Nutrition
'The Kitchen' is our high performance restaurant that provides a world class, flexible, performance nutrition service in a purpose-built environment enabling elite athletes to meet their dietary needs. The menu and environment serves as a vehicle to educate and empower athletes on how to make appropriate food choices to achieve and optimise their individual nutritional goals: Ultimately enhancing athlete health, recovery, training and competition performance.
Our menu and nutrition philosophy have been designed specifically to meet the nutritional needs of elite athletes. From an athlete on a rest day with low energy demands, to an athlete needing to increase their carbohydrate intake ahead of a competition, our menus can be tailored accordingly. It is for this reason that the menu and food has been divided into separate sections: FUEL, REPAIR, SUPPORT & PROTECT so that athletes can customise a meal to their individual needs.
Recognising the importance of nutrition in helping optimise health and training adaptations, we have a wide range of fruits and vegetables available each day and we encourage athletes to obtain a variety of nutrients at each meal service.
High quality protein sources are the bedrock of the EAC menu ensuring that athletes have the tools to recover and repair from their training and competition schedules. There are also a range of meals that are higher in iron that have been specifically designed for athletes staying at altitude. Recognising the needs of vegan and vegetarian athletes, myself and the Performance Chef Gareth, have ensured that there is a high quality plant based protein dish available at each meal service.
James Moran, English Institute of Sport
This attitude to training and nutrition is fundamental to our food operation. We are working in partnership with UK Sport, Sport England and English Institute of Sport to create a world leading training facility that meets the unique needs of high performance athletes. Whether you're in training for the Olympic Games, in pre-season training or post event recuperation, the Elite Athlete Centre provides you with a world class high performance environment, ensuring you can perform to the best of your ability.
Finding the perfect accommodation with the right nutritional focus is a challenge facing the whole sporting sector, particularly when it comes to accommodating the needs of individual athletes. Our menus contain scalable options from the key nutrition building blocks. Athletes, their coaches and nutritionists can choose to have more or less of each individual element to suit their requirements and training needs. We are also supporting this process through the eating environment with the use of food stations that encourage athletes to move around and discourage the plate loading that often occurs in a traditional hotel buffet.
Our chefs are also on hand to offer valuable support. Rather than staying in the kitchen, unseen by the guests, they are on hand to discuss the food on offer and make recommendations to maximise the experience and nutritional value of each plate. Our whole menu and environment serves as a vehicle to educate and empower you to achieve your health and performance goals through fresh, sustainable and locally sourced ingredients, which will in turn enhance your health, recovery and performance.