As a chronically over-stoked rock climber, obsessed with exploring my physical and mental limits in a weight sensitive sport, I am passionate about using nutrition to help maximize health and performance - both for myself and for fellow athletes. I began climbing in college, then started down various life paths for a few years before eventually pursuing climbing full time. Fast forward to now and I have been living in a van and traveling to climb for the past seven years. During that time, I completed a Masters degree in sports nutrition and became a registered dietitian. I am a REDs certified provider and have been doing 1:1 remote nutrition counseling with climbers for the past two years. Throughout both my athletic and dietetic careers, I have found that understanding daily energy requirements and how to adjust intake according to varying levels of physical output is a main pillar of using nutrition to support health and performance. The following blog will explore total daily energy expenditure and energy balance - what they are, how to estimate and track them for yourself, and why they are important in optimizing both athletic performance and long term health. 

Definitions:

• Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE): total number of calories your body burns in a 24 hour period. This includes:
  • Basal metabolic rate (BMR): The calories your body burns at rest to maintain essential functions like breathing, circulation, and cell function. This is influenced by many factors including weight, age, gender, hormones, and body composition.
  • Non-exercise adaptive thermogenesis (NEAT): The energy expended through activities like fidgeting, standing, walking, and other daily movements like cooking and cleaning that aren't formally classified as exercise. 
  • Thermic effect of food (TEF): The energy your body uses to digest and process food.
  • Exercise energy expenditure (EEE): energy used for planned exercise, training, climbing, skiing, running, etc. This is the variable that fluctuates the most and, as athletes, we need to pay the most attention to in order to understand our individual calorie requirements for energy balance. 
• Energy balance: In the most simplified sense, energy balance is the relationship between the amount of energy consumed (calories) and the amount of energy expended. When your body is in a state of neutral energy balance, you would expect to be relatively weight stable over time. This is referred to as your maintenance calories. If you are consuming more than you are expending over an extended amount of time, you would expect to gain weight and when you are consuming less than you are expending, you would expect to lose weight. 

Why is this important? 

Nutrition is only one piece of the performance puzzle but it is the supportive base that allows you to practice your sport more often, have longer, more effective sessions, and recover better in between. Understanding energy balance for your individual needs allows you to manipulate your energy intake to achieve a wide variety of goals. First and foremost, it empowers you to make sure you are adequately fueling your body for the demands of your sport and preventing the long term health consequences of under fueling. This is important because adequate energy intake supports better performance, improves adaptations to training, reduces injury risk, and allows you to spend more quality time doing your sport. At the same time, managing energy balance enables you to optimize your body composition and periodize your fueling strategy for training, recovery, and performance phases throughout the year. For example, some athletes maintain a slightly higher body weight throughout the winter training season and then strategically cut a small percentage of body weight for a specific window of performance season on your project route. 

What does this look like in practice?

The tool I have found most useful for tracking all this actually involves a third value: Energy availability. To reiterate, your body requires a certain amount of energy (calories) from food each day in order to maintain basic physiologic functions. This is your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Adding in activities of daily living and exercise (NEAT and EEE) significantly increases the energy your body uses. After subtracting the energy used for exercise, the energy left for physiological functions is called your energy availability (EA). If there is not enough to cover your BMR, your body will be in a state of Low Energy Availability (LEA). LEA can lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs), which leads to a wide array of detrimental health and performance issues. We want to avoid LEA and REDs so using an Energy Availability Calculator allows you to track this EA over time. To use this tool, we need to calculate a few different values. All of these include a degree of error, but if you can track them the same way for yourself over time then the values become meaningful, even if only relative to you:

• Calorie intake: this includes all calories consumed during the day through food and drink. Using an app like Cronometer makes this relatively simple. This number would get entered in the ‘calorie intake line in the EA Calculator.
• Exercise energy expenditure: this includes calories burned through any planned exercise - climbing, skiing, training, approach hike, etc. This number will always be an estimation but you can use an online METs Calculator to get a value for nearly any activity. MET estimates for rock climbing range from 5-8 depending on the intensity and style of the climbing. Remember, you are calculating only for the number of minutes actually spent doing the activity (ie: on the route), not the other two hours you spent at the gym socializing! This number would get added to the following number and entered in the ‘calories burned’ line in the EA Calculator. 
• General energy expenditure (NEAT): this includes calories burned through activities of daily living or general movement - going for a walk, yard work, cleaning, commuting via bike, etc. Again, you can use the METs Calculator to obtain a value for these activities.

Generally speaking, to support optimal health and training adaptations, we want to see EA around 35 cal/kg of lean body mass for males and 40-45 for females. I like tracking EA instead of calories or scale weight because there tends to be less of a negative connotation with this value than there is with either counting calories or only looking at body weight on the scale. Using the EA calculator also provides an easy way to understand how to adjust calories up and down depending on your activity level on any day. You can simply manipulate the input and expenditure in the spreadsheet and it will tell you how much you need to eat to achieve different EA values. If you track this long enough, trends will emerge showing what EA range enables you to have the best performance, sleep, recovery, weight gain or loss, mental health, ability to manage stress, etc. You can then use it to strategically manipulate EA up and down at different times of the year. For example, increase EA when you want to gain muscle mass during a training phase or decrease EA when you want to reduce body fat for a performance phase. 

This level of detail is certainly not necessary for everyone all of the time. I don't even keep track like this for myself or my clients the majority of the year. But if you are really trying to fine tune your nutrition or think you are experiencing signs and symptoms of LEA, this can be a really useful tool. There is plenty more nuance that could be discussed and if you are interested in learning more, get in touch with me or another nutrition professional!

When does this become a problem?

It is worth acknowledging the pervasive culture of disordered eating in the climbing community. In gravitational sports like climbing—where you are moving your body against gravity to accomplish the goal—there is a tendency to adopt the mindset that lighter is always better. That can make teasing out the nuance between discipline and disorder feel complicated. 

I get it. Gravity is real, so we can’t ignore that nutrition and body weight are pieces of the performance puzzle. But, your lightest weight is not necessarily your strongest weight and chronic underfueling prohibits you from reaching your potential because neglecting the importance of food as fuel impacts optimal performance, training adaptations, growth and development, and long-term health. As mentioned above, chronic LEA can lead to REDs which is associated with a host of consequences for both your athletic performance and general health. If you are curious to learn more about REDs, there are many resources online including this article previously posted on the SCARPA blog: https://us.scarpa.com/community/blog/article/fuel-your-body-to-climb-your-best   

To wrap it up:                                                                    

Understanding your energy requirements as an athlete is one of the most powerful ways to compliment all the hard work you put in at the gym or out practicing your sport. Learning how to tailor your nutrition to your workload and adjust your intake up and down in accordance to activity level is a fundamental element of performance nutrition. Tracking your energy availability is a useful tool for doing this. While it is easy to get caught up in tracking things and let it have an impact on mental health or body image, that will only be counterproductive to being a happy, healthy athlete! This is a helpful resource only if you can use it to gain a better understanding about how to manage your overall health in the context of being an athlete. If you have questions, want more details, or are interested in working with a sports dietitian to better understand the nuances of this for yourself, contact me here: https://amitywarme.com/.