§ 01 · Health · Vivacity
Most athletes are pursuing performance on top of poor health. We start the other way around. Health is fertility, sleep, sun on skin, food made of food. The work here is quiet — clearing the body so the rest of the work can land.
Start here →What health actually means
Health is not the absence of injury. It's vivacity — the feeling of being fully alive inside your body. It's waking up without an alarm and feeling ready. It's moving through a day without the mid-afternoon collapse. It's a body that can do what you ask of it without negotiation.
Most athletes think they eat fairly healthy. Chicken breast, protein shakes, the occasional pizza. But conventional sports nutrition shares more DNA with the processed food industry than with what a body actually needs. The optimization is for macros and convenience, not for cellular health.
The first thing Nico did when he started working with professional teams was teach them about health. He ran tests. Most made some changes. A few took it seriously — and those few got results that surprised their coaches, their teammates, and themselves.
Health knowledge has become so rare and confusing that people think they're doing okay. They're not. They're just not sick enough yet to notice. The gap between "fine" and thriving is where most athletes live permanently. The work is to close that gap before performance demands make it obvious.
Three principles
01
Before adding load, before increasing intensity, before optimizing anything else. The body will tell you what it needs when it's not suppressed by what it doesn't. Most people skip this step entirely because it doesn't feel productive. It is the most productive thing.
02
Not from a bag, not processed into something easier to eat. Organic when possible. Seafood, beef, vegetables, fruit. What your ancestors ate is a better baseline than what sports science recommends. This isn't complicated. It's just unfashionable.
03
The basics that most athletes skip because they're not complicated enough to feel productive. These are the highest-leverage inputs in the system. Fix these before adding a supplement. Fix these before changing your training. Fix these first.
From the health writing
The other two rooms