Water Over Stone
“Water over stone” is a phrase I come back to constantly–as a parent and as a coach. My own kids, and the athletes I work with, often need to hear the same things hundreds of times before they land. Especially the boring ones: eating enough, sleeping enough, drinking enough.
With my kids, the gap usually shows up as hanger–irritability between siblings, restlessness, aimlessness. With athletes, it looks different. It shows up as flatness before the work even starts.
I see it most clearly in warm-ups. A build set that’s normally automatic suddenly comes out 3–5% slower. Perceived effort feels high, but the outcome doesn’t match. And before anything hard has happened, the athlete starts projecting forward–If this feels bad now, today’s going to be rough. The conclusion arrives early: I’m flat.
Last week, one of my athletes came up to me ten minutes into practice, still in the warm-up, and said, “Coach, I just don’t think I have it today. Should I just take the afternoon off?”
So I asked the same questions I always ask. Did you eat after your morning workout? When? What did you have for lunch? When? What did you eat before this session?
His answers mapped cleanly onto how he felt in the water. We’ve had this conversation a hundred times. Water over stone.
That exchange captures something I see constantly: most performance problems don’t feel nutritional. They feel like conditioning issues, motivation problems, or something hydration should fix. Carbohydrates rarely enter the conversation because they aren’t exciting. They don’t promise upside. They don’t feel like a lever. They’re assumed to be optional. That assumption is where things quietly go wrong.
The Questions I Actually Get Asked
Parents and athletes rarely ask, “Do carbs matter?” The questions sound more like: Are electrolytes enough? Should we add this supplement? Is my kid overtraining? They just seem tired and flat all the time.
Those questions aren’t naïve. They come from patterns parents see at home. Their kid is dragging. They’re irritable after practice. Homework feels harder. Recovery between sessions looks worse. The logical conclusion is that the training load is too high.
Sometimes that’s true. (Quick coaching aside: the other major issue I see is sleep–phones in bed quietly stealing recovery.)
But more often than expected, once I start asking what the athlete actually ate and when, the picture shifts. The workload didn’t change. The fuel underneath it did–or never showed up in the first place.
Why Carbs Are the Boring Answer
Carbohydrates aren’t a strategy. They’re a constraint.
As intensity rises, ATP demand rises, and the body meets that demand primarily through glycolysis, which depends on glucose. Fat oxidation is too slow. Protein is protected and inefficient. When carbohydrate availability drops, the system doesn’t break–it downshifts. Automatically.
On deck or on the field, that downshift isn’t dramatic. Athletes aren’t falling apart. They’re just slightly off. Timing is late. Execution is less crisp. They can finish the work, but they can’t repeat quality. Over the course of a practice or a game, that half-step compounds into what looks like a bad day–when it’s really a bad fuel day.
“We’re Hydrating Well–Isn’t That Enough?”
This is the first assumption I hear, and it makes sense. Hydration is visible and well-reinforced - especially where I coach. In Texas, heat and humidity make dehydration obvious. Cramping is loud. Athletes recognize it immediately.
Flatness isn’t obvious. And hydration doesn’t fix it.
Hydration and electrolytes support plasma volume, nerve conduction, and temperature regulation. What they don’t do is provide substrate. You can be fully hydrated and still see early skill degradation, reduced repeatability, and slower decision-making. Hydration keeps the system running. Carbohydrates determine how much output it can sustain.
“Is My Kid Overtraining?”
This is the most important question to get right, because the fix depends on the answer. If the problem is truly too much training, rest helps. But if the problem is underfueling, rest doesn’t solve it. The athlete takes a day off, eats the same way, and the same flatness shows up a session or two later.
It’s hard to become a monster at your craft without the compound interest of consistent work.
What I look for is whether fatigue tracks with workload or with fueling gaps. Overtrained athletes break down progressively over weeks. Underfueled athletes look great one day and flat the next. The inconsistency is the tell.
When a parent says, “Some days they look amazing and other days they look like a different kid,” my first question is almost always about food.
Why Supplements Don’t Solve This Either
Supplements modify signals. They don’t replace fuel.
Caffeine can mask fatigue. Creatine can help with short bursts. Neither increases glucose availability or restores glycogen mid-session. I’ve watched athletes crush pre-workouts and still fade at the same predictable point in practice. The feeling changed. The limitation didn’t.
Glycogen Is the Quiet Limiter
As muscle glycogen drops, calcium handling becomes less efficient, force per contraction declines, and motor patterns lose consistency. These changes happen before maximal strength drops and before heart rate peaks. That’s why athletes often say, “I feel okay, but nothing’s clicking.”
They’re right. The system is working–just within tighter limits than they realize.
As blood glucose declines, the central nervous system feels it too. Reaction time slows. Error correction lags. Working memory narrows. On the field, this shows up as hesitation, missed cues, and poor spacing–not because confidence vanished, but because processing capacity shrank.
I wrote more about this in my piece on athlete burnout, where underfueled athletes begin comparing themselves unfavorably to peers. Physiology and psychology reinforce each other.
Timing Isn’t Optimization–It’s Maintenance
Fueling before, during, and after activity isn’t about maximizing performance. It’s about preventing predictable degradation. Before activity, glycogen sets the ceiling. During activity, glucose preserves execution. After activity, carbohydrates restore capacity for the next session.
This is maintenance physiology. No different than sleep or warm-ups.
When I keep asking my athletes the same fueling questions–water over stone–I’m not micromanaging their diet. I’m helping them see why what they ate at noon explains how they feel at four. Once named, the connection is obvious. But because carbs are boring, nobody names it.
The Unsexy Conclusion
Carbs aren’t a hack. They’re infrastructure.
You don’t debate oxygen. You don’t debate sleep. You don’t debate shoes.
Carbohydrates belong in the same category. Boring. Required. Non-negotiable.
From years of watching the same patterns play out, I can tell you this: the athletes who finally internalize that fueling is as fundamental as showing up are the ones who stop having mystery bad days.
Water over stone. Eventually, it gets through.
If this reframed something for you–or if you’ve seen this pattern with an athlete you coach or parent–I’d like to hear about it. Share it with a coach who needs to see it, or send me a message.
