BTY Training Lab: Tracking Macros vs. Dieting
June 24, 2018
By Bryce Wood Bryce Wood is the owner and lead coach of Better Than Yesterday Training Lab in Chicago. Registered D10 athletes can RSVP for complimentary spots at BTY's Saturday morning training sessions between now and The D10 Chicago 2018.
My passion for nutrition, performance, and body composition comes from my athletic background. I played sports year-round (basketball, baseball, and track) and like most kids had no idea about how/what to eat, or how to train to improve myself physically. As a result I had really poor body composition. I also struggled with asthma through middle school and college, which hindered my abilities to perform to my capabilities.
Once I started digging into the area of nutrition and training (unfortunately this was long after college!), I began to understand how to adjust and manipulate my food intake to enhance my strength, performance, and body composition. At BTY we spend a lot of time with every athlete working on nutrition in association with training. In order to truly optimize your results, you need to make your nutrition plan work for you!
If you go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out which diet will serve you best, you’re likely going to get a lot of conflicting information. At BTY, we emphasize that what you’re putting into your body at the *macro* level (tracking protein/fat/carbs and knowing overall calories) is a main driver of your training success or lack thereof. Our primary goal is to create a sustainable way to eat for performance, body composition, and health. Can you eat a Paleo Macro Diet? Yes! Can you eat Low-Fat Macro Diet? You can! Can you eat a Low Carb Macro Diet? Yes again! The secret to success is in how you set up your "Macros."
Tracking Macros
The more detailed you are with your nutrition routines, the faster and more easily you’ll see progress. Since our commitment is getting athletes the best results possible, a dedicated focus on proper nutrition and fueling is essential.
Here’s an analogy I like to use: Say you wanted to increase your squat. If you haven’t been doing any squats, you’re likely getting better and stronger just by going to the gym. Now suppose someone who’s been doing squats for a long time asked you about range of motion, rest periods, and what percentage of your max you were using. If you were committed to a squat program, you’d want to know these answers, right? You’d want them to be second nature.
And yet, there are a lot of really successful and people with pretty good body composition that couldn’t answer these questions about nutrition:
How many calories do you eat/day?
How many grams of protein/fat/carbs?
What’s your weekly +/- weight loss/gain goal?
How do partition your nutrients throughout the day?
What percentage of your carbs do you get from fiber?
Any diet can work (Paleo, Keto, Weight Watchers, Mediterranean, Low Carb, Low Fat, etc), just like any squat program can work. In each case, if you’re not digging into the details, you may just end up more confused than when you started.
I think we’ve all tried or know someone who has tried every diet out there and failed miserably with each. If you over- or under-eat on any nutrient, you can end up blaming or falsely praising that “diet” for your success or failure. So rather than following a rigid diet that cuts out foods that we enjoy eating, we’d rather you create a sustainable plan that allows you to get results and enjoy your life!
In the next installment, I'll explain the simple approach to setting up your Macros.
Bryce before Macros and after Macros