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Performance Nutrition

Our aim is to Unleash the Power of Food to ensure the 8000 meals every athlete eats every four years reduces the risk of injury and illness, facilitates the adaptive response to training and enhances competition performance.

Why is there a Performance Nutrition team at the UK Sports Institute (UKSI)?

Many athletes plan their lives in four year cycles aiming for that next world championship or Olympic Games. During this time, they will compete anywhere between 20-100 times, train 2000-4000 times depending on their sport, and eat or drink 8000 times.

Every single one of those 8000 eating or drinking moments will change the biochemistry of the body, sometimes subtly sometimes dramatically. If an athlete can accumulate the effects of those changes to their biochemistry they can reduce the risk of injury and illness, facilitate the adaptation to training and enhance their performance.

Anti-Doping

Clean sport is something that everyone at the UK Sports Institute is passionate about, and we want to be able to watch athletes do absolutely amazing things whilst knowing they’re clean and they’re doing it fairly.

Visit our Anti-Doping page to learn more about our commitment to clean sport. You can also access helpful information from UKAD, which includes information and guidelines on protecting your sport.

The Aims of our Sports Nutritionists

We aim to:

  • Provide world leading Performance

  • Nutrition Support to British Olympic sports and English National Sport.

  • Influence more meals for more athletes.

  • Set the standard for Performance Nutrition in the UK.

  • Ensure the UK Sports Institute is the most effective place to be a performance nutritionist and be

  • Greater than the Sum of our Parts.

  • How does Performance Nutrition have a performance impact?

Our Approach to Sports Nutrition for Elite Athletes

We take a Performance Backwards approach to the work we do by first understanding what it takes to win for the sport and athlete and then trying to match the appropriate nutrition intervention to the determinants of performance.

This may be influencing hypertrophy in a strength athlete by looking at protein intake, reducing bone stress injury in an endurance athlete by looking at energy availability or working with a hotel to get the right food for athletes when they go off to compete.

While we are always looking to change the biochemistry of the body we do this by changing the food behaviour of an athlete. To do this we embed our fully qualified practitioners in the sports we support so they can be in the training environment, build effective relationships and ultimately influence the food choices of an athlete.

To support this, we aim to be Greater than the Sum of our Parts so that a sport may see one practitioner, but have access to 22 brains. Alongside this we have developed a partnership program with some of the leading sports nutrition companies so we can provide quality assured, evidence based products to our athletes.

To find out more about sports nutrition and the impact it can have on athlete performance, get in touch with us today.