Evidence Based Sports Performance

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Evidence Based Sports Performance Current training protocols are destroying athlete’s bodies 😰 But we help athletes compete for the long game 💪 Evidence-based. No fluff.

For athletes built to last. At almost 50 years old, I have several years of experience in health and fitness. As a Physical Fitness and US Army Combatives instructor and as the owner of a health and fitness studio, I have spent many years helping people improve their health and physical performance. Through my own experience and struggle with managing my weight and trying to find the best way to stay strong and active as I get older, I've learned valuable lessons that I've built into Ultimate Ketogenic Fitness.

10/14/2026

The stimulus has to be enough to improve you. The rest has to be enough to let that improvement happen.

Nearly every problem a first responder or tactical athlete brings me comes down to one of those two being off.

If you're not progressing and you never really feel your sessions, your stimulus is too small. Go heavier, go harder, or add a set.

If you're not progressing and you feel wrecked all the time, your training isn't the problem. You're not recovering from it.

Most athletes only ever change their training. When things go backward, they add more volume or more intensity, and it gets worse.

You need to be willing to adjust both. Change one thing, track how you respond for about 4 weeks, and you'll find out which one was off.

When you last stalled, did you change your training or your recovery?

He tried keto, it went badly, and he quit. Then he went back and did it properly.Dave MacLeod is a Scottish professional...
10/13/2026

He tried keto, it went badly, and he quit. Then he went back and did it properly.

Dave MacLeod is a Scottish professional climber with first ascents at E11 trad, 9a sport and 8C boulder. He also holds a master's in human nutrition, so he reads the research himself.

For 20 years he ate a conventional high carbohydrate athlete's diet. Over time the weight crept up and his energy swung through the day.

His first attempt at going low carb failed. He hadn't adapted properly and he hadn't managed his electrolytes, so he felt terrible and stopped.

That's where most athletes finish the story. They tried it, it was awful, and now they know.

He went back and committed to it properly. He's since kept climbing at elite grades on a low carb, largely carnivore diet, into his forties. Fewer energy dips, stable hunger, lower body fat.

His own estimate is that it takes about a month to get your normal training capacity back and several months to reach your best. He's also blunt that athletes who are used to restricting need to eat enough fat and enough calories, or it won't work.

He doesn't pretend the carbohydrate research doesn't exist either. His argument is narrower than that: those studies rarely account for an athlete who is already fat adapted.

10/12/2026

Nobody looks at 400g of carbs and 60g of fat in a day and calls it an extreme diet. For a lot of CrossFit and HYROX athletes, that's just normal sports nutrition.

Flip it around. Eat 50 to 100g of carbs with more fat, and suddenly you're being restrictive.

That difference in how we see it is worth questioning.

Being ketogenic doesn't mean you never eat carbs. It means your body relies more on fat and makes more of its own fuel. Your glycogen is still there and your blood sugar is still maintained. Carbs just stop being the thing your whole diet is built around.

The real question isn't whether carbs are good or bad. It's how much a specific athlete actually needs.

When carbs aren't taking up 300 to 400g of your day, there's room for the food that helps you recover. Essential fatty acids, fat soluble nutrients, and highly bioavailable protein from whole food.

Food is how you recover. It isn't just fuel for the next session.

What would change if you built your diet around recovery instead of fueling?

10/09/2026

I don't care about the mechanism. I care what happens to the athlete.

Someone can explain to you exactly why a gel should work during a HYROX race. The pathway, the transporter, the uptake rate. All of it technically correct, but useless on the floor.

Then you get to the sled, and you're cooked anyway.

If I put someone on this and we talk again in three months, here's my whole list. Can they run harder and longer? Are they recovering better? Are they getting hurt less?

That's it. The mechanisms don't mean a squat to me if the answer to those three is no.

We've built an entire field on explaining why things should work instead of checking whether they did. And the athletes standing in the gym are the ones paying for the difference.

What actually changed for you in the last three months?

A top 10 finish in the over-50 division at the CrossFit Games. Animal-based since 2018.Robbie Moyles came to CrossFit in...
10/08/2026

A top 10 finish in the over-50 division at the CrossFit Games. Animal-based since 2018.

Robbie Moyles came to CrossFit in 2011 and went at it properly.

Then years of gut problems nearly took the whole thing away. Severe IBS, bad enough that it was dictating what she could train and when.

In 2018 she changed her food completely. Seven months in, the gut issues were resolved. Within three to six months of the switch, her strength and her recovery were both noticeably better.

Then she qualified for the Games.

She'll tell you it was the diet that stabilized her energy, brought the inflammation down, and let her body handle what high-intensity training was actually asking of it.

She didn't find this at the start. She found it after years of doing it the way she'd been told, and after her body had already begun taking it away from her.
moyles

10/07/2026

If you never give the system a rest, it goes the other way.

Take a Masters athlete training hard 6 days a week in a CrossFit gym and sleeping 6 hours a night. Cortisol stays up, lean mass comes off instead of going on, they have no energy, and their body is sitting in fight or flight and never coming out of it.

Then the whole thing gets read as a work problem... Must need to go harder.

Your metabolism never gets the chance to settle down, adapt and recover, so none of what you're asking for can actually happen.

This isn't about how many days you train. It's about whether the work you're doing and the recovery you're getting are in the same ballpark.

Do you get enough sleep, take enough rest, and eat foods that support low inflammation?

Fat adaptation isn't just burning more fat. That's the part you can measure, not the part that actually matters.What act...
10/06/2026

Fat adaptation isn't just burning more fat. That's the part you can measure, not the part that actually matters.

What actually changes is the machinery. The transport that moves fat where it's needed. The mitochondrial capacity to use it once it arrives. The enzymes. Gluconeogenesis coming online. How your body handles glucose and glycogen when it isn't leaning on you eating them every couple of hours.

Storing. Accessing. Producing. Burning. Adaptation means the entire system gets better.

That's why it takes months instead of a weekend. And it's why somebody two weeks in who feels terrible hasn't proved anything yet. They've turned down the old system and they haven't finished building the new one.

Which part of your metabolism do you think you're actually training when you cut the carbs?

10/05/2026

"Low carb is catabolic. You'll lose muscle on it".

It's the first thing anyone says when a Masters athlete mentions dropping the carbs, and it's the single reason most of them never try.

Here's what the research actually found. In ketogenic athletes, fat free mass goes down a little. Muscle mass stays the same. No significant change in skeletal muscle, which is the stuff that makes you strong.

What came off was water. You got tighter. You didn't get weaker.

It really annoys me when people say a ketogenic diet is catabolic. It's catabolic if you aren't feeding yourself enough, and that's true of every diet there has ever been. That isn't a keto problem; it's an underfeeding problem, and it has a completely different fix.

If you've spent years eating around that fear, you haven't been protecting your muscle.

So eat enough. Whole food, animal-based, low carb, with adequate fat and protein.

Where did you first hear that one?

10/02/2026

Keto doesn't make you faster. It doesn't make you slower either. That isn't where the difference is.

Every study we have on CrossFit and endurance athletes measured the same handful of things. Reps. Weight moved. Time. Even how hard the work felt. There is no meaningful difference between a keto athlete and a carb-fueled athlete, and I'll say that about my own side of the argument as readily as anyone else's.

The difference shows up on the back end.

Less inflammation. Lower injury risk. More volume you can actually absorb. Shorter recovery time. Which adds up to an athlete who performs at a high level for longer.

For a Masters athlete that isn't a small difference. Most of them aren't chasing a number they've never hit. They're trying to get back to one they used to own. This is what makes that possible, and then what stops it slipping again.

Eat whole food, animal-based, low carb, with adequate fat and protein. This will give you low inflammatory, highly nutritious options that will support your metabolism.

She spent years believing athletes need carbs to perform, because that's what everybody told her.Jocelyn Rylee has owned...
10/01/2026

She spent years believing athletes need carbs to perform, because that's what everybody told her.

Jocelyn Rylee has owned a CrossFit gym for 17 years. Level 4 coach. Competed at Canadian Nationals in weightlifting and at Regionals.

Early on she ate paleo, the standard CrossFit way. Then as she started competing seriously she did what she was told and loaded up on refined carbohydrate, most of it after training.

After her second child in 2016 she reset and did it properly. Macro counting first, 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fat. She gained weight.

So she went the other way. Three to four months into a ketogenic diet her energy stabilized, she was sleeping better, her strength came back, and she was doing it at a lighter bodyweight than in her competitive years.

Eight years later she's still there. She has low insulin, stable glucose, more lean mass and better bone density.

She didn't lose her performance when she dropped the carbs. She got it back.

She posts all of it:

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