Newell's Constraints Model in Nutrition with Patrick Burnett

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework Impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you.

Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. It's going to be a unique episode today because we're diving into a topic that we haven't yet discussed, and that is the world of basketball nutrition. So, uh, Paddy Burnett, thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, Alex, great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Obviously, it's been great.

So, Paddy, you will be one of the few people in the world who can talk about Alex Sarama as a traditional basketball coach. So we both grew up in the town of Guildford in Surrey in the United Kingdom. And when I first knew you, Paddy, you were an under-14 player.

I was your 18-year-old coach, and I was coaching you, having no clue what the hell I was doing. And obviously, this was many years ago. Yeah, man, great to have you on the show today.

Great to be here. I was thinking earlier, it's a little bit like a weird full circle moment. I wonder if we went back to like 18 and 14 and said to ourselves, oh, in a few years' time, this is what we'd both be doing.

I think we'd both be a bit shocked.

Absolutely we would. So, you know, last season, Paddy, you had— I had the pleasure of you coming out to spend some time with me in Italy, and we were implementing, you know, evidence-based sports performance ideas specifically in regards to the role of nutrition.

but some other areas too, into our program. And I think it's really interesting because this is a world that isn't really explored to a great extent within basketball. And it's shocking how easy it is for some of these ideas to be done. And that's what I realized.

You can do these things with no budget. It's just a case of being organized. Even then, even at the higher level, as we spoke about, Paddy, in the NBA, WNBA, EuroLeague, there's a lot of pseudoscience and a lot of ideas which are not aligned with contemporary evidence.

So, Could you just introduce kind of what you do and, you know, why it's obviously so important for basketball programs on many levels?

Yeah, for sure. I'd say my title and such is I'm an applied sport and exercise nutritionist with a keen interest on obviously sports performance nutrition. And obviously, as Alex, you've kind of touched on that, it's— basketball does have some elements there. There are obviously staff members that are hired.

The NBA is a little bit ahead, but it's probably nowhere near compared to some other sports. Particularly if we compare it to like American football, for example, it's a very different landscape. Yeah, definitely. But as you alluded to there as well, it can be done without this massive budget.

I think that's a really key point. I think a lot of the time people think that doing like really introduce any form of nutrition is going to cost you a lot of money, and that's not the case at all. It's just knowing where to find the opportunities, and that's really like what my kind of role is within Either working with an organization or working with like an individual athlete.

Excellent, Paddy. So what I want to get to is we're going to spend a lot of time today on the practical kind of things that we did while we were together in Italy, but I want to start with the theory. And I think one of the first kind of things when you came in is we spent some time together talking about the constraint-led approach and the theory that underpinned everything we were doing at college prep.

Can you just explain to why you thought that was useful from, you know, how you approach your role as a nutritionist and why that really allowed you to align your approach with what we were doing, you know, actually on the court.

Yeah, definitely. I think obviously your keywords and obviously Transforming Basketball, your focus is player development. And really, as a nutritionist, that's what I want to achieve as well. It's slightly different aspects, obviously on court with— and food and hydration are very different aspects.

However, they really do align. When you look at the principles of how you can either coach a player or guide them to like a designated goal in order for them to excel within their performance. So I think that really presented that opportunity really well.

Nutrition is an evidence-based environment. Unfortunately, within basketball, a lot of the research so far is only on supplementation rather than the principles being designed for the game. Just a brief example is carbohydrate intake is actually recommended primarily of other sports and like in other endurance sports, but that doesn't really translate to basketball considering you have players who may be on the court for 35 minutes, but you also have a player who's on the court for 2 minutes and it's not continuous.

It's a very stop-and-go-based sport.

Yeah, that's great. And I think what that really connects well with is understanding the role of constraints and what we're going to try and do now, Paddy, I don't think anyone maybe has done before in the nutrition field. But when you came, you had a light bulb moment where you realized how all the things we were doing and all the, like, contemporary skill acquisition ideas we spoke about— repetition out repetition, using external cues, and, you know, the essence of Newell's constraints model, individual task environment— well, you applied it all to nutrition.

So let's maybe start with understanding constraints. How did that maybe influence, you know, what you're actually doing now and, you know, some of the approaches that you introduced to us, with us?

Yeah, definitely. I think a key part of my role is being a problem solver. So with nutrition, with my expertise and what I've studied, my job is to facilitate the learning of a player and guide them to a designated goal. Obviously, constraints are everywhere within our life.

The main ones most associated with nutrition is cost. Travel is a massive one, particularly in basketball. Rest periods, for example. And I remember getting out there and just obviously the college prep program was really innovative in its own creation, but it was really intriguing to see what was kind of being used without knowing exactly what the topic was.

Oh, absolutely.

And I think just from speaking to the players, from the players in that first training session and going to dinner with them the first night, I picked up on so many different problems that I wouldn't even naturally have thought of just for them, because every case is different.

I think that's the key thing to remember here. What a professional club will have compared to an amateur club is worlds apart. However, there are similar problems that you just can pick up from spending a bit of time with an athlete, and that's part of my role really.

Love it. So you actually sent me Newell's constraints model that was relevant for nutrition, and you did an amazing submission for the book Transforming Basketball. Which I'm very grateful for. So I'm just gonna read this little bit from there and then we can talk about it.

Let's start with individual constraints. You spoke about rates of expenditure, daily calories, food preferences, phase of preparation, ability to cook, environment, home training facility, away game facilities, hotel, form of travel such as planes, bus, and then task constraints, fueling for the game itself, when the games are, recovery periods, hydration, travel preparation, and practice preparation.

So there's a lot going on. So what this is getting at is many of the one-size-fits-all approaches to nutrition, just as what I'm saying in basketball coaching, they're simply inadequate, right? Even in the NBA, what we're seeing now.

Oh, 100%. They're so individualistic. Although all of these opportunities and constraints appear, they're so individualistic. And you have to— one of the key things, like, you may have a player, or you may have 2 players who play the exact same position, But what they need in terms of nutrition is worlds apart.

And I think a lot of the time people can get that really wrong.

What was the example? Was it— it was Luka Dončić and another— I can't remember who the other one was.

Luka Dončić and LaMelo Ball, both point guards or guards and such. And they're the same height actually, but they have a massive difference in terms of weight. Even just visualizing them as players, you can see that Luka, you'd probably almost describe as a more kind of solid player, more muscular compared to LaMelo.

person more like ectomorph, mesomorph, for example, but they have really, really different requirements. They may both be the key players to both their teams. However, in terms of energy expenditure, the hydration demands, they're so, so different. And that's just any— the same as a coach working with 2 players who want to play guard.

They can be 6'1, both of them, or 6'5, whatever. But if they're 20 kilos different, the way they're going to expend energy, what they're going to react to, It's completely different.

I love that. For me, one of the takeaways a few moments ago, Paddy, you described yourself as a problem solver. That's a word I use a lot with an ecological approach. And I think what we see now, especially at the highest levels of our game, is nutritionists are maybe not fulfilling that same role.

Instead, what I'm seeing is a lot of dependency with players upon key staff such as chefs. And what we see is, you know, chefs prepare all the meals, but they're not kind of helping the players be independent and actually, you know, be able to regulate themselves and understand how to make better decisions regarding hydration, food, etc.

So do you think that's a trend that is relevant within basketball? Maybe how could we eclipse that and what can we do to solve that problem?

Definitely. Um, nutrition is still a growing industry. I think that's one thing to really kind of consider. Um, obviously within the NBA there are dietitians and nutritionists who work with teams, Which is great. And they will have team chefs who will be preparing things where you go to the facility, for example, and you're at your training facility and there'll be food available for players, which is great.

The players also, it's common to have a performance chef. That's a really growing thing and that's across multiple sports. But this sense of reliance can be presented. And the other aspect is there can be miscommunication as well. Not in all cases. There are some cases where obviously it works perfectly.

Mm-hmm.

However, it can go wrong if you have a performance chef at home, for example, and you have a nutritionist. If you're not really getting your chef to tell your dietitian or nutritionist what you're eating at home, it's very difficult because they could give you way too much of something or far too little because there hasn't been communication between the two.

The approach that we have in Europe opposed to America is slightly different, so that must be considered. However, within the sport of basketball, Not many people could name that many nutritionists, particularly in the UK, European basketball, but even over in the States, there are dietitians and nutritionists.

However, not every team has one. It's very rare for a team to have a large amount, like a big-scale full-time staff and such. There's gonna be a lot, there's a lot of nutritionists and dietitians who will be working with multiple sports teams. So that could be going across from a basketball team to a baseball team, to an American football team, to a soccer team.

And it's very difficult to juggle that, and the current practitioners do a really good job. However, it kind of identifies that there needs to be a little bit more, and I think this is a growing industry, and I think that's where basketball can head with this, within this topic.

Absolutely. And obviously something we've spoken about a lot, Paddy, is our vision for the future, and that's how I finished the book, where an organization has individuals where we all share the same theoretical framework. So for instance, all using the CLA, And we're all working very closely together in integrated fashion.

So even yourself as a nutritionist, you understand basketball. And even if you haven't necessarily played, I think it's so important to have an intention to learn because what I noticed is by you understanding the game, it really informed your practical approaches. And that's what we're gonna spend the rest of this podcast discussing so coaches can implement these things.

And the first place I wanna start, I absolutely loved when you were with us how you took parts of our principles of play and you actually put it in a nutrition, in the perspective of nutrition to help our players make better decisions. So what I mean is we have our gold, silver, bronze medals for shot selection.

You were in all the practices, you were involved, you were giving the players their stuff, their water, their snacks, but then you were also watching and learning and then you applied it. Can you explain to people when we were in that pizza restaurant in Torino for our game, we didn't have many choices available.

that were good for where to eat. Can you explain that amazing medal concept, please?

Definitely. I think when people probably hear that we went to a pizza restaurant before a game, they're going to be like, what in the world is this nutritionist doing? So just to clarify, um, it was— we had a lack of time, and this is a common problem that a lot of people face, particularly if you're traveling to games on a lower budget, or if you had to get a bus, or it's just— it's a lack of opportunity to feed.

So what I did is I worked, we worked, we booked what the restaurant was and I got the menu up as soon as I could because part of the nutritionist and dietitian kind of role is the food preparation side of things. In this case, obviously we weren't cooking the food ourselves, but an external source was.

But I need to know roughly what, well, I need to know as best I can what was in the food, what were the options available to the players, and what was going to be in my opinion, absolute ideal. So that's our gold medal option.

What was going to be the best possible pizza or dish that the players could eat to prepare them for the game that they were going to play approximately 2 and a half, 3 hours? What I did then was I screenshotted the menu, I went through it, and I highlighted going through each individual food and item that was on the, like, the restaurant list and such, and the menu.

And I labeled it either a gold, a silver, and/or a bronze. We did slightly change the bronze a little bit to a red just to make it—

Can't touch bronze.

But the great part of that, I think, was the fact that it applies to this idea of the whole organization using the same methodology. And it made it simple and more easy for the players to understand what option was the right thing to go for.

Because they hear in practice these gold medal shots where it's the perfect opportunity, and that's what they look to choose. And I think we were really successful in selecting that option. And I think we did quite well as well if we then related to the actual game.

Obviously it was a victory, which was amazing, but the energy levels which were tracked were really good, and the fatigue hit quite a lot later than it had previously done from what I had observed and recorded. Which was great. And it also allowed the players to learn, but in a very indirect way.

So as a nutritionist, sometimes I'm fortunate if I get 5 to 10 minutes with an athlete, because you have to be willing to work on the fly, work on the move. Players today have a lot put on them. There's a big demand. You want to get the best out of them on the court, but you don't want to stress them out any more than you need to.

So choosing to kind of sync the 2 options in the gold medal option and such. just made it easier for them, and it was something they already understood. So it took very little teaching from me, but it made it really easy for them to follow.

Great, really nicely explained. And, you know, it's just, it was so good, Paddy, because it was, it's so practical and anyone can do that. And I think how you explain that, this is the future of basketball. It's just a matter of time. And obviously, you know, that's why Transforming Basketball exists.

In a way, we want to show what this vision could look like and just expose people and organizations to what the potential of this approach could be at some point in the future. And it's staggering. So I want to also get to something I really liked.

Now, you heard me speak about repetition out repetition, and you also heard me speak about external cues, because that was in, you know, college prep. We had regular educational sessions with the coaches where we would talk about ecological ideas. We were talking about the latest research and trying to apply it.

And you heard about these 2 concepts. And then you applied it to nutrition. Can you talk about both those things and how we could achieve that in nutrition?

In terms of external cues, in many countries with food on packaging, for example, you have labels. And if you're not taught how to use them, it can be difficult. But one of the things I kind of used with that example is the use of external cues, which are present on food.

So from using evidence-based practice and the current understood knowledge of the topic of basketball, of what's the right things to be feeding our players. I can use those labels and that information to just inform players of what they should be selecting. And that's something that doesn't cost the organization any money, the players any extra money.

It's just an easy external cue they can use. I know you touched on the kind of coaches presenting and educating the players with— I remember they were like short seminar-style workshops, and that's some of the work that I also then presented to the players and Made it practical.

Yeah, fun.

And that's the best way I've always believed to approach nutrition. And based on adherence, that's what's been shown to be most successful. When an individual is able to see it for themselves and take it to their own life or their own examples, they're so much more successful in applying it.

The same principle as when you're in a game of basketball, you're a training session, and you're not doing drills for the sake of repetition.

Yeah.

It's the key point. I'm not— we're not trying to create robots. We are working with people, and nutrition could easily become into, like, can often fall into this, I want to eat healthy, or I need to eat this, so I'm just going to have rice, chicken, broccoli, for example.

It's like a staple meal, but we need far more than that. And if you're teaching people to eat like robots, that's what can actually lead to some forms of eating disorder.

Yeah.

And it's present even, really unfortunately, even present within elite athletes. I think of cricket, for example, and Freddie Flintoff is a really good example of that. Just a really unfortunate circumstance. And part of my job is, yes, I want my players to be eating the best way possible for them to perform, but I want them to be eating the best way for their development as an individual.

And that's where the kind of the synergy comes between the two.

And eating in a way that embodies repetition out repetition, as Bernstein once referred to in regards to motor movement. So I also love how you spoke about how they learn by doing it. And that kind of links to what I've spoken about before on the podcast and JJ Gibson's concept of knowledge about versus knowledge of.

And, you know, if you are just using, you know, a presentation, you are giving players the science and you're just giving them theory, it's gonna do nothing. It's how they actually learning by doing and you doing some of these practical things. And we're gonna get onto those now.

Yes.

But I also wanna say my favorite external cue that you used was eat the rainbow. When we were in— we were at a buffet and, you know, you said to the players, eat the rainbow. And that was just a great example of an external cue, which, you know, we've been speaking about.

It was so cool.

Yeah, definitely. Just touch on it. So eating the rainbow, we kind of refer to like our fruits and our vegetables, and they're so important because they've got so many additional properties within them that many people just miss. Yes, it's important to have our intake within nutrition of carbohydrates, fats, and protein, which most people hopefully will be familiar with, but we also need other things like antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and these are all coming from our fruits and vegetables.

However, different fruits and vegetables have different properties and different things that they offer. And when I say eat the rainbow, what we're trying to do is if we eat a broad spectrum of colors, it means that we're getting as many of these as possible.

So for players seeing that, they can go, you know what, the more colorful my plate is, the better I'm doing at getting this in. And it means that they don't necessarily have to think, oh, I need to have this one because it's got this much of this in it.

It's more, if I have a widespread, I'm covering everything a lot better.

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I love that. So let's look at the practical considerations, and I think you know when for me, you know having now just after I'd say four years really applying the CLA, it makes me appreciate even more how important your role is and. You realize the differences and, you know, the marginal gains.

In fact, not even marginal, the huge gains you can gain when you're adding all these things up. So we're gonna look at some practical kind of things that programs of any level can immediately do. And what I'm gonna do, Patty, is I'm gonna read some of these from your book contribution, and I'd just like, love for you to build on them and kind of talk about what you did when you were working with me at prep.

The first thing we're gonna start with is a hydration station, which you implemented immediately.

Yeah, definitely. So a hydration station isn't an original idea. It's something that many teams do try to have. However, is it always amazingly used within all training sessions? Probably not. At a professional level, yes. At a more amateur or more semi-professional level, or even a level of professional basketball where there's limited budget, it's not done as well as it could be.

So a hydration station is literally just setting up A designated area of either your players' water bottles, or if you can provide the opportunity of presetting up everything, if you have a nutritionist or you have an extra assistant coach.

Manager who can do it.

Yeah, manager, exactly. Just having someone who could fill up bottles of water, and then that way you can also then make sure that the players are drinking enough. For example, when I was working with college prep, we did this on a table, and there's different types of fluids you can intake.

So I won't go too much into that now because it's very complicated. It's not complicated, but I'll be here forever. But we set up a station so we could just basically track how much our players were intaking and allow me to notice if, you know what, there may be a time where a player wants to get that opportunity of getting in a couple more shots, or they weren't quite happy with how they did in the drills.

They want to stay out and keep practicing it, which in some senses is great. But it allowed me to go, okay, we're— they're now going to be at risk of some level of dehydration. I could then either go to them or a manager, assistant coach can notice that and go, Okay, just need to have a quick drink.

And it's just an easy thing.

But it's great you're so aware of that. And, you know, you're really aware of, you know, those interventions just by understanding basketball and actually paying attention to the practice versus just being what I see in many other than the coaches. I see every other practitioner in basketball just completely passive in a practice.

And the reason why is because they're not empowered through the same theoretical framework, I believe. So great example. Next one, electrolyte drinks.

Yeah, so electrolyte drinks are really important. So with particularly within basketball being an indoor sport, even if you're playing outdoors with the development of like outdoor games, or if you're playing just training in an outdoor court, for example, when we're exercising, our body, it's natural to sweat.

So many, everyone sweats when they're exercising. And when we sweat, we're basically losing these electrolytes. So in a basic principle, it can cause the dehydration that you might experience after a game where you're You finish training or a match, for example, and you're, you feel absolutely knackered.

You have that drink and you feel like the water can't get you in, can't get in quick enough almost. And when we sweat, we're kind of releasing these in basic form, we're releasing these electrolytes. So electrolytes can be supplemented. So if you are in a position where you can afford to have a supplement, you can do this.

So there are many, many brands of sports drinks which are focused on these electrolytes. So you can buy them pre-made.

And we're not talking things like Gatorade.

No, not Gatorade. Has some of it, but there's also other bits in there. It's more common for teams actually to use other brands, although there are a lot of sponsorship deals in there, so that's where it can become a little bit complicated. But these supplements can come in like powder form where it's just electrolyte, basically it's a created electrolyte and you just mix it with water.

However, if you haven't got the budget for that, there is other options. When I was working with college prep, I wanted to show the players that if you weren't able to buy the supplement or your team weren't able to provide it to you and you wanted to make it, there are other options.

So just things like you can create your own, basically your own electrolyte drinks from using natural fruit juices, just adding a little bit of salt. I know a lot of time people hear the word salt and go, shouldn't be having too much of that, but it's actually important.

We should, are recommended to have a certain amount in our daily intake. And if you're an athlete and you're sweating more, you need to replace that as well.

And I loved how, you know, again, It wasn't the case of, okay guys, you're gonna come to the practice and we've got all these electrolytes made. And that you said it costs something ridiculous like 8 cents per bottle of electrolytes when we did it homemade.

Yeah.

But, you know, instead of them coming and us just hand feeding them with everything, no, we are giving them the tools to learn how to do it themselves. And that was the whole approach at College Prep. So, you know, when these players leave and they go into environments where they're not getting what we are doing, How can they flourish in those environments?

And we know that's what it comes down to. So I want to cover now carbohydrate and recovery snacks.

Yeah, fantastic. So carbohydrates are widely established as our key source of energy in terms of food intake for when we're performing. And it's really important we make sure that we're intaking them in preparation to participate. I won't go into all the science of how they're stored, but when we eat carbohydrates that are stored within our body, we then use that as a fuel.

So particularly within endurance performance, that's one of the key sources that we kind of tap into. So with these carbohydrates, yes, we want to take them and be eating them in preparation for the game. So I think most people will be really familiar with the idea of you have a big bowl of pasta a couple of hours before your kind of game.

In principle, you actually wanna start that a little bit earlier and carb load, which is a strategy. And I'd really encourage anyone to, if they want to apply this, I would really encourage having a bit of a read on that. And reading reliable sources.

That's the other thing I'll put in, but I'll touch on that a little bit later. And then the other aspect is when you finished exercising, particularly if you are in an environment such as basketball where you can have a really tight schedule. So you may have a training session and then within the next even 12 hours you could have another training session, or you could have a game within 24 hours after a training session.

If you look at the NBA, for example, some teams, it's common within the regular season to play a game on a Thursday night, and the next night you're on a Friday night, you're playing another game. So it's really important to start that process again and making sure we basically replenish our stores.

And then the other aspect of recovery is the element of protein. Uh, protein is really well known, well established, and it's probably— it's all over social media, and it's probably the most well-known supplement. And I think most people who either go to the gym or hear of Oh, you need to eat something to recover.

Most people turn to protein. So protein is really important. And when you finish form of exercise, it's really great to get that protein in to really begin basically what we call muscle protein synthesis, which basically means that we're repairing our muscles as quickly as possible.

But we wanna make sure that you are having a bit, little bit of both. It's not just about having just the protein or just the carbs. Mm-hmm. In terms of recovery, we wanna have both elements to really achieve that key goal. So if we look at this in terms of a gameplay example, let's say your player has finished training and they have a game the next day.

I want them to recover from the session, so that's where the intake of protein comes from, so their muscles are repairing. But I also want them to replenish their energy stores, so that's where the carbohydrates come in. And these can be created really easily, so you can get supplementation again for this.

However, one of my really key things that I try to do as a practitioner is The idea of food first. If I can get it from a natural food source, that's where I want my athletes to go and do, because the more natural we can get it, the better it is for general health.

Excellent. On that note, Paddy, I think the way that you helped us achieve that practically was amazing. And again, it took like— it was dirt cheap to do it. Could you talk about the snacks you provided our players during practice, during games, and then after them as well?

Post-practice, post-game.

Within carbohydrates, just to give it a bit brief, there's different rates of digestion. So you have some that digest really, really quickly. So the key one I can think of though, for those is like sugary kind of aspects. So you might see players having sweets before games or things like that.

It's because they burn really quick and they're digested really quickly so they can get into the energy source really quickly. Others are more complex and take a longer period of time to break down. So for example, whole grains or brown pasta, spaghetti, for example.

Mm-hmm.

They take longer to break down. So when I was working with, obviously working with yourself and college prep, my whole idea was basically depending on at what point in the day we were, it's gonna differ of what I'm giving them. So I made a really vast variety of things because the more options players can become aware of, the better their options are.

And it's the same principle as knowing all the different types of shot they can take within a game. That's how you can relate it. And that's what I really tried to do.

Yeah.

So for example, like if you have an open jump shot, that's gonna be your quickest form of release, for example, because you're gonna get like, you've caught the ball, open jump shot, you're taking it really, really quick. So it's the same principle with, you know what, I need to get carbohydrates really quickly.

So my open jump shots are, if you need a quick source of carbohydrates, it's something like these kind of sweets. Or the other thing I really use, 'cause it's cheap, is popcorn. Yeah.

And you've got all the popcorn cups ready for our players during Halftime, they had them during the practice breaks. It was great.

Yeah, definitely. And I think if you look at— the best way I can describe this to you is if you look at some of the best players in the world in terms of basketball, so your LeBron Jameses, your Steph Currys, all these people.

LeBron James is well established to be known for eating at halftime, um, and you can go read about that. It's really cool. That's the element we're doing with a basketball game. If you've had a really tough first 2 quarters, You don't want to be getting tired for the third and fourth.

I need to make sure that my players have energy to participate to their highest level, and that relates to both physical energy to perform but also the cognitive side of things. And I think that's a lot of what nutrition also provides, is a sense of cognition and the ability to be able to make all the really key decisions at the right time and not being fatigued, too fatigued, that that is negatively influenced.

And then the other kind of things I provide are kind of these recovery aspects. Protein balls are a really common item that you can buy, and that you can make them really, really cheaply and really easily. And it's a really cool way to do that.

And then the other option I provided is I actually created a kind of almost like a blend of a carbohydrate and a protein ball. Because say, for example, you've not got time to make both. If you can get 2 things in one, amazing.

If you've got a limited budget, it's the same principle. And it is fairly easy to do. There's some really great recipes and some really great people in terms of dietitians and nutrition practitioners who literally give this information away for completely free because they want the best athletes.

Love that. So, Paddy, last question. When you came, it was perfect timing because the week after we had— we flew to Slovakia for the finals of the European Youth League. And, you know, a lot of— we have a lot of professional coaches listening to this, and their teams are traveling a lot, and we have a lot of youth teams who travel long distances for their games in like cars, buses.

So could you finish just quickly kind of outlining travel strategies and maybe see if you can even tie that into the rest strategies too at the same time?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So just to kind of relate it to the BYBL, for example, when you— obviously I knew it was outside of your control and there's so many different factors that influence this, but when you told me when you were flying compared to when you were playing your first game, I was And not— I don't want to use the word shocked because I can understand why it happened, but in my head it was like, okay, that's not ideal.

We had to leave Borgo Manero at like 3 AM to—

yeah. Yeah, so it's not ideal for the players. It does have a negative impact because that's not— that you would never design that as a routine, and that's unfortunate. However, it couldn't be controlled. In terms of travel, without realizing when you're flying, a lot of like physiological impact is placed upon your body, um, obviously because You're going up into a much higher altitude.

And yes, you're in a controlled environment within an airplane, for example, or a bus. It's not natural. And I think if you've ever been on like a bus, for example, for a really long time and you— it gets really hot, or you have to have the aircon on for a really long period of time and it makes you feel like you're gonna cough, or you have that really like dry throat kind of thing, that can negatively impact performance because it's discomfort.

It's really— it's not optimal is the best way to really look at it. So one of the things I wanted to make sure for you guys traveling was how can I help you travel in the best possible way. And the key things I really kind of come back to is making sure in terms of intake of food preparation is as good as you can when you're traveling.

There's a— there's lots of different recommendations and things you can have, but one of the key ones is your joints can swell a little bit. So just from the basically the physical impact of being in a higher attitude, for example. So That's a key thing that I really want to make sure you're eating in the right way.

And then—

Berries, right? You told us to eat berries.

Yeah, eating berries and basically having antioxidants and anthocyanins, um, which is actually part of my— where I began within the world of nutrition with my original research was within anthocyanin research. And when you're flying, I wanted to make sure that you can do that to the best of your ability.

But if you are traveling for a long game, which is really common in basketball, if you think in the NBA, you're flying across from state to state or within Europe, in this case, you were flying from country to country. We want to be able to basically allow our players to be as comfortable as possible.

So there's different strategies you can do into this. For example, if you've finished a game, this is where the rest protocols can come in, and you're flying back that night, for example. It's having familiarity. So one of the key things that I really promote to people, if they can, is to travel with their own pillow.

And it sounds silly, and you might think, oh, it's frustrating to carry around my pillow around, but they easily fit into a backpack, or you can put it under your arm. Most airlines won't really bat an eyelid to it, really. It's because it's that familiarity.

If you're having the same— if you sleep on the same thing over and over again, you'll get used to it. One of the best examples I can give to this in terms of original usage is actually from the world of cycling. Formerly, when there was the Sky Sports—

Yes, I remember.

They basically traveled with mattresses, right? Mattresses and beds, and it was the same every night. It's the same concept. Yes, You're never gonna be as comfortable on an airplane seat or a coach seat or a car seat, for example, traveling back from a game.

But if we can have something that's familiar, it really helps promote that essence of being able to fall asleep. And rest is really, really crucial. It's the best form of recovery really we can get, and it's free. This is why a lot of people, you hear about how important sleep is, and I can't stress that enough.

It's so important both to obviously unwind from the day, but also for your physical recovery. And it's the time where a lot of the most adaptations happen, and we need to make sure that players are really getting that. And particularly working with the age group that college prep was, they're in that period of adolescence where they're kind of like they're transitioning, and we need to make sure that adolescents normally need to get 8 to 9 hours sleep.

Very hard to achieve, realistically speaking. However, the more sleep we can get, the better their recovery. And when you guys were flying to the games at 3 AM in the morning, Really, you needed your players to have a longer sleep. So what we try to really encourage is on that flight, when they got— after they got to the airport, they got into flight, try and sleep.

Even if you sleep for 2.5 extra hours, when you add that to the 5 hours you slept last night, it increases to 7.5, for example.

Excellent, Paddy. Numerous practical takeaways. And of course, you know, within the book Transforming Basketball, you wrote a contribution in the last chapter. Before we finish, where can coaches find out more about you? And I know too, we're working on a workshop on, you know, basketball nutrition and all these practical ideas actually showing you how to do it.

So maybe you could talk about that too.

Yeah, definitely. So in terms of me and finding me, I'm actually just about to launch my own, basically my own brand and such. So it's called PB Performance Nutrition. Really easy to follow. It's just my initials and then Performance Nutrition. So got an Instagram being released— well, but I'm hoping this will—

it will be— yeah, it will be there by the time we release this.

The other part is obviously through yourself, Alex. So from working with Transforming Basketball, um, one of the things that we are going to be offering is a course for coaches, even team managers, assistant coaches who— and other practitioners who want to begin to implement nutrition into their team or within their environment, that's another opportunity.

And then the other thing I recommend is, obviously I'm very thankful for the opportunity to be within your book because I think it's such an amazing concept. And the fact that we're developing the sport of basketball is— it's a great privilege to be a part of.

But people can look to that for the original, look at my piece. There's a lot of practical ideas that I've put in there with different budget options of like if you have a very limited amount of money or even if you have a large amount of money, and it can really apply to as many people as possible.

Fantastic. Paddy, thanks again for joining us today. Great stuff.

Thanks for having me.

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