Rise Nutrition

Rise Nutrition Board-certified sports dietitian (MS, RD, CSSD). I help high school, club, and college athletes fuel for performance, recovery, and the next level.

Soccer specialists and every competitive sport. Evidence-based coaching. No fads, no calorie obsession.

09/02/2026

The second-half fade shows up around the sixty-fifth minute, and everyone in the stands already has an opinion about it.
The first half hides a lot. Adrenaline is doing real work where the athlete feels fine, and nothing looks wrong from the sideline. Then halftime arrives. They sit down, they cool off, and whatever was carrying them stops.
Going back out is where it lands. Legs feel heavy earlier than they should, the burst is missing, and so everyone decides the player needs to be more fit or needs to want it more.
When it shows up is different for every athlete. In my experience some notice a dip around the sixty-fifth minute and some go later. What matters is whether it lands at roughly the same time most weekends. If it does, that is worth looking into.
And the first place to look is the hours before kickoff rather than the training. Breakfast, the pre-game meal, anything between that meal and the whistle, and how much you drank across the whole day. Most athletes I ask have never added it up.
That is a far easier and quicker problem to fix than fitness.

09/01/2026

Ask a club player about game day nutrition and you will hear about game day. Ask a pro and you hear about the day before.

With US Soccer and with the Columbus Blue Jackets, a lot of the emphasis sits on the day before. Game day still matters though obviously! What changes is how much weight it has to carry alone, because the more a performance depends on one morning going perfectly, the more exposed it is when that morning does not go well.

With the Jackets it is sharper, because the schedule gets congested enough that essentially every day is doing two jobs at once. Recovering from the game that just finished and preparing for the one coming potentially in less than 24 hours.

That produces the standard worth working toward. When you wake up on game day, you are keeping yourself in a good spot, not trying to get yourself into one.

The club version of this is smaller than people expect. It is three normal meals on Friday instead of two and a rushed snack, fluid taken in across the whole day, and a reasonable bedtime. None of it is complicated, you just need to stay aware and it just has to happen before the day you actually need it.

08/28/2026

Which food did this to me? Almost every athlete who feels heavy at kickoff starts there.

The answer is usually pointing somewhere else. When different meals were compared, how quickly each one left the stomach tracked almost perfectly with how energy-dense it was. What the meal was made of played a a smaller role in comparison.

So the first two questions are how much, and how long before kickoff. The ingredient list comes a distant third.

This matters because of what happens next. An athlete who decides a food betrayed them starts removing food, and an athlete eating less before games is the athlete who goes flat in the second half. The stomach may feel better but the performance ends up worse.

Check the clock before you start cutting anything.

If you/your athlete are eating too close to game time and showing up heavy at kickoff, that is exactly what the free 15-minute Discovery Call works through. We map out your athlete's pre-game fueling timeline around their actual game schedule. The link to book is in my bio.

08/27/2026

When nothing sounds good before a game, drink the pregame meal instead of eating it.

A smoothie built with fruit, milk or yogurt, a scoop of oats and a spoon of honey is a real pregame meal that happens to arrive in a glass. It goes down easier three or four hours out when a plate of pasta would sit there untouched.

I hear four things before games: I'm not hungry, nothing sounds good, it doesn't sit well, I don't want to chew anything. That last one gets read sometimes as just being difficult, but it is the most useful of the four, because it tells you the obstacle is the chewing rather than the food.

So the pivot follows the feeling rather than the clock. For one athlete it shows up thirty minutes before kickoff and a sports drink covers it. For another it is already there at eleven in the morning, three or four hours out, and that is the meal that becomes a smoothie. Same decision, different point in the day, and the point moves from athlete to athlete.

That is the part worth paying attention to. Have the awareness of when it usually arrives for you, because that is what tells you which meal is the one to drink.

One rule holds; no new foods on game day. Trial the smoothie on a training day before you trial it on a game day, same as anything else.

Get the fuel in. The form is negotiable.

Send this to a teammate who says nothing sounds good before games.

08/26/2026

Is that probiotic actually helping you?

Probiotics for athlete stomach symptoms: ten randomized trials, 822 athletes, only slight evidence of benefit.

That same review could not identify a best product, which matters when every brand on the shelf claims to be ‘the one’.

The 2025 joint position statement from Sports Dietitians Australia went further. It sorted every intervention into groups, and probiotic supplementation landed among the ones that reported negative outcomes.

The strategies that made its beneficial list were adequate carbohydrate and protein before and during exercise, and being properly hydrated going in.

What I see in practice is that a probiotic is not one thing. The strain matters and the timing matters, so two athletes taking what they believe is the same supplement can end up with complete opposite results. That is difficult to troubleshoot on your own, and can be a lot of money to waste guessing.

The list of things that actually worked is boring and cheap. That is usually how it goes.

08/25/2026

The game day breakfast that never happened is the one I hear about at three in the afternoon.

Nothing about missing it made the day easier. What your body needs by kickoff is the same amount it was going to need when you woke up. The only thing that changed is how many hours are left to get it in.

And the pattern I see, over and over, is that those remaining hours are the worst ones for it. Nerves climb as kickoff gets closer and appetite goes the other way. So the athlete is trying to eat more food than they would have needed at eight in the morning, at the exact time they want it least.

Two versions of this show up, and they need different answers. The first is that nothing sounded good first thing, which is common before an afternoon kickoff in the summer. The second is that the alarm went off and breakfast just did not happen. That one gets solved the night before, with the alarm set earlier and something already decided.

For the first, the answer is more eating moments rather than one big meal to force down later. Oatmeal and fruit when you get up, then toast with peanut butter an hour later. The last full meal lands three to four hours out from kickoff, and after that it stays small.

Save this for the next Saturday kickoff.

08/20/2026

What's actually in the cooler for a weekend of games? That is the one that decides a tournament weekend, and by the time a second game comes around it could have been three hours in the heat and the appetite has quietly gone.

Two things go in, and neither is complicated. Fluid, because it is hot and you are losing a lot of it. Food, because an electrolyte packet isn’t providing the energy. That is the whole reason the cooler beats the packet on a two-game day.

The appetite part is what people plan around badly. Heat and hard efforts both blunt hunger, so game two is exactly when eating feels worst and matters most. Which is why whatever is in the bag has to be something already known to sit well. A tournament is not the day to find out how a new bar lands.

Beyond the sandwich and the banana: pretzels, a bagel, grapes, chocolate milk after the first game, are all great rather than only water.

If you're fading in game two of every tournament weekend despite eating between matches, we can talk through that with a free 15-minute Discovery Call. Link's in my bio.

08/19/2026

One of those big electrolyte packets is roughly a whole hot match's worth of salt for a grown adult. For a fifteen-year-old it is more than that.

Which is not a problem on the day that earns it. A hot two-a-day, a tournament Saturday with two games, an August session you finish soaked through. On days like those the packet is doing exactly what it was built to do.

Where it stops making sense is the easy day, when the session was light or there was not one at all, or when the packet is just something to sip on the couch because it tastes good. On that day, water plus a salty snack plus the salt already on your food covers it.

One thing worth checking before you apply any of this. Electrolyte packets carry a wide range of sodium, so the right call genuinely changes depending on which product is in your bag. Look at yours rather than assuming it is the same one being described.

Look back at this week. Which day actually earned a packet?

08/18/2026

Look at your jersey after your next hot session. Notice any white streaks? That likely means you are a salty sweater, and that changes what you need.

Three signs, and all of them show up on your body rather than on a label: dried white marks on a dark shirt, a fine grit on your skin that feels like sand, and eyes that sting when sweat runs into them. One of those is worth noticing. Two or three is a pattern.

Worth being clear about what this does and does not mean. For most players, cramping traces back to tired muscles rather than a salt shortage, and a packet will not fix that. For the smaller group who lose a lot of salt and take little back in from food, sodium genuinely does help. The three signs are how you work out which group you are in.

If they are there, the fix is unremarkable. Salt your food more freely, keep salty snacks in the bag, and use a packet on the hot heavy days rather than every day. If they are not there, none of this is a reason to eat less salt.

One thing most of this conversation leaves out: as you adapt to training in the heat, your body gets better at holding onto salt and your sweat gradually becomes less salty. So a reading taken in the first hot week of August is not a permanent label.

1) Happy anniversary to the most amazing woman out there!2) Time to roll up our sleeves as we…3) run into year 8 togethe...
08/17/2026

1) Happy anniversary to the most amazing woman out there!

2) Time to roll up our sleeves as we…

3) run into year 8 together!

4) It’s going to be full on laughs…

5) and always great food 😋

6) Don’t forget your helmet and buckle up for the best year yet 🎉

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