#153 – Using a CGM surprised the Director of Sports Nutrition for the Miami Dolphins | John Parenti & Ben Grynol

John Parenti, the Director of Sports Nutrition for the Miami Dolphins, used a CGM and was shocked to see how his body responded to oatmeal. In sharing his CGM experience with his athletes, he emphasizes that everyone’s body responds to food differently, and urges them to get their lifestyle habits and routines in place before trying to change nutrition. A healthy routine makes all the difference in your life, whether you’re an athlete or not. In this episode, John shares how his CGM changed the way he ate, the importance of lifestyle and routine, and why you should always go back to the fundamentals.

05:08 – An eye-opening experience

John said wearing a CGM showed him some surprising things, like how oatmeal alone wasn’t a great choice for breakfast.

It was an eye-opening experience for me. It just showed me that specifically, dietician sometimes get caught up in, you need to eat oatmeal for better blood glucose control. But I saw myself that when I ate oatmeal by itself, I had a tremendous spike and I was like, “Oh shoot man, that’s very interesting.” But when I started pairing it with other things, eating my protein first and then going to eating my oatmeal. I saw that my blood glucose was a lot better. It still wasn’t in the range that your optimal range, but it was still something that I was like, “Okay, and this is really interesting here.” Not to say that, “Oh shoot, now I’m a type two diabetic by any means.” But it was just interesting to see the impact of what you ate and how your blood responded to that, mono label was going on inside.

06:45 – Check in with your body

While CGMs aren’t necessary for everyone, they help you pay attention to what your body needs and how it responds to different foods.

I see a lot of backlash with CGMs on social media and there are used for, “Well, if you’re not a type II diabetic, then there’s no really rhyme and reason to wear it.” And it’s like, I see where people are coming from on that. And I can see the argument, but also at the same time, it’s like, well, also ask yourself the question, why not? If you haven’t dug a little deeper in seeing how your body’s responding because I don’t see it as an elimination diet as some people might see it as. If you have a really bad response to something on a CGM or what have you, then people will automatically think, “Well, I can never have that ever again in my entire life.” And it’s like, “Well, no, not necessarily.” CGM uses a elimination diet, it’s not what it’s used for. It’s used for specifically to see how your body’s responding at that certain time, but also not just to that specific food group, but your overall lifestyle in general.

07:48 – Find a routine

John believes in the importance of routine for maintaining a healthy body. CGM tracking is one of the many ways you can get your body into a the right routine.

Something that I’m very passionate about is finding a routine for yourself because the people that have better routines of the people that have better structure and better timing, circadian rhythms, and they do the same things, really at the same time, over and over and over again, day in and day out, and they have healthy habits and lifestyle and they prioritize exercise, eating right, drinking the right things, getting sunlight at the right times, limiting light exposure at night, they have those healthy habits. Typically those are the people that have in my professional opinion, better blood markers, they have better control over things. They’re metabolically flexible. They can shift in and out of different types of things. So I think CGM tracking can be very useful in that sense. And I found it to be in my time, crazy times in 2020, to be a very enlightening process for me and how I view things.

12:34 – Less is more

Be careful not to take your interpretation of CGM data too far. If you’re leading a team, not everyone wants to know the mundane details.

I think as practitioners, you really have to be careful of how you go about saying, “Well, this is what the information is telling you.” So in a team setting, it’s almost like less is more, unless you really know your players and know who you’re talking to and know you can go into a deeper level with this person and this person may need just the bare minimum information of, “Okay, well, what does the HRV mean? What does sleep latency mean?” Say, and then how is that tailored to how I’m doing as a person. And athletes are always going to ask the question of, “Well, what’s good.” Any test or diagnostic thing that you do to them, whether it’s blood markers, FMS testing, or any screening metric, it’s like, “What is good? I want to know how I’m doing and how I compare to everybody else.”

26:24 – It’s all about structure

John said successful players are the ones who stick to a routine even between seasons. It’s easier to keep forward momentum going if you stay disciplined.

I go back to routine and preparation and structure because especially with the successful players, that’s always the common word. Those two words routine and preparation come from coaches, come from players, especially when they talk to rookies and new players coming in or any other professional athlete that’s came back, when I was working at a college level was talking about what’s the difference between NCAA and in the professional realm is when you have more time and money on your hands. I don’t know about money anymore especially with this NIL stuff, but it’s time and money. Especially if you look at a rookie coming in, they graduate and then they go straight into combine preparation. And I hear it every single year, rookies that say, “Man, I was in the best shape of my life when I was training for the combine.” And I’m like, “Okay, that was eight weeks of what, it’s eight weeks of structure. It’s eight weeks of, you’re training at this time, you have your meals dialed in, you have a nice looking smoothie with a long list of stuff that’s in it, you go into the cold tubs, you hot tub, you cryo, you do this, do that. You’re doing field work specifically at this time. Everything is mapped out for you.” And then they get to us, they get to work in mini camp and it’s a laid out structure. And then once OTAs and mini camp in, they have 45 days completely off. And what’s the normal human habit to do when you have time offs? Exhale.

30:17 – Drill the fundamentals

The most important idea to remember, whether you’re an athlete or just looking to optimize your diet, is the importance of the basics. Figure out the fundamentals before you try something new.

It’s about fundamentals and technique. You can get into the schematics of football, but if you don’t know your alignment, your assignment, just tackling fundamentals, proper blocking fundamentals, your five step dropped, your seven step drop were your kick slide as an offensive alignment. If you don’t understand these things and know placement, body awareness, just the overall big picture of football, you can’t even get into schematics because now you have to take more time in getting coached in the individual drills to understand the fundamentals. The same thing applies to nutrition, sport performance, athletic medicine, strength and conditioning, nutrition, all those things that all plays into a role. You have to figure out those fundamentals. And I think routine and preparation that to me is, you have to figure that part out because, they all say timing is everything, but time is always happening. So it’s a matter of what you do within the 24 hours that’s given and how you structure your day and what you’re going to do.

37:29 – You are what you do

The habits you choose to maintain say a lot about who you are. That goes for exercise, diet, sleep routines, and any other important aspect of your life.

As we say, “You are what you repeatedly do in all areas.” Nutrition, everything you eat, drink, training, your soft tissue routine, how you go into the gym or how you go into your training session with your intent behind it, from film studying your individual drills and just your mindset and your attitude and your presence. And it’s a big thing that is preached amongst, I would imagine, all club is like being present and being in that moment of doing exactly what you’re supposed to do or trying to learn and understand the hows and whys of what you’re supposed to do. And that doesn’t just go for football, that goes for training, nutrition, rehab, whatever phase that you’re in. You are what you repeatedly do every single day.

39:25 – Know your players

If you want to help your players be the very best, first you have to get to know who they are so you know what you’re working with.

You have to get to know your players. You have to get to know who you’re working with and find what makes them tick and the very cliché is meet them where they are. That is very cliché, but you have to do that. You really have to see what they’re doing right now and figure out what alterations that small maybe but it’s the small little things that add up to a bigger picture, again, very cliché. But I have found to be just very useful. And as I’m talking to players that maybe that are struggling, that again, it goes back to your routine and just finding that everything is just in their life, it’s left a chance. Yeah. It’s just like, “Man, if you could just figure out what time you’re going to sleep every single night and just stick to that, let’s focus on doing that. Let’s just focus on healthy sleeping habits.”

48:27 – Sleep is the key

Humans do better with structure. That includes your sleep routine. Make sure you implement healthy habits at night.

How many books do you know that are all about getting a child on a sleeping schedule? It’s a key word, schedule, humans do better with structure. And I think when dealing with players things that are successful with me that I’ve seen myself is just finding out what they do when they get home and just improving sleep hygiene. And that’s a huge thing right there that if you can check that box that checks like a lot of different boxes that they have to do to start winding down. That whole ten, three, two, one, zero rule with 10 hours limiting caffeine, your last large meal of the day three hours before bed, two hours no work, one hour limiting blue lights, zero take the bed. But you have to have that wind down process in order to achieve good sleep.

52:07 – Be a coach

Whether you’re with your team on the field or encouraging their lifestyle choices off the field, you have to be a coach and a guide for them.

It’s just like a coach would on the field. There’s times when they’re hard on them. And then there’s times when it’s like, you have to spend a little bit more time with them, coach them through things and be positive and follow up with positive reinforcement on those things to get them to what they want, get them to where they need to be because they have goals. They want to make the roster they want to do this, they want to do that, so you have to follow up with them in order to show them that you do care. It’s not just, I’m going to give you a handout and that’s it, to coach them through it and you walk them through it, give them examples, follow up with them the next day. How’d that go? And just peel back the onion layers. Because more times than not, when you spend so much time with a person, other things tend to come out that ultimately show why things worked and didn’t work.

John Parenti (00:06):

They all say timing is everything, but time is always happening. So it’s a matter of what you do within the 24 hours that’s given and how you structure your day and what you’re going to do. You have to have structure routine before any of the other stuff matters. More times than not to people that have structure, they have routine, they have better markers. They feel better on the field. The recovery process is better because there is intent, there is purpose.

Ben Grynol (00:39):

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

John Parenti thinks about performance. What does that actually mean? Well, John is one of our members and he’s also director of sports nutrition for the Miami Dolphins. And so on a daily basis, he’s working with players to focus on their diet, their exercise, their sleep, to ensure that each player is as successful as possible, both on and off the field. And what John’s found by using a CGM is that some of the insights he gleaned about the way that he fuels, the way that he eats, the way that he sleeps, all of the factors that combine into positive metabolic health, all of these things help him to achieve his personal goals when it comes to training.

And so he’s been able to take some of these anecdotes and spread them to players to say, “Hey, here’s what I saw when I used the CGM.” For some players, they’re interested in using wearables and for others, not so much. What he’s found is that positivity spreads. And so if there’s one player, regardless of whether or not they’re using wearable, there’s one player that can help to bring other players along in the journey, depending on where they’re at. This can be a big factor. Some of the things we talked about were even things like the way players wind down at night, how that affects their metabolic health and training. If players are staying up late, maybe watching TV, playing video games, all of these factors, John lets them know, it’s more than eating, it’s more than training, it’s more than those inputs that make up how one performs on the field, how they train, how they achieve their physical goals. And so it was a great conversation with John here’s where we kick things off.

Why don’t we get into your background in how you got into wearables, how you first heard about Levels and what you’re working on today right now, and how that ties into this whole idea of monitoring things like biomarkers and glucose and what the outlook on that might be.

John Parenti (03:02):

Yeah. So I first got into the CGM tracking … I’ve always known about it in my professional career, obviously as a registered dietician and through my DPD work, which is the coursework and curriculum that dieticians have to follow, in their undergraduate careers in order to get to the opportunity to be into a dietetic internship. And obviously when we get put into our clinical rotations and outpatient rotations, we deal with diabetes management, so on and so forth, you can go into that specialization if you want to, but sometimes for rotation specifics, you just get into lumped to do, maybe you get two weeks or you deal with it here and there in your clinical rotations and whatnot. But I really first got into the CGM tracking in 2020 during the lockdown.

So another colleague of mine was experimenting with Levels and I saw it through his social media. And so I went and googled Levels. And I saw that there was a beta trial and I logged into it and got in contact with the people at Levels and just got a sample of the tracking device and got a call on them. They started walking me through that this is what you do. This is how long you should wear it for, be yourself for the first week, see how you’re responding to things. And honestly, it was a month of a lot of experimenting, not just with the CGM, but with the lockdown, I’ve imagined that everyone experimented with a lot of different things, especially if you’re in the health world. So I really just used that time to track and see what I was eating and see how my blood glucose was impacted by what I was eating and the timing and how it was responding to my training and all that stuff.

And honestly, it was an eye-opening experience for me. It just showed me that specifically, dietician sometimes get caught up in, you need to eat oatmeal for better blood glucose control. But I saw myself that when I ate oatmeal by itself, I had a tremendous spike and I was like, “Oh shoot man, that’s very interesting.” But when I started pairing it with other things, eating my protein first and then going to eating my oatmeal. I saw that my blood glucose was a lot better. It still wasn’t in the range that your optimal range, but it was still something that I was like, “Okay, and this is really interesting here.” Not to say that, “Oh shoot, now I’m a type two diabetic by any means.” But it was just interesting to see the impact of what you ate and how your blood responded to that, mono label was going on inside.

So again, it wasn’t the end all be all like, “Oh man, this is going to be the single thing that’s going to change everything that I do by any means at all”. But it was just something that, it’s another one of those tools in the toolbox as health practitioners like to say, with strength and conditioning coach, dietician or athletic trainers, just another tool that you can use to better improve and fine tune some things. So after a month of doing that, I just saw small incremental improvements in the small substitutions that I started changing, but to me, and I think this is a misconception and I do want to point this out here that I see a lot of backlash with CGMs on social media and there are used for, “Well, if you’re not a type II diabetic, then there’s no really rhyme and reason to wear it.”

And it’s like, I see where people are coming from on that. And I can see the argument, but also at the same time, it’s like, well, also ask yourself the question, why not? If you haven’t dug a little deeper in seeing how your body’s responding because I don’t see it as an elimination diet as some people might see it as. If you have a really bad response to something on a CGM or what have you, then people will automatically think, “Well, I can never have that ever again in my entire life.” And it’s like, “Well, no, not necessarily.” CGM uses a elimination diet, it’s not what it’s used for.

It’s used for specifically to see how your body’s responding at that certain time, but also not just to that specific food group, but your overall lifestyle in general, which I think is another important thing, which also gets me to something that I’m very passionate about is finding a routine for yourself because the people that have better routines of the people that have better structure and better timing, circadian rhythms, and they do the same things, really at the same time, over and over and over again, day in and day out, and they have healthy habits and lifestyle and they prioritize exercise, eating right, drinking the right things, getting sunlight at the right times, limiting light exposure at night, they have those healthy habits. Typically those are the people that have in my professional opinion, better blood markers, they have better control over things. They’re metabolically flexible. They can shift in and out of different types of things.

So I think CGM tracking can be very useful in that sense. And I found it to be in my time, crazy times in 2020, to be a very enlightening process for me and how I view things and not to say that I’m echoing my CGM recordings to my athletes saying, “Well, I got this, you should do this.” Because everybody’s going to be different in how they respond to things. Some people respond like a flat line with oatmeal. I’m completely different when it comes to potatoes, I’m flat line, no matter what. Rice, same thing, but some people are just going to be so different.

So that’s where I think the individualization, and as you see the trends of nutrition, lifestyle, fitness, that’s just what it’s trending to those now tracking blood and getting more and more information on what you can pull from that in how you can fine tune your own personal nutrition training program based off of those results.

So, sorry to give you a really long winded soliloquy. This is going to be an hour of me just going off on complete tangents. But that was my experience for the mud that I got into CGM tracking. And I found it really important, a very useful tool.

Ben Grynol (09:52):

Let’s go into this cross section. So we got to paint the picture here. You are director of sports and nutrition with the Dolphins. And so you’re around professional athletes where we’re at this tipping point or this evolution with the way that people and especially people that are interested in athletic performance are thinking about wearables. So whether it’s Levels, whether it’s Loop, whether it’s Aura, but there’s this idea of biometric tracking where people can see data and say, “Hey, this is actually what’s happening inside my body.” 10 years, 20 years ago, that didn’t exist.

And I think a lot of the dietary philosophy has changed where the idea of, go eat a huge plate of spaghetti to carb load before you run a marathon. That doesn’t exist the same way that it does now, people have more data, but what are you seeing with people, we’ll just say with professional athletes, not necessarily in football, just this world of athletic optimization, what are you seeing as far as the way people are using different wearables to get insight? Is it something where you can feel there’s a bit of a movement going on where everyone is wanting to squeeze that extra performance? Is it something that’s still on the periphery as being long tail where there’s a few people doing it and not everyone, what’s your outlook on that and where it might head?

John Parenti (11:17):

In my opinion, well I think it’s different for those who are probably in an individual sport versus those who are in a team sport. I think as it relates to us in a team sport, I can’t speak for those in individual sports or who work with like Olympic athletes. So I’m just going to talk on a team level here. So to me, a team level, I think it’s peripheral, but I think it’s starting to become more closer if that makes sense.

So you have a lot of people that are very interested in it, but they have no idea what to do with the information. They just have a bare minimum of like, “Well, I’m looking at my readiness score, but then the readiness score could be confirmation bias.” It’s like telling them that they feel like, “Oh, it’s a bad score.” They can automatically think that, “Oh, wow, I don’t feel great today.” I guess, but you’re having that internal battle of … And I do it myself too, I could have the readiness score on my Oura ring of 60, but I’m like, “I don’t feel that terrible. I actually feel pretty decent.” But there’s also days where it’s like, “Yeah. Oh, whoa, this is completely reflective of like how I feel.”

So I think you have a lot of people that are very interested in it, but they just don’t know what to do with the information. But I think as practitioners, you really have to be careful of how you go about saying, “Well, this is what the information is telling you.” So in a team setting, it’s almost like less is more, unless you really know your players and know who you’re talking to and know you can go into a deeper level with this person and this person may need just the bare minimum information of, “Okay, well, what does the HRV mean? What does sleep latency mean?” Say, and then how is that tailored to how I’m doing as a person. And athletes are always going to ask the question of, “Well, what’s good.” Any test or diagnostic thing that you do to them, whether it’s blood markers, FMS testing, or any screening metric, it’s like, “What is good? I want to know how I’m doing and how I compare to everybody else.”

And when it comes to a lot of the lifestyle, things like HRV, Dr. Andy Galpin does a great job, and Dr. Huberman do a great job of saying, “Well, HRV, it’s relative to you.” A score of 20 can be good to somebody, but 20 to someone else that has a normal HRV of a hundred, that’s terrible. Well, I know I shouldn’t say terrible, but that’s not good. That means that something else is going on here.

So you really have to give them some perspective and track the data over time and have them do it consistently day in and day out, which I think sometimes in the team sports setting, the consistency part of that can be really challenging. Whereas they don’t wear it all the time. A lot of times in our realm, we have a lot of things going on from to lift, to eating, to meeting time, to practice, back to meetings, “Man, well, shoot, they weren’t wearing their trackable at that given time.”

So maybe the data’s just a little bit skewed or again, sorry if I’m going off on a tangent here, but I think that’s what you see more or less in a team setting, while you get some players that are really interested in the information that’s being extracted and that they’re seeing in their device and they need to know more and it’s just really hard to you can’t get up in front of the whole team and say, “All right, everybody put on their Oura ring.” You’re going to have some guys that are like, “I don’t want to do that because how are you going to use that maybe against me or something like that?” You know what I’m saying?

Ben Grynol (15:03):

Yeah.

John Parenti (15:05):

Whereas, I’m guessing if you’re dealing with a lot of people who work with individual athletes or Olympic athletes, they can use that to fine tune to get that one to 2% better and find out their daily habits and whatnot, because it’s just a smaller population. But never say never, I think it could potentially be something that’s used very well and can be well executed in a team setting.

I just don’t think it’s there right now. I know Whoop in the NFLPA I think they might have some form of a partnership or something like that. Maybe don’t quote me on that. So I know it’s there, and players are interested in it and we do, and I’ve worked with some players that are very interested in what the information means. And I can have those conversations with them on maybe this is what it’s telling you. This is what a low HRV is trying to say, this is what a high HRV is trying to say. Do you see the recovery scores are dipping based off of this type of intense training. Maybe you need to spend a little bit more time in recovery to give back into the green for the next day. If you know it was a really strenuous, hard workout or training session I should say.

Ben Grynol (16:25):

Have there been things that you’ve seen through your own experimentation where you’ve taken these anecdotes and spread that gospel to the different players that you’re working with, where it’s like, “Hey, I ate like, whatever it is, sweet potato.” I’m like, Let’s say it’s naked. You ate it without fat fiber or protein and you’re like, “This was the response that I saw.” So that you can start to pass some of this knowledge along. And the reason I ask is different sports have such different needs. Let’s generalize and say anyone that’s in high performance at being a professional setting.

So many different sports have different needs, a long distance runner or a long distance cyclist is not trying to get the same gains as somebody who’s a wide receiver in the NFL, totally different what they want to achieve through their training and through their nutrition, completely different. So how have you taken some of the anecdotes that you’ve seen and worked with people or worked with players on a case by case basis to spread certain knowledge, given that everyone, especially in football, two different teammates will have completely different needs as far as the type of training and gains that they’re wanting to achieve. If that makes sense.

John Parenti (17:45):

Yeah. I think, yeah. Catch me if I’m maybe going off in a wrong direction here, but one, it depends on the player and who you’re talking to and obviously what their specific goals are. So maybe if it’s based off of the CGM reading and say they are a body composition player and you’re trying to extract more information on maybe what their daily habits are? What their routine is? And figure out just like lifestyle patterns, how they eat, time they eat this, that, and the other and you sit down with them, you see what they eat, you see how they eat. And it’s hard because you don’t want to be like, “Well, I did this and they get promoted like that.”

And it’s like, “Well, I see how you’re eating here, if you were to eat your vegetables or protein first, and then your carbohydrates last, I found out for my own experimentation, I had a better blood glucose response.” But you really got to have that conversation prior to about, you’ve been talking about blood sugar control, you’ve been talking about these types of things, you’ve been having the conversations of lifestyle habits. Because if you just go in, just rip that bandaid off and start talking about that, they’re going to be like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” So you have to have some context and some pre conversations about that stuff. So again, that’s why I think it goes back to the relationship that you have with a player, what you’ve talked about before, what their goals are, what you’re trying to achieve and things like that.

Maybe another case here is, specifically I remember someone one time in my experience hasn’t been here, but a player I worked with one time was just like, they felt like they were dying at practice and they felt like they were such low energy. And they said, “Well, I stuffed myself with carbs before I went out to practice because I knew it was important.” And then they just kept on eating gummies and eating this and that. And I found out about it and I had a conversation with them afterwards, I was like, “Me personally, this is my opinion of what I think maybe was happening to you. And why you bonked at practice? I think you’re fighting the fire with fire. You may have had really low blood sugar going into it. And then you gave yourself a large bolus carbohydrates thinking that it would give you a lot of energy and make you feel a lot better. It may have made you feel a little bit better for the time being, but then you approached me and were asking for liquid carbohydrates and now you’re just fighting fire with fire at that point.”

And then it’s, “Well, why were you at that point of starving before practice, let’s go back and look at maybe what you were doing beforehand. Some of the food options that you were looking at because I was in the same picture with myself. I experimented with, I had a large carbohydrate meal before a training session and then drank liquid carbohydrates during a training session. And I felt that myself, I felt a lot worse during and after. I had a headache and I didn’t feel all that great.” And that’s just me personally, someone else could do that and feel completely fine and have rather stable blood sugars. Again, it just goes back to everyone as an individual. But now that I think about it, that’s one example that stuck out to me where I had the opportunity and the platform to be able to, “Okay, this was my experience with it. But this is also what I think is happening to you as well.”

Ben Grynol (21:33):

Yeah. It’s interesting. You see that with packaged bars that people think like, “Hey, this is going to help.” And they eat it, and they don’t. If you’re not reading ingredients or reading labels, you might not know if there’s 40 grams of sugar in this thing.

John Parenti (21:45):

Right.

Ben Grynol (21:46):

And then somebody has a huge crash and they just feel terrible. And it’s like, “well you’re hypoglycemic.” And they can’t figure it out because they thought they were taking something that was giving them energy. But instead it’s making them feel terrible. It’s depleting their ability to actually perform.

John Parenti (22:02):

Right.

Ben Grynol (22:02):

And you run into all these issues where people are trying to figure out, what’s the best approach to take? And I think taking gummies or any liquid carbs like that, it’s one of those things where, what we believe based on marketing, what we believe based on anecdotes is totally different than what can actually happen.

And like you said, individuals will have different metabolic responses, but there are so many other factors that come into play, like how much sleep did the person get the night before?

John Parenti (22:36):

Correct.

Ben Grynol (22:36):

They slept four hours, they’re going to have a totally different response if maybe it’s actually this oscillation in this pretty deep variability that’s going on for a couple days, because it was like, a couple days of poor sleep, a couple days of poor hydration. Maybe there was a really hard training session and they didn’t recover from that, like you were saying, they’ve gone, their recovery is low, they need more time to actually recover. And so you see this happen where things carry on and then people feel like they can’t really get ahold of what’s going on. And they say, “I don’t really understand why I feel terrible. And it’s a matter of like resetting those levers so that you can get to a point.

But I think that’s the neat thing without having wearables, there’s still this foundation of education that people can have if it’s like, “Oh, this is what’s happening internally if I do these things. And sometimes the data is the feedback loop that gives people that insight to say like, “Now I see what’s happening.” You don’t need to wear a wearable 24/7. Not everyone wants to, but if you have something where you’ve had the opportunity to see that, you’ve had that window, you go, “Oh, that’s what oatmeal did.” Without pairing with protein or fat or fiber.” Oh, that’s what sweet potato did.” And extrapolate that on and on. So yeah, it’s interesting to hear how there seems to be this ongoing education that you’re having to work with players on a case by case basis to like really figure out what works.

John Parenti (24:03):

Yeah. And honestly, it goes back to their routine and preparation. If they don’t have that figured out, everything else is going to be just all over the place and you see it in, if they are wearing a trackable, you tend to see it in that, if you see it in their body composition. And if they do it multiple times throughout the course of the season, it’s just a picture into the lifestyle. And it shows, okay, they were good here, why? Their body composition went up here, why? It came back down and it went back up, and it’s just like, all that stuff really paints a picture of their lifestyle, their habits, what’s going on this, that, and the other. Routine gives you such a foundation, such a structure, and what’s due in the day, if you don’t have these things figured out, especially as a professional athlete, if you don’t know what time you’re training, that to me is, that’s the centerpiece of your day.

What time you’re having your meals that dictates … If you’re working out at 6:00 AM I guarantee you’re not going to bed at midnight. I know I need to start winding down at this time. And those are small little nuggets, I go over with our guys because I found it to be really valuable that, if they can really hone in on their routine and what they do every single day and their preparation process, more times than not those guys have good eating habits, if not, they just eat at the same time every single day, which is a start, because if you can’t get someone to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time, every single day as a professional athlete, you’re probably not going to get them to choose broccoli over whatever “unhealthy” food that they probably should stay away from, especially if they’re a player that’s trying to hone in on having a lower body composition or just maintain where they’re at.

So I go back to routine and preparation and structure because especially with the successful players, that’s always the common word. Those two words routine and preparation come from coaches, come from players, especially when they talk to rookies and new players coming in or any other professional athlete that’s came back, when I was working at a college level was talking about what’s the difference between NCAA and in the professional realm is when you have more time and money on your hands. I don’t know about money anymore especially with this NIL stuff, but it’s time and money. Especially if you look at a rookie coming in, they graduate and then they go straight into combine preparation.

And I hear it every single year, rookies that say, “Man, I was in the best shape of my life when I was training for the combine.” And I’m like, “Okay, that was eight weeks of what, it’s eight weeks of structure. It’s eight weeks of, you’re training at this time, you have your meals dialed in, you have a nice looking smoothie with a long list of stuff that’s in it, you go into the cold tubs, you hot tub, you cryo, you do this, do that. You’re doing field work specifically at this time. Everything is mapped out for you.” And then they get to us, they get to work in mini camp and it’s a laid out structure. And then once OTAs and mini camp in, they have 45 days completely off. And what’s the normal human habit to do when you have time offs? Exhale.

Ben Grynol (28:05):

Let’s go off the rails.

John Parenti (28:06):

Yeah. Everyone wants to exhale and say, “Thank God. Now I have some time.” And it’s challenging for a rookie because that’s typically coming off of their senior seasons, that’s their time off. That’s the most time they’ve ever had off. And once this season ends, that’s a whole nother animal that you really have to educate them on is you really have to think about what your goals are, what you’re trying to achieve and here’s the time that you have off. What are you going to do with it?

Before you start thinking about training time and meals, everyone wants to think about time off and trips and that, okay, well, let’s pencil that in. But before that, obviously we want to look at mental and physical goals and where you’re specifically at, but let’s look at time off and how you’re going to use it, right? Here’s how many days you have, here’s how many days a week you’re planning on training, where are you training at? What’s your money situation look like? What does you know family stuff, what do you want to take care of? Is there any birthdays that you’re planning on doing for somebody significant other or what have you, and then let’s look at training okay. What time are you training? Where are you training? What time do you plan on going to bed? What time do you plan on waking up? What does this whole day look like? I haven’t even touched surface on food.

It’s all about planning these things out and making them aware and conscious of, well everyone’s common goal is they want to make the team, they want to make the roster in some way or form, whether that’s practice squad on the special teams or as an active player in a starting position or in a backup position, everyone just wants to make it right? And try and figure out what to do from there. So it just goes back to figuring out your routine and how that’s going to help move you forward. To me, the players, a big common theme of is like, “Okay, you’re either really talented or you’re a really good player, but someone has a better preparation process, knows the playbook, knows the schemes.

It’s just like in coaching. They say it all the time, it’s about fundamentals and technique. You can get into the schematics of football, but if you don’t know your alignment, your assignment, just tackling fundamentals, proper blocking fundamentals, your five step dropped, your seven step drop were your kick slide as an offensive alignment. If you don’t understand these things and know placement, body awareness, just the overall big picture of football, you can’t even get into schematics because now you have to take more time in getting coached in the individual drills to understand the fundamentals. The same thing applies to nutrition, sport performance, athletic medicine, strength and conditioning, nutrition, all those things that all plays into a role. You have to figure out those fundamentals. And I think routine and preparation that to me is, you have to figure that part out because, they all say timing is everything, but time is always happening.

So it’s a matter of what you do within the 24 hours that’s given and how you structure your day and what you’re going to do. It’s not even just about food. And I know we’re talking about glucose monitors here and we’re talking about … I’m going off on different things. But my point is, you have to have structure. You have to have routine before any of the other stuff matters. More times than not, the people that have structure, they have routine, they have better markers. They feel better on the field. The recovery process is better because there is intent, there’s some purpose. They train, they don’t work out, two different things here.

If you went up to someone and said, “I’m training at this time. More times than not, people are going to ask you, “What are you training for?” Or when you say, “I’m going to go work out at this time.” It’s like, “Okay, you’re just exercising, burning calories there.” Not to say one’s better than the other, but as it pertains to professional athletes, especially like Olympic athletes, this is a big thing. They train, specifically train for a specific sprint, jump, whatever it is, they’re training for something very specific, same thing with football, they’re training for a specific movement or skill, whatever it is.

So that’s why I think routine and structure is so important because it gives intent and purpose behind what you’re doing. You couldn’t give a football player that’s looking to gain mass, an aerobic training protocol. That’s not going to do anything for them. That to me, that’s just exercise and you’re going to go do some CrossFit stuff. But if you’re training, like you have actual intent and purpose, and that falls in line with your nutrition and what you’re doing, your nutrition has to match what you’re doing from a training perspective to achieve ultimately what you want to have and to get into the CGM specifics, okay, well, if you’re trying to do that, add mass, that’s a completely different animal than someone who’s looking to shed some body fat and alter their body composition, because food choices had a huge play in that specific part of it, gaining mass is a completely different animal. You know that you’re adding some body fat and some muscle mass on top of that, but ultimately to do it in the right way, food choices play a big role in that as well.

But you know that your allotment for other different food groups or things, you can tinker with that along the way. And also look at if you were to use a CGM, you could fine tune it to get it to where they don’t have massive spikes and drops. Their Delta change is literally within a tight window and strong man competitors are very fascinating to me. It’s like, how do you eat a thousand calories yet have fine tuned? Some of them use glucose monitors. And I find that to be incredibly fascinating, which something I definitely want to look into later down in my career, but those guys have to constantly force feed all the time. And if they use glucose monitors, I know some of them do like how do they fine tune then? That’s to me it’s fascinating how you can use food to manipulate things to achieve those outcomes that you want.

Ben Grynol (34:29):

Yeah. Putting on mass is an interesting one because the heuristic in the incorrect one that probably still exists to some extent is, if somebody wants to put on mass, they not only can eat anything. They “should” eat anything and lots of it. It’s like lots of high quantity, high chloric intake. All of these incorrect heuristics where it’s like, “No, you can’t just eat … Like eating a ton of Twinkies isn’t helping you achieve your goals, right?” That’s not the right fuel for putting on mass and so people are starting to evolve their lens with more education around things like nutrition, but also having data through things like CGMs where you can go, “Oh, this is what’s actually happening.”

And so it’s interesting to hear how that is evolving. But one of the things that you mentioned and would be good to touch on is the idea of routine where I think sometimes professional athletes can almost be on a pedestal where it’s like, “Well, they train hard and they’ve got it dialed in.” But understanding that everybody in the world has different ways of processing things like routine, the way they go about routine. And it’s important. So you hear of people who say, “I was doing so great. I was eating well and I was working out and then I had to travel for work. And I went off the rails.” It’s that sense of exhale that you mentioned where in an off season, I’d imagine that it’s really challenging for people that have been so disciplined and had tried to maintain discipline. And then all of a sudden the off season comes and it’s like that big exhale. Now I can do this. But it’s like, “Well, not really.”

It’s not one of those. They’re not two goalposts that are completely opposed where it’s like, you can be really good and really disciplined. And now here’s your chance to do anything you want. It’s like finding that median, but understanding that routine is integral for everyone and having a sense of healthy habits, that being sleep hygiene, that being nutrition hygiene, that being exercise. It’s not about what you mentioned, just phoning it in and saying, “I am like exercising.” It’s like, “Are you training? Or are you saying that you went to the gym and you did some sets or you did some aerobic activity and that’s good?” That’s not the routine that’s needed.

So it’s interesting to hear that even with pro athletes, you’ve got this constant reinforcement of creating the mindset around discipline and knowing that’s something that everybody in the world will constantly be on this hedonic treadmill of making sure they are having this discipline, having this mindset, making sure that people create healthy habits and healthy routines and they’re able to stick with them.

John Parenti (37:28):

Right. Yeah. And as we say, “You are what you repeatedly do in all areas, nutrition, everything you eat, drink, training, your soft tissue routine, how you go into the gym or how you go into your training session with your intent behind it, from film studying your individual drills and just your mindset and your attitude and your presence.” And it’s a big thing that is preached amongst, I would imagine, all club is like being present and being in that moment of doing exactly what you’re supposed to do or trying to learn and understand the hows and whys of what you’re supposed to do. And that doesn’t just go for football, that goes for training, nutrition, rehab, whatever phase that you’re in. You are what you repeatedly do every single day.

Ben Grynol (38:25):

What are some tactics that you use, granted the scope of what you do is wider than just nutrition, but giving people guidance where I’ll make an assumption that there are some people that they’ve got this grasp on the mindset and their routine and they’re maybe more disciplined and other people where you’re constantly working with them to create healthy habits. What are some tactics that you use that other people can have as takeaways like that they can implement in their lives to say like, “Hey, this is the approach that John takes with the athletes he works with because it’s not a matter of it being, “Well, that’s only for professional athletes.” To what you were saying. When you’ve got people that have these challenges and say like, “I’m trying really hard, but I can’t quite get it.” What are some of the tactics that you use to create some of these healthy habits?

John Parenti (39:24):

First is, you have to get to know your players. You have to get to know who you’re working with and find what makes them tick and the very cliché is meet them where they are. That is very cliche, but you have to do that. You really have to see what they’re doing right now and figure out what alterations that small maybe but it’s the small little things that add up to a bigger picture, again, very cliche. But I have found to be just very useful. And as I’m talking to players that maybe that are struggling, that again, it goes back to your routine and just finding that everything is just in their life, it’s left a chance. Yeah. It’s just like, “Man, if you could just figure out what time you’re going to sleep every single night and just stick to that, let’s focus on doing that. Let’s just focus on healthy sleeping habits.”

But before you get into that … Let me backtrack here because it dawned on me one day that as I was talking to a group of players before here, but I was like on this routine thing and just on this kick of like, we need to figure this part out before you can get into any food or whatever. Before we start talking about the benefits of carbohydrates, the benefits of antioxidants and this, that and the other, protein and building mass, that’s all great and fun, but like, especially at the college level, their routine changes so much, if you think about it because based on class schedule, their training times are all over the place.

But I was talking to some players and I was like, “Okay, when I say the word routine, I’m asking you, tell me what you do every single day. What time of day do you start with.” More times than not, they’re always, “Well, I wake up at this time and do this and this.” And it’s like, I need to go backwards a little bit. And I’ll relay this into my own personal experience and how I’m doing what I’m doing now.

I started to think about, all right, well, I started asking question, “Well, what time do you go to bed? What time do you wake up? And then carry on with the rest of their day.” And then I started to get Oura rings, Whoop bands, started looking at and experimenting with just some of the things that Dr. Huberman talks about Dr. Galpin talks about with there’s so many things centered around sleep and getting better sleep, chilly pad, having fans available, creating a good sleeping environment, cool environment, blackout windows, eye mass, blue blocking glasses. There’s thousands of things that you can have at your dispense that really, don’t cost anything or obviously if you set your temperature to 65 degrees and set it there, you’re going to have a pretty aggressive electricity bill, and my wife hates the cold so, yeah. We go back and forth on the thermostat quite often. I click it down, she’ll go back and click it up. And it’s just a constant battle. So I digress.

However I started experimenting with some of those things with, okay, cool environment and things that I’ve always known, but okay, I need to start putting this into practice. Now that I have these resources, I’m going to see how it impacts me. So I started experimenting with it. Cool temperatures, blackout curtains, dark room. I started to pick up more of a reading habit at night. And I just noticed that my readiness scores were better. Again, I will say that confirmation bias sometimes is a thing. My Whoop band, I was more consistent in the green could have been. I ate better that day, training program, I probably work out, I didn’t kill myself or I didn’t go as hard in a training session, maybe I shouldn’t say I didn’t go as hard, but I wasn’t completely taxing. And I structured my workouts a little bit better to get into the green, ate a little bit better, but I just noticed this trend.

And I just noticed in the morning that, man, I felt a lot better and I do the same thing every single day. It’s nerdy, but I look forward to having my glass of water with the electrolytes first thing in the morning, because I think as humans, we crave routine, we crave structure and something to just check the box. I think human beings do so much better with lists and structure, that’s a duh type thing to say, but we just do so much better when we know, okay, I can do this. Check a small box. Okay. Then you’re more apt to do something else like to check another box that makes you feel good. Maybe it’s the dopamine thing that Dr. Huberman is really big on, but getting that reward and sensation of you accomplish something.

So there’re just small little tidbits like that. And I just noticed that, man, when I got a good night’s sleep, my routine the next day was so much better. And it’s like I’d just gotten in habit of wanting to get and be competitive with myself and this is just me it’s not everybody, but it’s strive to have a good recovery score. So I could have those moments in the morning because to me, that’s a sacred time to wake up, mentally prep for yourself and get in these habits of you check the box to where it becomes so autopilot right? To where it’s just like, you save your brains.

I think this is in the power of habit, but humans, they strive for the structure and strive for things to check off the box that just inevitably just become so inherent, second nature. So your brain saves energy for when you get to work, you can just focus on that. And I was like, “Boom, this is football.” And this is what I just now want to passionately preach to these guys, start doing these things, go to bed at the same time every single day, have a wind down process. Instead of playing video games. And that’s another thing that I pry into with these guys. It’s like, “What do you do when you get home?” It’s the first question I ask, “Well, I play video games.”

And it’s like, “Do you understand, and I’m not harping on them, but well, did you know that you get better sleep when you actually wind down.” And if you think about it, you have mentally engaged into a video game, right? Playing call of duty or whatever it is or there’s this thing now where they’re watching on YouTube, watching people play video games to pick up tactics, I’m so disconnected. Zelda was a video game that I played and that [inaudible 00:46:25] the of time, that’s the one game I know. And I stopped playing it a long time ago, but you’re mentally engaging there. And I was having this conversation one time with a player and I was like, “You’re better off to do a wind down process because you are physically shifting yourself from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state.”

I’m not exactly saying those words because then that’s over their head, but it’s like, you’re shifting from turned on to a turned off state. I’m going to steal this from a strength coach I worked with, finding your gears. To me, I struggle with turning off because I’m such a wound up, when I lift weights, come on, let’s go, it’s max effort all the time, but it’s like, you really need to, when player athlete, the best athletes can shift on and off. If you were to do an oscillating movement, athletes, it just looks completely effortless because they know their gears, they could shift on and off. Same thing with a wind down process. You just need to find that off switch where you can whether it’s breathing techniques or it’s reading or it’s spending quality time or it’s just something that’s disengaging.

But sometimes there’s players that are like, “Man, I have to watch TV before I go to bed.” All right well invest in some blue blocking glasses, but if you’re going to watch something, watch something that maybe that you’ve watched before. So it’s not so stimulating or if people read, read a fictional book. Shoot, Harry Potter was great for me because it’s just like you get lost in just a different type of realm. And you could relax and actually start to wind the heck down. So that’s something I start with, “What do you come home to? What’s your environment like?” And I understand like there’s players that have kids and whatnot, but as kids, we strive routine as well. How many books do you know that are all about getting a child on a sleeping schedule?

It’s a key word, schedule, humans do better with structure. And I think when dealing with players things that are successful with me that I’ve seen myself is just finding out what they do when they get home and just improving sleep hygiene. And that’s a huge thing right there that if you can check that box that checks like a lot of different boxes that they have to do to start winding down. That whole ten, three, two, one, zero rule with 10 hours limiting caffeine, your last large meal of the day three hours before bed, two hours no work, one hour limiting blue lights, zero take the bed. But you have to have that wind down process in order to achieve good sleep.

And this is just my professional opinion based off of my personal experience and based off the information that I’ve extracted from the people that I’ve worked with, because you can’t just jump into bed expecting to sleep, or what do they call it? Sleep anxiety. And be like, “Man, I can’t fall asleep.” Because you’re so engaged with, “Oh shoot, I can’t fall asleep. What do I need to do?” And obviously there’s some yoga tricks and things that you could do to shift back into, but that takes a whole nother step of learning a different routine for that. And so there’s that word again.

So what are some easy steps that you can do to wind down or if you’re the type of person that can just go to bed and then fall asleep immediately, that’s great. Or you’re just so tired that you fall asleep, that might be another conversation in itself, but it just goes back to you asked me the question of what are some tactics?

It’s finding out what they do when they get home. And then how can you restructure what you do to create a good environment, whether that’s sleep or whether that’s what you do in the morning or whether that’s in training or in eating. But to me it’s just such a lifestyle habitual thing to achieve what you want to achieve. You have to ask yourself, what are you working towards? What is your optimal goal? Is it getting better sleep? Is it feeling better in springier in the weight room? Is it body composition? Is it adding mass? Is it this and that. You have to figure that part out or start thinking about what you’re doing training wise, exercising wise, or and that meals fall into that.

But again, I’m a dietician, this wasn’t strictly about glucose monitors and that, I know this is a small part of it, but man, it’s so beyond that. And I think just to answer your question, again, you have to meet players where they are, figure out what their habits are and do. It’s a follow up, it’s a constant follow up. And the more you follow up with these players and continue to ask them and track them in that and looking out for them and sending them positive reinforcement and there’s times to be hard on them and trying to hold them accountable, and then there’s times like, all right, well let’s reassess, but follow up with positive reinforcement like, “Look, I know you’re trying, I know you’re doing this, I know you’re doing that. We just have to keep keep riding a little bit, push a little harder do what we need to do.”

But it’s just like a coach would on the field. There’s times when they’re hard on them. And then there’s times when it’s like, you have to spend a little bit more time with them, coach them through things and be positive and follow up with positive reinforcement on those things to get them to what they want, get them to where they need to be because they have goals. They want to make the roster they want to do this, they want to do that, so you have to follow up with them in order to show them that you do care. It’s not just, I’m going to give you a handout and that’s it, to coach them through it and you walk them through it, give them examples, follow up with them the next day. How’d that go? And just peel back the onion layers. Because more times than not, when you spend so much time with a person, other things tend to come out that ultimately show why things worked and didn’t work. So I [inaudible 00:52:56] really long answer.

Ben Grynol (52:57):

No, it’s good. One last thing to dive into, which is you talked about accountability and when you’ve got athletes that are, we’ll say that they’ve got these habits and these positive lifestyle choices, this routine deeply ingrained in what they do day-to-day, have you worked with any of them as almost being accountability buddies, whether it’s formal or informal where some of the other players like to bring along people that say like, “I just can’t create this one habit that being maybe better sleep hygiene or that being hydrating first thing in the morning.” Some of these little micro habits that help people to build these positive habits and make these choices over time. Have you had any athletes that act as accountability buddies to each other to be like, they’re trying to bring each other along in the journey?

John Parenti (53:59):

Yeah. And you see it too with just player that have great routines, but they’re just influential people. Sometimes we just have players that like to get in an extra assault bike word, after practice. We’ll just do a quick little conditioning session and it can be infectious based on the person that actually does it or pop in with it hop in with them or try and make it competitive. Shoot, I remember watching one time, there was couple of players in the college level they were doing on the assault bike. It was two assault bikes facing each other with a foam roller in the middle. Obviously the fan blows the air, it’s like, “All right, well, who can go faster and move the foam roller more towards the other person.”

It’s small some may find it, well, that’s JVish if you’re going to put it that way, but it a small competitive it’s like, can you get another person’s like, “Well, I’m going to go in there. I’m going to do it.” So you find little things that are can be not necessarily fun, but engaging, but it’s also a small little workout or a small little conditioning session, or extra work. And it’s like, well, “Hey, did you know that it’s good to do this stuff because that’s working on your aerobic system this, that, and the other great way to burn extra calories. If you’re a guy that’s looking for body composition or for weight management, whatever, it’s like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, cool. That’s something that you can do.”

These guys are so competitive that they’ll call you into them, like, “Well, come on, man. If you’re going to tell us to do this, join us.” “You know what, absolutely I’ll do it. Why not?” That’s the camaraderie, that’s the teamwork that’s showing it that you’re in it with them. I have always felt that works as well. It’s showing him that, it’s just like if I’m going to preach this, I’m going to do it too. “I’m going to be in it with you. I’ll do this extra conditioning or let’s just eat together, there’s no judgment here.” But sometimes you got to get them comfortable with you. And it’s just like, I don’t know. But yeah, there’s players in the locker room that can be infectious leaders, lead by example or they’ll call them out and say, “Come on, let’s do this extra conditioning, let’s do this extra work or let’s work on hand placement, let’s work on our get offs or whatever it is.”

And it just slowly start to see, it starts with two people and it goes into three, four, and then you got the whole group doing that stuff. Or they want to see how fast they ran in practice, “I’m faster than that person.” And it’s like, well, and then it just turns into that where they end up being each other’s accountability people based on whatever metric you want to show them or how they compared to others, because they’re such competitive people by nature that you find what makes tick. And if you get a group that holds each other accountable in that way, that’s like, “Come on, man, we got to reach our goal, our benchmark of whatever it is.” It shows more value in what you’re doing in measuring or whatever it is. It just creates a better outcome.