Boost Performance With This Hidden Breakfast Hack

By Moz Neumann

What you feed yourself in the morning can dramatically set the tone for the day, in how your body performs and how your brain feels.

The Morning Meal Impacts:

• Hunger

• Energy

• Physical Performance

• Concentration

• The momentum it brings to meal number 2

All these things are impacted by your first meal of the day; therefore, we want to make sure you get it right.

What You Should Aim for in Breakfast

With breakfast, we are looking to replenish depleted amino acid pools and provide a reasonable amount of energy regardless of whether you’re training that day.

Eating high sugar cereals or the like will only lead to an aggressive spike in blood sugar levels which often lead to more hunger and low energy levels shortly afterwards, creating a cycle that is hard to break.

There is also a real need for micronutrition with breakfast because you’ve just been in a fasted state for 8–12 hours. You will be very receptive to nutritious food and able to digest and absorb them very well.

After all, high level nutrition is about having a multi-layered approach to health, recovery, energy levels and performance.

So, How Do We Bring All This Together?

Protein

For protein, 4 whole eggs that are free range and organic is a great place to start.

This gives you 30 grams of highly bioavailable protein, and around 16g of healthy fats from the yolks too!

There is an abundance of micro nutrition packed into those golden yolks, which is why we recommend going organic. The fat content will support steady energy release, by helping control the rise in blood sugar levels too.

Carbohydrates

For carbohydrates, gluten-free oats are a fantastic choice, mixed with dark skinned berries to bump up fibre content and antioxidant profiles.

Many people believe they are allergic to oats where in fact it’s just the phytic acid content disrupting their guts — an easy workaround here is to leave your oats soaking overnight in water, which reduces the phytic acid content, usually helping your gut tolerate them much better in the process. Another tip is to source oats that are gluten free.

Bonus Additions

To enhance the "health factor" of your breakfast further, having some Kefir yogurt is a superb way to benefit from its antibacterial properties, while increasing the healthy bacteria in your gut simultaneously.

Training Day Tip

Add extra fruit to your breakfast — chopped banana and a tablespoon of honey as well as the berries — for an additional source of fructose. The fructose tops up Liver glycogen that falls overnight and provides an additional source of energy to muscle glycogen. The extra vitamin C will also help with immunity.

Present data demonstrates that an addition of fructose to a glucose-based CHO source at breakfast improves endurance exercise capacity. Further studies are required to determine the mechanisms and optimal dose and ratio.

The Takeaway: Breakfast That Ticks All the Boxes

With a breakfast like this, we ticked all the essential boxes:

• High quality amino acids

• Healthy fats

• Slow-release carbohydrates

• Fibre

• Copious amounts of micronutrients

• Good bacteria

Of course, you can achieve these profiles with other food sources — we have just selected ones which are attainable to most people and relatively easy to prepare.