My nutrition journey started the summer before my junior year of high school. I had just made the decision to focus on baseball so I could play it in college. That in itself was hard to imagine at the time since I was a 5’10 145 lbs “skinny fat” kid. I started eating everything in sight desperately trying to put on weight (I can still remember forcing down chicken breast and pasta with hot sauce at 9 pm) as well as lifting 5 times a week.

By the time my junior year ended, I was 2 inches taller and about 30 lbs bigger. I still had about 10 more lbs to gain to be able to throw harder but my diet and training strategy had worked. At this point, I had gotten a couple of offers to play baseball in college and I was pretty excited about that. I committed to Calvin University over the winter during my senior year and I ended up becoming a starting pitcher for the team my freshman year (although my ERA was not pretty). Everything was going well for me… until it wasn’t. 

My main goal in my sophomore season was to prove that I belonged in the rotation and could be a reliable go-to pitcher. That got sidetracked as I had elbow tendonitis over the winter and then a groin strain about a week before the season started. I struggled to get on the field and once I got there, my confidence was shaken and I really struggled to throw strikes. The eat-everything-in-sight strategy I used to get recruited and start at the collegiate level was clearly no longer helping my body recover nor was it preventing the tightening of my muscles over time. 

I experimented with different diets (Paleo, Carnivore, Keto, and even Vegan). Most of these diets are tailored to adults who want to lose weight in order to improve their overall health, so I struggled to keep on weight over this time period. From this experimentation, I realized that there are parts from each of these types of “diets” that can be beneficial to certain athletes (like power athletes vs. endurance athletes) and more specifically… baseball players. Through a lot of research as well as mixing and matching aspects of the diets, I found what worked for me. So maybe, just maybe, it will work for you.

Right now I am training to have the opportunity to continue playing the sport I’ve dedicated so much of my time to and I am making sure to maximize everything in my control in order to reach my athletic potential… especially nutrition!

                                  -Alex Owen