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The U.S. Cross Country Ski Team, and other U.S. snowsport athletes, are getting an important lesson from the U.S. Olympic Committee on how to eat for athletic success.
USOC sport dietitians will be in the kitchen at the USSA Center of Excellence for a six-workshop series that runs through October in which athletes will learn the ingredients to meals that provide energy and promote health and recovery.
"We're having a cooking education series throughout the summer and the fall where we will run classes for teams on cooking education as well as for individual athletes who are here training over the summer," said USOC Sport Nutritionist Susie Parker-Simmons, who was formerly a USSA sport dietitian. "What we're trying to do is optimize their nutritional status, optimize their performance and their recovery so they are ready for the Olympic Games."
The center's kitchen is equipped with three cooking stations which will enable Parker-Simmons and her team to teach up to 20 athletes at a time.
"Already the athletes are completely engaged in the workshops. There is no doubt that this facility will directly enhance the quality of training," said Troy Flanagan, USSA sport science director. "If athletes are appropriately fueled, the quality of training goes up, the long term fitness benefits are improved and ultimately performances are enhanced."
A member of the USOC team who will be helping athletes become better cooks is Adam Korzun, a USOC sport dietitian who totes a culinary background that allows him to teach athletes how to make meals healthy and tasty.
"We show them we can do performance-based meals that are also tasty," Korzun explained. "Some chefs can only do one or the other. We bring those two things together and that is what we want to do with the chef program is combine those two worlds and concentrate on what the athletes want and need."
According to Korzun, the focus will be to give athletes the tools of ingredient use, as opposed to a series of recipes, so that they can use healthy foods in a variety of their cooking.
"We wanted to focus on teaching them ingredients and combinations that they can use. How to use brown rice rather than white rice when making a burrito, look for the whole wheat tortilla, lean chicken, mixing high fat and low fat cheeses," Korzun said. "We are giving them the right foods to fuel their performance and the right foods to recover.”
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