Unlock Your Inner Beast: Dive into England's Game-Changing Nutrition for Peak Performance!

England’s Six Nations campaign may have ended with more questions than answers but there is one area in which their standards did not slip. If you are a social media user, the chances are that at some point you will have stumbled across a behind-the-scenes clip from camp showing Steve Borthwick’s squad tucking in to a veritable feast, hearty and healthy fare on offer wherever they go across the campaign. It is no surprise that rugby players like their food but the broad and brilliant array forms a performance purpose, too.

For elite athletes, fuelling is of vital importance to maintain muscle and ensure full fitness in one’s chosen craft. In rugby, with its bone-on-bone collisions and intense activity under extreme stress, that is all the more important. “Some of these lads might be expending 4,000 to 6,000 calories on a given day,” explains England’s nutritionist Dr James Morehen, who has just concluded his third Six Nations with the side.

“They have to eat that, to make sure that they aren’t dropping weight or muscle. “Compared to the general joe, these are big lads from a skeletal muscle mass point of view. They are also turning over a lot of that mass, whether that is in camp in game.

They can train a lot in the gym but you are not going to put muscle mass on unless you are in a calorie surplus and you are supporting it right. The beauty of rugby is that we’ve got this insane amount of exercise-induced muscle damage, the same as in football, but where these boys are in a league of their own is you’ve got all these high impact collisions. We have to support them to recover.