Football Coaching: The Importance Of Nutrition In Football

What would you say in those sort of early days when you were considering what pathway to go down as far as a career? What was it about healthy eating and nutrition that particularly appealed to you, specifically in terms of helping and supporting young people?

I think for me, I think because I used to do a lot of sport when I was younger and there wasn't any information around how to eat.

I remember doing a race.

It was like the English schools, it was athletics and asking a question about something about what to eat.

And the answer was, oh, a Rolls Royce doesn't run on water.

Which whilst obviously being flattered to be compared to Rolls Royce.

So, well, that doesn't tell us anything.

And there was no information.

And then on reflection, you think there's so much young talent that goes to waste because they're not being fueled right.

And, you know, you build your body through the food you put into it.

And we all say you only get one body, you've got to live in it forever and you only get one chance to build it.

And yet there's no proper good information available to young people and especially young athletes to help them understand how to do that.

But what there is, is a lot of misinformation.

Like nutrition is notoriously badly communicated.

There's new fads coming out all the time.

Social media means everyone's got access to a lot of nonsense.

So we thought, okay, let's...

Let's change that.

And there's this big space where actually there's a huge need and there's no solution.

So that's what we're trying to change.

We've identified this is the gap.

People don't know.

And what we see is actually people really underestimate quite how much energy young people need.

They've got the demands of growth plus their training and plus life in general on top.

and those needs are very rarely being met properly and often you can wing it you get away with it for a bit but then you kind of the cracks start to go on underneath the surface and you increase your risk of injury or you stop enjoying it so much and kids fall out of love with their sport because they're not performing so well and that's so often so unnecessary because if they just ate a bit more um they would they would feel better in the process so that's a long-winded way that's why kind of we got interested in this space because it's opportunity is being wasted, talent's being wasted, and it's, yeah, unnecessary.