Matt Lovell Interview – Part 1

As regular readers know, I recently attended Leisure Industry Week (Click here for the review of the event). During LIW I managed to sit down for an interview with Matt Lovell, a nutritionist who can list the England Rugby Union team, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, Manchester City Football Club and UK Athletics among his clients.

Alongside his business partner Gavin Allinson, Matt has brought a brand new supplement to the market, R5 Aminos under the Aminoman brand.

As a big fan of his work for a number of years, I was really pleased to be given a chance to interview Matt.

We spoke about all kinds of topics, from the role of nutrition in elite sports, the supplement industry in general, the rise of the ‘celebrity’ nutritionist and how fitness and medicine can work together to deliver a joined up approach to health for the general public.

He was generous with his time and gave me so much during the interview that I have had to split it into two parts! Here is part 1…

Matt Lovell AminoMan Interview – Part 1

Hoyles Fitness (HF): Given improvements in nutritional preparation of athletes, what will the Footballer of the future look like – more like a Rugby player?

If you look at Rugby, every 1-2 years increase in lean mass has been 1-2kg. That’s probably reached a ceiling now as they are operating close to their genetic limits.

If you compare the World Cup winning 2003 squad, I used to think they were massive giants and strong, and they were in awesome condition, but pound for pound the guys now have more muscle and are leaner than those before them.

HF: But is that all down to nutrition? Training methods have advanced, but not that much – the tools of the trade are still largely the same.

Yeah, you’re right. I think the science around training has improved slightly and I think the science in terms gaining of maximum results in shortest period of time has improved – we know how hard we can push players and how long to need to rest before we can apply more stimulus.

Now the players understand rest and recovery better and that absolutely comes down to lifestyle and nutrition. That’s the biggest difference – the recovery.

HF: Clive Woodward introduced the sleep monitoring to the England squad. Was that with your influence?

We always monitored sleep – it’s a common question I ask all clients. If we look at the triangle of performance, it’s eat, sleep, train, with a smiley face in the middle – if you can stay happy within that context, you’ll be doing well in each of the three.

HF: So with regards to your product, you’ve spoken about it’s more for recovery – does that reflect the changing role of protein in fitness? For a long time protein was (wrongly) assumed to be important only to bodybuilders, but is R5 as useful for the 55 year old casual female exerciser as the 22 year old athlete?

I think the difference is that you have whole proteins – whey, soy, casein. These were associated with bodybuilding because overall, you’d need to take in more protein to build muscle.

The difference in the products I’m bringing out is that I’m basing them all around targeted use of individual amino acids.

Amino acids make up whole proteins, but when you use the individual ones in certain amounts then the role that amino acid has in the body gets kicked up a gear.

Every amino has a few specific roles – enzymes it might target, precursors to neurotransmitters and things like that, so by taking high dose single aminos, or formulas you regulate physiology slightly differently.

The other thing with free form amino acids is that if you ate a chicken breast 25-30g of protein, you might only have 2g of free form aminos – the rest of the protein has to be chewed, ingested, broken down and then absorbed, so the time it takes for that protein to trigger an anabolic response might be longer than if you took an essential amino acid or a branch chain amino acid, because those proteins are in a form the body needs to use, so there is no digestion at all – it’s down to how quickly they can exit the gut and get into the bloodstream to have an effect.

To come back to the original question, elderly people suffer a drastic loss of muscle as they get older, which is one of the reasons they suffer a drop in quality of life. For them, an amino acid blend is one of the ways forward for that population because you could take 6g of aminos and trigger protein synthesis and that’s better for a grandma than her chugging down a whey protein shake – she could just have an effervescent drink in the morning with 6g of aminos in, for example and have the same benefit for her requirements.

HF: Going back to athletic performance, how important is solid nutrition during injury rehab? A few footballers from the 90’s have said in their books how a lot of their rehab was spent in the pub!

So you are effectively what you eat, so the rate of recovery and the quality of that recovery is going to be directly related to the stuff you are taking in.

The thing is with injury, you don’t see many studies comparing injury rates with poor quality diets – they tend to test individual products and see if they help recovery. One of the difficulties is finding population groups you can study, because you can’t purposely injure half of your study group!

What you can look at are things like muscle recovery, soreness and stuff and there’s quite a lot of study on that. There’s quite a lot of studies on antioxidant intake, fish oils, turmeric and muscle soreness inflammation and protein synthesis and more or less all of them show that if you take high dose antioxidants you almost certainly reduce muscle soreness and if you reduce inflammation you often increase protein synthesis, so that would tie directly in with recovery.

Basically, if you are eating a pack of dry roasted peanuts and drinking 5 pints of lager, that might be pushing you in the wrong direction!

One thing you do see, and this is purely anecdotally, is a lot of kids with a poor diet, who eat a lot of sugar tend to be the ones who get more soft tissue injuries. Now the difficulty there is, is it the sugar causing the inflammation, or is it the fact that they’re eating all that sugar doesn’t leave any room for any quality in the diet?

HF: It’s chicken and egg though, isn’t it?

It is chicken and egg. When you take the sugar down and sort out other deficiencies they tend to recover a lot quicker and injury rates drop back down again. I suppose the key point is that although the data may not clearly show that sugar causes soft tissue weakness and therefore, injury, keeping it low in the diet of your kids is a good idea.

The interview with Matt was so full of content that I have decided to split it over two parts, so keep your eyes peeled for part 2 of the Matt Lovell interview coming up later this week.

R5 Aminos are available at www.aminoman.com. For further supplements, take a visit to Total Shape.

Click here to read Part 2 of the Matt Lovell interview.

If you want to follow more of Matt’s work, you can check out his site at http://www.sportsnutritionvlog.com/uk-sports-nutritionist/matt-lovell-sports-nutritionist-london/.

P.S. I’m giving away a FREE eBook ‘101 Health and Fitness Tips’ to everyone who subscribes to my VIP email list. By joining the list you’ll have access to exclusive content, discounts, offers and products from both me and selected partners. Click here to download!