Welcome to the engine nutrition course! We have designed this program to help you improve your performance on the rower, assault bike, bike erg, ski erg, as well as running.

We will also be showing you how to change your nutrition to help with performance in workouts and make you a better all-round athlete.

Now that you've downloaded the template, here's a couple of videos running through how to get the most out of it.

The template is really powerful and allows you to customise everything, it just takes a little getting used to. But you only have to watch these once to make things a whole lot clearer!

Our goal on this program is to provide you with a nutrition plan to maximise your performance but in a simple fashion

The diet template can be customised allowing you to make it work for you. However, please try to stick closely to the suggestions for aerobic capacity and anaerobic capacity depending on which you are focussing on. After this, you can customise to maintain progress.

In the template we have mapped out a structure for 4 feeds a day and 5 feeds a day.

This lesson just covers how to get the correct structure and how to make the correct meal choices.

When we talk about energy systems, we basically mean the systems in our body that supply us with energy during training. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the primary source used by the muscles for muscle contraction.

Please take the time to watch this short video where Luke talks through periodising your nutrition with some advice on how long to stay on each phase of the engine nutrition program depending on your situation.

We have provided you with a personalised nutrition plan that is going to help you improve your engine, but if you want to go to the next level, using certain testing methods can help.

Now we at Luke Hall Nutrition are quite clearly nutritionists. We are also advocates for staying in your lane, and this programme is designed to be followed alongside a training programme aiming to improve your engine and aerobic capacity.

But we’re going to poke our heads above the parapet here and offer a small amount of training advice. We’re going to essentially outline the training that we believe will most benefit you and amplify the nutrition work we’re attacking in this first phase!

In this video, Luke talks through exactly what we are going to be achieving in the aerobic capacity portion of the engine nutrition course.

We’ve already talked a lot about improving aerobic capacity, shifting the graph and raising the floor! But here we’re going to dive into what that means and define a few terms around the topic to make sure we’re all signing off the same hymn sheet and know exactly what it is we’re going to be improving! This first section of the course is all about improving Aerobic Capacity so it’d be nice to know what that means right?!

These little powerhouses are what produce energy. The mitochondria's main role in the cell is to take glucose and use the energy stored in its chemical bonds to make ATP in a process called cellular respiration.

Training low. This means training fasted or in a low / depleted glycogen state to stress the mechanisms required to produce energy from fat.

Low carbohydrate availability refers to a situation where the body is deprived of carbohydrate in some way, it doesn't mean ketogenic!

Stressing the body and forcing it to work harder / utilise different fuel sources will result in a more efficient aerobic and anaerobic system

We have spoken about training low but here is a just a quick recap on fasted training.

Simply put, it’s training after a long period of not eating (a fast), ideally to put your body in a state of low carbohydrate availability and/or low insulin levels to help AMPLIFY the adaptations of training.

Trying to go all out every single session is a sure fire way to burnout and hit the dreaded plateau.

Across the week you will have sessions that you need to push hard and others that we take the foot off a little.

As I mentioned in an earlier video, we need to build the floor first.

In the first section we have advised you to train fasted or at a lower intensity to augment specific adaptations. As we transition to focus on anaerobic capacity, more of these will become performance based. 

Here we’re going to outline some key nutrients when it comes to building your engine. We’ll tackle what they do, why they’re relevant and then offer up some food first interventions to get more in your plan! 

We know that a food first approach is needed, but supplements can help in certain scenarios...and when we have an increase in training load, the requirement for certain nutrients increases.

Let's break down the essentials. All links are at the bottom of the page.

We all know that hydration is key right?! We’ve heard it from here, there and everywhere, drinking fluids is a fact of life. BUT this lesson is designed to dive deeper into the why’s and how’s of hydration for performance. We’ll look at what happens to us when we’re dehydrated and how to put together tailored plans to prevent this from happening. 

Luke is back talking through a sample test and explains a little more about capacity. Serious knowledge bombs going down here!

Metabolic flexibility is the capacity to use one substrate or another, depending on the exercise intensity demands.

In fact, is the ability to use Fats and Carbohydrates as fuels (energy sources) to obtain ATP at different exercise intensities. More clearly: to be the best-using Fats AND Carbs, not only Fats OR Carbs.

Throughout the programme, we want to keep the outcomes at the forefront so that we’re constantly working towards achieving them! 

The desired outcomes of the first section were all about building the floor, the aerobic threshold so that we can train at a higher intensity without lactate building up! Now that we’ve built the floor it’s time to raise the ceiling. 

Here come the nutritionists offering training advice again! Well yes, but as we said before, we are nutritionists so we will stay in our lane and not go into a huge amount of detail here, what we will do however is just outline a couple of things that we want you to do to really get the most out of the anaerobic capacity focus portion of this course! 

Anaerobic capacity is all about raising that ceiling and we’ve put together a plan and lessons all directed towards achieving this goal.

That doesn’t mean that things are always going to go to plan though, a whole host of faults and barriers can arise so in this lesson we’re going to be tackling some of the most common faults people make when trying to build anaerobic capacity and how we can avoid them.

As we’ve laid out in previous lessons, this phase is all about raising the ceiling and building your anaerobic capacity! Here we're going to take a deep dive into what that actually means, defining anaerobic capacity and expanding on some factors that affect it and factors that we are looking to improve upon!

From NOCCO to smoothies, to coffee and protein bars, pre-workout nutrition can be a minefield!

Hopefully, you have found the specific pre-workout requirements for the time that you train but this section is breaking down nutrient timing

This section will be continually updated with new research as and when it is published.

With the intensity of training ramping up, you’re much more likely to experience some form of fatigue when training! Here we’re going to be diving into types of fatigue and which one you’re most likely to be experiencing, before expanding on why you are fatiguing in the first place and making sure we’re driving towards delaying this fatigue.

Something that goes hand in hand with anaerobic work is lactic acid. We’ve all been guilty of associating the pain from an intense metcon with lactic acid, but is lactic acid really the cause of that pain?

Here we’re going to dive into some common misconceptions around lactate, expose the real enemy and give you the tools and knowledge to delay the pain and raise that ceiling! 

Throughout the course we’ve been talking a lot about Fuelling For The Work Required. Employing this technique to improve metabolic flexibility, substrate availability and of course our engine.  When attacking aerobic capacity, that was all about training low, periodising carbs and fats in a way that leads to us sparing glycogen.

Relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) is the result of insufficient caloric intake and/or excessive energy expenditure. Consequences of this low-energy condition can alter many physiological systems, including metabolism, menstrual function, bone health, immunity, protein synthesis, and cardiovascular and psychological health.

It was more commonly known as the female athlete triad, but now RED-S is the term used as it can also be present in men.

Thank you so much for completing the lessons on the engine nutrition course. The beauty of this plan is that is can be customised and followed again depending on your training and goals.