Restaurants. Convenience stores. Road trips. Tournament weekends. The Fueling Planner helps athletes, coaches, and parents make better fueling decisions from the options already in front of them.
Get a practical recommendation for the moment— and understand why that choice fits what comes next.
The goal is not simply to label one menu item “good” and another “bad.” The right choice depends on where the athlete is, what they have access to, and what comes next.
A generic restaurant guide may point toward a lower-calorie option, a “healthier” item, or one meal someone decided was best.
The Fueling Planner combines the place with the fueling moment so the recommendation makes sense in the context of the athlete's day.
A practical option from the menu already in front of you.
Short context that explains how the recommendation fits the selected fueling moment.
Breakfast before school, food before competition, and a meal after training are not automatically the same decision— even when they come from the same restaurant.
Athletes can understand that fueling matters and still struggle to apply that information when time, access, travel, and the food actually available don't match the ideal plan.
School ends. Practice starts. The team travels. A tournament runs long. Dinner moves later. The decision often has to happen inside the time that actually exists.
Sometimes the choice is not between a perfectly prepared meal and fast food. It is between the restaurant on the route, a convenience store, or going without.
“Eat better” is easy to say. Standing at a counter before a game and deciding what actually fits that moment is different. That is where information has to become usable.
Traditional nutrition education often explains what an athlete should do under ideal conditions.
Real life asks a different question: What is the best practical choice I can make from here, right now, for what comes next?
Sometimes the next step is not finding a different restaurant. It is understanding how to make a better choice at the one already in front of you.
Early in my coaching career, I was teaching athletes what I thought was good, practical nutrition advice. Then one conversation showed me that practical only matters if the advice actually fits the athlete's world.
I was talking with football players about nutrition and grocery shopping—how to make better choices, how to build meals, and how to spend more time around the outside edges of the grocery store instead of living in the aisles.
It was the kind of advice coaches and nutrition professionals give all the time. And technically, there was nothing wrong with it.
Then one athlete told me he had never been inside a grocery store. His food came from the neighborhood convenience store.
“There Are No Grocery Stores In The Hood.”
That hit me hard.
I realized I was giving him advice that made sense in my world, but not necessarily in his.
So instead of repeating the lecture, I changed the assignment. I started looking at the food he actually had access to and built what became a kind of “7-Eleven All-Star Menu”—better options inside the environment he was already using.
That lesson stayed with me throughout my coaching career. Athletes are often willing to make a better decision—they simply need help seeing what that decision looks like inside the places, schedules, and constraints they are actually navigating.
The Fueling Planner is built around a simple idea: start with the place, schedule, and options the athlete actually has—then help them make the next better decision from there.
Better fueling does not have to begin with an ideal grocery haul, a perfectly packed cooler, or the “best” restaurant in town.
Sometimes it begins with knowing how to navigate the stop that is already on the route.
That question may communicate frustration, but it does not necessarily help the athlete navigate the decision already in front of them.
That changes the conversation from judgment to decision-making—and gives the athlete something useful they can act on immediately.
The goal is not to lower the standard. It is to give athletes a practical path toward the standard— one decision at a time.
A menu item does not exist in isolation. The same food can make more or less sense depending on when the athlete is eating it and what their body needs next.
Before activity, the goal may be to provide useful energy without making the athlete feel overly full. After activity, the priority shifts toward replacing fuel, supporting recovery, and preparing for what comes next. Timing changes what we are asking the meal to accomplish.
Breakfast helps begin replacing energy after the overnight fast and supports the school day, training, growth, and everything that follows.
As training gets closer, the decision becomes more about delivering useful fuel while considering digestion, portion size, and how much time remains before activity.
Competition raises the importance of timing. The goal is to provide energy for the event without creating unnecessary fullness or digestive discomfort.
Once the work is over, the job changes. The meal can now help replace carbohydrate, provide protein, restore fluids, and begin preparing the athlete for the next demand.
A recommendation may prioritize easier-to-manage portions and useful carbohydrate while limiting choices that could feel too heavy close to activity.
The recommendation can shift toward more total food, carbohydrate, protein, and fluids because the job of the meal has changed.
The Fueling Planner gives the immediate recommendation, but the explanation behind it helps athletes, coaches, and parents begin recognizing the pattern for themselves.
Sometimes the athlete is choosing for themselves. Sometimes a coach is guiding a team stop. Sometimes a parent is trying to help on the road. The decision framework stays the same.
Athletes eventually have to make fueling decisions on their own. The Planner gives them a practical recommendation and enough explanation to understand why the choice fits what they are about to do.
The tool helps turn a vague nutrition principle into a specific next move.
Coaches cannot personally build every meal for every athlete. But they can reinforce a useful process when the team is traveling, stopping after practice, or grabbing food between events.
One shared tool can reinforce the same message across an entire group.
Parents often know they want to help but may not know what makes sense at a particular restaurant or moment. The Planner gives them a practical answer and the reasoning behind it.
The tool helps support the decision without requiring the parent to become the nutrition expert.
The athlete does not need one set of advice from a coach and another from home. The same decision framework can travel with them.
Where are you? What comes next? What is the best practical choice from here? That creates a common way to think about fueling even when the people, places, and schedules change.
The person using the Planner may change. The question does not: What is the best practical fueling decision from here, for what comes next?
Years later at Dayton, I saw the same challenge in a different form. The athletes had access to food. What they needed was a better way to navigate the places they were already choosing.
Athletes would arrive at the arena before practice with food from places like McDonald's and Wendy's, sometimes eating while they were getting their ankles taped.
Those restaurants were not random. They were convenient, familiar, and on the route to the arena.
I could have told them to stop going there. I could have given another lecture about where athletes “should” eat instead.
What Can They Order There That Better Fits What Comes Next?
So I started looking at those menus differently.
I identified options that made more sense around training and competition and began giving the athletes a clearer map for the restaurants they were already using.
At times, I even placed those better options in their lockers anonymously so the athletes could experience the alternative without turning the moment into another nutrition lecture.
The athletes were not necessarily trying to undermine their training. They were making convenient decisions with the knowledge, time, and options they had in front of them.
Better coaching meant making the useful choice easier to see at the exact place the decision was happening.
That experience reinforced what I had learned years earlier: athletes often do not need another rule about where they should eat. They need a practical map for making a better choice wherever real life has already taken them.
The Fueling Planner is not built around imaginary “perfect meals.” It starts with the menu that actually exists and applies practical sports-nutrition logic to the athlete's selected fueling window.
Recommendations are built around actual restaurant and convenience-store menu options rather than generic examples. The goal is to help the user navigate the food they can actually order.
The same menu can produce a different recommendation depending on whether the athlete is eating at breakfast, before training, before competition, or after the work is finished.
The Planner does not stop at “order this.” It gives users a concise explanation of why the recommendation better fits that particular moment.
A useful fueling recommendation has to consider the job the food needs to do—not simply whether an item looks “healthy” on paper.
The Fueling Planner is a practical decision-support tool, not individualized medical nutrition therapy. Menus can change, individual needs differ, and allergies, medical conditions, dietary restrictions, portion needs, and personal tolerance still matter. When those factors require individualized guidance, users should follow the recommendations of an appropriate qualified health professional.
The immediate goal is to help someone make a better decision at the counter. The larger goal is to help athletes, coaches, and parents understand the pattern well enough that future decisions become easier.
Choose where you are eating and what the athlete is fueling for.
The Fueling Planner will show you a practical option from the real
menu—and explain
why that choice fits the moment.
The goal is not perfection.
It is making the best decision available for what comes next.
Choose where you are stopping — restaurant or gas station — then tell us the moment: breakfast, everyday pre-workout fuel-up, pre-game fuel-up, or post-game recovery.
Nutrition for athletes isn’t about being perfect — it’s about being prepared. What works in your system before the whistle is different from what your body needs after it. Here’s the framework behind every recommendation on this page.
Every order below — restaurant or gas station — was built against these windows, using real menu items and modifiers you can actually ask for at the counter.
Pre-Lift Fueling research: Critical Reload, citing Bin Naharudin et al. (2019), Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
Pre-Workout fueling windows: Critical Reload, What to Eat Before a Workout: High School Athlete Guide to Fueling.
A carb anchor, a modest protein source, and hydration. Research on trained lifters shows a real breakfast beats an empty tank for early-morning strength work — fed athletes completed meaningfully more squat volume than fasted athletes at the same load.
Moderate-to-high carbs, moderate protein, low fat and low fiber — so nothing sits heavy once the whistle blows.
If there's still time to eat, keep it small, familiar, and easy to digest. This isn't the window for a full meal.
Carbs to refill glycogen, 15–30g protein to start repair, fluids and electrolytes to replace what was lost.
Fat and fiber are back on the table. This is where the bigger, more complete recovery meal does its job.
One Tap Away Next Time
The Fueling Planner is most useful when it is easy to reach. Add it to your phone so the next restaurant, road trip, practice, or game-day stop starts with one tap.
Apple
Open the Fueling Planner in Safari.
Tap the Share button.
Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
Turn on Open as Web App, then tap Add.
The Fueling Planner icon will appear on your iPhone Home Screen for quick access.
Open the Fueling Planner in Chrome.
Tap the three-dot menu.
Tap Install and create shortcut.
Choose Create shortcut, then tap Add.
Some Android devices may show Install app instead. Either option can place the Fueling Planner on your Home Screen.
Don’t make the Fueling Planner something you have to search for. Save it once. The next time you need to make a food decision on the road, open it like any other app and get your answer.
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