What if nutrition is not the foundation of athletic development? What if it is a demand imposed by other kinetic circumstances? What if food and movement are not “medicine”, but simply a human’s natural state and a sinking standard has skewed our perception of “optimal?”
Further, these types of discussions often fall into either confirmation bias, post hoc arguments, categorical errors, or misattribution of symptoms and experience.
That’s a lot to tackle in a single article, but here we go!
The Low Friction Foundation
Earlier this year I wrote an article about re-envisioning CrossFit’s Theoretical Hierarchy of Development. I proposed that there are several misleading elements to this model, which proposes an ordinal demand — that’s what that word “hierarchy” means:
Nutrition
Metabolic Conditioning
Gymnastics
Weightlifting and Throwing
Sport
The previous article discussed revisions on the movement side, so here I want to emphasize that:
Fuel is not the foundation. It is a consequential demand.
CrossFit’s own operational practice belies this reality. How much class time is spent talking about nutrition versus a dusty poster in the bathroom? Of course, I’m not saying that fuel doesn’t matter — we’ll get to that later.
I’m saying that the ordinal demand is flawed. Logically, by the proposed hierarchy, I could accommodate lacking metabolic conditioning by improving my nutrition.
To the degree that that may be true, I’m willing to bet your training age is pretty low. You can’t out work a bad diet any more than you can out diet bad training.
The other problem here is that the internet is full of, and encourages, pedantic arguments over minutia. It’s way easier to “do your research” via YouTube benders and AI-assisted literature reviews than it is to spend the equivalent time sweating and straining enough to actually learn something about yourself.
In case you haven’t noticed, the world is not short on information or access to it. Therefore, the presiding problem isn’t accumulation of facts and curated truths. It’s wisdom and actual knowing.
How much can you know if you haven’t done? Haven’t failed? Haven’t bled, sweat, and cried wondering why you’re doing any of this? That requires experience.
Categorical Errors
Next, we have a mismatch of terminology and a misattribution of “root cause.” Many people point to Chris Palmer’s book “Brain Energy" (which is great) as evidence of food as psychiatric “medicine.”
But, what’s the title of the book? It isn’t “brain medicine.”
This is partially a terminology error, where (psychiatric) “disorders” are classified based on symptom checklists (DSM/ICD). What we get then is a lot of confusion about organic (biological / neurological) problems manifesting what appear to be a psychological symptoms (e.g. depression or anxiety).
That’s not exactly how it works. An ER doctor administering saline to resolve hyponatremia induced delusions doesn’t claim that sodium “cures” psychosis.
Humans don’t exist in test-tube vacuums. There are vast social, relational, emotional, cognitive, and existential factors that also contribute to various malfunctions and dysfunctions within those areas.
As above, it’s way easier to futz and fiddle with endless combinations of supplements, vitamins, minerals, “hacks”, and “the optimal morning routine” than it is to pull back the curtain on the things you’d rather not look at or remember about yourself.
Furthermore, we see endless idol worship among actual performance outliers and often attribute their unique idiosyncrasies and habits to universal best practices.
The line goes something like:
So-and-so that won this-and-that did blah-blah or ate yada-yada, therefore everyone should do blah-blah and eat yada-yada because it’s “optimal” and makes you “elite.”
The accuracy of a dietary intervention’s effects on performance may suffer from placebo effects (which are still valid interventions as they do produce measurable results), but validity cannot be as easily dismissed.
If a dietary intervention is solely responsible for an outlier’s exceptional status or performance, then why isn’t everyone who practices the same dietary intervention (hack, supplement, or morning routine) also performing at the same level as the outlier?
If we were to further test this hypothesis in an actual social science / statistical model, it would be far more useful to:
Pick an athletic field to study…
Look at the top 10 athletes in that field…
Over each of the past 10 years…
And ask “what are the most common, top-tertile (upper 33%) factors?”
Then, here’s the really hard part, you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to make concessions and accommodations to those “scientific” and “evidence based” optimizations in order to produce real results in your real life.
That is, if you want to play the infinite game.
Fueling Elite Engines
While we’re talking about games, let’s also talk about winning. Specifically, in contrast to finishing.
Finishing or surviving is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, akin to discussions of “endurance.” What I have no tolerance for is the entitlement of assuming that because you rose above average, you now preen insufferably about how “elite” you are.
This is another categorical error that exposes how a sinking floor (average) lowers the collective standing and warps the perception of achievement.
It would be fantastic if we “normalized” making changes in your health and fitness (and other areas) because you knew they’d make you a better person; instead of doing so in order to blab about “lifemaxxing” or some other rhetorical nonsense.
Borrowing language from Tim Grover, we can separate “players” into four categories:
Contenders (I added this one),
Coolers,
Closers, and
Cleaners
Contenders are big on thinking, purport to “know”, and are short on doing. Because of that, they’re also short on feeling. Because they cannot feel, they will never actually know — and only chose what to believe.
The line of thinking goes:
Start with an ideology (e.g. a dietary constraint).
Imply the ideology as the ground zero non-negotiable (appeal to reason / emotion / nature fallacy).
Search for post hoc confirmation to reinforce your belief.
Coolers, despite their best effort, and even good intentions, tend to be the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
People are amazingly resilient. We have done all kinds of extraordinary things under unimaginable circumstances. You can build muscle on a meatless diet. You can train HIIT intervals without carbs. You can run a marathon with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth.
I already know I can do a lot of dumb things for the sake of suffering.
So, the question I come back to here is, “are those folks winning?”
Closers might be the folks we’d consider outliers above. They are great performers who thrive under pressure. But sometimes they fall apart when unexpected variables are introduced.
If you’ve been alive for more than 30 years, professional athlete or not, you know that “shit happens” … sometimes bad shit, sometimes really bad shit, and occasionally really great shit.
Cleaners, not by coincidence, take the word “shit” in all of those instances, and replace it with “opportunity.” Then, they take action.
Diet zealots clutch their pearls when they see CrossFit champions noshing Snickers bars and Coors Light, or Michael Phelps drinking milkshakes, or Usain Bolt eating 100 chicken nuggets from McD’s.
Like it or not, those are the elite of the elite. To avoid the biases I mentioned above, we could easily accumulate a list of 100 examples. History is full of them.
Winners find a way to win.
Practical Application
I’m working on a project. It isn’t “longevity” in the pop-culture sense. If a health “expert” is currently 60 years old, we still have to wait another 40 years to find out if they were selling snake oil or not. In the meantime, I’ve work to do.
My current endeavor is finding a sustainable way to train twice per day (or about 10 sessions / week) over an extended timeline. At the time of writing, I’ve logged about 6 weeks. But, 6 weeks is just a training camp; it isn’t a long term model. That might look something like 12+ weeks.
To do that, I have to adjust the inputs. I’m 38 years old, 5’8”, 180 lbs, and around 10% body fat. My daily calorie intake is around 3,500 and I’m bumping that up to 4,000 and ~50% carbohydrates. That’s roughly 20-22 calories per pound of bodyweight, every single day.
For reference, high level athletes like Dante Leon and Alexander Volkanovski run similar proportionate intakes. Anyone who has browsed the nutrition archives of this site knows that I spent years in the low-carb and carnivore camps, trying vehemently to “make it work” under what I thought were high training volumes at the time.
My point in sharing all of this is to remind myself — as much as anyone else — that the “math of hard work” looks fundamentally different in the real world than it does in a RCT.
Herman Pontzer’s work on Constrained Total Energy Expenditure (CTEE) demonstrates that human metabolism isn’t simply additive — you can’t pour more fuel into a human, like gasoline into a car, and expect a linear increase in output. Pontzer’s model suggests a systemic ceiling around 2.5 x BMR before behavioral compensation occurs.
Conceptually, there are two ways to navigate this ceiling:
Build a bigger engine. Adding functional muscle mass increases your baseline metabolic rate (BMR), thereby lifting the total calorie output ceiling.
Train system throughput. Work capacity (e.g. metabolic conditioning) is a trainable and adaptable asset.
This brings us back to our starting point. I could accept someone else’s proposed limit (Pontzer) or rigid hierarchy (Glassman) and concede my desired achievements. But, that’s not what cleaners do.
Much preferred, I want to:
Train how I deem necessary to achieve the goals I wish to pursue.
Make the necessary accommodations of fuel and recovery to sustain that output (and subsequent adaptation).
In other words, stop making excuses. Do the work first, and fuel accordingly. Adjust as necessary to continue pursuing the goal.
Once you’re churning more than 2x BMR calories every day and still need more fuel for your required demands; Gatorade, orange juice, or even White Claws hit like a wave of euphoria.
This isn’t because you’re “carb addicted”, it’s because:
Excess protein is just expensive glucose.
At any rate, I reserve the right to be wrong, so stay tuned!