It’s Saturday morning. You’re walking up to the scale, ready to weigh in for the tournament. You step on, make it, then speed walk back to your bag to grab your cooler and start eating.

What are you eating first?

When you packed your cooler, were you thinking about what you need to eat to gain your energy back in time to wrestle?

Most of us have a general idea on food that gives us quick energy and food that takes a little longer. Either that or we pack our cooler with whatever sounded good the night before and let our body sort out the mess in the two hours between weigh-ins and wrestling. Regardless of whichever category you fall under, there is a specific formula for immediate post weigh-in eating that will give you the right type of energy you need all day long for tournaments.

First, we need to keep in mind that different types of food digest at different rates. This is key when it comes to eating for performance, especially during competition. There are three components to this formula: immediate energy, energy volume, and long-term energy.

When you are training, do you know what how to truly maximize your workouts by the timing and types of foods you eat?

Do you know what types of food you should be eating based off the intensity of your workouts?

Unless you’re a nutritionist, most of us are unsure how to eat strategically to maximize performance or have a general idea but are unaware how to time different types of foods to truly get the most out of your workouts. The key to understanding these concepts comes down to three things: heart rate ranges, digestion timing, and energy metabolism.

When you talk to people about cutting weight, you hear a ton of different stories about all the hardest weight drops they ever had to make. You hear about how difficult it was, how far they had to push themselves, and the mental games they had to play. For anyone who has had to cut weight before, you can relate. Eating very little for several days on end while pushing your body to make it through workout after workout multiple times a day in full sweats and multiple layers of clothing. At some point in every wrestler’s career, we’ve done it this way a few times. If you are STILL doing it this way, there is a much better way that most of the elite level wrestlers as well as MMA fighters utilize.

When you reflect on a competition and think about what work needs to be done, where do you place your focus? Do you typically look at the weak points of your game and the places where you got scored on, or do you reflect on what your strengths are and what you were scoring points with?