Recently I was asked to join a Program Advisory Committee for the Okanagan College Human Kinetics program by my friend Dr. Greg DuManoir. You may know Greg from Okanagan College as a professor. Or maybe you attended the Okanagan Strength & Conditioning Conference which Greg and I co-host. It could also be that you've crossed paths with Greg at Okanagan Peak Performance Inc where he trains. This is an exciting invitation as it allows us to provide feedback to the academic world as to what their graduates are doing really well at when they enter the job force. We are also able to give insights into skill sets that would benefit students once they begin their careers. And we are also able to share the trends that we are observing with respect to training in the post-rehabiliation, weight loss and athletic development fields. But that's not the real topic I'm going to cover in this post. Instead it has a nutritional theme which came to me during our first meeting yesterday. As with all meetings, our hosts at Okanagan College were gracious in offering us a variety of hot beverages as well as cold drinks in the form of juice boxes. It was at this point in the meeting that I leaned over to Greg and thanked him for the idea for my next blog article :) To be fair I know Greg wasn't the one who made the drink selection for the meeting and I'm just giving him a hard time. But it reminds me of a conference I attended in Seattle with Kayla last year. The lunch at this 'fitness' conference included cookies, potato chips and cans of pop. 'Now, hold on' you're probably thinking, 'there's no way juice boxes can be lumped in the same category as the...

So we all know the importance of the pre-workout meal. Well, maybe I'm jumping the gun. I should say that I hope we all know the importance of the pre-workout meal.And I should qualify the position I'm coming from on this topic. This is based upon training for performance and athletic excellence. The reason I make the distinction is that there is a growing movement and popularity for intermittent fasting when it comes to weight loss and body composition changes. I'm not referring to this type of goal.When it comes to pre-workout nutrition for a performance goal wer're looking to hydrate and top up the body's supply of glycogen. Glycogen is the body's stored form of carbohydrate which can be found in the muscle and liver. If we have some carbs before training this can help 'spare' muscle glycogen or minimize the depletion of this energy source.And while carbs are our best source to accomplish this we want to make sure to keep the pre-workout levels of fats and protein a little lower. This may seem contrary to what you'll see many 'meat heads' doing as they suck on a protein shake while warming up on the treadmill. Don't follow this lead. Too much protein slows gastric emptying and impairs performance.But while we hear all the time how important it is to eat before training, how important is it really? How much does it impact your performance? Can one meal really make a difference?Consider the following session I had with a client this week. This client wears a heart rate monitor while training and of course we are monitoring loads, recovery times and outputs on energy system work. And for this particular workout the client had not had a pre-workout meal.Here's what happened.When we got to some of the conditioning sets...