Welcome to Effortless Swimming, the podcast for swimmers, triathletes and coaches. Join Australian swim coach, Bretton Ford, as he reveals the latest techniques and information to improve your swimming. Let’s dive right in. Welcome to another episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast. Today’s guest is Renee Trost, who’s a naturopath here in Melbourne, and Renee has a background in field hockey, so she was an Australian team member for a number of years. She played in World Cups, World Champs, the championship champions trophy, and was also in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Renee, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Brent. Thanks for having me. I wanted to get you on today to talk about improving performance from a naturopathy perspective and with your experiences, a high level athlete, and how nutrition played a part in your recovery and your performance, and some things that athletes can do today to improve their own performance

with using maybe better food or better supplements and how we can get people feeling better and competing better. So to get kicked off, let’s just give me a quick background on your background as an elite athlete and how nutrition started to play a part in your recovery and your performance. Yeah, so as an athlete, most of the time we know about the three main nutrients, the carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and that’s really piled into most athletes at kind of a basic level. So I found as being an athlete and with my real passion lying in food that I thought that there was just a lot more that I could get out of my food and then out of my body so that I could back up training. So most athletes train every day on multiple times a day. Not unusual for athletes to do two sessions a day. Swimmers morning, nights, triathletes train two, three times a day. So at the peak of my training, we were doing over 10 sessions a week,

training six days a week with recovery on the seventh day. So I just really started to do a lot of research into how I could get the most out of my body and what foods would provide me with that edge that would make me elite and be able to function so I could back up my performances day after day. And I think the first and most general guideline I would give to athletes who are performing at their utmost potential would be to make your diet predominantly based around high net gain foods and to make that the real cornerstone of every meal. And so high net gain food is any food that offers more nutrition than energy. So we want to get in as much nutrition and vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates in the most natural form that the body can take on with the limited kind of caloric effect which sounds a bit weird because we need calories for energy but we want to make sure that we can balance energy in and energy out

and really enhance the nutrition side of it all. So high net gain foods are most predominantly your fruit and vegetables so you think kale, spinach, berries, those kind of things and they really provide a big bang for what you’re eating and for those athletes who are struggling with a little bit on the weight side of things these foods are going to provide you with everything that you need and they’re accessible, they’re everywhere and they’re really easy to eat. So on the flip side of it, a low net gain food this is food that has more calories than nutrition so they’re things like and these are the things that athletes kind of tend to go towards post-training they’re things like your white breads and your lollies so they contain more calories but they have less of a nutritional value. Yeah absolutely and also one of the things that I guess not everyone has to deal with but if you are an elite athlete and you might have a team

or you might be personally sponsored by a company let’s say it’s Uncle Toby’s or if it’s Powerade or Gatorade you’re sort of forced to have these drinks or foods that you may not necessarily be the best thing for you but you’re sort of forced to have them so you sort of came across that as a high level athlete is some of the things that you may have been encouraged to take weren’t the optimum food that you should be having. Yeah definitely so sports trends are a big one so you see a lot of sporting teams walking around with their Powerade or Gatorade bottles and that’s not to say these foods don’t serve a functional purpose they’re really good at getting those electrolytes in and getting the quick carbohydrates in and I think they’re fine to have but we can boost that nutrition by say having you can carry around a fruit juice in one of those drink bottles we used to promoting that brand to be getting in more nutrition

as well as consuming their product so by no means is anything like that bad or taboo but you can definitely get more in and still be loyal to those sponsors. Yeah absolutely because it is an important part of sport is the money that comes in from sponsors but it’s not necessarily the best thing for health or recovery with some of these things and in terms of I know we spoke about this last week when we had a chat was that with recovery in terms of inflammation so if you’ve got bad knees and your knees flare up a bit sometimes taking anti-inflammatory tablets and pills aren’t always the best things to have to reduce that information can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah sure so most of these kind of medications are more of the short term gain so they’re based on immediately reducing information or immediately reducing pain so that you can get through your event or get through your training session and like again that serves a functional purpose

and sometimes it’s fine but there is a downside to that where it still promotes degeneration and it still promotes information and you’re not taking that active substance so you’re not actually treating the cause of what’s going on so say you do have inflammation in your knee or your shoulder you can take those things to get through your schedule but it does things like it has a bad reaction on your digestive system where it’s shown scientifically that any inflammatory disease can degenerate your gut lining which means if your gut’s not functioning properly you’re not absorbing your food optimally which means you’re not getting the right fuel in so that your body’s now not functioning it creates this cycle of stress which effectively brought inflammation and exercise and bad food can do innately in your body so you can use food as medicine here to help negate that inflammation and we can do things like using fish oils

as a well known supplement that you can take to help reduce inflammation and you can also take your any inflammatory with that fish oil so you’re getting a beneficial supplement there to treat the cause as well as still possibly taking something short term to get you through your training session but by no means I know many athletes who are on multiple and inflammatory tablets day after day long term and I think if we can strip it back and treat the cause and really help that person’s body regenerate through food, through supplements through a more kind of holistic approach then your body thrives in its entirety, not just one joint or one movement That’s the problem I’ve got with a lot of high contact sports or high level sports let’s say it’s AFL, Australian football for those overseas is that players that might have bad shoulders, bad knees and before the game they’re just pumped full of anti-inflammatories and all these drugs

and things like that that help them not feel the pain of what they’re actually putting themselves through and then a few days later they’ll just be in a whole lot of pain again and they do it week in, week out and for the club it’s good because they’re getting the performance from it might be their top player but long term this player’s really suffering suffering for the short term and then down the track they might not be able to walk without pain and knees down the track and I understand it is a business and it is a job I guess but for the health of the player it’s really not a good thing so if you can treat it with something more natural whether it’s fish oil or other natural anti-inflammatories and reduce the amount of tablets and pills that you’ve got to take then you’ll be much better off down the track and I think using food as a functional kind of medicine here is perfect because we have to eat so if we make sure that our diet’s packed

full of the things that actually heal our body then we can use these things in the short term to get through that one injury or to get through that one debilitating effect but because our diet is nourishing our body it’s actually healing as well so that we’re not on these things long term and one food that I knew about this food when I was playing I would have consumed it by the truck load is turmeric turmeric is such an easy food to get in you can eat it, you can drink it cook with it, sprinkle it on things you can get it in and that’s one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory and it assists with reducing recovery time and enhancing muscle repair and it’s one food that I suppose as Australians we don’t particularly eat a lot of so this food, turmeric, I would just every athlete should be consuming it in some way, shape or form daily but it’s beneficial effects Do you recommend getting the tablets or do you recommend taking it on top of

like a main meal or what? Yeah, some people can’t afford turmeric is actually quite expensive as a supplement so some people won’t be able to afford to be staying on it long term but I would definitely take it as a supplement because it’s broken down into the active component cuckuman which has the highest therapeutic effect but if you can eat it as well then you’re just getting it in every kind of form that your body can absorb the thing with turmeric is and most people don’t know this is it’s not actually bioavailable it’s just a source in the body which means that we don’t absorb a high dose of it so we have to take and eat a lot of turmeric to get those beneficial effects but if we take it with like so if you’re cooking with turmeric and you add a little bit of oil you cook it with a bit of fat saying like curries or dals that actually helps the body absorb those therapeutic benefits of the turmeric to really get in and help with the regeneration

at a cellular level Yeah, I’ve just got a juicer recently and every morning I’ll have a juice with say a carrot an apple an orange and I’ll cut up half a half a piece of turmeric and put that in as well and it’s really good Yeah, so if you had added a little bit of coconut oil to that juice because it’s a medium chain trope of glyceride which means our body absorbs that fat and we utilise it for energy faster as well as containing other enzymes you would be absorbing more of that drink at a cellular level than you would be without that little bit of fat in there Okay, interesting, I’ll have to try it and that’s one of the things that I’ve added to my pantry is coconut oil I’ve been using that in for cooking and all sorts of other stuff for the last couple of months and it’s fantastic it’s amazing how many uses coconut oil has got Mmm, yeah, it’s phenomenal it’s a phenomenal product And the same goes for a lot of other health

foods, I mean my pantry my pantry has almost completely changed in the last couple of months just with replacing foods that aren’t ideal with foods that are much better more natural and it’s a learning process too so I mean I aim to completely cut out gluten now just in order to feel better and be a bit leaner as well but that’s one of the things I’ve changed but yeah, just changing things that I eat and changing the way that I cook and start out the day it’s been so much better in terms of how I’m feeling I’m not as tired, I don’t need to sleep during the day because I get up at 4.30 for coaching and I don’t need to come back and have an hour of sleep to feel better I can run on less sleep because of it Well that’s the joy of healthy eating is that our body is not looking for that next quick fix or it’s not looking for the nap or it’s not looking for the sugar hit because we’re feeding it and when our cells are so full of energy

on a basic level from all the nutrition that we’re having we can actually find that we can perform better we can work harder our rest and down time and recovery time isn’t where we’re feeling like we have to find the next hit it’s actually just purely rest and recovery and I think with athletes we’re so used to looking for that next thing that gets us through the session or pumps us up or gives us the next kind of stimulation that we forget that the fundamentals of good food and nutrition and hydration are what our body is really trying to find Yeah it’s a good point I used to be so tired when I used to be in school and be training 8 or 9 times a week and I’d have some week fix after training and then I’d get to about 10 o’clock and I’d be so tired I’d just want to curl up in a ball in the corner in class because that kind of the high of having the week fix and then you just feel very heavy and lethargic after that and just changing what you eat

you have a lot more energy throughout the day Yeah it’s fantastic and even like talking about things like your juice you know most athletes even if they just have a juicer day you can get so much out of it and one of the big juicers that’s coming through a lot of the sports journals or scientific studies done on it is beetroot juice and so most athletes like I would probably don’t know any athletes that use fruit or vegetable juices as a form of increase to enhance performance or to assist with recovery or to get them through to the next training session and it’s such a great way to get the most nutrition out of a form of food to get us through to that next training session and beetroot juice so the benefit aside from like its high antioxidant status is it contains a compound called nitric oxide now this nitric oxide helps relax the blood vessels which means we can get more blood flow to our muscles which means we can get more oxygen to our muscles

so that we can work harder and recent studies have shown that so continually having beetroot juice say every day, if you juice in the morning or as a single dose enhances exercise economy which means we can work harder with less damage done to the body and through these scientific studies as well it’s showed that beetroot juice consumed prior to exercise enhances our capacity and performance so it’s shaving thousands of seconds of people’s times or this was done in long distance runners so it was shaving minutes of some of these people’s performance times and it was basically in Australia we can find a product that’s called Beetot Shot which contains the 300mg of nitrates which is what these scientific studies were based around and it was shown that two hours before your exercise session just having this 70mg shot was allowing people to perform better faster and harder and back it up for their next exercise session so for those people out there who aren’t having beetroot

in their juices or who aren’t having juices at all this is one food I would definitely put into my daily routine what was that thing called, was it beetit? yeah it was called beetit so they’re beetit shots there’s small little 70mg shots that you can buy most health food stores now stock them so I thought they’re readily available in Australia oh that’s good I’ll have to check that out I have been having beetroot most days in a juice and I think having the right tools is a big part of it as well definitely I can’t recommend getting a juicer highly enough it’s just completely changed the way I feel and eat I would never go through that many fruits and veggies in a day if it wasn’t for a juicer yeah that’s right and you just think of everything that you’re getting in there’s your multivitamin that you’re getting in daily through your juice so it’s great to have a functional food that way exactly yeah and it’s such a great way

to start the day like it just feels fresh drinking that too so having the right tools is a juicer for the food processor as well I make a lot of muffins and even healthy raw cheesecakes and things like that having the right tools to be able to do that makes it much easier and it’s worth investing in something good as well not just a cheap one because if you’ve got the right tools that are good they’re going to last you longer and it’ll be much easier and less frustrating too when it comes to cleaning anything like that a blender, a juicer and a food processor should be a must in every athlete’s kitchen just because it cuts down on time as well how easy is it to throw something in a blender and you’ve got a healthy smoothie or a snack to go but you’ve got your pre-workout protein shake with some fruit and veggies in there I just think those kind of things are so quick and easy rather than finding somewhere to buy something or to cut up

all the small pieces yourself and athletes what we’re looking for is we don’t want to spend all of our spare time in the kitchen we want to be able to spend it doing other things yeah absolutely and what I’ll normally do on a Sunday is just try and cook as much or prepare as much food for the week as possible using these things and then it saves going out to the shop which might take 10 minutes there 10 minutes back to just get a snack so it’s good to be able to have those things during your freezer and I think also for athletes I suppose the good athletes are aware that they need to eat as soon as they can after kind of their event or exercise session within the 30 minutes to 1 hour window but for a lot of people who are travelling home or having to drop by the supermarket before they get home before they can have something to eat taking a smoothie or fruit juice with you so that you can consume that after your training session is just such a

vital tool to decrease the information get ready for the next workout that’s about being organised and prepared but you don’t want to spend hours doing it yep absolutely time is very precious if you’re working full time and training or if you’ve got a family or anything like that you don’t want to be spending too long in the kitchen so it’s great to be able to prepare those things now what are some of the main things that someone will come to a naturally path for well I find mostly with athletes especially they come from if the two things one that they have kind of a bad digestion or they’re kind of struggling a little bit with their stomachs and guts and absorbing food and sometimes they just think it’s all food intolerances but a lot of them it just comes down to their digestion so strenuous exercise places quite a stress on our digestive system and absorption of nutrients and I think of it as your gut and digestive system

is like a filter to your body and if we’re not filtering the food and getting the most and extracting the most nutrients out of our foods I’m not fueling our body the way we want to so with a lot of athletes I do a lot of gut repair so that they can utilize the food that they’re consuming to get the most out of it through recovery the second thing that I see a lot of the time is a lot of them come in feeling a little bit run down or they’ve got a bit of a cold and a lot of this comes from when we exercise we stress our body and our white blood cells might just drop a little bit and predominantly it’s through a bit of carbohydrate depletion so white blood cells they use glucose and carbohydrates for their energy and so I find sometimes a lot of athletes because they’re consuming the wrong types of carbs they’re kind of not fueling their body as optimally as they can so it’s changing what they do eat to more kind of functional

food so they’re still getting the carbohydrates but they’re also getting those nutrients in there to allow their body to work harder on a level that is you know right up there with the lead athletes yeah that that probably is something I can relate with when I was as a teenager training so many times a week occasionally I’d get some kind of I don’t know if it was reflux whatever it was but just putting in hard work for an hour and a half two hours in a session to the point where you’re just ready to pass out almost there’s something about being able to digest food properly in order to get the nutrients and the carbohydrates to be able to to get through that set I don’t know what it is but pushing your body incredibly hard does make it difficult to to make sure you can get all of those things in yeah it does and that’s where those things like juices and smoothies are so vital because they don’t take a lot of effort from the body to digest yet they’re full of nutrients

and for a lot of people it is really hard to eat a meal straight after they exercise so that’s when you know something simple like a water down fruit juice for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and a lot of the time they contain components in them which are healing to the digestive system as well so having a diluted fruit juice afterwards and getting that hydration in even eating things like cherries and bananas those kind of things they contain the carbohydrates that you need to get in they contain other essential vitamins and minerals that are really hard on the digestive system and it’s quite funny because I love when we come into summertime in Australia because I’m a big cherry fiend but they’re one of the things that athletes as well should be eating so they’re kind of up there with beetroot juice and it’s the component in cherries called anthocyanins and they’ve shown similar benefits to beetroot juice that they contain such a high antioxidant

and any inflammatory actions that it’s now being recommended that athletes can consume cherries in massive amounts post-event so I don’t know if everyone loves cherries as much as I do but when I found these studies coming out I was more than happy to go down and get my box of cherries I think that’s like when I finally realised that eggs aren’t necessarily bad for me so I made the mention of that so there’s so many good foods out there that taste great and are good for you and are better for you than the lollies that tend to come out after a training session or I know after playing hockey we used to have lollies halfway through the game and at the end of the game because it was seen as getting that glucose back into the body it’s just such a negative way to get the nutrients in where if we have our fresh fruit and our drinks they still contain the sugars but they contain nutrients as well yeah absolutely and I’ve in the past I’ve worked with

some people who are diabetic and you know there’s this one guy that would always want to get his sugar levels up blood sugar levels up so go out and get a coke is there anything worse that you could possibly get in order to do that it’s crazy and the same goes for lollies it’s like okay I’ve just done an event I need to replace my glycogen stores I better go and get some lollies it sounds fine if you don’t think about it too critically but you know if you’re really looking at what you’re putting in your body it’s just straight sugar and it’s going to give you that that spike in your in your energy levels and then you’re just going to crash afterwards yeah that’s right and I think for what most athletes as well don’t realise is that it’s such a refined sugar that it really does spike our blood sugar levels and yes we get the glucose benefits from it in places in our stores but sugar is also pro-inflammatory so it enhances the inflammation that’s going on in your body

and as an athlete if your next session is that afternoon or you have to back it up again the next day or say you’re in the middle of competition you want to try and decrease as much information as possible in the body and you know fruits do that so they contain those in inflammatory properties and they contain the antioxidants to get rid of the oxidative stress that exercise consumes but all those people who are grabbing lollies if I was a swimmer I’d be telling all my competitors to go to the lolly bar while I ate my cherries I’d be you know a little get ahead of them for the next meet yeah exactly right and it is to meet most swimmers have got a couple of races spread over a few hours so if you’re having lollies straight afterwards then you’re probably going to find it difficult to back up your next couple of races yeah that’s right that’s right now when someone comes in they’ve got these problems what sort of they’ve got these complaints

what sort of things do you do to help find a better person to go and how do you make your recommendations sure so I put on my luck to use food as medicine if you haven’t noticed so I think supplementation is really good to boost people up initially but I really think that especially as athletes we have to invest in our bodies so I like getting people involved in you know the purchasing, preparing and eating of their health really so you know as much as I’ll give a supplementation just to kind of decrease the information in their body or to correct an imbalance or deficiency I predominantly like to educate them on what foods to eat so you know changing their weak picks to maybe oats in the morning which helps rebuild the gut lining and contains low GI foods which means that at last our body can use the energy from those oats longer even something like enhancing getting them to get a fresh fruit juice or using food as a functional way for them to heal

and repair another thing I noticed a lot with athletes is they’re good flora in their digestive system so the probiotics that we hear so much about is usually quite depleted because we stress our bodies and a lot of athletes eat the wrong food so they eat a lot of refined carbohydrates so just replenishing those good bacteria which helps their immune system it helps their performance it helps their digestion and I find that that’s one of the supplements that I really encourage athletes to take if not long term yeah and and I’m of the opinion that that you really need to make a quite a quite a big change even if it’s gradual but if you just change one thing let’s say you’re just taking the the say turmeric yeah it’s going to help you but if you sort of replace the things that are making you feel like crap and you swap them over for better foods if you make that sort of whole change then that’s when you really start to see the benefits

is you’ve really got to get yourself right with sort of 80 90% of it and then you really start to see the benefits they’ll come much quicker yeah that’s right you’ve really got to get yourself right with the majority of what you’re eating and what you’re doing yeah that’s right and it’s I think it’s really good to go and see a professional about those things because they can really point you in the right direction and then the supplements they do give you a high quality supplements so over the counter or you can go into a health food store and you can buy you know every supplement or variation of a supplement but they’re not really as high quality as the supplements you can get from a qualified practitioner and there’s also supplements that are activated so they’re in a form where a body can absorb them and assimilate them without having to expend a lot of energy and they’re only available normally to practitioners

so I think sometimes for athletes we try to Google things and we try to do a lot of cure cure ourselves but if we go and get a nutrition coach or we see someone who specializes in these areas you know you’re really getting your bank for your buck and you’re learning and you’re learning how to balance your body and you’re getting that optimal nutrition in with the least amount of strain on the body yeah I highly recommend going to see people who know what they’re talking about especially seeing someone like yourself who’s got that background in sport I was chatting to a physiotherapist yesterday about and she works specifically with swimmers now she knows what swimmers need to do in order to get them themselves flexible enough and strong enough in the movements and the muscles that swimmers use and same with yourself in terms of eating the right foods for an athlete because you come from that background and you know

how it feels to be taking this after exercise and all that sort of stuff so it’s really worth seeing someone who can help you with that what’s the why is it that say professionals and therapists and things like that do have these supplements that are better easily absorbed and compared to the other counter ones like what’s the difference in how they’re made or why they have got those differences yeah that’s right so basically practitioner supplements they’re more expensive for a reason because they’re of a fine type of quality or where the over the counter ones either have a lower dose so you have to take more of them or they’re just not as bioavailable so the nutrient you’re getting is not readily absorbed or is easily absorbed from the body so that’s why the practitioner products they’re designed almost like a medicine so they’re designed to provide you with the best form of that nutrient that your body can absorb and it’s I suppose good

and bad because it’s not accessible to everyone so not everyone can get in to see a practitioner to get a specific product so it is good for those people who need an alternative but I know when I was an athlete investing in my health and nutrition I wanted that form that would give me the best edge for my performance and you know those products unfortunately aren’t available to everyone but they are if you go through the right channels yeah okay oh that’s that’s interesting and yeah and I think it does getting better quality stuff even if it’s a juicer or food processor or your supplements yeah it’s not going to cost you a little bit more but you’re going to get so much more out of it and I’m of the opinion I’d rather have less things but that are of a higher quality rather than getting you might get 10 supplements that are all of straight from the chemist or whatever so it’s um I think I think as well if we invest in our bodies

so if we invest in our health and our body we can actually then remain in our sport at the highest level for longer so you know we have less injuries we have better health we have better recovery times and we can actually perform at a higher level for longer which you know is priceless really yeah completely if your health’s not right then it doesn’t matter what else if you’re making loads of money or you got loads of friends if you’re not right yourself it doesn’t you know nothing else really matters so investing in your health is the most important thing I definitely believe that’s why I just came straight from my therapy appointment and a chiropractor appointment and that’s why I say chiropractor every week is because I want to make sure that I’m that I am feeling good and I’m right and my spine and health is all fine so it’s definitely worth looking after yourself yeah definitely now how can people get in touch with you

if they want to see you for you know if they’ve got any complaints whether they haven’t got as much energy as they’d like throughout the day or if they are having some stomach or gut problems while they’re training how can people get in touch with you sure well they can drop me a line at my email address which is renaeareandwe or lowercase at pigpotential or lowercase or one word dot com dot au that’s renae at pigpotential dot com dot au or they can call pigpotential if they wanting to look in for an appointment or even just to drop in the clinic and kind of see what we’re all about down next we’re a multimodality clinic that really aims towards getting the best for the athlete awesome and I mean the clinic’s in near Melbourne it’s about 20 minutes out of Melbourne so if you’re in Melbourne you can head there if people are interstate or overseas they would still like to contact with you whether they do like a Skype consultation is that

a possibility? yeah that’s fine just contact me by email so I can set that up with them but definitely open to chatting and helping people out there get the best out of themselves awesome well renae thank you so much for joining me on the podcast really enjoyed chatting with you and talking about health and feeling better and getting better performance through nutrition in all those sorts of things really passionate about especially moving from moving from a diet that wasn’t so great and I was feeling tired every single day to where I’m now a little bit smarter with what is actually going into my body and feeling much better for it so I really appreciate you coming on the podcast you’re welcome I’m glad I could share some knowledge awesome thanks renae that’s alright thanks friend thanks for joining us on the effortless swimming podcast to get transcriptions, bonus videos and to be the first to hear about new episodes

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