Gone are the days of pizza and beers after a game, replaced by individualized meal and supplement plans and teams of dietitians and advisers.
Philipp Grubauer didn’t feel bad, exactly. He didn’t feel good, either.
The goaltender was merely coasting along during his inaugural season with the Colorado Avalanche in 2018-19, preparing for games as he always had and ignoring — at first — his body’s increasing lethargy.
At the time Grubauer was like most of his NHL peers, wielding a meticulous and well-thought-out pregame routine that didn’t include questioning how — or, more importantly, why — he was eating certain things. Convenience trumped everything.
And then, Grubauer hit a wall.
«I didn’t really pay attention to food my first years in the league. It wasn’t a big thing,» Grubauer told ESPN last month. «But the more I thought about it, I was actually feeling pretty tired [during games]. Like probably around the first or second period, I was usually pretty tired, and I would pump myself full of energy bars and all that [processed] stuff in between periods.
«It probably wasn’t right. But time is really short to cook something at home. By the time you get home from morning skate and have your nap, you almost have to get right back. I needed a way to make food easy so I could focus more on the game.»
It was around then that Grubauer, who now plays for the Seattle Kraken, received a call from Amanda Gyuran. She’s a Denver-based performance chef and co-founder of Elevated Eats, a meal prep service for professional athletes. The two got to talking, and Grubauer thought he had found a perfect solution, someone to design and execute an eating plan with minimal effort required on his part.
He signed on to be Gyuran’s client. It was the first step in an eye-opening journey ahead.
«At first it was just about the food,» Grubauer said. «And then we got rolling and we did a couple of tests, like gut tests and DNA tests where it shows what your body can absorb or what nutrients it can’t absorb. Like, from eating steak, your body might not pull iron out of the steak; it might pull it better out of salmon for example or from a different vegetable. So, from the time Amanda started cooking for me, we got it dialed in a little bit more and more.»
Welcome to the world of designer athlete nutrition. It’s an increasingly popular trend in an industry where longevity is paramount, execution is key and finding the slightest edge can add extra zeros to a paycheck.
GYURAN WORKS WITH players across every major sport, each with their own motivations for seeking out an alternative health approach but with a common goal of maximizing their potential. That requires taking an individual outlook on each person and getting down to the nitty-gritty of what makes their body tick.
«Before anything else, I have all my athletes go through advanced functional lab work with medical and naturopathic doctors,» Gyuran said. «That’s really their blood markers, stool, urine, genetics. That really helps us to customize both the supplements and meal plans we give them based on exactly what’s going on inside. We also test what antioxidants their bodies respond best with, and everyone is so different.»
That might be true on the genetics side. But through uncovering the unique variabilities of each client, Gyuran also found that athletes within certain sports were more alike internally than you’d expect.
«What’s kind of cool is that, especially with hockey players, they have a lot of similar things in their lab work around hormone levels and vitamin deficiencies,» Gyuran said. «It’s the lab work that really makes what we do most effective, because really anyone can make healthy foods for an athlete. But adding in all of these really specific ingredients helps us to give every meal a purpose.»
It’s an approach tailor-made for an athlete’s framework, the same way his skates are sized to an individual foot. When Kylene Bogden, a board-certified sports dietitian and functional nutritionist, was working at Cleveland Clinic early in her career, she began seeing players drawn to that more holistic, progressive approach in addressing not just food issues but overall health concerns.
She recalls one athlete who had no idea he was living with a dairy allergy. His daily bowls of cereal were causing unexplained chronic congestion and fatigue that wouldn’t resolve and ultimately impacted his performance. Bogden discovered the issue via blood work and within a day, she realized, «he could breathe again.»
«You’d see some of these athletes, and they weren’t healthy,» Bogden said. «They were bloated after every meal or they had a face full of acne, eczema, psoriasis, hives. They’re taking [medicine] every day to get through the season because of how crazy their allergies are. This is not OK. We have to dive deeper than this basic surface-level, conventional nutrition approach because it’s one thing to have a low body fat. But if your total body health is not in line, you’ll never reach peak performance, and we need to start making this unique to players.»
Having access to that standard of care and information is a privilege professional athletes have over the average person. Ditto being able to afford services like Gyuran’s that hand-deliver an optimal diet. It’s not a position Grubauer takes being in for granted, especially when the benefits of implementing his assigned changes came about more rapidly than expected.
«I would say [I felt different] in, like, a week,» he said. «Your body has to adjust a little bit, but once you eat the right stuff, your body starts to adapt right away. We were eating better, eating cleaner, and I didn’t have that tiredness anymore. So it started off just with food focus, and then once I got more knowledge behind her food and what she makes and the science behind it, it moved on to a different perspective.»
CALE MAKAR DOESN’T leave anything to chance. Not on the ice, not on his plate.
Colorado’s top-pairing defenseman found Gyuran when he ran up against some new dietary restrictions. Makar aimed to tackle the challenge head-on, and he relied on Gyuran’s adjustments to find a path forward supporting both his body and his play.
Makar was so impressed with the offerings and overall food philosophy that he began shunning some team-provided meals in favor of fueling road trips with Gyuran’s cooking too.
So Gyuran would pack Makar coolers to take with him. Then, rather than risk eating unknown fare in an unfamiliar city, Makar finds access to a microwave and heats up those preferred, pre-prepared dishes.
The reigning Norris and Conn Smythe trophy winner has no regrets.
«I take the pregames on the road, and I love it,» he said. «It can be a little bit of a hassle sometimes, but at the end of the day, I know exactly what I’m putting in my body, and there’s a convenience to it, for sure. It goes to the mental aspect of the game, knowing you don’t have any questions in the back of your mind: Did I do something wrong during the day? Did I not have the same pregame meal?
«You try to maintain and control everything that you can, and for me the diet aspect of it is definitely important.
