A taste of glory: Nutritionist’s golden rules for sporting success

At the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, which concluded on Sunday, nearly 11,000 athletes competed across 46 events. That's a lot to pack into two weeks. Take table tennis as an example: the tournament ran from Sept 20 to Sept 28, with seven gold medals on offer, making for a highly compressed schedule that placed great demands on athletes' energy management and recovery.

For athletes competing back-to-back, glycogen stores are depleted fast — and that is where nutrition comes in.

"In a dense schedule, I believe the most important thing for athletes is sugar supplementation," said sports nutritionist Xu Baolu, who has spent years providing tailored nutritional support to Chinese national teams and elite athletes.

His work spans a wide range of demands: making weight for competition in judo; managing body composition over the long term in figure skating and artistic swimming; supporting endurance in race walking and rowing, and fueling explosive power in hurdles and jumping events, as well as meeting the combined technical and physical demands of sports such as badminton, football, basketball, tennis and golf.

Among the athletes he supports is table tennis player Wang Manyu, who clinched gold in all three disciplines she entered — the women's team, women's singles and women's doubles.

Xu says that to better prepare for the Games, athletes need to increase the proportion of carbohydrates in their diet two to three days before competition and add some sugary drinks to help replenish glycogen. During competition, he has athletes increase the proportion of staple foods in their three daily meals to 70 or even 80 percent.

This approach — adjusting nutrition based on the demands of each competition — is not limited to the Asian Games. For Xu, sports nutrition is not about handing an athlete a fixed meal plan and asking them to follow it for months. He specializes in individualized, stage-specific support, working alongside each athlete's existing coaching, medical and scientific teams.

He describes his approach as a dynamic nutrition decision-making system. Training load, body weight and body composition, recovery, sleep, dietary intake and, when available, biochemical markers are monitored over time. Nutrition strategies are then adjusted according to how the athlete responds.

For major competitions, the process becomes even more specific. Xu adjusts carbohydrate intake, hydration, recovery nutrition and meal timing according to the event schedule and the athlete's individual response, while working alongside the athlete's existing support team.

Xu began working with Olympic sprinter Su Bingtian ahead of the Tokyo Games in 2021, where Su went on to set an Asian record of 9.83 seconds in the men's 100 meters. He later worked across a range of sports, including alongside figure skating pair Sui Wenjing and Han Cong, who won gold at the Beijing Winter Olympics, and Olympic swimming champion Zhang Yufei, known as China's "Butterfly Queen".

Drawing on these experiences, Xu has observed that support teams in Chinese elite sport are becoming increasingly specialized, with experts from different disciplines working together to meet the individual needs of each athlete.

"Su's team, for instance, included a biomechanics expert, a strength and conditioning coach, an assistant coach, a rehabilitation specialist, a massage therapist, a team doctor, a medical supervisor, and a nutritionist like me," he explained.

"I think the new generation of athletes has more passion and enthusiasm — athletes feel that they are enjoying the training themselves, that they want to achieve this goal, and that is why they do it. Once they have this passion, enthusiasm, and sense of initiative, they start to think about what they need," said Xu, adding that athletes such as Zhang and Wang will usually quiz him on his dietary advice, keen to understand how it fits into the bigger picture.

Xu, who holds a master's degree in Nutritional Science from the University of Nottingham, became interested in nutrition at a very young age.

"My grandfather had diabetes. I remember when I was little, we lived on Erqi Road in Wuhan, where there was a shop selling food specially for diabetics. When my mother and I went to that shop, I felt an urge to understand what diabetics can and cannot eat," Xu recalled.

Growing up, Xu became a sports enthusiast who often played football, swam and also trained in track and field. That childhood experience sparked his curiosity about what goes into food. Combined with his love of sport, it led him to sports nutrition.

He observes that in China, a greater number of people are paying attention to nutrition and participating in sports, but he still believes many people overlook the importance of a balanced diet.

"People overestimate the benefits that supplements may provide, while overlooking the benefits of a balanced daily diet," he said.

"While we start to pay attention to protein, we need to leave part of our stomach for vegetables and fruit, for staple foods, for carbohydrates."

After years of working with Olympic champions, world champions and other elite athletes, Xu believes the most important lesson from high-performance sport is not any particular supplement or diet.

It is the ability to adjust.

"Nutrition is not a formula that stays the same every day," he said. "Training changes, competition changes and the body changes. What we need to do is observe those changes and keep adjusting nutrition accordingly."

That philosophy, he believes, applies far beyond elite sport. The data may be different and the interventions may be simpler, but the principle remains the same: build a sound dietary foundation, observe how the body responds, and adjust.