Taking a squad to a tournament

Everything else written about competition travel is written for one athlete.

You have eight. Four are cutting, two are not, one was eliminated yesterday and one fights in 3 days, and they are all eating from the same buffet in a building you do not control.

Bring your own scales

Before anything about food, the thing that causes the most avoidable failures on a trip.

That is one item of luggage and it removes an entire category of disaster.

The dining hall is the problem, not the solution

Cafeteria and buffet catering is standard for groups at major competitions, and it exists for good reasons: fast service for people short of time, flexibility, and cost efficiency at scale.

The sports nutrition literature identifies two specific problems with that model, and both land hardest on a combat sports squad.

• The opportunity to overeat when a large variety of food is offered in effectively unlimited amounts.
• The absence of the normal supervision or constraints on intake that exist at home.

Read those against your situation. You have athletes who need to be a specific number by a specific morning, standing in front of unlimited food with nobody watching, in a week where they are already hungry and already stressed.

For them the buffet is the single hardest place they will stand all week.

And the same room contains opposite requirements

This is what makes a combat sports squad different from a team travelling to a match.

At any given meal you may have an athlete 4 days out and restricting, an athlete who weighed in that morning and needs to refill fast, an athlete eliminated the day before with no requirement at all, and an athlete who has not started his cut.

They sit together and they watch each other.

The one who is cutting watches the one eating freely. The one eliminated is eating like a man on holiday next to somebody who has to make weight on Thursday. And the youngest athlete takes his cues from whoever looks most confident rather than from whoever is doing the right thing.

That dynamic calls for a staffing decision, and no meal plan solves it.

What actually works

Separate the meals where you can. Not as punishment and not announced as such. Athletes at different points in the week eating at different sittings removes the comparison without anybody having to be told about it.

Where separation is impossible, sit with them. A coach at the table changes behaviour more than any instruction given beforehand, and it works in both directions: it restrains the one overeating and makes the one under-eating visible.

And name what is happening rather than pretending the room is neutral. An athlete told in advance that the dining hall is the hardest place he will be this week handles it better than one who discovers it.

And the rule about the eliminated athletes

A fighter who lost yesterday is finished for the week and behaves accordingly, which is reasonable.

The problem is where he behaves that way. He brings food back: takeaway, sweets, fizzy drinks, and it arrives in shared rooms where somebody who has not weighed in yet is trying to sleep.

The rule is simple and it should exist before you travel: food outside the plan stays outside the shared rooms.

Nobody is being told what to eat. They are being told where. An athlete who has finished competing does not get to make the last night harder for the one who has not, and framing it as a house rule rather than a judgement is what makes it stick.

Infection control, which matters more here than at home

An athlete in the final days of a cut is dehydrated and in a caloric deficit, and both suppress immune function.

Now put him at a buffet where several hundred people have handled the same serving tongs.

Hand sanitiser after the counter and before touching cutlery or food. Not before joining the queue, which is when people actually do it and when it achieves nothing.

One athlete with a stomach upset in a shared room is a risk to the whole squad, and the response is isolation and hand hygiene rather than sympathy. The food safety material covers the principles.

The things that go wrong abroad

Food they will not eat. Athletes are frequently reluctant to try unfamiliar food, unsure which local items correspond to what they normally eat, or limited by hygiene concerns. Which means an athlete can be surrounded by food and still under-eat, and the staff reads it as nerves. The youngest travellers are the most likely to do this and the least likely to say so.

Missing categories. Common gaps at competition catering include fresh fruit and vegetables, and provision for allergen-free, halal, kosher or plant-based diets. If anybody in your squad has a requirement, ask before departure rather than at the first meal.

And the anti-doping one. In certain countries, meat contamination with prohibited substances is a documented risk rather than a theoretical one.

That is a compliance decision, not a nutrition one, and it belongs to the staff. The contaminated meat material covers which substances and where. What belongs here is that the decision to avoid or permit local meat is made before the trip, communicated once, and applied to everybody, because an athlete deciding for himself at a serving counter will decide wrongly.

The timetable problem nobody plans

Weigh-ins for different categories frequently happen at different times, and bouts run across different days and sessions.

Which means your squad has eight schedules, and the catering has one.

An athlete whose bout falls in an evening session has to eat at a time the dining hall may not serve. If you have not solved that in advance, he eats what he can find, which is the worst version of every principle on this site.

And an athlete who weighs in early and fights late has a long window, while one who weighs in late and fights soon after has almost none. Those are different situations requiring different plans, and giving both the same instruction produces one good outcome and one bad one.

What to bring

The highest-value thing a coach packs is food that does not depend on anybody else, as a buffer between a schedule that changes and a body that needs feeding on time.

• Rehydration solution for after the weigh-ins, in quantity and by count, rather than one packet for the squad.
• Familiar carbohydrate that survives travel.
• Something with protein that requires no preparation.
• Enough for the athlete who lost his bag, because that happens on roughly every trip.

The travel material covers what an individual should carry. The staff version is that you carry the redundancy, because the athletes will not.

And the part about you

A coach on a tournament trip is awake first, asleep last, managing eight people's food, weight, moods and paperwork, and eating whatever is left.

There is no version of this where the person making the decisions is well fed and rested by the end of the week, and the decisions that arrive latest are frequently the most consequential: whether somebody makes weight, whether somebody competes, whether the fighter who looks unwell is unwell.

That connection is my own observation rather than a finding, and it is consistent with what is known about fatigue and decision quality generally.

Two things help. Eat when they eat, rather than after, because a coach who skips meals to manage meals is degrading the instrument the whole trip depends on. And delegate one thing before you leave, in writing: even a parent or a senior athlete owning the water and the snacks removes a category from somebody carrying too many.

Decide the meat question before you land

The sports nutrition literature puts the irony well: travel increases the risk of both failing to meet nutritional goals and falling ill, at exactly the point when performance matters most.

For a squad that risk is multiplied by the number of people, divided by the number of staff, and concentrated in a room full of unlimited food where half of them are trying not to eat.

Bring the scales, plan the meals, separate the groups, carry the redundancy, and make the decisions that belong to you before anybody has to make them at a counter.