The Red Wings keep their players busy during development camp’s “down times” via seminars on social media, sleep and nutrition, and team nutritionist Lisa McDowell’s nutrition course tends to take the cake in terms of having an impact upon the players’ behaviors. DetroitRedWings.com’s Dana Wakiji penned an article about McDowell’s crash course in advanced nutritional techniques:
McDowell has learned that you can teach these kids a thing or two about foods and their impact on their performance on ice, things that show up when they test the players’ blood.
“One of my favorite stories goes back to Luke Glendening,” McDowell said. “When he was at development camp, he told me that he ate out often. He just didn’t have the skills and he learned them and he learned real simple recipes and his markers are amazing. So I think it does make a difference. When I can take their lab results back to them and sit with them and show them where opportunities are and now they’ve seen the foods. They’ve seen spinach, they’ve seen kale, they’ve seen beets, they’ve seen tart cherries, oatmeal. We did build overnight oats that will soak in almond milk. I don’t know that they would ever do that at home but now they know, geez, I literally made oats in minutes and I can make a week’s worth, put them in the fridge and have them every morning and get that blood sugar control so they can preserve their glycogen stores on the ice.
“So they’re lessons that are so tangible. They can apply them and then they can feel them when they skate.”