How important is nutrition to a performance athlete? Just ask British CrossFitter Steven Fawcett.
There might be a fine line between winning and losing, but one little tweak to Steven's diet made a big impact and helped him become the first British man to qualify for the CrossFit Games.
It's often hard to quantify marginal gains from sports science at the elite level - but changing the way he structured his diet meant Steven saw 'beginners' gains' in his big lifts.
How does adding 25kg to your squat numbers sound when you're at the sport's top level?
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JOE asked Steven what was the key that took him from a leading European athlete to qualifying in the world's top 40 to challenge for Rich Froning's CrossFit Games title?
"The main thing that’s changed and helped is definitely my nutrition," Steven told JOE.
"Matt Hodges from Buff Box approached me 10 months ago. He sat me down and went through my diet and realised I was completely under-eating on calories. 1200 calories less than I needed and the calories that I was getting in were not really high quality."
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Now Steven gets all his meals sent to him on a daily basis with the correct macronutrients, optimum portion sizes with protein-rich meals prepared in a super-steamer which cooks and cools the food in 20 minutes to seal in the nutrients.
"As soon as I started that all of my strength numbers went up through the roof," he said.
"I had four months of strength training so my strength shot up. When it came round to start conditioning, because I had so much more energy from all the good food, my conditioning was the same, if not better, than when I was at my fittest in the last season.
"So when I started conditioning in my training as well as the strength work my fitness went through the roof compared to last year."
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The impact of tweaking his diet was clear from his workout performances. His strength numbers rocketed and his times plummeted - just in time to smash the European Regionals.
"I did a workout from last year before Regionals and I repeated it a few weeks before Regionals this year.
"It was a 10 minute AMRAP (as many reps as possible) of ground-to-overheads with 120kg. I got 20 reps last year. I can remember finishing that workout and being knackered and not being able to do a single rep more.
"But this year I got 30 reps. That’s a lot of an improvement. That’s 50%. It just shows over the year I thought ‘I’ve not really improved that much’ but it shows that I’ve done a workout which killed me last year and I’ve got 50% better."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_lBjBi5IkM&feature=youtu.be
Check out the
hardcore training Steven puts himself through and JOE's interview with the Lancashire athlete about what it too to make the
CrossFit Games. 
