Sports Nutrition Ep. 1
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What role does nutrition play in establishing a solid foundation for performance? The answer might be simpler than you think.
This week on the Castelli podcast, we’re excited to welcome Dani Hofstetter, Sports Performance Nutritionist. He'll delve into the essential nutritional guidelines and explain how small behavioral or intake changes in your nutrition can result in significant long-term health and performance improvements.
We'll explore optimizing everyday nutrition for cyclists, endurance athletes, and triathletes, highlighting the importance of carbo-loading and incorporating a diverse range of colorful fruits and vegetables for peak performance.
This week on the Castelli podcast, we’re excited to welcome Dani Hofstetter, Sports Performance Nutritionist. He'll delve into the essential nutritional guidelines and explain how small behavioral or intake changes in your nutrition can result in significant long-term health and performance improvements.
We'll explore optimizing everyday nutrition for cyclists, endurance athletes, and triathletes, highlighting the importance of carbo-loading and incorporating a diverse range of colorful fruits and vegetables for peak performance.
TOPICS COVERED & TRANSCRIPT
(00:00) Introduction
(07:58) How Many Servings of Daily Fruits and Vegetables
(10:55) Multivitamin Supplements, Is There Really Any Benefit
(13:24) Organic vs. Conventional: Which Has More Nutrients
(16:52) The Problem with Too Much Fiber Before a Workout
(17:27) Tips on Carbohydrate Fueling and Maintaining Steady Sugar Levels
(22:58) Why Variety and Colorful Foods Are Better
(29:59) Recommended Daily Fiber Intake
(33:57) Should You Take a Daily Probiotic Supplement
SOREN JENSEN
Have you ever wondered if you are fueling your body right with a balanced intake of vegetables, fruits, carbohydrates, proteins, fats and staying hydrated? Hello folks and welcome to the Castelli Podcast. In this episode we are moving away from rider interviews, how to dress guides and the technical aspects of Castelli's performance enhancing products. Instead, we will delve into a topic that can enhance not only our athletic performance, but also the quality of our daily lives. It's a subject that has been debated for years and is relevant to every one of us, sports nutrition. And to be more specific, we will explain why a balanced diet, including fruits, vegetables, carbohydrates, protein and good fats, is required to supply and support your biological machine. And to make sure we are in good hands, I have invited a sports performance nutritionist, who works closely with world tour cyclists, elite triathletes, ultra-athletes, runners, mountaineers and everyday athletes like you and me. The interview was so jam packed with good stuff and lasted almost 2 hours that we in the end decided to split it into 2 episodes. So today we will be serving you the first almost 45 minutes and the second episode where we will cover micronutrition will go live next week. And if we go a touch long and it's getting long for you, just hit pause and come back when you can, because I promise you, it will be worth it. So let's dive in. Welcome back, Danny Hofstetter. We are very excited to have our own performance-focused nutritionist chatting to us. Danny, let's start the episode with you telling the listeners a little bit more about yourself and how you ended up where you are today.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Well, hi, Soren, and thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So way back, I think, nutrition or kind of eating, the family table, dinner table or whatever meal we're talking about, was always an important situation. And that's already one thing I always told my athletes today as well. You should not only look through the functional perspective if we talk about food. It has a huge social and emotional aspect for us as well. And only if we can take these three kinds of topics together, then we can make meaningful change. But back to my history, I was active as a tennis player and an endurance athlete for pretty much all my life. And I discovered that my talents are much more in the endurance realm. Then I discovered cycling. I was a bit late to the party. If you're not good enough to make it in one sport, you start multi-sports. That's how I made my way into duathlon and triathlon. That was around 95, 2000. I got pretty strong pretty quickly and made my way into long distance racing, which was kind of the lion's share of my career. And during my triathlon years, I studied food science because I was always interested in the topic and I was probably too lazy to study medicine. So that was kind of a natural science and it was something I was really interested in. And then over the years, the elite sports aspect combined with food science led me to sports nutrition. I started working with athletes pretty early on and did that as a part-time hustle for many years. And six years ago, I decided to found my own company, which I'm working still now today, mainly in elite sports that can be professional athletes, that can be kind of ambitious hobby athletes, and a huge width of different sports, so from professional ballet dancers up to mountaineering, pretty much in between. And obviously my roots are in endurance sports, that's also how we met, by the way.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, at the YOLO-MITES 5000 event.
DANI HOFSTETTER
And endurance is obviously a sport where nutrition has a pretty direct impact. So every athlete that is keen on performance had his experience where nutrition let him down. And there are sports like team sports or different sports where the whole energy metabolism is not so crucial or not directly performance related. And that's why they are not as involved in the nutrition questions as an endurance athlete.
SOREN JENSEN
So if you hear a little bit of background noise, it's actually because I'm sitting here in a Portland office this week and I got the warehouse people just right behind that wall. So right here before jumping on the pod with you, I had to ask those guys to turn down the music volume out there, else we would have had Lionel Richie's background voice on the podcast, but I think they're pretty okay with that. And also, Dan, I want to thank you for giving me some advice before jumping on this trip to Portland, because I was struggling with a bad cold before, and Dan, he actually sent me a long text message about everything that I would have to eat and take care about just to have a more speedy recovery. And you know what, Dan? It all helped. It really helped me. Also your advice on getting rid of not only the cold, but also the jet lag shortly and keeping myself hydrated on the plane and everything. So thanks for that. It's a pleasure.
DANI HOFSTETTER
You realize we're jumping right into the topic because it's not just performance related. I think you can have an optimization of your nutrition in every part of your everyday life, right?
SOREN JENSEN
You're right. So let's dive into it, Dan. I'm super excited. And for those of our listeners that are thinking, oh, wait, wait, wait, I know this guy. I've heard his voice before. Yes, you probably have. We did an episode with Danny in August where we discussed how to prepare for the Elite Men's Road World Championship in Glasgow, covering topics such as pre-race and doing race nutrition, and how to boost post-race recovery. And we also delved into details like the aero clothing worn by the Italian national team at the road worlds and more. So if you haven't listened to that episode, make sure to add it to your Q-list. But back to this week's episode. Danny, let's dive in.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Try to be concise.
SOREN JENSEN
Dan, we really want to focus on what everyday amateur and pro cyclists, endurance athletes and triathletes should be going about with their day-to-day nutrition. It's not that one thing that you do once on race day. It's literally what you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep every single day, compounded over time. No matter how fit you are, you have to have a fuel source to function. So do all the spending and money on nice bike equipment, training and anything you want to do. If you don't have the fuel, you are not moving very well, you are not functioning at all. So can you start us off with some maybe founding principles or fundamentals around what you want cyclists and endurance athletes to understand about day-to-day nutrition. Maybe then let's start with the basics and start with eating enough fruits, vegetables on a day-to-day basis, even though we're still trying to eat enough fuel to support training. What should you start thinking off?
DANI HOFSTETTER
So, if we start with fruit and vegetables, the general recommendation is that every active person needs five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. One portion equals about the size of your fist. So if we have different vegetables or fruits, then you can make up that portion guide easily because hopefully everybody has his hands every day with him. The fruit and vegetables are important in basically three aspects. You have lots of vitamins and minerals that are very essential for us. And then you have the third aspect, which is fiber. Fiber is very important for a healthy gut, for a healthy microbiome. And that's the first kind of dilemma that we hit because as endurance athletes that train a lot, we need to make sure that we don't eat too much fiber before our workout because fiber is digested very slowly. So that is an individual thing where you notice, okay, the salad from lunch still sits quite high when I'm going for an intense ride or not. But generally the recommendation is no raw food before a hard training session. Have your fiber and vegetables rather after your workout. And also, of course, if we talk about breakfast, make sure you use fruits. In the Asian culture, people eat vegetables for breakfast as well. But generally, kind of in the Western cuisine, we rather go for fruits and berries for breakfast and have vegetables, salads and stuff for lunch or supper.
SOREN JENSEN
The five servings is a compound number. How would you divide the servings between veggies and fruits?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I would say go for two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables and of those vegetable servings make one raw because if we have some food raw, we make sure that we also have enough from the heat sensitive vitamins because through cooking you have some nutrient losses, right?
SOREN JENSEN
It is, it is. Actually, I thought it would have been more, but we can maybe go into that a little bit later what happens if you train your gut to eat more vegetables. I mean, of course, we have the fiber thing. I think that's also something that people need to train their gut for. But you know what, while we're talking, I was just googling around and found out that only 12% of the European population eats the recommended and general guidelines around fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, which is just crazy. I mean, a lot of people, they take multivitamins rather than other things because it's easier or we think that's better for us, but we lose the fibers and other important things for our gut. What do you think about that? Do you recommend any of your athletes to include supplements into their diet?
DANI HOFSTETTER
For very high stress situations, let's say, I mean, we're heading into an Olympic year for certain sports, it's two weeks of several disciplines where you have to perform, the preparation is already hard, then you use a multivitamin as kind of an insurance. But generally, supplements, multivitamins, and multiminerals are not necessary when you already eat enough and qualitative fresh food. And that's some point that I want to focus on because one reason why you have only these 12% getting enough fiber, fruit and vegetables in their diet is unfortunately processed food is something that is now kind of the default for many people and a healthy diet means I buy mainly unprocessed foods, natural ingredients that are not industrialized or prepared into a convenience meal and then we have more nutrients and we have less loss during production and during kind of the whole food chain until it's on my plate.
SOREN JENSEN
You're right, coming back to also the fiber intake, that extra plus, that extra bonus you get is about eating the real thing versus multivitamins. So yeah, and then you're probably also going to save your money on it.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, we call this kind of the entourage effect where an isolated supplement has a lesser efficacy than a natural food because the natural food, the metrics consisting of fiber, of different secondary plant substances and those vitamins, that is digested better and absorbed better than an isolated substance and that's why this kind of natural environment is even more important. And so one easy advice I give my athletes is buy food that has a very limited amount of packaging material because then you have mostly unprocessed food. And if it is packaged in a commercial way, make sure the ingredients list is as brief as possible, because then you mainly get the raw materials as you wish for it.
SOREN JENSEN
Correct. What's your thoughts then on organic fruits and vegetables versus non-organic?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I mean, organic from an environmental point of view, it's a huge plus and I'm supporting that. You could never prove that organic fruit and vegetables have higher amounts of vitamins or fiber or other nutrients. So there we have to say, if you stick to products that have seen soil, because lots of fruit and vegetables are coming from growth houses. Like greenhouses? For instance, tomato, obviously, if you're in Castelli country, your home turf, you can eat tomato, it tastes like tomato. And if you buy the stuff that has never seen soil or sun directly, then you buy mostly colored water and obviously there are less nutrients inside as well. So here I would say if you have a chance to buy fruit and vegetables at a farmer's market where you know it's been in a natural environment, that's good, but there's no proof that organic produced fresh foods contain more nutrients than regular produce.
SOREN JENSEN
That's interesting to hear. As you said, in Denmark, we only grow great tomatoes in summertime and they're never going to be the Italian quality for sure or the South of Europe. But it also depends a little bit on just eating the right things. I mean, it's probably more important than to, wherever you live, eat seasonal fruits and vegetables and then you probably also get it fresh near where you live.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes. And one thing, I'm not saying back in the days everything was better, but since the means of conserving, preserving food was less sophisticated, like let's say 70 years ago, people had to choose right what they eat in winter in terms of fruit and vegetables. And if we look back and see what they had as seasonal and fresh food, then we also make most things right in our dating tradition. And today you have the opportunity to eat strawberries all year no matter where they come from.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, berries coming from Peru or other places.
DANI HOFSTETTER
And it's not a discussion whether this is morally or environmentally meaningful or wise, but if you eat seasonal and local, you can say it's rich in nutrients. And we lost a bit of the taste. Also let's say now in Europe we're heading into winter and the winter vegetables are not as fancy as the asparagus and the berries etc. But you could have it easily if you go to these more like roots and beets that are winter vegetables and you get the whole nutrients that you need as well.
SOREN JENSEN
Okay, now that makes sense. So that actually leads me to the next question, Dan. When it comes to fiber, the only time that you would not eat fruit and vegetables due to the fiber intake would be when you're carbo loading the day before or on race days, just to avoid that fiber intake. You just want to keep that as low as possible, correct?
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yeah, I mean, it all depends on how hard we're heading out. As a routine cyclist, you can eat even heavy foods and go for an easy spin and you don't suffer. If you're not as experienced and the intensity is relatively higher, then you need to make sure that the meal you eat last before heading onto your bike is easily digestible. And I think if we're talking fiber, we automatically talk about carbohydrates. First thing, yes, as athletes and everybody who's listening to the Castelli podcast is mostly active, I think, makes sense. And so our need for carbohydrate is increased. There's been a lot of discussion about low carb, no carb, keto, paleo, whatever form of diet. In the last 15 years, we had amazing scientific studies that proved the endurance athlete that eats more carbs and eats them at the right time has a better performance in training, in recovery, in competition as well. And what you refer to is carbohydrates come in different forms and shapes and paces because I say pace because a carb source that contains more fiber is digested slower and releases its energy into our bloodstream more steady. So like the satiety is longer, the blood sugar increase is more steady and more gradual. Then when I eat simple sugar, that gives me a blood sugar rise that is immediate, like within 10 or 15 minutes. But the sharp cliff that we, the drop of the blood sugar roller coaster is something we want to avoid. And the tricky part when we compare everyday nutrition and what we need during exercise is we try to have a steady blood sugar throughout. That means in passive hours, so the whole wheat stuff, cereals that are not processed. So instead of just plain pasta, I probably go for quinoa, brown rice, whole wheat, wheat products. I'm not saying wheat is bad per se, but if you have it refined as pasta, as couscous or white bread, then you get to this kind of rapid carbohydrate. And the closer we get to exercise, so let's say 90 minutes before a ride, during a ride or right after, that's when we need the fast carbs because the energy goes into our bloodstream and our muscles pretty immediately. immediately, we use it while we're exercising and because the hormonal response to food is completely different when we're active, then this is the time where we can hit the high sugar intake, where we can eat white bread, where we can have a ripe banana and it's not detrimental to your health. Right. And the same goes to finish that off with the fiber amount. A proper sports bar, like an energy bar that is made for your active phase contains the least amount of fiber, a good one, because fiber slows down the absorption rate and the time it takes until the energy hits your muscles. And if you eat fruit during exercise or shortly before, then the fiber amount slows down the energy release. But with fruit, it also depends on the ripeness of the fruit like immature fruit or unripe fruit contains more fiber, ripe fruit has more sugar. You can taste that because it's sweeter, right?
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, yeah, no, it is sweeter. And I think I'm kind of dragging you down into a rapid hole here on something that we probably will be covering also a little bit later when talking about fueling for race day or just a long event or a weekend ride. If I eat raw vegetables versus cooked vegetables, is there any difference there from my stomach for when it comes to digestion?
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, because the cooking process breaks down cellulose or makes it easier to digest. That's why raw salad, vegetables, whatever, is sitting long in your stomach. And the passage from the stomach into the gut and then the time it takes to absorb it in the gut is much longer than it was cooked well before.
SOREN JENSEN
Right. Do you think Grand Tour cyclists in the evening steer away from cooked vegetables?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I think during a Grand Tour, they definitely eat vegetables, not huge amounts because the amount of energy they need to put in their system is giving you a certain bulk. And if you eat a lot of vegetables, the satiety kicks in earlier and you're not hungry for the carbs you need to eat as well. I mean, nowadays, grand tour cyclists, apart from what they've consumed already on the bike and right after a stage, they eat more than a kilo of rice per day. I mean, a kilo white rice in a day. It's massive. It's not fun.
SOREN JENSEN
That's crazy. It is not fun. And you need to train your gut for that. That's for sure.
Dan, let's go back to fruits and veggies. In your opinion, is there any priority for fruits and veggies over others when we're looking from a performance perspective?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I normally say this because nutrition advice needs to be applicable and simple. Otherwise you think too much about it and you go cuckoo. And I always say eat the rainbow. So the different colors of vegetables and fruit, they bring you different nutrients. And if you have a huge variety and it is colorful, then you can be quite sure that you get everything in the right amount. And that's also from a culinary point of view, more interesting than if you have it very kind of monotonous. And the colors by itself, they give you different antioxidants and the good blend from the green to the red to the yellow ones is actually what your body needs. And that goes for not so active people as much as athletes, obviously.
SOREN JENSEN
As athletes, yeah.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Because only if you like it, you eat plenty of it and you shouldn't muscle it down every day. That's not fun.
SOREN JENSEN
So instead of sticking to bananas and eating two bananas and an apple a day and go tick, job done, people should try to incorporate lots of different colors and in particular, try and eat seasonally as well, because we know that fruits and vegetables grown in season are better for us and more nutrition rich than ones that are forced to grow out of season. My next question, with the minimum recommendation guideline of five servings of fruits and veggies a day, is that a strong minimum? Would you be better off doubling it and you're going to be way better off? Does it just get better as you go bigger? What do you think?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I think if we look at the increased amount an athlete eats versus a rather passive human being, then you automatically get to higher volumes of food. And there's no need to stick to the five portions. The five are a healthy minimum or a healthy optimum, but you will not double or triple the effect if you eat six, seven, or eight portions. It's, like I said, if you eat more, then the potential risk of having some deficiencies in certain nutrients are obviously smaller. But I see more athletes eating a lot of fruit and vegetables throughout this amount. And that's what I just mentioned with the Grand Tour rider, because that gives you some well, that they are not enough eating the more energy dense foods, carbohydrates, fats and protein. And so if people are eating too much fruit and vegetables, they most often have a bit of a lack in the other departments. So that needs to be balanced. And that needs to be balanced, yeah. So more is not always more.
SOREN JENSEN
No, and plus I assume you can also do some damage that you said earlier. It's too much of one thing versus the other.
DANI HOFSTETTER
It's not just damage, but... Having a really high fiber intake, and it can also be too high, accelerates your digestion in an amount where you miss to absorb enough energy and nutrients because the time the food takes in passing through your stomach and your gut is so short, then you cannot absorb effectively and your stool gets very loose. And that's why more and more we talk also about stool quality and how the digestion works.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah. So, folks, make sure to eat different colors, all the rainbow colors that Danny mentioned earlier, it's good for us and eat also in season as well. And when it comes to colors, I mean, I think it's easy also to get a little bit of everything having the mix of different colors because as we know, oranges and or citrus fruits, they're really high in vitamin C, but then the other colors like purple colors and things are higher in different other vitamins as well. So yeah, make sure to eat the whole good mix of all colors. Dani, what are the main vegetables that you would categorize in your top five for an athlete?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I always incorporate leafy greens, whether it's spinach, broccoli, kale and their relatives, because we see that they contain a lot of good fiber, different fiber types that are good for your microbiome and an ideal amount of nutrients and antioxidants. And you can be very creative. You can eat them raw, you can eat them cooked, combine them with different vegetables and then also cereals. So the leafy greens, they are kind of your number one. And then I would say beets, whether it's beetroot, whether it's the winter vegetables like pastinaks, I think that's the same word in English, pastinaken in German.
SOREN JENSEN
I think the English word is parsnip and then pastinaca sativa is more the scientific and Latin word. But I think we got most of the languages covered here.
DANI HOFSTETTER
What grows in the soil gives you very different blend of nutrients and one popular item that contains in this family is carrots and then apart from that you have obviously tomato and the red family or which Again, the colors and also from a meal perspective, how you can bring in a certain variety, fiber, nutrients, and just a menu composition that makes sense.
SOREN JENSEN
So just to wrap this up, guys, go for colors, rainbow colors, and do save your money, please, on multivitamin pills. Go and get a fruit and a vegetable box for half the price and you do a much better job for your health. Okay, we need fiber in our diet. We talked about that before. Like it's a hard balance as an endurance athlete. Too much fiber is not good either. You mentioned that earlier, but you still need that for all of your little gut microbeads to be happy, to produce so many different things in our gut. And our immune system is mostly in our gut. Exercise is a stress factor. And if you are doing a lot of it, we need to have a really robust immune system. And one of the ways that we can do that is eating fiber and eating fruits and vegetables as we pointed out before. Could it be a problem if we have too much fiber in the stomach? And what is the recommended daily fiber intake for a normal trained athlete?
DANI HOFSTETTER
The recommendation currently is at 30 grams, 3-0 per day. The general cyclists I see, I mean, let's say they ride their bike for 10 hours a week. The amount of food that they need in terms of calories, they easily reach 30 grams when they eat fresh and unprocessed food. So that's an easy to manage. Normally if we have the energy needs covered and you don't go to excessive amounts of fiber, you arrive probably at 45 maybe 50 grams and that's if you eat mostly whole wheat foods and cereals during the day and I think everything over 30 grams gives me plenty of fiber for the gut, for the gut microbiome, for an easy and healthy digestion. One thing that we cannot tell yet because the microbiome research is kind of a very early or immature thing yet, there's lots of research going into it now, but the most honest opinion is we know a lot, but we know mostly that we know nothing yet because it's very complex. Billions of different bacteria and yeasts that are interconnected and interdependent of each other. And there's a lot of analytics around. You can send your poo into a laboratory and you get some results. But currently, and many will now disagree, but the current state of the art is each analysis only gives you a very momentarily view and the dynamics of these populations in your gut are so rapid that there is no test that can tell you your gut microbiome is healthy, So the balance is not intact and you should take X, Y, Z and then you're better off. And that's now what you said, the best thing you can do is eating enough fiber and what's very important is different kinds of fiber. So vary your vegetables because there you got different types of fiber. One of the best things you can get is barley and oats because they contain two sorts of fiber that are super interesting, easy to digest, very good for your gut health, but also not interrupting with sports, so kind of sitting long in your stomach. And again, it might sound boring, but again, variety is kind of key. And if you have different fiber, what we call prebiotic because it's the food for the microbes in your gut intestine, then they're happy, then they have enough energy and then they produce these short chain fatty acids that are feeding into your immune system that are making sure that the gut brain axis is fully functioning, that we don't have any mental problems because lots of mental issues such as depression or low mood is based in the gut as well. And so enough fiber makes definite sense. And you get to this again if you're not only eating processed foods and if you're more heading towards the whole food, whole wheat stuff that contains lots of grains and fiber.
SOREN JENSEN
Would it make sense for a cyclist or an athlete to spend any money on probiotic pills just to keep the gut happy or in cases where maybe you're coming, you've been underwater and you're coming trying to recover like I did last week from a cold or flu or something?
DANI HOFSTETTER
You mentioned something very important, that is stress. Stress, whether it's mental stress, huge workload from work and or sports, acts almost like an antibiotic. Antibiotics kill your gut microbiome as well, such as other bacteria. That's why we take it as a medical device. And stress can really suppress the gut microbiome. And currently, probiotics make sense, especially after an antibiotic treatment, because you have to kind of reintroduce them into your body. But the current trend shows that natural foods are a better way to propagate the good growth of micro bacteria in your gut. That is again fiber, so prebiotics and probiotics from natural foods. That's fermented food, fermented vegetables, that's your yogurt, your dairy products. And yes, you can accelerate with a good probiotic the recovery process, but at the moment it's not proven that taking probiotics regularly or at intervals that you can have a general better state of health. What we see though and that's kind of the stepping stone towards the performance nutrition or fueling for events like ultra events, grand tours that go longer and you need to fuel and kind of abuse your gut day in, day out because you have such a high energy turnover and food consumption. Preventive probiotic treatment can avoid or can reduce GI issues. So whether it's diarrhea, whether it's bloating, whether it's cramping, if we preventatively take probiotic before such an event, we can reduce the risk of GI distress. So gastric intestinal distress.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, because that was actually my next question to you when talking about the big stress there is around a grand tour, but even there was a post recovery from an Ironman or another Ultra. So should we talk about the macronutrients? I think there are eight, but let's talk about maybe the core four, like carbohydrate, protein, fat, and if I'm not wrong, then water.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, those are the most important ones. And I start with water because basically our body consists, depending on our sex and muscle mass, between 65 and 70% of water.
SOREN JENSEN
That's it for the first episode of Sports Nutrition. Tune in to the second episode next week where we'll discuss micronutrients and fueling strategy for race day. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to subscribe, give us a 5 star rating to help us be seen by other cyclists or athletes in the algorithm. And if you want to suggest a future podcast topic, just shoot us a line at podcast at castellicycling.com or hit us up on socials. I'll drop Danny's contact details and other important information from this episode in the show notes. Danny, it's been amazing to have you on and we hope that athletes continue to learn more about this stuff, including ourselves, because it's just so important and I really appreciate everything that you're doing. And most cyclists or athletes are in the same boat. They are undereducated and it's people like you that can make everyday athletes become better versions of themselves if they are just willing to put their time into listening to the advice. Thanks again for taking the time and see you next week.
DANI HOFSTETTER
I can't wait to get back and I'm happy if I can shed some light on simple tips that can make athletes cope better with.
SOREN JENSEN
We appreciate it. We appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. Thanks again, man. I know it's getting late there in Europe at the moment and you also have a call, I think, with an athlete, one of your clients here in a few minutes. So I thank you again for taking the time to meet us.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Thank you, sir. Take care, eat well and ciao, ciao.
SOREN JENSEN
Ciao, ciao. Take care, everyone. Ride safe and see you next week!
(07:58) How Many Servings of Daily Fruits and Vegetables
(10:55) Multivitamin Supplements, Is There Really Any Benefit
(13:24) Organic vs. Conventional: Which Has More Nutrients
(16:52) The Problem with Too Much Fiber Before a Workout
(17:27) Tips on Carbohydrate Fueling and Maintaining Steady Sugar Levels
(22:58) Why Variety and Colorful Foods Are Better
(29:59) Recommended Daily Fiber Intake
(33:57) Should You Take a Daily Probiotic Supplement
SOREN JENSEN
Have you ever wondered if you are fueling your body right with a balanced intake of vegetables, fruits, carbohydrates, proteins, fats and staying hydrated? Hello folks and welcome to the Castelli Podcast. In this episode we are moving away from rider interviews, how to dress guides and the technical aspects of Castelli's performance enhancing products. Instead, we will delve into a topic that can enhance not only our athletic performance, but also the quality of our daily lives. It's a subject that has been debated for years and is relevant to every one of us, sports nutrition. And to be more specific, we will explain why a balanced diet, including fruits, vegetables, carbohydrates, protein and good fats, is required to supply and support your biological machine. And to make sure we are in good hands, I have invited a sports performance nutritionist, who works closely with world tour cyclists, elite triathletes, ultra-athletes, runners, mountaineers and everyday athletes like you and me. The interview was so jam packed with good stuff and lasted almost 2 hours that we in the end decided to split it into 2 episodes. So today we will be serving you the first almost 45 minutes and the second episode where we will cover micronutrition will go live next week. And if we go a touch long and it's getting long for you, just hit pause and come back when you can, because I promise you, it will be worth it. So let's dive in. Welcome back, Danny Hofstetter. We are very excited to have our own performance-focused nutritionist chatting to us. Danny, let's start the episode with you telling the listeners a little bit more about yourself and how you ended up where you are today.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Well, hi, Soren, and thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So way back, I think, nutrition or kind of eating, the family table, dinner table or whatever meal we're talking about, was always an important situation. And that's already one thing I always told my athletes today as well. You should not only look through the functional perspective if we talk about food. It has a huge social and emotional aspect for us as well. And only if we can take these three kinds of topics together, then we can make meaningful change. But back to my history, I was active as a tennis player and an endurance athlete for pretty much all my life. And I discovered that my talents are much more in the endurance realm. Then I discovered cycling. I was a bit late to the party. If you're not good enough to make it in one sport, you start multi-sports. That's how I made my way into duathlon and triathlon. That was around 95, 2000. I got pretty strong pretty quickly and made my way into long distance racing, which was kind of the lion's share of my career. And during my triathlon years, I studied food science because I was always interested in the topic and I was probably too lazy to study medicine. So that was kind of a natural science and it was something I was really interested in. And then over the years, the elite sports aspect combined with food science led me to sports nutrition. I started working with athletes pretty early on and did that as a part-time hustle for many years. And six years ago, I decided to found my own company, which I'm working still now today, mainly in elite sports that can be professional athletes, that can be kind of ambitious hobby athletes, and a huge width of different sports, so from professional ballet dancers up to mountaineering, pretty much in between. And obviously my roots are in endurance sports, that's also how we met, by the way.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, at the YOLO-MITES 5000 event.
DANI HOFSTETTER
And endurance is obviously a sport where nutrition has a pretty direct impact. So every athlete that is keen on performance had his experience where nutrition let him down. And there are sports like team sports or different sports where the whole energy metabolism is not so crucial or not directly performance related. And that's why they are not as involved in the nutrition questions as an endurance athlete.
SOREN JENSEN
So if you hear a little bit of background noise, it's actually because I'm sitting here in a Portland office this week and I got the warehouse people just right behind that wall. So right here before jumping on the pod with you, I had to ask those guys to turn down the music volume out there, else we would have had Lionel Richie's background voice on the podcast, but I think they're pretty okay with that. And also, Dan, I want to thank you for giving me some advice before jumping on this trip to Portland, because I was struggling with a bad cold before, and Dan, he actually sent me a long text message about everything that I would have to eat and take care about just to have a more speedy recovery. And you know what, Dan? It all helped. It really helped me. Also your advice on getting rid of not only the cold, but also the jet lag shortly and keeping myself hydrated on the plane and everything. So thanks for that. It's a pleasure.
DANI HOFSTETTER
You realize we're jumping right into the topic because it's not just performance related. I think you can have an optimization of your nutrition in every part of your everyday life, right?
SOREN JENSEN
You're right. So let's dive into it, Dan. I'm super excited. And for those of our listeners that are thinking, oh, wait, wait, wait, I know this guy. I've heard his voice before. Yes, you probably have. We did an episode with Danny in August where we discussed how to prepare for the Elite Men's Road World Championship in Glasgow, covering topics such as pre-race and doing race nutrition, and how to boost post-race recovery. And we also delved into details like the aero clothing worn by the Italian national team at the road worlds and more. So if you haven't listened to that episode, make sure to add it to your Q-list. But back to this week's episode. Danny, let's dive in.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Try to be concise.
SOREN JENSEN
Dan, we really want to focus on what everyday amateur and pro cyclists, endurance athletes and triathletes should be going about with their day-to-day nutrition. It's not that one thing that you do once on race day. It's literally what you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep every single day, compounded over time. No matter how fit you are, you have to have a fuel source to function. So do all the spending and money on nice bike equipment, training and anything you want to do. If you don't have the fuel, you are not moving very well, you are not functioning at all. So can you start us off with some maybe founding principles or fundamentals around what you want cyclists and endurance athletes to understand about day-to-day nutrition. Maybe then let's start with the basics and start with eating enough fruits, vegetables on a day-to-day basis, even though we're still trying to eat enough fuel to support training. What should you start thinking off?
DANI HOFSTETTER
So, if we start with fruit and vegetables, the general recommendation is that every active person needs five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. One portion equals about the size of your fist. So if we have different vegetables or fruits, then you can make up that portion guide easily because hopefully everybody has his hands every day with him. The fruit and vegetables are important in basically three aspects. You have lots of vitamins and minerals that are very essential for us. And then you have the third aspect, which is fiber. Fiber is very important for a healthy gut, for a healthy microbiome. And that's the first kind of dilemma that we hit because as endurance athletes that train a lot, we need to make sure that we don't eat too much fiber before our workout because fiber is digested very slowly. So that is an individual thing where you notice, okay, the salad from lunch still sits quite high when I'm going for an intense ride or not. But generally the recommendation is no raw food before a hard training session. Have your fiber and vegetables rather after your workout. And also, of course, if we talk about breakfast, make sure you use fruits. In the Asian culture, people eat vegetables for breakfast as well. But generally, kind of in the Western cuisine, we rather go for fruits and berries for breakfast and have vegetables, salads and stuff for lunch or supper.
SOREN JENSEN
The five servings is a compound number. How would you divide the servings between veggies and fruits?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I would say go for two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables and of those vegetable servings make one raw because if we have some food raw, we make sure that we also have enough from the heat sensitive vitamins because through cooking you have some nutrient losses, right?
SOREN JENSEN
It is, it is. Actually, I thought it would have been more, but we can maybe go into that a little bit later what happens if you train your gut to eat more vegetables. I mean, of course, we have the fiber thing. I think that's also something that people need to train their gut for. But you know what, while we're talking, I was just googling around and found out that only 12% of the European population eats the recommended and general guidelines around fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, which is just crazy. I mean, a lot of people, they take multivitamins rather than other things because it's easier or we think that's better for us, but we lose the fibers and other important things for our gut. What do you think about that? Do you recommend any of your athletes to include supplements into their diet?
DANI HOFSTETTER
For very high stress situations, let's say, I mean, we're heading into an Olympic year for certain sports, it's two weeks of several disciplines where you have to perform, the preparation is already hard, then you use a multivitamin as kind of an insurance. But generally, supplements, multivitamins, and multiminerals are not necessary when you already eat enough and qualitative fresh food. And that's some point that I want to focus on because one reason why you have only these 12% getting enough fiber, fruit and vegetables in their diet is unfortunately processed food is something that is now kind of the default for many people and a healthy diet means I buy mainly unprocessed foods, natural ingredients that are not industrialized or prepared into a convenience meal and then we have more nutrients and we have less loss during production and during kind of the whole food chain until it's on my plate.
SOREN JENSEN
You're right, coming back to also the fiber intake, that extra plus, that extra bonus you get is about eating the real thing versus multivitamins. So yeah, and then you're probably also going to save your money on it.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, we call this kind of the entourage effect where an isolated supplement has a lesser efficacy than a natural food because the natural food, the metrics consisting of fiber, of different secondary plant substances and those vitamins, that is digested better and absorbed better than an isolated substance and that's why this kind of natural environment is even more important. And so one easy advice I give my athletes is buy food that has a very limited amount of packaging material because then you have mostly unprocessed food. And if it is packaged in a commercial way, make sure the ingredients list is as brief as possible, because then you mainly get the raw materials as you wish for it.
SOREN JENSEN
Correct. What's your thoughts then on organic fruits and vegetables versus non-organic?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I mean, organic from an environmental point of view, it's a huge plus and I'm supporting that. You could never prove that organic fruit and vegetables have higher amounts of vitamins or fiber or other nutrients. So there we have to say, if you stick to products that have seen soil, because lots of fruit and vegetables are coming from growth houses. Like greenhouses? For instance, tomato, obviously, if you're in Castelli country, your home turf, you can eat tomato, it tastes like tomato. And if you buy the stuff that has never seen soil or sun directly, then you buy mostly colored water and obviously there are less nutrients inside as well. So here I would say if you have a chance to buy fruit and vegetables at a farmer's market where you know it's been in a natural environment, that's good, but there's no proof that organic produced fresh foods contain more nutrients than regular produce.
SOREN JENSEN
That's interesting to hear. As you said, in Denmark, we only grow great tomatoes in summertime and they're never going to be the Italian quality for sure or the South of Europe. But it also depends a little bit on just eating the right things. I mean, it's probably more important than to, wherever you live, eat seasonal fruits and vegetables and then you probably also get it fresh near where you live.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes. And one thing, I'm not saying back in the days everything was better, but since the means of conserving, preserving food was less sophisticated, like let's say 70 years ago, people had to choose right what they eat in winter in terms of fruit and vegetables. And if we look back and see what they had as seasonal and fresh food, then we also make most things right in our dating tradition. And today you have the opportunity to eat strawberries all year no matter where they come from.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, berries coming from Peru or other places.
DANI HOFSTETTER
And it's not a discussion whether this is morally or environmentally meaningful or wise, but if you eat seasonal and local, you can say it's rich in nutrients. And we lost a bit of the taste. Also let's say now in Europe we're heading into winter and the winter vegetables are not as fancy as the asparagus and the berries etc. But you could have it easily if you go to these more like roots and beets that are winter vegetables and you get the whole nutrients that you need as well.
SOREN JENSEN
Okay, now that makes sense. So that actually leads me to the next question, Dan. When it comes to fiber, the only time that you would not eat fruit and vegetables due to the fiber intake would be when you're carbo loading the day before or on race days, just to avoid that fiber intake. You just want to keep that as low as possible, correct?
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yeah, I mean, it all depends on how hard we're heading out. As a routine cyclist, you can eat even heavy foods and go for an easy spin and you don't suffer. If you're not as experienced and the intensity is relatively higher, then you need to make sure that the meal you eat last before heading onto your bike is easily digestible. And I think if we're talking fiber, we automatically talk about carbohydrates. First thing, yes, as athletes and everybody who's listening to the Castelli podcast is mostly active, I think, makes sense. And so our need for carbohydrate is increased. There's been a lot of discussion about low carb, no carb, keto, paleo, whatever form of diet. In the last 15 years, we had amazing scientific studies that proved the endurance athlete that eats more carbs and eats them at the right time has a better performance in training, in recovery, in competition as well. And what you refer to is carbohydrates come in different forms and shapes and paces because I say pace because a carb source that contains more fiber is digested slower and releases its energy into our bloodstream more steady. So like the satiety is longer, the blood sugar increase is more steady and more gradual. Then when I eat simple sugar, that gives me a blood sugar rise that is immediate, like within 10 or 15 minutes. But the sharp cliff that we, the drop of the blood sugar roller coaster is something we want to avoid. And the tricky part when we compare everyday nutrition and what we need during exercise is we try to have a steady blood sugar throughout. That means in passive hours, so the whole wheat stuff, cereals that are not processed. So instead of just plain pasta, I probably go for quinoa, brown rice, whole wheat, wheat products. I'm not saying wheat is bad per se, but if you have it refined as pasta, as couscous or white bread, then you get to this kind of rapid carbohydrate. And the closer we get to exercise, so let's say 90 minutes before a ride, during a ride or right after, that's when we need the fast carbs because the energy goes into our bloodstream and our muscles pretty immediately. immediately, we use it while we're exercising and because the hormonal response to food is completely different when we're active, then this is the time where we can hit the high sugar intake, where we can eat white bread, where we can have a ripe banana and it's not detrimental to your health. Right. And the same goes to finish that off with the fiber amount. A proper sports bar, like an energy bar that is made for your active phase contains the least amount of fiber, a good one, because fiber slows down the absorption rate and the time it takes until the energy hits your muscles. And if you eat fruit during exercise or shortly before, then the fiber amount slows down the energy release. But with fruit, it also depends on the ripeness of the fruit like immature fruit or unripe fruit contains more fiber, ripe fruit has more sugar. You can taste that because it's sweeter, right?
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, yeah, no, it is sweeter. And I think I'm kind of dragging you down into a rapid hole here on something that we probably will be covering also a little bit later when talking about fueling for race day or just a long event or a weekend ride. If I eat raw vegetables versus cooked vegetables, is there any difference there from my stomach for when it comes to digestion?
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, because the cooking process breaks down cellulose or makes it easier to digest. That's why raw salad, vegetables, whatever, is sitting long in your stomach. And the passage from the stomach into the gut and then the time it takes to absorb it in the gut is much longer than it was cooked well before.
SOREN JENSEN
Right. Do you think Grand Tour cyclists in the evening steer away from cooked vegetables?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I think during a Grand Tour, they definitely eat vegetables, not huge amounts because the amount of energy they need to put in their system is giving you a certain bulk. And if you eat a lot of vegetables, the satiety kicks in earlier and you're not hungry for the carbs you need to eat as well. I mean, nowadays, grand tour cyclists, apart from what they've consumed already on the bike and right after a stage, they eat more than a kilo of rice per day. I mean, a kilo white rice in a day. It's massive. It's not fun.
SOREN JENSEN
That's crazy. It is not fun. And you need to train your gut for that. That's for sure.
Dan, let's go back to fruits and veggies. In your opinion, is there any priority for fruits and veggies over others when we're looking from a performance perspective?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I normally say this because nutrition advice needs to be applicable and simple. Otherwise you think too much about it and you go cuckoo. And I always say eat the rainbow. So the different colors of vegetables and fruit, they bring you different nutrients. And if you have a huge variety and it is colorful, then you can be quite sure that you get everything in the right amount. And that's also from a culinary point of view, more interesting than if you have it very kind of monotonous. And the colors by itself, they give you different antioxidants and the good blend from the green to the red to the yellow ones is actually what your body needs. And that goes for not so active people as much as athletes, obviously.
SOREN JENSEN
As athletes, yeah.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Because only if you like it, you eat plenty of it and you shouldn't muscle it down every day. That's not fun.
SOREN JENSEN
So instead of sticking to bananas and eating two bananas and an apple a day and go tick, job done, people should try to incorporate lots of different colors and in particular, try and eat seasonally as well, because we know that fruits and vegetables grown in season are better for us and more nutrition rich than ones that are forced to grow out of season. My next question, with the minimum recommendation guideline of five servings of fruits and veggies a day, is that a strong minimum? Would you be better off doubling it and you're going to be way better off? Does it just get better as you go bigger? What do you think?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I think if we look at the increased amount an athlete eats versus a rather passive human being, then you automatically get to higher volumes of food. And there's no need to stick to the five portions. The five are a healthy minimum or a healthy optimum, but you will not double or triple the effect if you eat six, seven, or eight portions. It's, like I said, if you eat more, then the potential risk of having some deficiencies in certain nutrients are obviously smaller. But I see more athletes eating a lot of fruit and vegetables throughout this amount. And that's what I just mentioned with the Grand Tour rider, because that gives you some well, that they are not enough eating the more energy dense foods, carbohydrates, fats and protein. And so if people are eating too much fruit and vegetables, they most often have a bit of a lack in the other departments. So that needs to be balanced. And that needs to be balanced, yeah. So more is not always more.
SOREN JENSEN
No, and plus I assume you can also do some damage that you said earlier. It's too much of one thing versus the other.
DANI HOFSTETTER
It's not just damage, but... Having a really high fiber intake, and it can also be too high, accelerates your digestion in an amount where you miss to absorb enough energy and nutrients because the time the food takes in passing through your stomach and your gut is so short, then you cannot absorb effectively and your stool gets very loose. And that's why more and more we talk also about stool quality and how the digestion works.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah. So, folks, make sure to eat different colors, all the rainbow colors that Danny mentioned earlier, it's good for us and eat also in season as well. And when it comes to colors, I mean, I think it's easy also to get a little bit of everything having the mix of different colors because as we know, oranges and or citrus fruits, they're really high in vitamin C, but then the other colors like purple colors and things are higher in different other vitamins as well. So yeah, make sure to eat the whole good mix of all colors. Dani, what are the main vegetables that you would categorize in your top five for an athlete?
DANI HOFSTETTER
I always incorporate leafy greens, whether it's spinach, broccoli, kale and their relatives, because we see that they contain a lot of good fiber, different fiber types that are good for your microbiome and an ideal amount of nutrients and antioxidants. And you can be very creative. You can eat them raw, you can eat them cooked, combine them with different vegetables and then also cereals. So the leafy greens, they are kind of your number one. And then I would say beets, whether it's beetroot, whether it's the winter vegetables like pastinaks, I think that's the same word in English, pastinaken in German.
SOREN JENSEN
I think the English word is parsnip and then pastinaca sativa is more the scientific and Latin word. But I think we got most of the languages covered here.
DANI HOFSTETTER
What grows in the soil gives you very different blend of nutrients and one popular item that contains in this family is carrots and then apart from that you have obviously tomato and the red family or which Again, the colors and also from a meal perspective, how you can bring in a certain variety, fiber, nutrients, and just a menu composition that makes sense.
SOREN JENSEN
So just to wrap this up, guys, go for colors, rainbow colors, and do save your money, please, on multivitamin pills. Go and get a fruit and a vegetable box for half the price and you do a much better job for your health. Okay, we need fiber in our diet. We talked about that before. Like it's a hard balance as an endurance athlete. Too much fiber is not good either. You mentioned that earlier, but you still need that for all of your little gut microbeads to be happy, to produce so many different things in our gut. And our immune system is mostly in our gut. Exercise is a stress factor. And if you are doing a lot of it, we need to have a really robust immune system. And one of the ways that we can do that is eating fiber and eating fruits and vegetables as we pointed out before. Could it be a problem if we have too much fiber in the stomach? And what is the recommended daily fiber intake for a normal trained athlete?
DANI HOFSTETTER
The recommendation currently is at 30 grams, 3-0 per day. The general cyclists I see, I mean, let's say they ride their bike for 10 hours a week. The amount of food that they need in terms of calories, they easily reach 30 grams when they eat fresh and unprocessed food. So that's an easy to manage. Normally if we have the energy needs covered and you don't go to excessive amounts of fiber, you arrive probably at 45 maybe 50 grams and that's if you eat mostly whole wheat foods and cereals during the day and I think everything over 30 grams gives me plenty of fiber for the gut, for the gut microbiome, for an easy and healthy digestion. One thing that we cannot tell yet because the microbiome research is kind of a very early or immature thing yet, there's lots of research going into it now, but the most honest opinion is we know a lot, but we know mostly that we know nothing yet because it's very complex. Billions of different bacteria and yeasts that are interconnected and interdependent of each other. And there's a lot of analytics around. You can send your poo into a laboratory and you get some results. But currently, and many will now disagree, but the current state of the art is each analysis only gives you a very momentarily view and the dynamics of these populations in your gut are so rapid that there is no test that can tell you your gut microbiome is healthy, So the balance is not intact and you should take X, Y, Z and then you're better off. And that's now what you said, the best thing you can do is eating enough fiber and what's very important is different kinds of fiber. So vary your vegetables because there you got different types of fiber. One of the best things you can get is barley and oats because they contain two sorts of fiber that are super interesting, easy to digest, very good for your gut health, but also not interrupting with sports, so kind of sitting long in your stomach. And again, it might sound boring, but again, variety is kind of key. And if you have different fiber, what we call prebiotic because it's the food for the microbes in your gut intestine, then they're happy, then they have enough energy and then they produce these short chain fatty acids that are feeding into your immune system that are making sure that the gut brain axis is fully functioning, that we don't have any mental problems because lots of mental issues such as depression or low mood is based in the gut as well. And so enough fiber makes definite sense. And you get to this again if you're not only eating processed foods and if you're more heading towards the whole food, whole wheat stuff that contains lots of grains and fiber.
SOREN JENSEN
Would it make sense for a cyclist or an athlete to spend any money on probiotic pills just to keep the gut happy or in cases where maybe you're coming, you've been underwater and you're coming trying to recover like I did last week from a cold or flu or something?
DANI HOFSTETTER
You mentioned something very important, that is stress. Stress, whether it's mental stress, huge workload from work and or sports, acts almost like an antibiotic. Antibiotics kill your gut microbiome as well, such as other bacteria. That's why we take it as a medical device. And stress can really suppress the gut microbiome. And currently, probiotics make sense, especially after an antibiotic treatment, because you have to kind of reintroduce them into your body. But the current trend shows that natural foods are a better way to propagate the good growth of micro bacteria in your gut. That is again fiber, so prebiotics and probiotics from natural foods. That's fermented food, fermented vegetables, that's your yogurt, your dairy products. And yes, you can accelerate with a good probiotic the recovery process, but at the moment it's not proven that taking probiotics regularly or at intervals that you can have a general better state of health. What we see though and that's kind of the stepping stone towards the performance nutrition or fueling for events like ultra events, grand tours that go longer and you need to fuel and kind of abuse your gut day in, day out because you have such a high energy turnover and food consumption. Preventive probiotic treatment can avoid or can reduce GI issues. So whether it's diarrhea, whether it's bloating, whether it's cramping, if we preventatively take probiotic before such an event, we can reduce the risk of GI distress. So gastric intestinal distress.
SOREN JENSEN
Yeah, because that was actually my next question to you when talking about the big stress there is around a grand tour, but even there was a post recovery from an Ironman or another Ultra. So should we talk about the macronutrients? I think there are eight, but let's talk about maybe the core four, like carbohydrate, protein, fat, and if I'm not wrong, then water.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Yes, those are the most important ones. And I start with water because basically our body consists, depending on our sex and muscle mass, between 65 and 70% of water.
SOREN JENSEN
That's it for the first episode of Sports Nutrition. Tune in to the second episode next week where we'll discuss micronutrients and fueling strategy for race day. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to subscribe, give us a 5 star rating to help us be seen by other cyclists or athletes in the algorithm. And if you want to suggest a future podcast topic, just shoot us a line at podcast at castellicycling.com or hit us up on socials. I'll drop Danny's contact details and other important information from this episode in the show notes. Danny, it's been amazing to have you on and we hope that athletes continue to learn more about this stuff, including ourselves, because it's just so important and I really appreciate everything that you're doing. And most cyclists or athletes are in the same boat. They are undereducated and it's people like you that can make everyday athletes become better versions of themselves if they are just willing to put their time into listening to the advice. Thanks again for taking the time and see you next week.
DANI HOFSTETTER
I can't wait to get back and I'm happy if I can shed some light on simple tips that can make athletes cope better with.
SOREN JENSEN
We appreciate it. We appreciate it, man. Thank you so much. Thanks again, man. I know it's getting late there in Europe at the moment and you also have a call, I think, with an athlete, one of your clients here in a few minutes. So I thank you again for taking the time to meet us.
DANI HOFSTETTER
Thank you, sir. Take care, eat well and ciao, ciao.
SOREN JENSEN
Ciao, ciao. Take care, everyone. Ride safe and see you next week!
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