The RL diet: Oliver Gildart on what his pre-season bulking regime is like
Photo courtesy of Richard Long
The rugby league diet is our new feature where we give you an insight into the eating habits of your favourite professional players, in partnership with Heaven ‘N’ Health.
Great Britain and Wigan centre Oliver Gildart is our third guest…
Describe your diet for us…
“We are pretty lucky in the season. We have a chef at Wigan and he keeps on top of what we need to eat. We come in to training and we have plenty of eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and omelettes. Porridge is there for lads who want that and protein shakes as well. We tend to have a lot of porridge and shakes in pre-season.
“I could never cook when I first moved out so I had to learn pretty quickly but I go to a few healthy eating places near where I live. I like cooking though, I’m trying to get in to it a bit more now and I keep it pretty healthy.”
Protein intake…
“For me, I try to put on weight in pre-season so I’ll be having three or four protein shakes throughout the day.
“The shakes I have when wanting to put weight on have around 1,000 calories in them. They are horrendous to drink and then you’ve got to try and eat as well so me and Sarg [Dan Sarginson] at Wigan are always on mass gain.”
4,000 calories a day in pre-season…
“I struggle eating when I have a lot of heavy shakes and it is tough to do but you need the calories in your system when you are training everyday in pre-season.
“I will stop once the season starts because I end up feeling heavy and sluggish. We have all the fish oil tablets and vitamins in our changing rooms as well so we get looked after very well at Wigan.”
Supplements…
“So within our protein shakes, we’ll have a scoop of creatine in there and that goes in with most things really to help us maintain high performances.
“We have a little room that’s a protein room so it’s all set out for us. We have a list on the board of what to have, so the lads who are trying to lose weight will have low calorie shakes and the ones who are trying to bulk up will have the higher calorie ones.”
The off-season…
“We just do what we want really in regards to our eating. We go on holiday and just chill out, I think that’s important because we train for five or six days a week for the rest of the year. You need to just chill out in the off-season and let your hair down a bit.”
