But here's the invisible layer:
Player A has a cocker spaniel. Two walks per day. That's an extra 200-300 calories you couldn't have known about.
Player B is meeting a friend for paddle tennis in the afternoon. Player C stayed on the pitch 15 minutes longer because they're working on a specific skill.
Your carefully calculated plan just drifted 10-20% off target. Not through any fault of your own—the data simply wasn't available. Multiply that across 30 players and 10 sessions per week.
This gap exists because we're caught in the middle of what Dunne calls the collision—three industries converging at once, faster than our workflows have adapted.
Sports nutrition research exploded. A 17-fold increase in publications over 20 years. Roles evolved from consultants to multi-practitioner departments.
Sports technology matured. GPS, heart rate monitors, power meters moved from lab to pitch.
Consumer technology crashed the party. Athletes showed up with Oura rings and WHOOP bands. Not because you recommended them. Because they bought them.
The conversation shifted. Athletes aren't waiting for top-down interventions. They're bringing tech to the club asking: "Can you help me use this?"
The data to close these gaps already exists. It's just siloed in different departments or sitting unused on their wrist.
Actionable Takeaway:
Consider your data strategy. The GPS tracking training load, the heart rate from sessions, even the Garmin from the dog walk—this data can dynamically recalculate plans in real-time. We have tools that can integrate existing data streams to move from industry-wide guidelines to genuine personalisation.
ACTIVE JOBS
University of Kansas Hiring
Assistant Sports Dietitian at The University of Kansas Health System.
Louisiana State University Hiring
The hot protein topics that should be on every practitioner's radar.
PERFORMANCE TECH
Oakley Meta Vanguard AI Glasses
Memory fails under stress.
Research in professional female footballers using doubly labelled water shows athletes underreport energy intake by approximately 22%. Not because they're careless—because recall breaks down when you’re a busy athlete.
The $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard captures POV video with Garmin biometric overlays during training and competition.
An athlete insists they followed the fuelling plan during their marathon buildup long run.
The video tells a different story: 85 minutes between gels instead of 45. Pace dropped during that window.
Over 12 weeks of captured runs, you build a longitudinal case study showing their fuelling window correlates with performance decline in the final miles. Pattern visible across 47 training sessions.
You compile this into a 5-minute video demonstrating exactly why adjusting their timing produced measurable results.
That video becomes proof—for the athlete questioning whether nutrition timing matters, for your practice methodology, and for converting skeptical athletes.
The efficiency shift: reviewing 3-minute auto-captured highlight reels replaces 30-minute calls reconstructing "wait, did you skip that aid station?"
This is just one application. The same POV footage could reveal GI distress through subtle behavioural cues—repeated hand movements to abdomen, facial expressions, slowed consumption—before athletes consciously recognise symptoms.
Or identify why athletes abandon fuelling attempts mid-race (packaging difficulties at pace), validate race-day protocol execution under actual competition conditions, or capture environmental factors that explain plan deviations.
The technology is here. The applications we haven't imagined yet are the interesting part.
Requires Garmin devices for biometric integration. Battery lasts up to 9 hours.
