Powerlifting nutrition

"General Nutrition Tips”

By Ian Smalley

Yep, I said it. These two words seem to go together about as well as “Sumo” and “Diet”, but in the spirit of confronting paradoxical phrases I will address this issue head on. Most of the advances in the world of powerlifting over the past 20 years have involved either the advent of gear or the changes to training since gear took over the sport. Lets face it, the entire Westside system is built on training protocols that help you to use gear effectively. One subject that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is powerlifting nutrition and supplementation.

The common perception of strength athletes is that they are big hairy white dudes who eat McDonalds and lift big weights…and in the early days of the sport that wasn’t a totally unrealistic stereo type. But today, because of the progress made in optimizing training to get the inhuman results you see in geared lifting, the question has now been raised, “what else can we do? ”.

Well, the sad truth is that our step-cousins in iron, Bodybuilders, have had the answer for quite a while now. Who would have thought that the quest for the perfect “looking” body would lead to the evolution of the perfect “functioning” body, at least in terms of strength anyway.

What the mirror lovers have known for a long time is that its not just how much you eat, its what you eat that really matters. Often bodybuilders must take their diets to the extreme in order to control body fat and body water levels, but since powerlifters don’t have these restrictions it makes the idea of powerlifting nutritrion a strictly performance based tool.

The whole idea of 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight was probably brought to the forefront by supplement companies marketing to bodybuilders, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. In fact, we should be happy because all of the “breakthroughs” in supplementation and diet in the last 15 years have come from the bodybuilding industry.

We should thank them, just not to their faces…