The Hotseat with Ste Winrow, Performance Nutrionist - Jan 2026

This month's Hot Seat features repeat guest Steve Winrow of Winrow Performance, answering nutrition questions from our coaching athletes. Steve is a sports nutritionist with a background in exercise physiology, working with everyone from recreational runners to professional tennis players. He's also one of Nick's current athletes, training for a sub-3 Manchester Marathon.

Topics Covered

Overmarketed Nutrition Trends Steve calls out three: low-carb/keto diets (no benefit for endurance performance — the "godfather" keto study was based on just five athletes), fasting protocols (overstated benefits largely based on rodent studies), and the gut health/probiotics craze (not harmful, but a well-balanced diet does the heavy lifting).

Intermittent Fasting & Autophagy The autophagy argument doesn't hold up. Hard endurance training is already a far stronger stimulus for cell repair than fasting. Withholding fuel post-training just impairs glycogen replenishment and increases inflammation. Fasting can work for calorie control — but it doesn't do anything metabolically "fancy."

Appetite Hormones: Ghrelin & Leptin Ghrelin drives short-term hunger (rises before meals, drops after). Leptin reflects longer-term energy status and sits in fat tissue. Rapid weight loss drops leptin fast, which slows metabolism — one reason weight loss stalls. Protein is the most effective macronutrient for managing satiety. Poor sleep and underfuelling disrupt both hormones.

Key Takeaways

1. There is no benefit to low-carb or keto diets for endurance performance. If you want to run fast, eat carbs.
2. Fasting is fine for calorie control but does nothing special for cell repair or metabolism.
3. Aim for 2g/kg protein per day. Use the 3-2-1 method as a starting point and adjust carbs to training load.
4. Fuel the work required — ~0.8–1g/kg carbs either side of hard sessions.
5. Sleep is your number one recovery tool. Prioritise it ruthlessly.
6. Consistency is the biggest predictor of success. Illness and injury kill consistency. Recovery prevents both.

Guest Details

Steve Winrow — Winrow Performance Instagram: @winrowperformance Weekly newsletter every Monday (February focus: recovery)

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See you on the next one.

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Matt's IG - https://www.instagram.com/ultracoachmatt/

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Maximum Mileage Running Podcast. My name is Nick Hancock. I am your host. I am a UK athletics and US coach, founder of Maximum Mileage Coaching, which is now five coaches strong. And in this episode, we host our athletes every month. We have something called the hot seat where our athletes put us on the spot and ask us questions. This week we actually uh we actually put uh a guest on the spot and we had the fantastic repeat offender to the um to the hot seat Steve Winrow of Winrow Performance. He was in answering all of our nutrition-related questions. Uh Stee is brilliant. He's actually one of my athletes at the moment. I'm actually helping him get ready for the uh Manchester Marathon. Um, but he works with athletes of all levels um within the endurance space and also within things like high rocks, um, triathlon, crossfit, uh you name it, and he works with some top professionals and some uh a couple of professional tennis players as well. Um yeah, Steve is awesome and he gave us some great insights into our nutrition, how it can help us with our running. Um, so without further ado, here is the recording from the hot seat. Right, we've got a few on. So if anybody else comes in, I'll I'll let them in. So let's get cracking. We haven't done one of these in a little while. I think it was um before the summer last year we did the last one. Um and I am uh intending to do this every month now. So uh I'm very happy to say that we've got the guest speaker because that means I don't have to do anything, you don't have to listen to me all the time, which you well, I don't coach everybody on this call, but most of you have probably had enough of me and my voice. So um good to have uh, and it's good for me to have some more ammo. Um, you know, if you hear some of the things that I say uh again, or uh really from an expert point of view, a more expert point of view. Um yeah, I couldn't think of anybody better. So Mr. Winrow, over to you if you'd like to introduce yourself, other than you are one of my athletes as well. Indeed.

SPEAKER_02 2:26

Yeah, thanks very much, Nick, and hello to everybody on the call. So uh my name is is Steve or Steven, whichever you want to look at. Because I know some some guys in America don't understand my name being Steve. It's just short for Steven. So, but um, yeah, my background is is actually exercise physiology. So um from an educational standpoint, I grew up as a as a tennis player, I was lucky enough to get to an okay level doing that, um, and then went down the exercise physiology route before moving later on into like sports nutrition, performance nutrition as a as a postgraduate um degree, and then I was doing a lot of CrossFit at the time um in that period before moving over to um long distance triathlon, so Iron Man. Uh, and that's what I tend to try to do these days, but um had my son uh nearly two years ago now, and it's much easier to train for a marathon than it than it is Iron Man, although the mileage is uh a lot different, and I'm loving it. It's been great under Nick's, and Nick's looking after me to try and get me to a sub three, so we'll see how that goes. But yeah, I've been lucky enough to in that time after my postgrad to start up win roll performance and been in a great position, a very lucky position to be able to work with every level of athlete now, um, from your everyday recreational runner through to um professional sports athletes with a lot of um challenges and different challenges and a lot of experiences that have shaped um the way that we put things together in the business. So hopefully I'll be able to give you a little bit of insight today and everything that you want to discuss or know. Hopefully, I'll be able to dumb things down amidst the very confusing world of nutrition.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

Confusing? What world's supposed to be carnivore, keto, no seed oil? Fast for three days every Monday. That's the other one as well, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Yeah, you can do you can try anything, you can say anything you want online these days, that's why it's so confusing.

SPEAKER_03 4:51

Yeah. Um, great, thanks, D. Um, yes, so we do have some questions, but if anybody does want to ask any questions, please do chime in uh at any point. Um, Daniel, I'm just going to mute your uh can I mute you? Yes, I can. There we go. Um uh yeah, if anybody wants to chime in with uh with any questions, please do. But we do have some ahead of time. So um I'm gonna start off with what why not, since we're talking about the confusing world of uh uh nutrition. Uh this is a question from Nick. We've got a few questions from Nick. Uh, which nutritional trends do you find as overmarketed with at best marginal success?

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Uh can I say all of them? Is that an answer, acceptable answer? Um no, I mean, look, within nutrition, I always say that you've only got one topic that's more polarizing than nutrition, and that's politics. And online influencers know how to influence, they know that nutritional topics are the one thing that will build them the following. You have people who start out influencing outfits from Zara and then suddenly become a nutritionist, and then they've got 100,000 followers. I think from a trends perspective, everybody eats food and rightly so, therefore has an opinion. If something works for one person, then they are likely to then go and tell their friends about it and say it's the best thing since slash bread. Um, and that ultimately leads that person to then go and try it. If they have a little bit of success, then it starts to spread a little bit more. But also, some people don't find success and then they start feeling bad about themselves because if it works for them, it should work for me. And that's not how nutrition works, it's very individual. Um, but I guess a bit I digress there really a little bit. If I have to put myself out on a whim, I would probably at this period of time, I would say low carbohydrates is a trend that most people go for, whether that's keto or just going high fat, low carb as a diet. Um, which is the reality is you can go keto, and if you want to go through that process, you can basically end up just as good as if you had a high carbohydrate diet, but you don't get any benefits, and you do have to go through quite a bit of a turmoil to be low carbohydrate for that period of time because ultimately what you're trying to do is put your body into a ketogenic state. So you're putting it in ketosis, which body then makes ketones to act like glucose, because under normal conditions, the only fuel for the brain is glucose, and when it runs out, it will start doing things to to give it the fuel, otherwise, you'll die. Um, but there is no benefit to going low carbohydrate or ketogenic for endurance performance. There is none. Um, if it works for you as an individual, great. But going low carbohydrate will ultimately impair your ability to use them very well. So if you want to run fast, you might have a problem. If you want to run a marathon, four and a half hour marathon, sure, go high-fire. It doesn't really matter what you went through. But if you want to run at your fastest capability, then carbohydrates should become more of a focus.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Uh this is what this is what I was gonna sort of just chime in on is that yeah, you anybody can go keto, but for anybody who wants to run faster, that's not gonna help you.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

No. Think about metabol, like metabolic flexibility means your ability to use fat and carbohydrates efficiently as a fuel. But what people always say is that to be metabolic and flexible, you just need to teach your body how to use fat.

SPEAKER_03 9:07

Yeah, it doesn't mean it doesn't mean you don't have to eat carbs, right? We we we we become fat adapted through all of that easy running.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Yeah, exactly. The biggest driver of being able to use fat as a fuel is training. Nutrition comes second. Um fasting is another one. A lot of people like to train fasted, a lot of people like to go on fasting protocols. Um, I don't necessarily see a problem with people following fasting protocols. I think you've just got to be mindful that if you are fasting in a period in which you are training, that you're probably limiting yourself to some degree in that sense. If you're fasting for calorie control, great. But anything else outside of that, there are just overstated rodent-based studied benefits to fasting. Um that's another one. Um three is a round number. Sorry, go on.

SPEAKER_05 10:17

Yeah, would you say that a lot of these trends are um experience based rather than evidence-based? Is that is that the idea here is that when you said earlier, if it works for me, maybe it'll work for you and my 1 million followers, but there's no there's no real evidence there. It just it just happened to work. I'm I'm the lucky person who happened to work with X diet, X, X type of nutrition.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

It will be there will be evidence behind so, for example, with low carbohydrates and ketogenic diets for performance, there's evidence there. There's evidence to say it works. So the people who are in that camp are able to lean upon that evidence to say that it works.

SPEAKER_05 11:00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

The thing with evidence is that you have to be able to understand it, read it, see the data to be able to then interpret it and see whether the the conclusions from the study are actually relevant. So, like one of the keto studies, for example, like that they lean on as the godfather study for backing ketogenic diets, was done on five athletes. I think just five? Yeah. Wow. I think two didn't respond, one stayed the same, one was drastically better than all the rest. I can't remember what happened to the other one. But because the one that did so well did that well, the outcome of the study based on the data was ketogenic diets helped form.

unknown 11:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

You have to really dive into it to see if yes, there's evidence behind these things, and there'll be evidence in fasting. There's a lot of rodent-based data for fasting protocols, but you have to understand like testing a rat does not then suddenly mean that it will work in a human being. That's the whole idea around that continuum of testing. So some is evidence-based, and you are able to find evidence, it's just whether that is the correct interpretations of the data that's there. Gut health is probably the third one at the minute. Yeah, that's probably the big thing. Probiotics, yes or no? Depends who you talk to. Oh, but asking you. I think for me, probiotics is one of those where I don't necessarily see much of a downside to trying, but there isn't much to say that it's going to work. You have prebiotics as well. So probiotics is giving the bacteria. Prebiotics is food feeding your current bike bacteria. That's the difference. I think what you've got to remember of the probiotics is that the gut is this massive, humongous world of bacteria inside of your gut. If you think of it like think of it like a city, your gut is the city. Within that city, you've got certain places within it. And you know, you might have one part of the city that's really uh affluent, there's lots of nice buildings, it's really healthy, but then the other the other part of the city is not very healthy. Uh, and you are trying to put probiotics in to just deal with one small part of the city that's wrong, or there's things going wrong in that part of the city, but not understanding the rest of the ecosystem. So you're kind of feeding something that it might work, it might not, we don't really know. Um, but there is probably not much downside to it. The reality is the the attention to gut health is is a good one. Um, I think it is something that needs to be looked at and focused on, but you can do so through just a well-balanced diet, wide variety of nutrients, focus on your fiber intake, and then try a foot probiotic if you want to. I think with supplements that you've got to try to be mindful of is once you start something, if you perceive it to have worked, you will never come off that supplement. So if you try food-based things first, at least you can start to try to understand whether it's a food that has helped you rather than supplement.

SPEAKER_03 14:34

Yeah, it's that food first, yeah, but not food only. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

We'll leave it at the three is a round number.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

Just while we're while while you talked about um fasting, because we we have do have a question about fasting, so let's um let's just kind of stay there for a moment. So the question is, is there any place for intermittent fasting and endurance training diets? Thinking 16.8, 186, you know, what whatever whatever um ratio you uh you choose. Um can you do it on rest days or less intense weeks? Um and I think sort of part of the question or the second part of the question is um for cell repair.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

So um if we lean on the if we start on the cell repair side of things, we can debunk this quite quickly. This is autophagy, right? It's something that we you know we can, it's not something that we can switch on with fasting as much as you know if you go out and train, if you exercise, you cause cell death, you cause autophagy. It's to say it probably drastically more than what you would do when you're fasting. What happens when you fast, the longer that you do it, uh the eventually you're gonna eat again, and what you've just broken out is gonna come back anyway. So the like hard endurance training itself is a very strong stimulus for autophagy. Most of the sexy stuff that you might see online will come from like 72-hour fasts in rodents, not necessarily humans. Um there's basically no real evidence, you know, that withholding fuel to promote cell death uh gives endurance athletes any better adaptation or recovery. You should just eat it appropriately. Um, so autophagy is kind of a largely misunderstood. Um, it's something that's happening all the time. Yeah, you can think of it.

SPEAKER_03 16:54

It's something that's always happening.

SPEAKER_02 16:55

Yeah, you can think of it as just cellular housekeeping process that happens all the time.

SPEAKER_03 17:00

It's just yeah, think about your skin, skin, you know, peeling and that sort of stuff. It's that's autophagy.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Yeah, I think from you know, from a performance standpoint, if you're fasting in a period where you're training, then your glycogen depletion after hard training is not replenished, and you're gonna have a big problem then training again. Your inflammation is gonna be higher. Um, you know, and these kind of things where path people in the fasting world try to promote the fact that it reduces inflammation. Well, I'm like, well, if you train in that time and you don't replenish what you've lost, then you're gonna promote inflammation. So I think it's just fasting is a fine tool if you're looking to lose weight or promote fat loss because it will reduce your eating window, but it doesn't do anything fancy metabolically or cellularly, biochemically, it just reduces you see your eating window from that perspective. Um, and there really is no s no evidence to suggest that it's gonna work any better than just continually eating unfortunately.

SPEAKER_03 18:13

Cool, thank you. Nick, did you try to ask something before I uh went to that fasting bit? You're on mute.

SPEAKER_05 18:25

Yeah, I was going to and now I forgot what I was going to ask. It was uh something in the something that Stephen had brought up earlier, but it if it comes back and if we have time or if it's relevant, I'll I'll chime back in.

SPEAKER_03 18:44

Cool, bro. Okay, sorry. I wanted to stay on the fasting, but yeah. Um well, let's ask another one of your questions. So um describing that relationship between ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, and uh and leptin, this is the satiety uh hormone, how can we optimize them in our day-to-day diets?

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Um background for those who I guess maybe not sure what they are. Ghrelin and leptin are your appetite hormones uh that interact with the brain to sort of regulate energy intake and energy output. Okay, so you've got ghrelin, which is a short-term hormone that rises and falls in response to our meals. So it will rise before a meal you will eat and then it will drop. Um, it drives hunger and maybe food-seeking behavior, whereas leptin reflects more of a longer-term energy status, so it sits within your fat tissue, and that also helps regulate metabolism and appetite and thyroid function, things like that. So if you can imagine that if you lose body weight or body fat quite quickly, you lose leptin quite quickly, and the body will then um detect that and start to slow things down because it will see that as a threat to life. So when we were we had our cavemen ancestors, if they were losing body fat, then that was a threat to their life. They thought they weren't eating, therefore, the body would start to slow down and shut down, so it would burn less calories. And that's why part of one of the reasons it becomes more difficult to lose weight because you lose things like lectin from body fat um from a hormonal perspective. Um underfueling, poor sleep, things like that can chronically disrupt both of those hormones. So you can find with like poor sleep that you might have a situation where ghrelin might remain elevated. If you're in these periods of low energy availability, a lot of people in those states can report that they have a bit of volatility with their appetite. They can find that they're eating and then they're hungry after eating, and they're kind of in this mental battle between am I hungry or am I just being a little fatty about it? Yeah. So it's it it can play around with people. Um and obviously when leptin falls, other uh metabolic systems may start to reduce as well. Um what was the was it about optimizing? I mean, well, if you want to, from a macronutrients perspective, protein will have the best effect upon ghrelin, for example. Um generally speaking, we see in the research that protein based foods will maintain your satiety and your satiation and your hunger levels at a better level than your fats and sugar counterpart, fats and carbohydrate counterpart. Um So again, this is another reason why, if you are losing weight, protein is a very, very important macronutrient from a from that perspective. What was the optimization? It was optimization, wasn't it? So from a practical, maybe evidence-based perspective, optimization is not always about suppressing appetite. It may be about restoring stable signaling and making sure you have adequate total energy intake, sufficient carbohydrate availability, particularly around your sessions, regular meal timing, which might stabilize those ghrelin rhythms, prioritizing sleep. So if you're someone who is unfortunately in a job or a role where you have to do night shifts and there's lots of different work patterns that disrupt your sleep, that can become a bit problematic for people.

SPEAKER_05 23:13

And as far as you know, the blood tests that are available in both uh North America, Europe, and Asia, uh, I believe they can measure ghrelin and leptin, but they can't measure the cell signaling aspect of those two hormones. Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 23:34

I would probably say that is right, particularly from a commercial testing perspective. There may be things that they could do in a lab to understand it, and they might be looking at certain other signaling pathways that they can test that ghrelin and all ghrelin and leptin might be involved in, um, to then see. But your commercially available blood tests, probably not.

unknown 24:00

Right.

SPEAKER_03 24:00

Okay. Just um wanted to pick up on similar subject. You mentioned about protein. So to get let's kind of I think sort of take that question right down to kind of its basics. What you what what are we um what are the guidelines that we're talking about for um macronutrient intake for endurance athletes?

SPEAKER_02 24:27

Protein-wise, you were looking uh I think the guidance says at the moment 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo of body weight for protein. Uh per day, right? Per day, yeah. Um, my recommendation is for people to try to get to two grams per kilo, but that's can be quite a blanket approach. For some people, they might currently only be getting one to one point two grams per kilo. So to send them to two grams per kilo is uh a big jump. Um, so that's one thing to consider there. If you can get to two grams per kilo, great. There is evidence to say that going upwards towards three grams per kilo is also great. You've just got to be mindful of the more protein that you have, the less of the other macronutrients that you can have, particularly carbohydrates around your training session.

SPEAKER_03 25:16

And the more farts there will be.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

Yeah. Yeah. Uh and it comes out to quality as well, right? These a lot of people can have three grams per kilo um of protein and they're not necessarily getting it from the best sources, which can be a problematic as well.

SPEAKER_04 25:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:33

Lindsay?

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Um, what you said, Nick, is pretty much exactly where I was going to go. If I'm if I'm tracking calorie intake and and keeping my pro getting to that protein goal of 120-ish, then my my carb intake is so feels so low. And like Nick says, my my fat content is is high, even with sort of high quality. So then that that almost instinctively feels inconsistent with needing carbs for fueling for running. So just interested in your perspective there. And then if I can add a second question, then around quality. I can't really get that pro to that protein goal or not comfortably without protein powder. But I don't necessarily that doesn't necessarily sit comfortably with me every day, that kind of processed element. So interested in your thoughts there.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Uh so first of all, uh, this is just a case of individualization to the athlete. So there's you know, you've got a certain amount of calories to consume in a day on your expenditure, and you've got to play around with those those those numbers. Um so if you was to get to say 1.6 grams per kilo of protein, what what does that get you to? Roughly.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Uh well, um two grams gets me to 120.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

Okay, so you could go down to say 100 grams, and you would then be left with or eggs, so that's like 400 calories worth of protein. You could then have three grams of per kilo of um carbohydrates, which is somewhere around 200 grams carbohydrates, and then you might have 50 grams of fat. So you've got that's how you might put together your intake, and you just play around with that from there. Protein should be like your set target, so you set that. You could almost set your target for fat as well, and then you just play around with carbohydrates from that point, depending on whether you've got a really hard day or a really easy day. So you need to do to change your carb, to change your day-to-day variation up. Um, the second part to your question around the whey shakes. Um, so yes, they're processed, so baked beans. Um, but baked beans are packed full of fiber, they're packed full of protein, they're packed full of carbs. All that whey protein is is is you are deriving the whey from milk. So if you can get a high-quality protein shake that is potentially tested, maybe inform sport tested or cologne tested, something that's high quality and you know what's in it, then there is nothing wrong with having one of those every day. I have one of those every day. Like Nick mentioned earlier, it's not about it, it's food first, but it's not food only. If you're someone who is low on their protein intake and you have a budget of calories to attain an extra 20 grams of protein, if you're trying to do it from a salmon because you're feeling healthy, that's gonna cost you maybe 250 calories. A whey protein shape with 25 grams is gonna be 100 calories. Um, and if it makes you feel better about it, throw it in a smoothie. Put your whey protein in with some a little bit of milk, almond milk if you wanted to, or coconut milk, alternative milk if it makes you feel better, strawberries, banana, spinach, job done.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

You can't say that's not healthy just because he's got a whey protein shake in it. And it helps you get to your numbers.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

No problem.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

Okay. Um I just had dinner and I'm hungry again. Um so uh this is a question that um has come from somebody that I coach actually who um has just been tested low for iron, literally yesterday. Um what her question was what could potentially cause someone who eats a fair amount of meat, takes protein, shakes, etc. etc., to be so low in iron?

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Well, I think the first thing to acknowledge is that your iron intake from a food perspective is a drop in the ocean, really, compared to what potentially is causing you to have low iron. Um low iron is common in endurance athletes because you're training a lot and a lot of the time you don't have adequate recovery because we all like to run too fast and not recover on our SAs. Um obviously you couple that with not my athletes. Obviously, you couple that with some impairments in people's nutrition from an energy perspective, not necessarily just from an iron perspective. Um for those who maybe want a background on iron, like it's it's essential for oxygen transport and energy production. It's a key component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen around in the blood, delivers oxygen inside the muscle cell, carries mitochondria, allows the energy body to produce energy aerobically. If your status becomes low, then your body's ability to deliver oxygen is going to become compromised. So for endurance athletes, that may show up as reduced aerobic capacity, higher RPE, less power or pace, poor recovery, increased fatigue. She might just be finishing sessions and just be knackered all the time. And this can happen before before it's even reflected in iron being low, because it's actually ferritin most of the time that people are referring to when they say they have low iron. Um and iron deficient can iron deficiencies can impact performance long before somebody is anemic, uh, which is why ferritin is important to manage. Um, but it's very, very rare that it's about intake alone. Um, you can lose it in blood, you can lose it in sweat, you can lose it from internal bleeding, which sounds scary. But for example, if you are training very, very hard or intensely, then there could be ischemic issues in the gut because you're just sending muscle blood to the muscle, right? To try and keep moving. Um, I think if you want to optimize your nutrition to try to help. Now, if you are low on iron, I have to preface preface this with you need to have iron supplementation to get yourself right. Nutrition alone won't solve a low iron issue. From a nutrition perspective, however, if you want to stay on top of it and have a focus there, then we need to be thinking about iron-rich foods um to be consumed, but also we need to think about the bioavailability of those iron-rich foods. So, what a lot of people um maybe misunderstand is that when we consume a food, we don't just automatically derive the 500 calories that is set on the sheet. It's not how the body works. For example, if you had 500 calories worth of protein coming in, you probably only get in 400 calories out of that. Okay, because it takes a lot for the body to digest protein. From an iron perspective, you have maybe ones that are maybe a little bit more bioavailable than the other, which means that some iron will be absorbed better than others. Pairing your iron intake with a vitamin C in will will help. So if you have a vitamin C source alongside your iron source, that will help absorption, it helps deliver iron in. Try to take calcium away from when you have an iron-rich food. So if you're trying to optimize your iron intake, then you would keep your iron, sorry, you would keep your calcium away. Uh that's because iron and calcium compete for absorption. So if you put them both in at the same time, there's a fight going on, so you'll have a new a lack of both. Um so that's an important point around the absorption side, but also whilst we're on absorption as well, you've got the uh another hormone called hepsidin, which after training, hepsidin rises, which blunts iron. And obviously, if you're training quite a lot, hepsidin will remain elevated. If you're trying to put iron in, hepsidin will stop that from coming in. So you can see why, not only from the perspective of if you're in a high training load and it's difficult to match your energy needs and you're struggling to recover anyway from a from high volume, you couple that with the fact that hepsidin is constantly blocking the iron that's coming in, we kind of a bit of a problem with with iron. So it's something definitely to worth worth uh monitoring. And for females as well, if you're going through menstruation, it's important for you guys to think about that as well. Um, because you have more natural blood loss with that to consider. So try not to take it with tea, coffee, calcium, uh, and pair it with vitamin C sources and think of iron-rich foods to have, whether that be heme or non-heme, which is animal or non-animal.

SPEAKER_03 35:47

Daniela, did you want to ask something there?

SPEAKER_00 35:49

Or no, you touched on it right after I put up my hand. I was gonna say how ferritin levels drop during menstrual cycle. So I was just curious how that um if if that was true. Um, but yeah, I was I was sure it was.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Yeah, so hormones change quite a bit across the menstrual cycle. Um, ferritin can be one. One thing I would suggest is that if you are to have as a as a female, particularly if you're if you were menstruating normally, if you was to get your iron tested to make sure that you repeat that test at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 36:24

Okay. Any questions? Anyone? I've still got others. I'm just trying to find them. Anyone? No? Okay. Um this is a this is a really good one. This is especially um this is especially good for for ultra runners because bloating is something as ultrarunners experience quite a lot. Um so the question is discuss you know, can we discuss bloating and the foods or supplements that can potentially reduce it? Um and then when would you approach your primary care physician to discuss it? I guess that's kind of on a day-to-day basis. And then I uh for me, there's kind of part of it that I would want to sort of talk about in a uh in an endurance context, because you know, even during short race or shorter races like half marathons, I have had people go, Oh, yeah, I just I did that race and I felt really bloated. Um, even sometimes when I sort of go back and go, right, what did you eat in the few days before you race? None of it was particularly high fiber, you know, which is an obvious one I would always kind of come to. So anyway, bloating.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

Well, it's so bloating is is is common um in endurance. I think it's common in the in the world, right? It's rarely caused by a single food, it's usually quite multifactorial. Um, you sometimes people like to go down the routes of diagnosing themselves with issues, which is kind of a bit insulting to those who maybe are um suffering because it's very different to getting bloating compared to having the challenges of an IBS, for example. Um bloating, if we think about it from the lens of performance. If we think about fiber, fiber is an undigested part of a carbohydrate. So when we consume it, the body doesn't digest it very well, which means it passes through the digestive system pretty much whole, which then causes fermentation in the gut, which usually yields positive bacteria, which is obviously good for gut health. It will draw water to stool, so particularly insoluble fiber, will support in um regulating motility um and soften stool, so it's good for constipation. It will generally also slow the rate at which food leaves the stomach, so you will generally feel a little bit fuller for longer. But whilst them benefits, which there are, there are several benefits to fiber, and I implore you all to make sure that you get enough. Um, from a lens of performance, those three things that I just mentioned can be very counterproductive. If you're trying to carbload, for example, and you're consuming a high amount of fiber, then you are stressing the gut extortionately high because there is a lot of digestion process involved. I like to think of it like a funnel at the top, like if you've got the top funnel at the top, very wide. This is like your whole grains, your fruits, your vegetables, packed full of vitamins, uh, minerals, fiber, okay. In high amounts, there's a lot of digestion process that needs to occur in order for it to end at the end of that funnel as glucose. Everything that we consume ends as glucose. The body converts everything to glucose. That's its job, that's the fuel for the body. So if you've got a lot of things to break down, that takes time, it takes energy, and it stresses the gut. If you want to just provide rapid energy, then some sweets or a gel will be fructose and glucose, and all the body has to do is break off fructose, and you've got fruct glucose. Yeah. So there's very little digestion process involved in that process happening. So that re potentially then reduces the stress on the gut when you're trying to consume a lot of carbohydrates. But that's just the carbohydrate lens. As we mentioned before, with the protein side of things, there is a huge thermic effect of food with protein. So the thermic effect of food means the energy cost of digesting food. So it's somewhere around 20 to 30 percent. Which then means for every hundred calories that you consume of protein, you're gonna lose 20 to 30 calories in absorption energy cost. That cost is a stress on the gut, so can be problematic, people can be bloated. Um, and again, with fats that generally will sit in the stomach for quite a long time. There's a very small thermofective food with fat, so it's different, it affects the body in a different way. But you'll know yourself if you have high-fat foods, it generally makes you feel a little bit sluggish. Um, when it comes to bloating, it can be very, very individual, and it's something that you would have to map out to try to understand specifically what is causing your issues. Is it a FODMAP issue? Because one of the things that really, really bugs me is how people go and get a food intolerance test. So, food intolerance tests will usually you will go and you'll have your skin prodded and picked and pulled away at, and it will test for certain antibodies. Um, and they are IgE antibodies, which are not the same as IgA. What happens in the body is when you consume a food, your body will produce antibodies in order to digest that food, those IgEs. So if you eat a certain food in the days before the test, those antibodies will be present on the test. And the test will then flag that as your intolerant to that food. So, as we know, with everybody who goes for an intolerance test, they come away allergic to wheat, gluten, and barley, because it's in everything, right? So there's like there's loads of people walking down the gluten-free aisle and they're like, I'm sick to death of this. But it they come off when they go to that gluten-free diet, that wheat-free diet, they effectively are putting themselves on an elimination diet, which is what you would do to treat IBS, because you are going to reduce things that would cause gas and bloating from your diet. But you've just you've not done anything fancy there, you've just eliminated foods. And the whole point of an elimination diet is for you to eliminate foods out and slowly bring them back in one by one until you find a trigger. So if you eventually find a trigger that might be milk, for example, that causes a digestive issue, you then know that potentially could be my issue. Yeah. So when you should see a GP is large. Probably if you have persistent bolting independent of your training load, if there is any maybe unintentional weight loss, even going back to iron, iron deficiencies, chronic fatigue, diarrhea, constipation. If you're having issues through the night, if you see any blood, mucus, or major changes in your your usual bowel habits, usually that would be a medical situation to be in. And really importantly as well, like from your guys' perspective, I am happy as a practitioner to be able to support people from a performance perspective around the potential medical um issues when it comes to uh IBS or any other issue. But it is not my job to treat that with nutrition. That would be a dietitian's job. And it's very, very important that because I've had it where people come to me with issues around IBS and they want me to treat it with nutrition, and I have said no. And they then have their backup and say, Well, my PT did it. Why can't you? It's very important you do not go to a PT for a medical issue. I've worked with IBS athletes in the past, and it's fine for me to be able to give guidance to help them from a nutritional perspective for their performance, but I can't say to them, right, we are now going to do X, Y, and Z to treat this symptom, and we're going to play around with this, this, and this for that. So it's just something to think about. Um interventions that maybe might help would be to reduce your fiber intake around your training windows, so reduce that digestive stress. So rather than having anything that maybe is sitting heavy or is a whole grain, you might remove to a more refined grain. So instead of brown, you've got for the white. Just keep it real simple. If you're usually someone who has alts for breakfast and you're struggling with that, then move to a cereal-based breakfast, make it a little bit less fiber. Just simplify it. Um and play around with it as well. Find what works for you. Because ultimately it's all about what works for you. It doesn't matter whether I tell you to have a bagel and jam or somebody else tells you to have sourdough and eggs. If sourdough and eggs works for you and you're still able to train well, great, carry on with that. But if you're having issues with that, maybe try the bagel and the jam.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

Great. Thank you, Steve. Um, three more questions we've got left, unless anybody wants to jump in with any more. Um, you've given us some wide range of um answers and information tonight, which is what these hot seats are all about. So, what I wanted to do was kind of bring all this together and say, like an ask, rather, on a kind of a day-to-day basis, how can we kind of simply put all this together to end up with a plate of food?

SPEAKER_02 47:23

So, my my overarching thing that I always finish with when I'm doing say a seminar or anything, is to give the quote that nutrition is quite simply about eating a well-balanced diet that meets your energy needs on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of nutrients. That's as simple as nutrition has to be. Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise around that, and there are diet trends and extremes. What those diet trends and extremes fail to realize is that we've took the benefits of all of them and put them all together, we probably have the most optimal human being, which is just simply taking. Let's take the benefits of red meat from the carnivore coal. Great, let's take them. Let's take the benefits of plant-based foods from the plant-based great, let's take them. Let's take stuff from paleo, let's implement them. So it's about a above everything, finding what works for you. I drive it home all the time because what might work for Daniela might not work for Nick. Okay. And if you both try to do the same thing, one of you might succeed and the other might not. And one of you will feel good and the other won't. Basic things for you to think about is we want whole grain-based carbohydrates to take up the majority of a carbohydrate intake. We would then want to use maybe more of a refined carbohydrate in and around your training session. So in the hours before and afterwards, you would reduce that fiber intake, maybe reduce your protein intake, increase your refined carbohydrate intake. Protein can stay stable across every day. Fats can stay relatively stable across every day. If I was to tell you to have 50 grams of fat, I would rather you do that through salmon, nuts, seeds, and olive oil than I would from donuts, pizza, and bacon. Not that you can't have them, but there's better ways of going about it. Um, you can use the method of say 321. So there's a very simple method of saying three grams of carbohydrates per kilo of body weight, two grams per kilo of body weight protein, one gram per kilo of body weight for fats. If that falls outside of your calorie demand, so if that's too much, what you can do is you could potentially, if you feel like your carbohydrates are too low, then reduce your fats because there are nine calories per gram of fat. There is only four calories per gram of protein and carbs. So if you have 10 grams of if you reduce 10 grams of fat, you will save yourself 90 calories. If you reduce 10 grams of protein, you will only save yourself 40 calories. That's the difference. So 321 is a nice method. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis would be very different, depends how you've how you eat and how you train and when you train. But usually what I would do with athletes, if it's at that basic level, would be let's implement a structure that is breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. And then beyond that, it's fueling. How do we fuel a session? Okay, but sometimes people are training first thing in the morning, so breakfast becomes that post-workout. Yeah, so then it's like, okay, so that might be post-workout, and then we might be lunch, snack, dinner, snack, for example. If you can get three or four solid good meals into your day, whatever you do with the rest of it can be focused on how you feel you're training. And it can be that simple. I'll I'll I'll stop there just in case you've got any more big questions and stuff, but there are other principles that we can look at.

SPEAKER_03 51:22

Yeah, I was gonna say one of the I think most simple ways I think of seeing uh implementing that 321 that I've seen, uh, is it is it perform performance nutrition guidelines of um a palm size, uh was it yeah, handful size of carbohydrate, a thumb size of fat, and a fist size of protein, something on the movement?

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Yeah, so there's like a hand-based protocol, basically, um, which you can find on online to help you guide you in terms of portion control. There is also performance plates that you can look at. So, performance plates, if you've not seen them, is we'll tell you what a low, a medium, and a hard day might look like from a plate. So, usually a low would be protein, vegetables, fats, medium would be proteins, starches, vegetables, and then a high carb would be lots of starches, some vegetables, some protein. So you're just increasing the starches, which is just you your breads, your pastas, things like that, to attain your carbohydrates. So you're just increasing the carbohydrate total of your plate. Um, yeah, yeah, cool.

SPEAKER_03 52:43

And then uh next question was it was for me, but it's gonna include you as well, really, because the question is what would be the one to two most essential training or recovery advice uh or advice is to give your athletes, and one to two most essential training or recovery advice to take away. One of those is gonna be nutrition, massive, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

I think obviously nutrition is uh my number one thing, right? But I will concede it to sleep. Sleep is your biggest performance enhancing tool that you're gonna have. Do everything that you possibly can in order to get a good sleep. And if you're not sleeping well, figure out how you can improve that sleep. That's how you're gonna get the most out of your recovery. I've worked with people in the past, so for example, at the Grand Slams in the tennis, you've got it on the moment Australian Open, they'll play night matches. Some of them night matches might go on until two in the morning. But what do you do with that athlete at that point? Do you refuel them with a hundred grams of carbohydrates and then send them off to bed? Or do you just allow them to go to bed? For some of them, they can probably eat, for others, they probably can't. And it's very difficult to manage that situation because they've got to go to sleep. The elite, the professional athletes that I work with, most of them have time in their day to nap. Great luxury for them, right? For us, not so much because we've got a job. We work, but for them, that's their job. So there's no getting up at six o'clock and going for the going to do a run anywhere or anything like that. None of that. It's wake up at nine o'clock, lounge around, go and do the session, come back, have a nap, have some food, go out and do another session. That's their job. So I have to drive home how trying to optimize sleep as much as you can. Um, from a nutrition perspective, it's about fueling for the work that has been required of you. So your hard sessions are going to require carbohydrates. If you can go somewhere in and around 0.8 to 1 gram per kilo either side of a hard session of carbohydrates, you'll be in a good place to perform and recover. Yeah. Take advantage of that post-exercise window because your muscle will be sensitized to your ability to take up those carbohydrates. Keeping it very, very simple. You've got proteins that come and sit on a muscle membrane and act like insulin does. So when you consume foods in the immediate aftermath after training, carbohydrates in particular, then they will be fed into the muscle much more effectively than if you delay it. So that's a big one for the for the recovery side of things.

SPEAKER_03 55:40

Um, I mean, I'm trying to think of another one. But from from my perspective, while you're thinking, those are the two for me as well. It's sleep and recovery. And I know for a lot of people sleep is not a lot of people, but yeah, for some people, sleep is not easy. Um, you know, stress, the working day, family, all that kind of stuff can be, you know, keep us up at night. So I do get it. Trust me, I do. Um, you know, kids, if you've got young kids, Steve, you're uh very in the thick of it at the moment, aren't you? You're right in the uh you're writing the hard bit. Um, so I do get all that side of it. Um, but if you know when I hear some saying, oh, you know, I'm not sleeping very well, I'm like, okay, well, what were you doing until one in the morning? Oh, I was fucking scrolling on my phone. Get off your fucking phone and leave it downstairs on charge instead of bringing it to bed with you. That would that change my life.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

I think it's you know, there's a really good way of looking at this in the sense that training has not evolved all that much in the last 20 odd years. The principles are the same, but a lot of things come and go, and a lot of methodologies come in, and different ways in which you're training, they all pretty much are the same thing. The difference now is that athletes are largely training in order to progress and feel good and race well, rather than trying to train and feel absolutely knackered all the time. Because that was the the mindset was I should be sore, I should be tired, I need to train more. And the reality is they got in a lot of easy training because they simply couldn't train harder, they were exhausted, but ultimately they just put themselves in the bin. And nowadays we have so much access to information and tools, and coaches have a big understanding of how to recover. It's hard as the athlete to accept that you need to recover because you constantly feel like you need to train to get better. But training is just you knocking on the door. Recovery decides whether you're going to get better, it decides if someone's going to answer the door. So that can be sleep, it can be nutrition, it might be hydration, all these things.

SPEAKER_03 58:11

So there's a lot that can be said for literally just sitting down for five minutes after you've done your run. You know, stuff like that. It's it's quite amazing, though those little things. They don't have to be big, you know, massive, you know, sitting there in a in a um pair of those Norma Tech compression boots. You know, I've got those, I love them, but you know, by the time you've spent five minutes setting up and getting in, you could have just sat down.

SPEAKER_02 58:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:40

With the chocolate milkshake.

SPEAKER_02 58:42

I say too, I do some presentations to the youth guys, and I have a slide on there around the biggest predictor of success, and the one thing that's correlated the most to athletic potential and success over time is consistency. Those who can remain consistent, train the most, and do the most hours will therefore have a more chance of being successful. And what are the two things that impair consistency the most? Illness, injury. And both of those things will occur when you don't recover well. If you're constantly in a state where you're not recover replenishing your nutritional status, then your exposure to infection risk will go up. If you don't sleep well, your exposure to that will go up. It is 10x times higher to where you'll get an injury if you've got bad sleep.

SPEAKER_04 59:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:41

Now getting a good sleep, I'm conscious of time, but getting a good sleep is not necessarily just about hours. It's about quality too. And there's good evidence that I've seen where they what they do is they bring people into the lab and they put them in the sleep monitors and monitor the sleep with all the probes on the head. And then what they do is after the after they've done their sleep and they come out is they tell the participants. They'll take a group of participants and they'll say, You had a bad sleep. And they'll take another group of participants and they'll say, You had a good sleep. And then they'll get them to do a cognitive-based test. Those who are told that they had a good sleep do better on the test than those who are told that they did badly, regardless of the sleep quality. And it tells you that the perception in which you how good of a sleep you get is very, very important, as much as maybe quality is important, and then hours too. Because we can all sit there and say that you know, eight hours is the optimal, and that's what we need to aim for. But if you can't physically get that, then you're creating a rod for your own back as a coach because the person is just not going to do anything that they are you ask them to do because they'll just think, oh, well, I can't sleep, so what's the point? Reality is if you can get six hours sleep, do whatever you can to make those six hours as effective as you can.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:07

And it's quite interesting what you're saying about that study because what do we all have on our wrists that tell us if we've slept good or not, Lindy? Watches. And that's why every morning when I wake up, I mean, I've got I've got an evening report on here now. I never look at it, I need to turn it off. I keep forgetting. Um, yeah, I don't want to fucking read a report when I wake up in the morning. So I just ask myself, you know, waddle downstairs, stick the kettle on. How do I feel? Yeah, feel good or I don't feel good, you know, that was a good sleep or it wasn't a good sleep. And then I'll see what my watch says. And if it agrees, great. If it doesn't, great. I don't care. I know how I felt, and I think that's a really good takeaway because if you absolutely go by what your watch is telling you all the time, and it's like, oh, you slept crap. Well, yeah, you're gonna that's what you're gonna think, that's what you're gonna believe, and then the rest of the days shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:06

So yeah, I think you've got to let the data you're sorry, you don't let the data inform you. You've got to inform the data.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:15

Yeah, um, yeah, yeah, and this is why I ask for feedback every week with the uh with the check-in forms. Um, last one, really quick one, and it's more of a I know the answer. Have you solved the riddle of stitches yet?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:32

No, no, no. No, so there is somebody I can't remember his name. I'm gonna try and get his uh his name up, who is very close to trying to understand it. Um, I think it might be Mr. Morton, but if you wanted to look at the research, it's ETAP, so exercise-related transient abdominal pain. There's a good paper on it, commonly reported referred to as a stitch. We don't particularly know what it is in the same ways. We don't particularly know what causes cramping. Um, there is from a stitcher's perspective, there could be so many different risk mechanisms involved in this. I'm just looking at the abstract here. You've got potential of ischemia to the diaphragm, stress on the visceral ligaments that attach to the abdominal organ, GI ischemia, cramping in the abdominal musculature, ischemic pain from the compression of the celiac artery. So I could go on forever and ever. It's very hard to understand.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:40

Because a lot of people attribute it to oh, I ate too close to exercising. I mean, sometimes I get a stitch without even moving.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:51

I have a personal issue with this, and I only get it when I do Olympic distance triathlons where you've got to run 10k. I don't get it on a half iron man where it's a half marathon, I don't get it on an iron man where it's a marathon. It's something to do with intensity and the breathing control for me. I think I've tried everything. I've tried drinking less, I've tried drinking more, I've tried gelling less, I've tried gelling more, I've tried everything. But for whatever reason, then on that 10k, somewhere around 7k, and it hits me. And I just can't stop getting one. So if anybody ever comes up with a reason, please let me know.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:34

Good stuff, Steve. Thank you so much. Um, everybody who's attended, thank you so much. I hope you've taken away uh plenty from that. And um I will plug Steve's services, he is great. So if you are looking to optimize your performance, then uh you know, through nutrition, and we've formed formidable partnerships with various athletes, haven't we? Sam recently, um Chris Chaplin who's on the call at the moment, um, yeah, and and and others as well. So give him a shout.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:08

Yeah, anybody who needs anything, you know where I am. Obviously, in the group's part of Nick's Stable of Athletes. So if you need anything, let me know. I've also got the newsletter, which you'll find on uh my Instagram, which goes out every Monday. So I've actually got a full month's worth of recovery-based content coming in February. So if you're interested in that, it should be good, hopefully.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:34

Winrow performance on um Instagram. Yes. Cool. Tuesday, thanks everyone. Thanks everyone. Thanks, everyone. Hello everyone. Bye, bye.