When I did my S&C Level 1 course, one of the things we were told was that chances are, if we're working with strength athletes, that they're not getting enough protein.  I was a bit surprized by this, but ok ... the coach that tells me I need to eat more steak has won my heart and mind!

Yesterday the stupormarket had lots of little bits of porterhouse and rump steak, cut thick, but small (150-200 grams) quite cheap, so I bought a few, and today, I've had steak for breakfast and lunch!  Mmmmmm.  Protein is yummy! I've just done my session in the powerhouse, and tonight will be riding in to the Mermet, coaching there, doing some cleans, then riding to a mate's place afterwards.  That steak is good fuel!  I'm almost benchpressing 100kg (97.5kg, 5, 3 and 3 reps, which is getting close).  Bench isn't a terribly useful exercise for cycling, but it's still good to see improvement, it wasn't that long ago that 70kg was hard, now it's a warmup.

Peter Cayley's not in at the Mermet tonight, so I'm taking my charges in but we'll be unsupervised.  I wanted to ask him about a nutritional challenge, when you're training for strength you need to keep your food intake up (or you catabolize all that muscle you're working hard to build up ... bad!), so the challenge is, if you're in a strength or power phase of training, how do you keep body fat under control?  Sensible eating, sure, but the balance is pretty fine - I'm not in the best shape at the moment due to a combination of too much pizza and a lot of time off the bike working and coping with life's curveballs, but I need to be building strength and power at the moment.  How to address both at the same time?  A close look at most elite track sprinters shows that they're often a bit overweight, so I suspect they're erring on the side of too much, not too little, but I want to pick a few other coaches brains to see how they approach the issue.

John Nicholson's going to run the next DISC session this Sunday as I'll be up at Bonnie Doon planting trees and hacking about on the EX8, it'll be good for my people to get some exposure to his methods, especially my sprinters. If you didn't know already, Nicko's a former world champion track sprinter (1975 & 1976).  He has, you might say, some clues about track sprinting!