Adequate calory intake for progression in gymnastics

Hello,

I've been reading a lot about nutrition in this forum so far, still now I'm much more confused than before.

To improve at skills like HSPU, Pull-Ups, Dips, Planche etc. should I rather eat at a slight caloric surplus or is maintenance enough?

Most the answers have been so far that one should eat enough protein and veggies ... IMO that's a bit vague

ok still as a gymnasts one is not that interested in gaining weight anyway but isn't it unavoidable that you are gaining weight (in form of muscle mass) and are hence eating at a surplus?

Even those gains due to the neural component must have its limits, do I need to eat more at this point maintaining a slight caloric surplus?

I'm a bit confused since in bodybuilding you wanna keep that surplus to ensure muscle growth and if it comes down to gymnastics it appears to me that calory counting becomes not that important.

I've never personally found counting calories to be very useful. I always make sure to eat healthy food, and get lots of exercise. 

Counting calories drains so much energy...in my experience 

I was a huge fan of calories counting, but I've recently abandoned it because it was ruining my relationship with food. Now I'm using another method for every meal but breakfast: I have a big plate and I make sure half of it is from a protein source. The other half is divided into fiber carbs (aka some sort of veggie) and complex carbs (rice,whole wheat pasta, potatoes). Depending on my appetite or activity for the day the ratio between these two sources of carbs changes. I also make sure to get some fats from some olive oil, seeds, avocados, nuts, fish oil.

I also have some snacks when I'm hungry outside of meals, like nuts, fruit, coconut milk, pumpkin seeds and such. Morning staples are eggs over easy and oats with cinnamon. I'm now leaner than ever, but I weight around the same, so I must have gained some lean mass. Hope this will help you!

Edoardo Cagnola said:

I was a huge fan of calories counting, but I've recently abandoned it because it was ruining my relationship with food. Now I'm using another method for every meal but breakfast: I have a big plate and I make sure half of it is from a protein source. The other half is divided into fiber carbs (aka some sort of veggie) and complex carbs (rice,whole wheat pasta, potatoes). Depending on my appetite or activity for the day the ratio between these two sources of carbs changes. I also make sure to get some fats from some olive oil, seeds, avocados, nuts, fish oil.

I also have some snacks when I'm hungry outside of meals, like nuts, fruit, coconut milk, pumpkin seeds and such. Morning staples are eggs over easy and oats with cinnamon. I'm now leaner than ever, but I weight around the same, so I must have gained some lean mass. Hope this will help you!

That's exactly what I do ! I also used to count calories for a long long time, but now this has changed and I'm much better now.

My opinion is that calories counting is a great learning tool. After a good period of calories counting one can stop counting and use his own intuition, because during the calories counting period he learned loads of information on food caloric content.

I'm personally still counting calories, and I lost 25kg (55 pounds) in two years and I'm not going to stop counting anytime soon. Having said that, if at some point I will stop counting, I will still be able to mentally gauge my food intake and that is because of what I learned in the past two years.

Also, I'm 41. I would probably not have counted calories in my twenties when I just wanted to enjoy food and I was not overweight.

Giovanni Garcea said:

My opinion is that calories counting is a great learning tool. After a good period of calories counting one can stop counting and use his own intuition, because during the calories counting period he learned loads of information on food caloric content.

True that.

I agree that counting calories is a good learning experience. Definitely valuable to be able to look at a piece of chicken and estimate the macros, but long-term calorie counting is weird

Giovanni Garcea said:

My opinion is that calories counting is a great learning tool. After a good period of calories counting one can stop counting and use his own intuition, because during the calories counting period he learned loads of information on food caloric content.

I'm personally still counting calories, and I lost 25kg (55 pounds) in two years and I'm not going to stop counting anytime soon. Having said that, if at some point I will stop counting, I will still be able to mentally gauge my food intake and that is because of what I learned in the past two years.

Also, I'm 41. I would probably not have counted calories in my twenties when I just wanted to enjoy food and I was not overweight.

This is a good point. It's very easy to over/underestimate the calories content of food if you haven't spent a lot of time paying attention to how much is in each thing you eat.

Thank you for your answers,

Yeah calorie counting is (IMO) a great tool as an entrance point to get a better feeling of what you are actually eating. I do it (still) myself ... but rather rougly to get an approximation since it's not that hard for me to put on weight

Funny thing is that I was rather looking for an answer whether it is necessary to make progress in gymnastics you need to maintain a slight caloric surplus or not.

Or is it rather a matter of constant training, hence time put in and to only "support" the training you do with adequate calories and a surplus is not that important.

That's an interesting topic. I've been into very strict calorie counting recently.

I think in the short run, you will make the fastest progress when you are eating slightly below maintenance because you'll lose weight and being lighter will make most of the exercises easier. But obviously that is not a maintainable long term strategy. I've been on maintenance (well, at least on my estimation of maintenance) for the last 8-10 weeks and I've further progressed, slowly though. I'm taking a few body measurements weekly and everything did stay at the exact same count during this phase.

Starting this week I'm going to try a slight caloric surplus now (around 300 kcal above maintenance) since I think that is the best way to build up some strength at this point. We'll see... I'll report back my results.

I grew up fat and had a binge eating disorder as a child.  I ended up borderline anorexic later on when I was in my teens which was partly due to a hormone disorder and loss of appetite but also the mental effect that being bullied extensively in school and my mother placing extremely high importance on the way I looked to the point where her acceptance of me was conditional.

Later I went through every single diet: atkins, low fat, eat every 2hrs, etc etc etc until I arrived at paleo.  Then I became paleorexic.  "there's grains in this gravy sorry I can't eat that" omg.  This was probably the worst of it all because I stayed this way for years, relatively lean.

Until my restrictiveness caught up with me and I finally started binging on bread, cereal, milk: all of the things I denied myself for years.  Then it became oh no lets diet all the weight gain off.  Then it was like a cyclical diet of binge, diet, binge diet repeat repeat repeat... I told myself it was ok because I was on paleo but just doing "refeeds"

Finally in my twenties I got honest with myself and just thought you know what, all these stupid diets, marks daily apple, putting butter in my coffee, worrying about GI index, not eating this and that, worrying about food to an insane level.... I have given myself a massive eating disorder and I don't even know how to eat any more.  I either eat too much or too little and I don't even know what foods I even like any more - just whether they are good "paleo" or bad "everything else"

For me counting my macros and making sure I eat junk food when ever I want as long as it fits my macros is the best thing I ever did.  I am free from the guesswork, free from the yo-yoing, free from worrying in restaurants, the neurotic thinking, free from ideas that food is good or bad: it's just food.

Starting to count my calories and macros was quite literally the best thing I ever did and I needed to do it to escape the mental torture that fad diets create.  I now have 100% control over my diet and can use it as a tool towards my body composition goals.

What stopped me from just doing this before was the fad diet gurus who say things like "calories don't count" or "counting calories feeds the neurosis" "calorie counting is conventional wisdom" (if you have ever read marks daily apple) and actually "calorie counting" the phrase itself is seen to have bad connotations, made out to be a lot of hard work and a bad idea.

I found that it isn't much work, you get used to weighing things, after a while you can eyeball most stuff, it keeps you in line, helps you make RATIONAL decisions and feels good to know you're in total control.  Yes you might look stupid to other people and they may say things like "obsessive" etc.. but at the end of the day they are only negative about it because they secretly wish they could possess the discipline to do it too all whilst saying "I don't have time for that" or "that's unnecessary, just eat normally" etc.

lol rant over, I think some people need calorie counting when their relationship with food has become caustic like mine had - much in the same way someone who wishes to cut back on drinking keeps a drink diary.  For me, MyFitnessPal for iPhone is a god send and I would still be in that crazy torturous good food-bad food cycle for the rest of my life like I see so many many many people in every single day.  Even the food companies add to the good food bad food nonsense by selling low fat products with the idea that fat is bad...

it makes me so so sad and to anyone suffering with an eating disorder caused by some form of fad diet nonsense, the key is to count your macros and eat what you want!  You'll find you end up eating healthily most of the time anyway out of choice once you're finished eating junk due to the restriction you've been mentally torturing yourself with over the years out of your system!

But yea if I could go back to just eating based on hunger I would... but I haven't done that successfully since like the age of 2 years old so for me counting is like a learning process.  It is ORDERED eating to combat DISORDERED eating, and works for full on eating DISORDERs too

For me, "it depends" means usually going a couple of months with a slight surplus with a couple of low calorie days here and there to balance things out, and after the couple of months a few weeks of RFL style dieting to bring me back to under 10% bodyfat.