Climbing Nutrition began in 2015 with the purpose of helping climbers (or really anyone) make good, rationale choices about nutrition. With this goal in mind, Climbing Nutrition produces content that focuses on three primary concepts:
- Sports Nutrition for Climbing
- General Nutritional Advice
- Critical Thinking About Nutrition
Sports Nutrition for Climbing
Climbing is a sport, and as with any other sport there are good and bad nutritional practices that can affect an athlete’s performance. At Climbing Nutrition, we try to bring to light the practices that can aid your performance on the wall and make clear why other practices are or could be harmful—including discussions on supplements, fuel choices, protein needs, recovery, and more.
Many people think sports nutrition is primarily important for top-tier athletes looking to sharpen their game just a little more, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Good sports nutrition encompasses all ability levels and encourages climbers from beginner to world-class to think about the fuel they put in their body and how it affects them—because sports nutrition isn’t just about performance, it’s about forming healthy relationships between food and exercise.
General Nutritional Advice
Sports nutrition is a narrow topic within the spectrum of nutrition—even for athletes, sports nutrition is only a single part. As such, we don’t only focus on sports nutrition here at Climbing Nutrition, but also write articles on broader topics within the nutrition world, such as vitamins and minerals, dietary fats, meal preparation, and more.
Unlike many nutrition websites, we don’t prescribe to a single dogma, but explain the topics at hand as simply as possible using science as the cornerstone of understanding. You won’t find any articles proclaiming the magical benefits of coconut oil—though we’d certainly be happy to discuss what the evidence indicates it could be good for—nor will you find any diatribes on the evils of carbohydrates (or fats, or whatever). Good nutrition is rarely black and white, and we try to fill in the grays in as understandable a way as possible.
Critical Thinking About Nutrition
The final focus for Climbing Nutrition is critical thinking on the topic of nutrition. We’re not the only nutrition site out there, and unfortunately, many sites push biased, dogmatic agendas. To combat the spread of misinformation, we can choose to either put out the flames one by one or try to smother the blaze by getting rid of the fuel. At Climbing Nutrition, we try to do both.
We put out singular fires by posting articles busting myths in the nutrition world, like whether most people are really magnesium deficient, or whether microwaves destroy nutrients. These articles educate others on why a certain idea is incorrect and allow them to point others in the right direction, but do little to stop the general spread of misinformation. To fight the latter, we try to teach others how to think critically about nutrition, including being skeptical (even of us) until provided with convincing (and non-anecdotal) evidence.
Climbing Nutrition Is a Community Resource
While Climbing Nutrition is written and curated solely by myself (Brian Rigby, MS, CISSN, rock climber, food lover, board gamer, and dog owner), everything I do is in pursuit of building a stronger, healthier rock climbing community. As such, I’m always looking for input from members of the community—whether it’s comments and clarifications to my articles, questions on topics I haven’t covered, or helping me decide which articles to write next.
If you have a question in regards to nutrition, please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to ask (the contact form helps me avoid spam emails). I try to answer every email I receive, and then pass that answer along to the community in the form of “Reader Questions” articles (using a pseudonym in place of your name if so desired).
If you want to see what articles I’m considering, please visit Climbing Nutrition’s Patreon page. There will always be a post on the current topic list, and members who contribute a dollar or more through Patreon can vote on which article they’d like to see next.
Thank you for being here—for being a reader—and I hope you find Climbing Nutrition a tremendous help to your climbing and health!
Sincerely,
Brian
