Shauna’s Nutrition Journey

Improving your performance and hitting more PRs is more than just spending more time in the gym.  It is also about being dialed in…in the kitchen!

The forgotten element to performance is nutrition.  You can train hard and make gains to a point, especially in the beginning, but unless you start addressing your nutrition, your training will only get you so far.

I have an amazing story for you from one of my clients who exemplifies this perfectly.  Shauna’s story shows how changing up what you put in your body will assist you in achieving the goals and PRs you are working towards…or maybe have been unsuccessfully working towards for years.

Shauna had been participating in CrossFit for a couple years prior to choosing to work with me.  And more importantly, COMMITTING to work with me.  To truly see the changes, it requires an all-in commitment, at least for a period of time.

As any CrossFit athlete does, Shauna had made progress in her first couple years as the body is learning to move again.  The muscles are turning on, the body is learning movement patterns, and strength gains come quickly due to the muscles and nerves gaining the new movement patterns.

Over time, this progress slows down and is harder to come by.  Eventually, the progress hits a plateau.  Shauna experienced just that.  It got to the point that she wasn’t making gains in the gym or on the scale, which was important to her.

She was frustrated and new she had to change something.  She decided to see what nutritional changes would do for her.

When Shauna and I first met, she was making the same mistake many athletes do.  She was eating healthy…to a detriment.  She was not taking in enough calories.  First things first, I adjusted the amount of food she was eating.  She needed to eat significantly MORE than she had been.  Yes, you heard that right.  I was having her eat more food, not less.

Food is essentially the fuel for our body.  Just like your vehicle requires fuel to function, your body does as well.  Don’t give your body the fuel it needs and it will not function to its potential.

Within weeks, she was reporting more energy in her workouts AND reporting she was dropping pounds.  The scale is not the end-all-be-all for athletes, but it can be helpful, especially in the beginning.

And the improvements kept coming.

In the past year, Shauna has seen…

…a 36# loss in body fat.

…a 15% loss in body fat percentage.

…an increase of 25# in her snatch.

…an increase of 25# in her clean and jerk.

…a decrease of 1:00 in her 400m run time.

…a decrease of over 2:00 in her 1-mile run time.

…an ability to now do pull ups and handstand push ups without assistance.