I just spend the last couple days helping out at a hockey skills camp in Ottawa, Canada. Now that I’m back, I’d like to share some observations with you.
The key thing that I noted from this years camp is that the athlete with the lowest body fat is rarely the athlete with the best conditioning. In fact, if you were to rank the athletes I was working with last weekend, the leanest most shredded athlete wouldn’t have even been in the top three for conditioning.
It is true that you can have incredible conditioning, whether it is aerobic or anaerobic, and not be “shredded”.
Now, I’m not saying that body composition isn’t important in sports. If you take the really well conditioned athlete and melt twenty pounds of fat off him or her, they become an even better athlete. They will still be highly conditioned, only now they will have less weight that they have to move around with them.
That’s were nutrition comes into play. Nutrition is the key to losing body fat, especially for highly trained athletes.
If you are already training for two or three hours a day on almost every day of the week, adding in some more exercise with the hopes of losing weight may just not be possible and will definitely not be effective.
While most people understand the importance of keeping a workout log, I think that keeping a nutrition log is far more important for an anyone who is trying to lose some fat.
Just like with a workout log, a nutrition log allows you to look back on the last week, month or year and really examine what worked for you and what didn’t work for you. It allows you to quickly identify why you had stalls in progress or dips in performance.
Bottom line: If you are trying to lose weight but are not keeping a nutrition log, you are making the process a hundred times harder then it needs to be. Keep a log and you will be able to lose fat without compromising any of your conditioning or performance.
