With all the information out there about sports nutrition and different diets that will supposedly increase athletic performance, it can be overwhelming to know exactly what’s important to focus on when designing your own optimal climbing diet.  However, while performance oriented nutrition is a rather complicated topic and the diet that works for one athlete may not for another, there are some basic principles that all climbers should keep in mind when working out their ideal performance diet.

To help clarify these basic principles of sports nutrition, here’s an article by Brian Rigby of Climbing Nutrition that lays out the goals of sports nutrition by depicting them as a pyramid and then walks you through each of the pyramid’s tiers describing their relative importance.

“In this article, I’ve chosen to represent the steps of good sports nutrition as a pyramid. I chose this shape for two reasons:”

1. It’s easy to see how each tier from bottom to top gives relatively less benefit in accordance to the sort of performance gain one should expect at each stage. You gain a lot more from eating adequate calories and timing your meals well than you do from dialing in your macro goals and periodizing your nutrition.

2. It demonstrates how each tier builds upon the tier(s) before it. There’s no point in making macro goals if you’re not going to bother eating enough calories to begin with.” – Brian Rigby

Tiers of the Sports Nutrition Pyramid:

While Brian describes each of these tiers’ importance in sports nutrition in great detail, his main point in designing this graphic is to both illustrate the relative importance of each goal and show how each one builds upon the next.  In other words, Rigby feels that getting enough calories to fuel your climbing is the single most important feature of good sports nutrition.  According to him, if that goal hasn’t been met then there is no point worrying about nutrient timing or macro nutrient ratios.

If you are new to the idea of tweaking your diet to maximize climbing performance, this article (as well as the rest of Rigby website) is a great place to start.  Check out the full article by clicking through below.

Other Sports Nutrition Resources:

Additionally, if you are interested in learning more about how to better fuel your climbing, check out our Nutrition Guide by Aicacia Young or set up a Nutrition Consulting session with TrainingBeta’s own Neely Quinn.  With either option you will learn a ton about how tweaking your diet can propel you towards better climbing performance.

Full Article: The Sports Nutrition Pyramid

(photo courtesy of climbingnutrition.com)

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• Understanding Your Metabolism and Climbing
• Introduction to Losing Weight for Climbing
• 5 Reasons Climbers Should Eat More Kale
• How Do Nutrition Needs Differ Between Types of Climbing?