I have a question from Jurek Brown about diet and nutrition when playing golf. It's a good question because it's really important. It says, “You touched on nutrition and the importance of it to maintaining a good round. Could you tell me what DJ eats when he's in tournament mode? I do take peanut butter sandwiches and plenty of fruit drinks as you suggest and I have noticed a significant improvement. A little more light here would be appreciated as I am not sure about what I'm burning and what I should eat to 'store.' I do hope you don't find this a silly question.”
Silly? Heck no! What's silly is not eating well enough when you play. Let's start off with a couple of basics. Before you play you should have a pretty good meal, whether it's breakfast or lunch or whatever. You want to have that no less than 30 minutes to an hour before you play. You want to eat something that's high in carbs and protein.
Because why? If you're playing 18 holes, that's a minimum of four hours playing golf. You want to have that meal sustain you from start to finish. What you would therefore be doing during a round is to snack, to keep your energy level high enough so you don't get into low blood sugar where you start to run out of gas. It will hit you before you know it. In many cases you can hit one shot pretty good and by the time you get to the next ball and you're ready to hit it, you could be going into low blood sugar and not really know it. Then, all of a sudden, wham! You hit a lousy shot and one or two shots later you finally realize your hands are shaking and your body's shaking and your knees are weak. You say, 'Holy Cow,' I'm in trouble. So we want sustainable energy with a good meal.
The other reason why you want to eat that sustainable meal is because once the food goes to your stomach a great amount of the blood being pumped with your heart is going to help digestion. That's why you only want to snack. If you eat in the middle of a round and wolf a hot dog down or a hamburger or eat a tuna fish sandwich and stuff like that, a big intake of food in one sitting really quickly, like you'd be eating this at the turn, again it's going to send a lot more blood to your stomach rather than to all the body parts, like your fingers and your feet and your brain. We want to blood to go to parts that a really important playing golf, not so much digestion.
So what do we eat? Well, you want snacks. Peanut butter crackers, cheese crackers are good. Peanut butter sandwiches are great, but I wouldn't wolf the whole sandwich down in one sitting because we're back to the issue of blood being pumped to the stomach to digest it.
We want to snack and munch. Bananas are awesome because of the potassium. But I will say this. You mentioned that I mentioned drinking fruit drinks. I don't know if I ever mentioned fruit drinks because fruit drinks, by their very nature, have a lot of natural sugar in them, never mind a lot of added sugar. You don't want sugar. Candy bars, or anything to do with sugar, are out of the equation. So you want to stay away from those.
The drinks you want to drink are the sport drinks to supplement water. If it is super hot and you're perspiring a lot, you're perspiring out a lot of electrolytes and other chemicals that your body needs which water does not put back in. It hydrates you but doesn't give you those extra things you've lost from your body that you have to have. So you want to drink the sport drinks.
That's what DJ drinks. He drinks the sport drinks. One of the things they really drink out on Tour is Amino Vital. They give it to them at every tournament. It comes in little plastic packages. You rip it open and pour it into a bottle of water and shake it up. Many times you might even see them when they're showing players standing around the tee doing it. I've seen it done a number of times. They shake it up, they drink it. It's usually got a lemon flavor. It's awesome. That would be a good thing to drink when you're out there.
You also have the sports bars, like Power Bar and others like that, bars that have a lot of nuts in them. Trail mix type bars. I've seen a lot of players put trail mix in plastic bags and do that. I've seen DJ do it. But stay to the stuff where you munch.
One last good thing to really eat is a lot of nuts. One of the best ones is almonds. If you buy raw almonds at the supermarket, those are great. If you have to buy something in a can that's full of salt, as I've done in the past, I open up the can, I put the nuts in a glass or something to wash off all the salt, I don't want all that extra salt. Almonds are great. They have protein and they're long energy lasting.
That's what you want. You want to eat a little after you've had your good meal to sustain you for the whole round, just a little to keep you going. Stay away from sugar. Stay away from candy. Stay away from fruit drinks.
The Surge!