Rise Nutrition

Rise Nutrition I'm Jay Short, a Registered Dietitian and Performance Expert. Join the community for research, recipes, tips & more.

I created Rise Nutrition to bring you a different type of nutrition coaching that is focused on you & your goals.

06/23/2026

The first game of a tournament you always feels the best. By the third one though, your legs are heavy, and most players blame themselves. Here's the part that actually decides it: what you did immediately after game one.

That fade is real, and it's been measured. In elite youth soccer, researchers tracking players through a packed run of matches found the total distance covered dropped across the later games. These are players at the top of their age group, fully fit, and the output still came down. So if you've felt it, you’re not alone and it happens at all levels.

What makes it fixable is the timing. In a normal week, your body has days to refill the fuel in your legs. At a tournament, it has hours. The window between games is short, and most of how you'll feel in game three gets decided in that gap.

So the move is straight forward. After the final whistle, get carbohydrate in soon, within the first hour, then again at your next real meal. Make it the primary part of the plate. Rice, pasta, potatoes, fruit, bread, the foods you already eat. Don't hold out for the perfect meal later. Something sooner beats something perfect and later.

Refuel fast, and you leave something in your legs for the game that matters.

06/22/2026

The most important game of the weekend, and you're playing it on empty. That's the situation for the away-game morning nobody plans for.

6am wakeup call. Kickoff at 8. You walk down for the hotel breakfast and realize it doesn't open until 7. Or it's open, but it's a coffee machine and a basket of muffins, and the line is ten deep.

Two moves. First, plan around what hotels reliably have: oatmeal, bagels, bananas, eggs if there's a hot bar. You can build a real pre-game breakfast out of that. Second, and this is the one that saves you, pack a backup the night before. A bagel, a banana, a shake you've used before. Something familiar that travels.

That way an early kickoff or a closed dining room never decides how you fuel. Game days start the night before, and so does breakfast.

06/20/2026

Fresh legs in game two starts with this bag: carbs you enjoy, a protein option, fluids, nothing new. Pack it the night before. Discovery Call link in bio.

06/19/2026

You did the hard part. You showed up, you trained, you put in the work.

But the gym doesn't build you. It breaks you down. The real progress happens in the hours after you leave, and only if you give your body what it needs to rebuild.

Three things drive that recovery. Eating enough to cover the work you just did. Hydrating well enough to actually use that fuel. And sleep, where the repair happens.

You can train as hard as you want, but if the recovery side isn't there, you're just stacking stress without the rebuild. That's not a programming problem and it's not a motivation problem. It's a recovery gap.

Train hard. Then fuel what you just asked your body to do.

06/18/2026

Gas station before a game? No bad foods here necessarily, but certainly better picks: banana, pretzels, jerky, protein shake. Easy carbs plus a little protein. Save this for your next trip.

06/17/2026

Game three of the tournament. The final. Your legs are gone and everyone says the same thing: not fit enough.

Most of the time, that's not it.

The fade in the Sunday game usually isn't caused by Sunday itself. It's built on the short, rough night of sleep you got Friday in a strange bed, plus two days of eating whenever and whatever the schedule allowed. That stacks up and many times it doesn't hit the first game. It hits the last one.

And that's the good news because a true fitness problem could take months to fix. A routine problem you can change this weekend.

Protect Friday night's sleep and meals. Then repeat that to protect Saturday's as well. Treat them like part of game-day prep, because they are. That's where Sunday's legs actually come from.

06/17/2026

The supplement aisle wants you to believe muscle is something you buy. It isn't.

If we're talking actual return on your money, two supplements are worth it for building muscle. Creatine, because it lets you squeeze a little more quality work out of every session, and that adds up over months. And a protein powder, because it makes hitting your protein easier on a busy day.

Here's the part the marketing skips: neither one builds anything. You build muscle in the gym by giving your body a reason to adapt and sending the signal for it to build. Then the actual construction happens while you sleep and while you're fueling enough for your body to spend energy on that building process instead of just keeping you running.

Under-sleep and under-fueled, and you've got a body that's too busy surviving to bother adding muscle. Supplements can't override that. It's amplifying a process that's barely happening.

So before the next tub of anything, ask two questions. Am I sleeping enough to recover? Am I eating enough to actually build? Lock those in and the supplements finally start earning their spot.

You're already doing the hard part by showing up to train. Give your body what it needs to turn that work into something.

06/16/2026

Travel can slow an athlete's sprint speed for up to three days. That's not a typo, and it's why elite teams plan travel the way they plan training.

In studied athletes, traveling slowed sprint speed and cut the ability to keep firing off high-intensity efforts late in games. The effect didn't vanish the next morning either. It lingered for a few days.

Now, a club player driving three hours to a showcase isn't crossing eight time zones, so let's be honest about scale. But the reason travel matters is the same at every level: it disrupts your sleep and your normal eating rhythm, and those two things drive the exact qualities soccer depends on. Your burst. Your repeat-sprint ability in the 70th minute.

That's also why the Sunday game of a tournament is so often when the legs go. The disruption from Friday and Saturday is still working against you.

The move: treat a travel day as one you plan sleep and meals around on purpose. Not a day you improvise.

06/16/2026

The protein aisle makes this feel like a bigger decision than it is.

Isolate gets filtered further than concentrate, so it ends up leaner per scoop with less of the natural milk sugar (aka lactose) and fat. That's the actual difference. Not some hidden muscle-building advantage.

For recovery and building, they do the same work. Same amino acids, same signal to rebuild. What your body responds to is how much total protein you're getting across the whole day. The tub it came from is way down the list.

The one situation where paying up for isolate makes sense: dairy bothers your stomach. Less lactose means it tends to sit easier. If that's not you, concentrate covers it and may leave some extra money in your pocket for actual food.

You're already doing the hard part in training. Don't let a label talk you into spending more than you need to.

06/15/2026

The crowd isn't what beats you on the road. The routine you left at home is.

Every away game, the cleats make the bag. The shin guards make the bag. Your fueling routine? That gets improvised in a hotel lobby at 7am, and it shows up in your legs by the second half.

Here's the part nobody plans for: unfamiliar food, a kickoff time that keeps moving, a breakfast you can't count on, and a shorter night of sleep all stack up on the same day. None of them are huge on their own. Together they're the difference between feeling sharp and feeling flat.

The fix isn't fancy. It's deciding what the day looks like before you walk out the door. Where's the pre-game meal coming from? What's in the bag? What's the backup if the hotel breakfast is a bust?

Pick your next away game. Answer those questions before you leave. That's the whole move.

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