In this interview, I spoke to former West Ham and Scotland defender Christian Dailly about his health changes after his career, and a bit about his career.
What did a typical training day consist of at West Ham/Scotland? – “Our day was mainly some preparation or injury prevention gym work that proceeded a morning football session. Those sessions tend to go from more skill based technical work to more match specific work over the session and would almost always finish with a match on various sized pitches and team sizes. Early in the week we would do some running and strength work in the gym. Tuesday was usually the toughest day with 2 sessions both at high volume and intensity plus strength work.”
What did your diet look like at West Ham and Scotland? –
“My diet was mainly about getting enough carbohydrates or sugar in to fuel my training including plenty fruit and vegetables with lots of protein, including shakes etc, for recovery. This was apparently how to get enough energy in to cope with the demands of the professional game. I now know how misguided much of this advice was.”
Why did you decide to study nutrition? –
“Through my coaching and science journey I studied everything about the human body as I was acutely aware that much of what I was told, and had tested out/experimented with, didn’t work. I was regularly tired, sore, underperforming and injured. I also coached athletes so had built up a huge practical expertise and had extensive learning as I was completely immersed in academic literature. Over time, I started looking at the human body through an evolutionary lens as that made complete sense. I then realised that nearly everyone eho had coached or advise me had been wrong on almost everything.”
How much can nutrition affect an athlete’s performance if their diet isn’t right? – “It’s absolutely huge. It’s the number one go to straight away to full health and drive elite performance. Many out-train their bad diet because they are young enough, but the diet I followed is guaranteed catch up with you sometime. I had 9 knee operations in my career and multiple other surgeries. I’m now 51 years old and much much stronger, healthier and robust than I ever was throughout my football career mainly because I don’t eat anything I did then and what I have replaced that with.”
What do you believe to be the best diet for an athlete and why? – “The best situation for any human is to be what we call fat-adapted or metabolically flexible as this is our evolutionarily determined physiology that provides you with an almost endless fuel supply from your own fat stores through ketosis and lipolysis. We make our own glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis as well as glycogenolysis. We need essential fats and protein in our diet and zero carbohydrates or fibre. There are no essential carbohydrates. An athlete should base their diet around fatty beef and eggs in the appropriate amounts. This is in alignment with our evolution; a performance and injury prevention game changer.”
