The GAA Pre-Season Nutrition Checklist
The off-season has been and gone.
And whether you used it as a break or as a chance to knuckle down, you know that the new sporting season is on the horizon.
This might bring a feeling of fear around the tough gruelling sessions to come.
It may also (hopefully) bring a feeling of excitement to get back into some structured training.
Either way, there are some unique challenges that can come about during pre-season for GAA players, and I want to give some key points to ensure your nutrition is supporting your efforts during that time.
I've put together a checklist that will help you do just that.
If you tick each of these boxes, you're likely to be in a much better spot come the start of the season.
1. Address Your Body Composition Goals
The best time to have worked on optimising your body composition was probably during the off-season, where you weren't having to worry about fuelling for team training and matches, and could simply focus on getting that extra layer of body fat off or getting that extra bit of muscle on.
If you did that, fair play to you.
But if you didn't, the second best time is the pre-season.
Whilst you might have the concerns of fuelling some tough training sessions, you don't have the same worry of having to fuel match performance, which gives you some wiggle room.
And even if it means having a bit of a tougher pre-season, if it means you end up going into the season lean and not having to worry about body composition during the competitive part of the year, it's a trade-off you'll probably be willing to take.
I've discussed the principles and strategies around how to drop body fat and gain muscle as an athlete in-depth elsewhere.
But as a brief overview, the main focus will be on getting your calorie intake to a point where you are dropping bodyweight steadily without it being so much that it's overly affecting your performance and recovery, or gaining muscle steadily without it being so much as to lead to excess fat gain.
That's usually somewhere in the range of a 0.5-1.5% bodyweight loss per week for fat loss, and 1-2% of body weight gain per month in the case of muscle gain.
You'll then want to ensure the macronutrient breakdown of those calories is appropriate, aiming for about 2g of protein per kg bodyweight in order to facilitate recovery and preserve or build muscle, with carbs and fats making up the remainder of the calories, in amounts that will depend on the intensity and duration of training you're doing, and preference.
Further supporting these goals through adequate intakes of fibre and micronutrients, hydration, and supplementation will help.
Lifestyle factors like sleep, your home/work environment, and stress management will also play a big role in your ability to sustain your nutritional efforts.
2. Supply Your Energy Demands
I mentioned the concerns you might have around fuelling your tough pre-season sessions and recovering off the back of them.
If you have a body composition goal of getting leaner, you'll worry that you'll either have to sacrifice performance in these sessions because you're trying to sustain a calorie deficit, or that you'll have to sacrifice your fat-loss goals in order to fuel for those sessions.
Even if you don't have a fat loss goal, you might still have concerns around trying to eat enough to fuel those sessions whilst avoiding body fat gain.
In either case, the first priority will be to have your average calorie intake in an appropriate place for your goals.
But a key strategy that most athletes don't consider is that you can alter your supply of calories based on that day's demands.
I'm not advising that you try to calculate exact numbers of how many calories you're burning each day using a smart watch or something similar, and trying to match that exactly - that's overly complicated, and will likely be inaccurate anyway.
Instead, a simple method I use with my clients is to have a Training Day calorie target and a Non-Training Day target.
The idea here is to take your usual average daily calorie target, and place your non-training day target below that, and place your training day target above it, aiming to have these average out across the week to match close to that of your initial target.
For example, if you were aiming to hit (on average) 2300 kcal daily in pursuit of your fat-loss goals, your Non-Training Day intake might be around 2100 kcal, and your Training Day intake might be 2500 kcal.
Because the average for the week is roughly the same as if you were hitting 2300 kcal each day, your weight-loss across a period of weeks should be the same.
The difference being that in the case where you've allotted your intake based on that day's training, you're going to have more fuel on the days it's needed most, and get your fat-loss on the days you don't need as much fuel.
Of course there can be some downsides to this approach, mainly where hunger can increase on the non-training days due to the lower intake, so the extent to which the intake differs day-to-day (or your ability to use this approach at all) could be limited by this.
Still, there are strategies you can implement to account for this, like increasing your fibre intake on non-training days for example, so this approach is very much worth considering if you've not considered it before.
3. Start Building Long-Term Health Habits
There are some elements of nutrition that don't have a noticeable impact in the short-term.
Not having that immediate positive feedback makes it harder to implement them.
But if you neglect them, you miss out on the long-term benefits.
Here I'm referring to things like sufficient fibre intake, eating enough fruit and vegetables, and health supplementation.
It could also include lifestyle considerations like sleep, hydration, meal prep, and cooking skills among others.
In the thick of the season, when training ramps up and matches start coming thick and fast, the last thing on your mind is starting to build new habits on top of what you're already doing.
For that reason, starting to get these in place during the pre-season will help them become a natural part of your lifestyle, giving you a better chance at sustaining them through the season, and reaping the continued benefits to health, immunity, recovery, and performance as a result.
4. Practice In-Season Protocols
As with the long-term health habits, it can be difficult to start implementing new nutritional strategies in the thick of the season.
The reduced time and headspace are factors.
But an additional factor is not wanting to implement something that risks messing up your performance when it matters most.
For example, you might not want to start adding in a new pre-performance supplement before a big match, since you can't be 100% sure what effect it's going to have for you, having not tried it before.
For this reason, the pre-season can be a great time to start practising the nutritional strategies you hope to be able to have as tools in your box come the in-season period.
This could include carb-loading, optimising your pre-training/pre-match meal, using intra-performance nutrition, sports drinks and/or energy gels, and experimenting with supplements.
For example, you might have a big training session coming up on a Sunday morning, and whilst you usually wouldn't need to carb-load for it, you could use it as an opportunity to practise how you'll carb-load for matches when they come around.
In practising these, I'd recommend taking note of any struggles, benefits, and downsides you experience, so that they can inform your future efforts in implementing them.
5. Create a Transition Plan
It's one thing having a great pre-season where you get super lean, fuel like a champion, and look after your health and recovery.
It's another thing keeping that going through the season.
This is usually because the focus and demands of these two separate times of year differ.
The in-season brings unique challenges, mainly around managing the demands of high loads of training and playing, along with the other life demands that can come with the summer months - e.g. kids being off school, more social occasions, and summer holidays.
That means that the same plan you had through the winter months won't likely work when it comes to summer sport.
But if you go into that period prepared, you stand a better chance of having a productive transition, where you take the work you've been doing in the off-season, and continue to bring in key elements of that into the season, whilst allowing flexibility with certain other aspects.
That could look like continuing to monitor your calorie intake, but switching the focus from body composition improvement towards fuelling, recovery, and body composition maintenance.
It might look like transitioning from experimenting with your fuelling for training to building consistency with an approach that you're repeating for each session.
Or it might even mean taking into account things like how much focus and effort you're willing to put into nutrition in general, whether that is allowing more flexibility having spent the off-season knuckling down on it, or on the other end, stepping things up a notch in pursuit of supporting the increased demands on the body.
To summarise, the pre-season presents an opportunity to make necessary body composition improvements given the decreased performance demands compared to in-season, whilst still requiring fuelling and recovery provisions for the tough pre-season sessions.
It also presents an opportunity to start building long-term health habits, and practising in-season nutrition strategies.
Creating a plan for transition between the pre-season and in-season will then improve your chances of maintaining the progress and habits you’ve built, allowing you to achieve your potential for the season.
Article Written By Conor O’Neill
P.s. You can find out more about Performance Nutrition Coaching HERE.