As a chronically over-stoked rock climber, obsessed with exploring my physical and mental limits in a weight sensitive sport, I am passionate about using nutrition to help maximize health and performance - both for myself and for fellow athletes. I began climbing in college, then started down various life paths for a few years before eventually pursuing climbing full time. Fast forward to now and I have been living in a van and traveling to climb for the past seven years. During that time, I completed a Masters degree in sports nutrition and became a registered dietitian. I am a REDs certified provider and have been doing 1:1 remote nutrition counseling with climbers for the past two years. Throughout both my athletic and dietetic careers, I have found that understanding daily energy requirements and how to adjust intake according to varying levels of physical output is a main pillar of using nutrition to support health and performance. The following blog will explore total daily energy expenditure and energy balance - what they are, how to estimate and track them for yourself, and why they are important in optimizing both athletic performance and long term health.
Definitions
- Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE): total number of calories your body burns in a 24 hour period. This includes:
- Basal metabolic rate (BMR): The calories your body burns at rest to maintain essential functions like breathing, circulation, and cell function.
- Non-exercise adaptive thermogenesis (NEAT): The energy expended through activities like fidgeting, standing, walking, and other daily movements.
- Thermic effect of food (TEF): The energy your body uses to digest and process food.
- Exercise energy expenditure (EEE): energy used for planned exercise, training, climbing, skiing, running, etc.
- Energy balance: the relationship between the amount of energy consumed (calories) and the amount of energy expended. When your body is in a state of neutral energy balance, you would expect to be relatively weight stable over time.
Why is this important?
Nutrition is only one piece of the performance puzzle but it is the supportive base that allows you to practice your sport more often, have longer, more effective sessions, and recover better in between. Understanding energy balance for your individual needs allows you to manipulate your energy intake to achieve a wide variety of goals. First and foremost, it empowers you to make sure you are adequately fueling your body for the demands of your sport and preventing the long term health consequences of under fueling.
What does this look like in practice?
The tool I have found most useful for tracking all this actually involves a third value: Energy availability. After subtracting the energy used for exercise, the energy left for physiological functions is called your energy availability (EA). If there is not enough to cover your BMR, your body will be in a state of Low Energy Availability (LEA). LEA can lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs), which leads to a wide array of detrimental health and performance issues.
Generally speaking, to support optimal health and training adaptations, we want to see EA around 35 cal/kg of lean body mass for males and 40-45 for females. Using an EA calculator provides an easy way to understand how to adjust calories up and down depending on your activity level on any day.
When does this become a problem?
It is worth acknowledging the pervasive culture of disordered eating in the climbing community. In gravitational sports like climbing—where you are moving your body against gravity to accomplish the goal—there is a tendency to adopt the mindset that lighter is always better. That can make teasing out the nuance between discipline and disorder feel complicated.
Your lightest weight is not necessarily your strongest weight and chronic underfueling prohibits you from reaching your potential because neglecting the importance of food as fuel impacts optimal performance, training adaptations, growth and development, and long-term health.
To wrap it up
Understanding your energy requirements as an athlete is one of the most powerful ways to compliment all the hard work you put in at the gym or out practicing your sport. Learning how to tailor your nutrition to your workload and adjust your intake up and down in accordance to activity level is a fundamental element of performance nutrition. If you have questions, want more details, or are interested in working with a sports dietitian to better understand the nuances of this for yourself, contact Amity at amitywarme.com.
