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Sigma Nutrition Radio

#608: Performance Nutrition in Elite Rugby – James Morehen, PhD

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Health & Fitness, Nutrition

4.8 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Performance nutrition in elite sport is often discussed in terms of meal plans, supplements, and macronutrient targets. However, effective practice in professional environments depends just as much on education, trust, communication, and the ability to translate scientific principles into decisions athletes can act on under real-world constraints.

In this episode, Dr James Morehen discusses his work across elite rugby, football, and combat sports, with particular attention to the demands of professional rugby. The conversation explores how practitioners support athletes in a high-impact collision sport, including fuelling for training and match play, managing body composition without reducing athletes to arbitrary numbers, addressing recovery from muscle damage and injury, and developing practical systems around game-day nutrition.

The episode also provides insight into the realities of building a career in performance nutrition, including the importance of applied experience, interdisciplinary collaboration, and learning how to coach athletes rather than simply prescribe to them.

Timestamps:
  • [03:31] Interview starts
  • [10:26] Educating athletes on nutrition
  • [13:55] Breaking into elite sport
  • [26:26] Physiological demands of rugby
  • [30:53] Energy needs and timing
  • [38:28] Body composition measurements: utility?
  • [46:16] Game day fuelling strategy
  • [01:07:09] Key ideas (premium-only)

Links:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 608 of the podcast. My name is

0:06.8

Danny Lennon. You're very welcome to the podcast. Today we're going to be talking about sports

0:11.2

nutrition and more specifically some of the aspects that relate to being a performance

0:16.0

nutritionist in elite professional sport and in this case most specifically in professional rugby.

0:22.8

I'm going to be talking with Dr. James Morahan, who is a performance nutritionist that currently

0:27.8

works in a variety of roles. Some of them specifically in elite professional rugby.

0:33.5

He is currently the head nutritionist for England rugby, the men's senior team.

0:37.2

He also works with Bristol Bears across, the men's senior team. He also works

0:38.4

with Bristol Bears across their senior men's, women's and academy squads. And he also works with

0:44.8

a range of other elite level athletes, most notably some professional boxers in the UK. He also has

0:51.4

experience in other areas that we will discuss as we get into this. But in

0:55.5

addition to that, he has a PhD from Liverpool John Moore's University and has published in this

1:01.3

area of applied sports nutrition. And so has done a lot of work not only conducting these studies,

1:06.7

but specifically in high level athletes and teams, and we'll get into that today.

1:13.1

So we'll be discussing some of the interesting aspects related to the physiological demands

1:18.3

of a sport like rugby, how to fuel that, particularly when we're talking about a professional

1:23.9

level and certainly at the elite levels like international rugby that we'll discuss.

1:28.8

And then also some of the considerations for many of you who are sports nutritionists,

1:34.0

performance nutritionists, or are aspiring to be in that field of what it might look like

1:39.0

in terms of a career pathway to get into roles within elite level sport, what that looks like, some of the

1:45.6

challenges with that and some of the things that through Dr. Morhan's experience, you can maybe

1:51.6

take some useful instruction from. So we're going to be getting into all of that in this episode.

...

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