🎙️ Upside Video Chat with Ted Munson, Sports Nutritionist, Brentford FC (Premier League)

Today we have the honor of interviewing Ted Munson, the sports nutritionist of Brentford fc, a Premier League club.

You can watch the video interview below by clicking on the Youtube link. You can also listen to the audio interview by clicking on the link at the top of the page:

Here is a picture of Ted on the field:

📝Show Notes: During the interview we discussed Ted’s journey into performance nutrition, where he focuses on player personalization, health, and rehab. He explained his approach of adapting guidelines to each athlete, periodizing nutrition to match training loads, and using behavior change to build buy-in. Ted highlighted tech like Hexis for GPS-linked fueling, DEXA scans, and MX3 hydration testing, and sees the future of nutrition moving toward deeper personalization, gut testing, and better products. If given unlimited resources, he would create an AI-driven athlete data platform and even a “robot chef” that teaches players to cook meals tailored to their needs.

You can read the full transcript of the podcast interview with Ted located at the top of this blog post.

Here are the quotes from the interview with Ted:

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1. Tell me about your background

“I’ve been practicing in performance nutrition for just over 10 years now. I started out working in elite sport up north after completing my BSc and MSc in sport and exercise science, followed by a postgraduate diploma in sport and exercise nutrition to get on the British Dietetics Association’s Sport and Exercise Nutrition Register. That qualification allowed me to work in elite sport settings here in the UK. Early in my career, I was with Hull City Football Club as a sort of hybrid sports scientist and nutritionist, because back then very few Premier League clubs had dedicated nutritionists. Later, I joined Science in Sport (SIS), working across a broad spectrum of sports like cycling, rugby, and football, which really opened my eyes to different performance environments beyond team sports. About six or seven years ago, I launched my own consultancy, and that led to roles in the English Championship, Formula One, Premiership Rugby with Harlequins, and Luton Town Football Club. More recently, I’ve been with Brentford in the Premier League, now going into my fourth season, and also supported the Danish national team at Euro 2024 and in the Nations League. It’s been a pretty broad journey, but I’m really enjoying working in the Premier League at a club that’s so focused on development.”

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2. What do you do as a sports nutritionist?

“When people outside of sport think of a nutritionist, they assume it’s just meal planning—but in reality, it’s far more comprehensive. My role as sports nutritionist is very broad and focuses heavily on player personalization. That means tailoring strategies both inside and outside the club, based on individual player goals. These goals might be physical, like gaining muscle mass or dropping body fat, or performance-based, like increasing high-speed running capacity or improving jump height to win more headers. Everything we do as performance nutritionists is linked back to performance on the pitch. But beyond that, a huge part of my job is keeping players healthy, because illness prevention is just as important as performance. We monitor body composition with tools like DEXA, hydration status, and blood work multiple times a year, looking at markers like CRP, antioxidants, and inflammation. Athletes, especially in the Premier League with so much travel, are prone to upper respiratory tract infections, and avoiding time lost to illness is crucial. Another area is rehab—we support injured players so that they come back faster, stronger, and better recovered. Shaving two or three weeks off a long-term injury is incredibly valuable at this level. On top of that, I work on acute fueling strategies around training and match days, supplementation, menu planning for hotels and travel, and coordination with consultants like psychologists and sleep specialists. It’s about so much more than menus—it’s about being part of a truly integrated multidisciplinary team.”

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3. What is your approach towards nutritional strategies in elite sports?

“Early in my career, I made the mistake of sticking too rigidly to guidelines. Guidelines are useful as a starting point, but they’re not always practical in the real world. For example, guidelines might recommend more than 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilo of body mass the day before a match. For a 140-kilo rugby prop, that’s an enormous amount of food and often not realistic. What I’ve learned is that the key is always putting the player first—understanding who they are, what they’ve done before, and then slowly developing strategies that suit them. I also believe nutrition should be periodized just like training loads. We increase carbs on high training load days, especially with double sessions or gym work, and reduce them on lighter days. This improves energy levels and helps with body composition. One of the biggest evolutions in my approach over the last five years has been focusing on behavior change. You can have all the knowledge in the world and quote guidelines perfectly, but if you can’t get athletes to follow them, it’s meaningless. It’s about building trust, using behavior change models like COM-B, and understanding intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Nutrition isn’t just about telling players what to eat—it’s about meeting them where they are, building relationships, and creating buy-in so that changes actually stick.”

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4. What are your preferred tech and why?

“I’ve always been cautious about technology in nutrition, because while tech can give us great information, it should never take away the conversation with the athlete. For me, technology should help us share information quickly, make decisions quickly, and educate—but it must fit into the workflow and support, not disrupt, those important relationships. A great example is Hexis, which I’m a huge fan of. It links fueling recommendations directly to a player’s GPS data, so it’s personalized in real-time based on what they’ve actually done, not on estimates or equations. That’s the level of personalization we need. Another area where tech has been really valuable is body composition—we’ve moved from skinfolds to DEXA scanning, which gives us much more detailed insights. I prefer focusing on muscle mass rather than body fat, and players respond really positively to that framing. Hydration testing is another example. We’ve been using MX3 saliva testing, and while I was skeptical at first, after comparing it against urine tests in-house, it’s proved accurate and much easier for players to buy into—because let’s be honest, no athlete enjoys peeing in a cup. These tools are fantastic for education and for turning data into meaningful actions, as long as they don’t replace the conversations we need to have with players.”

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5. How do you see the future of nutrition in elite sports evolving in the coming years?

“I think the future is going to be about going even deeper into personalization. Personalization has been a buzzword for a few years, but now we’re finally getting the tools and resources to make it a reality—apps, more nutritional staff in clubs, and better integration with training data. Blood testing has already been a huge step, but I think gut testing will be the next frontier. We’re learning more about the gut-brain axis and how it influences performance, recovery, and even sleep. The challenge will be making data collection less invasive and more actionable. Another area is product innovation—highly concentrated carbohydrate shots, isotonic drinks, and recovery products that taste better are game changers because better taste means better adherence. On the research side, I think we’ll see more individualized guidelines for specific sports. FIFA’s nutritional guidelines are a good start, but we need follow-ups that are more sport-specific. It’s also encouraging to see more PhD students embedded in elite clubs, doing research directly on players. Over the next decade, I think we’ll see a convergence of better tech, better products, and better research, all making nutrition more personalized and practical for athletes.”

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6. If you could build any tech and had unlimited resources, what would you build and why?

“If I could build anything, I’d probably build two things—one realistic and one a bit more fun. The realistic one would be an all-in-one data resource for a club. Right now, nutrition, S&C, GPS, and psychology data often sit in silos. I’d love a system where all of that is integrated, creating an AI-driven model of each athlete. That way, you could draw on all the data holistically and even ‘test’ interventions virtually on a digital twin of the athlete before applying them in real life. That’s a really powerful way AI could help us make better decisions. The more fun idea would be a robot chef—an AI-powered assistant that cooks meals tailored to what an athlete needs on any given day based on their workload. But here’s the twist: for it to work, the robot would have to teach the athlete the recipe, so they actually learn how to make it themselves. I don’t want to just serve food to athletes—I want to support them and help them build understanding. The risk with technology is that it can make people passive, so it has to be designed in a way that empowers learning and independence.”

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