UK Sports Institute

Interview with Emma Gardner, Senior Performance Nutritionist at the UK Sports Institute (UKSI), on how they gain their competitive advantage using Nutritics. The UKSI delivers performance-impacting solutions to Olympic and Paralympic sports.

Nutritics is proud to be the official supplier to one of the world’s leading institutes of high-performance sports.

“I think performance nutrition has changed drastically over the last few years. I think we understand a lot more now, we have got a lot more research to back up our decision-making. But it has also changed in distinct terms of how many nutritionists work within sports. Our team is growing rapidly over the last six years. Probably going from maybe ten of us to almost 25 plus. And it is great for the discipline of nutrition but it is also nice to see sports is recognising the importance of nutrition as well.

“Nutritics ultimately helps us to empower the athletes to make better food choices. When I first started using Nutritics maybe only three or four of them would actually regularly prepare their own food to bring to training and competitions. Since we have been using Nutritics, they now understand meal plans a lot better, they understand what goes into foods. Now we see that maybe 25% of them actually regularly make their own food to bring in and they actually understand what goes into the foods they use. Definitely a great tool to use for us.

“We see lots of performance benefits. I definitely see that when we educate them in nutrition, they create much better meal options for themselves and hopefully that makes them then a better athlete on the pitch. So we take for example an athlete who is rehabbing. She would submit a food diary, I would use Nutritics to analyse that food diary and then sit with the athlete and create a meal plan that is specific to their rehab plan.

“We compete against many different nations. We want to find every advantage that we can. Nutritionally, there’s a lot we need to work on but using a tool like Nutritics will help us and will help the athletes to better understand what we are trying to achieve. So I believe it gives us a competitive advantage, definitely. It has drastically improved what I can see from a habit point of view, and them preparing their own food.

“We have got lots of major competitions coming up over the next 12 months and I will be using Nutritics to try and get them to better their education and understanding.

“One of the great additional benefits of the UKSI is that they are big into people development and personal development. And in the time that I have been in the UKSI, I have seen that first hand, so I have not only developed as a person but also as a practitioner through many of the opportunities that the UKSI has given me. An example of that is Nutritics. We would get additional education with one of our partners. Within the UKSI nutrition team we further develop our knowledge and understanding of using tools such as Nutritics.”