From Unaware to Expert: Applying the Conscious Competence Model to Nutrition
In training, an off season can be helpful to avoid burn out, usually doing some things differently, adding more variety to your training, whatever you feel is necessary to recharge your battery and refuel the fire for your next comp.
With nutrition, it’s very common to go from super strict tracking to not tracking anything at all for a long time and struggling to get back on track.
Intuitive eating is one of the most famous trends in nutrition over the last couple of years, I’m sure you’ve come across some very aesthetic Tik Toks of a gym girlie/gym bro showing a full day of eating without tracking calories. Most of these videos show that it is possible to have an amazing physique or performance without tracking every single gram of food (tbh most of them only eat that way when they’re recording) and it might be tempting to ditch your food scale and nutrition coach to just focus on consuming what your body vibes to BUT it is a skill that needs to be developed
The Four Stages of Competence model is a simple way of explaining how our brain develops a skill and we can use this information to improve our nutrition skill so we can have an “off season” from nutrition without going on a perma bulk.
Unconscious incompetence: The stage you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t think there’s a need to make any changes
How would you expect your brain to make sound nutrition choices that align with your goals if you’re not conscious of the basics like portion sizes, macronutrient breakdown that make you feel good, foods that make you feel bloated, etc.
Everything might feel like it’s okay but are you truly doing what’s getting you closer to your goals?
Conscious incompetence: The stage where you start to feel frustrated seeing that change needs to be made but you don’t know where to start or you’re overwhelmed by all the work that needs to be done
Getting a little too far from your weight class during the off season that you start dreading the cut you’ll have to go through and you eat like everyday is your last pushing your bodyweight even higher.
Conscious competence: you have the knowledge and skills but there’s still a lot of brain power dedicated to performing
Tracking everything to see where you’re at is a perfect example of this, you have the skill and the knowledge but you still have to think about it.
Unconscious competence: a high level of competence where you can just perform the skill without thinking
This is the point where intuitive eating comes in handy, you know so much about yourself, your body and how your nutritional choices impact your performance and goals that you don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about what you’ll eat next or panicking when you go off track.
Using your time with your nutrition coach to ask questions and learn even more about your body and how it responds is one of the most important things you can do to have a more holistic approach to nutrition and go from the conscious competence stage to the unconscious competence.
My recommendation to have an effective offseason using a more intuitive approach is:
When you’re tracking everything, focus on building consistent eating habits and try to build a meal plan that you enjoy and is easy for you to follow.
As you transition to a more intuitive approach, keep the base of your eating habits and “meal plan” the same but try to change food sources, play around with recipes that you enjoy and are close to what you’ve been consuming previously.
After some time of not tracking or just tracking very loosely, take a few days to track and see where you’re standing, if you feel like there’s something that could be improved or something you’d like to change and apply those changes.
