Dear Performance Nutrition Leaders,
This week: a hydration reframe, the latest news, and an innovative wearable that estimates ventilatory thresholds.
💡 LATEST RESEARCH
Most practitioners frame hydration around performance. Match day. The competition window. Sweat loss protocols. A new review in Sports Medicine says that framing may be missing the bigger story.
Francisco and Armstrong pulled together emerging evidence on what chronic under-hydration actually does to athletes over time — and the numbers are striking.
Approximately 58% of athletes habitually consume less than 35 mL/kg/day of fluids. That qualifies them as chronic low drinkers.
The mechanism the paper points to is arginine vasopressin (AVP) — the hormone that rises when the body senses low fluid intake. In non-athletic populations, persistently elevated AVP and chronically concentrated urine have been linked to insulin resistance, low-grade inflammation, and elevated chronic disease risk.
This is a review drawing substantially on non-athlete evidence, so practitioners should hold the mechanistic translation to elite sport with appropriate caution.
The performance case for adequate daily hydration is already solid. This paper adds a second reason to care.
📈NEWS
UCF Athletics hiring sports nutrition fellow
Tom Colligan shares nutrition provision at Chesterfield FC
PhD studentship available at Manchester City Women’s Academy
Manchester United Women’s Academy hiring performance nutritionist
Emmy Campbell (Newcastle United Women’s Nutritionist) publishes first study of PhD
Elysa Wesolek appointed Football Performance Nutrition Fellow at University of Miami
Beth Vickers featured as a nutrition contributor on the launch of the Women's Rugby Roadmap platform
Swati Bathwal leads nutrition and anti-doping workshop for GoSports Foundation's India para athlete programme
Kala Riester featured by Intermountain Health for her pre-match fuelling work with Real Salt Lake and Utah Royals FC
Dr Joanna Li hosted as a guest lecturer at NTU PESS, sharing real-world insights on fuelling elite Singaporean athletes at major international games.
Dr James Morehen, Aimee O'Keeffe, Cameron Blake, and Craig Umenyi to present to the Performance Plate Pathway beta course on what elite fuelling looks like inside their clubs
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💡Performance Tech
Estimating energy expenditure sits at the core of every performance nutrition role.
Get it wrong and the fuelling strategy falls apart.
The challenge is that most field-based methods are indirect. Heart rate and power data give you a signal, but not the full picture.
Tymewear's VitalPro is a wearable breathing sensor that measures ventilatory thresholds in real time — the same thresholds traditionally measured in a laboratory lactate test.
The science behind it is well-established. Ventilatory threshold 1 (VT1) and VT2 closely track metabolic shifts during exercise. Measure those, and you have a reliable, non-invasive marker of training intensity and metabolic demand.
Professor Stephen Seiler, put it directly on the Fast Talk Labs podcast: the technology "could allow us to replace lactate threshold measurements in the field with ventilatory threshold measurements, making the process less invasive and more practical."
That matters for nutrition because threshold data shapes zone targets, which shapes fuelling demands. Tighter threshold data means more precise carbohydrate prescription.
The device is currently used as an official supplier to Team Visma | Lease a Bike.
VitalPro starts at £299.
Performance nutritionists who understand the tools athletes are using are better placed to interpret the data that comes with them.
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