Adaptive Health (2025)

25/10/2025

30 nutrition facts to celebrate turning 30 🤟🏻

1. Getting enough fibre is the most slept on factor for helping weight loss, digestive health and getting enough nutrients in
2. Athletes are usually low on carbs, not protein
3. All fluids count towards hydration
4. For weigh ins shortly before competing, cutting fibre down for a couple of days if an easy way to lose a bit of weight without hurting performance
5. Creatine is a safe and effective performance and health supplement. It won’t make you go bald. I’ve been taking it for years and my hairline is perfect 😂
6. Eating excessively “clean” can be problematic
7. If you train a lot or at high intensities, get some fast digesting carbs in before your session
8. Organic has generally been shown to be no healthier than non organic
9. Frozen fruit and veg is just as good as fresh, plus it’s convenient, cheaper, stays fresher
10. Most of us don’t eat enough healthy fats. Avocado, nuts, seeds, olive oil, oily fish for good hormonal health
11. Every food is processed to some degree
12. Sufficient calorie intake (maintenance calories) is the most important nutrition factor for sports performance
13. Caffeine doesn’t give you energy, it delays fatigue. Calories provide energy
14. UPFs can be part of a healthy diet in moderation
15. Foods are not good and bad, they have no moral value
16. Artificial sweeteners are safe, you only need to watch your intake if they give you digestive issues
17. Hydrate before you caffeinate
18. Supplements are the tip of the iceberg. Get everything else right first
19. Cut caffeine 8-10 hours before bed
20. Start training well hydrated
21. Post fight weigh in, minimise fats and fibre, maximise carbs
22. Gauge your diet quality on your overall diet, not its individual components
23. No amount of alcohol is health promoting, but you can have it in moderation as part of a healthy approach
24. Carnivore and keto diets are anti sports performance
25. Carnivore diet will probably give you heart disease and / or bowel cancer
26. If you’re aiming for fat loss and not seeing progress, you probably don’t need to drop your calorie target. You probably need more consistency with the current target
27. Keep enough nutrition variety to prevent deficiencies and not get bored, but enough consistency to make it easier to prepare for
28. Plant based protein sources are underrated. Nutrient dense sources like tofu, tempeh and mycoprotein can have surprising amounts of protein
29. Take care of your body with the fuel for the health, performance and body composition that you want to have
30. Food is not only fuel. It’s an important part of social connections, culture, pleasure and expression

21/10/2025

Some kind words from in his interview with interview ahead of his win on EFC 5

But also some important points from both Oscar and Dave on the value of having someone qualified, experienced and results driven to help take the stress and guesswork out of your S&C, nutrition and making weight.

Whether you’re in prep for a fight or camp, or don’t have anything coming up but just want to level up your performance, drop me a message and we can get to work 🤝

Shoutout to Dave as always for the footage and for the huge work he does for the Irish MMA scene!

20/10/2025

How much weight you can safely cut on fight week while still being ready to perform in your fight or comp depends on numerous factors like your age, gender, weight, body composition, menstrual cycle stage, experience level and so on.

But one of the most important factors is how much time you’ll actually have available between weighing in and fighting.

This will determine how well you can rehydrate and replenish carb stores and so it should be a major consideration in your fight week cut.

You don’t want to be getting in there still depleted or dehydrated, even partially.

It’s not good for your performance, or your health.

16/10/2025

Fighters - train ya core

But forget hitting high rep sets of crunches until burn out

Pick a core flexion exercise, a rotational core exercise, a lateral flexion exercise

Hit 3 sets of 6-12 reps on each one, adding load when and where suitable and progressing that over time.

Do that weekly (you don’t have to do all 3 exercises on the same day), for a few months and watch how strong your core gets and the improvements it brings to your game

Then we can start thinking about sprinkling in more fancy stuff like anti extension / rotation, etc, but get strong in the basic core movement patterns and you’ll see huge benefits 🥊🥋

14/10/2025

Like most people I work with, Leah had a good idea of what to do, or how to get the results she was looking for. But actually getting it into a structured approach and having coaching accountability to help her get it done consistently, is what’s made the difference.

Just a short few weeks of work here from Leah, who came back on board with multiple goals for us to balance:

- Body composition: She wasn’t feeling her best in her body after feeling she’d let things go a bit this year 💪
- Sport: Finishing out the camogie season 🏒
- Fitness: Get ready for her first Hyrox 🏃‍♀️

The first “rule” of nutrition for good performance is that we eat at maintenance calories. BUT we can still perform and recover well, at least for short amounts of time, while being in a calorie deficit and dropping body fat, provided we set things up right.

A small to moderate calorie deficit, short enough in duration, just enough fats and protein to get away with each day while maximising carb intake, good hydration, sleep and training load management, macros well timed around training and matches, and we’re on to a winner.

A few weeks later and Leah’s made the body composition progress she was looking for, is in to a camogie county final this weekend while performing well on the pitch, and we’ve got her Hyrox prep well underway.

Next phase from here will be bringing her to maintenance calories to drive training performance and recovery up while maintaining body competition, and ramping up the Hyrox prep once the camogie season is finished this weekend.

If you want to work on both body composition AND performance goals, while still taking a health first approach, let’s lock it in to get things moving before the end of the year.

Get a head start on both feeling and performing your best in 2026 🤝

13/10/2025

Finishing out the recap posts from client events over the weekend, another great show from 👊🏻

Had 5 clients and 3 past clients fighting on this one.

with a dominant win after putting in a big camp. Oscar is in great shape so our focus when he came back on board for this fight was just refining things physically, having him peaking for the fight while hitting weight smoothly. Looking forward to seeing his amateur career take off from here 💥

and were all unlucky but 3 young athletes with lots to come for them 🔜

Great to see wins for all 3 of which I’ve got to work with extensively in the past

And of course main event Manning strikes again with another finish. is 5-0 as a pro now with 5 finishes. This was a big step up for him in level with a last minute opponent change but the outcome was the same. We’ve got the weight cut and fuelling process down to a tee for Brian and I’m looking forward to seeing it in action in Europe as he gets his contract underway in the months ahead. It’s mad, I remember being in the same jiujitsu beginners course as Brian less than 4 years ago. His progress in MMA since then has been insane. This man will be on the biggest stages of all very soon ☝️

Great weekend for clients and plenty more to come before the year is out 🤙🏼

12/10/2025

Had two pro boxing clients in action Friday night 🥊🥊

who I worked with on his nutrition, fuelling and weight cut for the past few weeks. Was delighted to get the chance to work with Spike who’s an Irish boxing legend and an absolute gent. Still going strong at 41 and first fight back in for Spike in 18 months so we wanted a well managed weight cut and refuel to have him strong in the ring and it paid off with a win 💪🏻

and I have done a couple of months work together on his nutrition and S&C and he came in to this one in top shape, in his own words “best I’ve felt on weigh in day”. Cathal had a great performance and I and plenty others thought he won the fight but he was unlucky to lose out on the decision. Only 24 and tonnes of potential ahead of him 👊🏻

Cool to be working with all levels of athletes in a variety of fight sports now from boxing to MMA to jiujitsu to taekwondo.

The aim is always to help each athlete to reach their peak performance 🤝

11/10/2025

Incredible work from the 4 clients I had competing at the TKD World Championships (more to follow today with team events).

with 5 wins and a very narrow loss in the final to become vice World Champ 🥈 Without giving too much detail, Alyssa was in hospital for a procedure just over 5 weeks ago and I wasn’t sure if she’d be ok to even cut weight after that, not to mind say compete at the highest level! But she was cleared to do it and had an unbreakable mindset to get it done. Still only 19 and so much potential ahead of her!

with a great run also, picking up some strong wins and losing out to the division winner in the semi final to take a bronze 🥉 Daniil and I have just started working together on his S&C and nutrition in the last month or so. Another young athlete with lots to come in future 👊🏻
valkov has put in one of the biggest and most consistent training blocks I’ve seen from anyone in the 6 months we’ve been working together. Gutted for him that things didn’t go his way yesterday but that’s sport, just not your day sometimes no matter how hard you work. A huge priority for us was building his “ring fitness”, bringing his conditioning up to match the amount of muscle mass he carries and I think we can safely say we achieved that. This guy embodies the word athlete in terms of how he approaches everything and his insane physicality. On we go 💪🏻

And finally, absolutely huge to see dominating to become World Champion after a Euros he was disappointed with earlier in the year. We’ve been putting in the work for this for nearly a year and a half, getting him doing ongoing focused S&C for the first time, multiple different body composition phases, transforming his nutrition. Delighted for Luke and looking forward to seeing what’s next!

08/10/2025

Full day of eating intuitively, no set plan or tracking (for the purposes of this post I just noted down everything I had for the day and tracked it at the end to remove any potential bias of choices 😅)

Current aim is maintenance / fuelling good training performance and recovery. This is a standard enough day, slight variety day to day, aiming to keep meals simple, nutritious, enjoyable, affordable, easy to prep and supportive of goals.

Happy with this intake, solid from a fibre and health perspective, good protein and fat intake, the only slight change I would make based on my training load would be to push carbs up a bit more.

Saturated fat intake looked a little high but after looking further at it I’m within the recommended limits of 15, ideally 10% of total calories (29g saturated fats at 9 calories per gram = 261 calories of sat fats, which is 9% of my day total of 2900 calories).

Tracking and plans can be very useful means to an end. I use periods of tracking myself at certain points most years, but I think a solid aim for most people is to get to a point where you can just eat without overthinking, while supporting good health and any other goals you have (at least for phases of time, before you bring back in tracking or other nutrition approaches if and when needed).

That’s the eventual aim I work with most clients on.

07/10/2025

4 happy athletes weighed in easy today and ready for the TKD Worlds this week

This was the combat sport I started out with growing up and I saw (and took part in) some mad methods for making weight when I was competing as a teen 😅

Weight making has come a long way but I still see a lot of athletes very unsure of the safest and smoothest ways to go about it, as well as proper rehydration and refuelling afterwards.

Glad to have these clients strong, fit, fuelled and ready to go.

Looking forward to seeing them in action this week 🥋

04/10/2025

Water loading for weight cutting.

The why, the when and the how 🥤

01/10/2025

8 years 🫶🏼 Bit less hair on me head now than I had back in 2017 but we’re doing alright 😂

Adaptive Health

25/10/2025

21/10/2025

20/10/2025

16/10/2025

14/10/2025

13/10/2025

12/10/2025

11/10/2025

08/10/2025

07/10/2025

04/10/2025

01/10/2025

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