How Nathan Payton Feeds the Strongest Men on Earth

At this year's Arnold Classic, Nathan Payton had four strongman athletes on the competition floor. They finished second, third, fourth, and seventh. Austin Andrade, largely overlooked in the pre-show predictions, came in second. Trey Mitchell put up five reps with the Austrian Oak log. Martine Lee returned from what Nathan described as some of the most severe injuries he'd seen in this sport and hit the podium in his first contest back.

None of that happened by accident.

Nathan Payton has been the nutrition architect behind some of the biggest names in professional strongman: Brian Shaw, Tom Stoltman, Martine Lee, Austin Andrade, Evan Singleton, and others. He sat down on Table Talk to walk through exactly how he feeds these athletes on competition day and what he's learned from years of standing backstage with a glucometer while 400-pound men carry stones across a stage.

The answers were not what most people expected.

Pull up any behind-the-scenes footage from a major strongman event and you'll probably see the athletes eating Rice Krispie treats. Brian Shaw was known for it. People assumed it was just a snack. They were wrong.

Nathan started using them over 20 years ago, tracing the approach back to Travis Ortmire, who trained in a literal storage unit in Texas on blacktop that hit 110 degrees in summer. The environment forced a question: how do you keep a large, powerful athlete fueled and hydrated through an all-day competition without digestive interference, bloating, or constant bathroom trips?

The answer was in the physics of the cereal itself. Put Rice Krispies in a bowl, and you have about 36 seconds before they turn into a soggy mess. That expansion is exactly the point. A dry, starch-based carbohydrate acts like a magnet for fluid. For every gram of carbohydrate ingested, the body holds roughly four grams of fluid alongside it. The Rice Krispie treat is small enough to take up minimal stomach volume, simple enough to digest quickly, and dry enough to pull in and hold circulating fluids rather than add to them.

The contrast is the popular sports drink approach: load an athlete with a large volume of liquid combined with carbohydrates and electrolytes simultaneously. The body reads that as overflow and dumps it. You end up with sloshing in the stomach, frequent urination, and electrolytes that never make it into the muscle cells. Nathan has one word for it: inefficient.

Nathan doesn't guess backstage. He monitors.

Every athlete gets their blood glucose checked before competition begins. Fasted, then again after breakfast, before any activity. On a two-day event like the Arnold, that baseline means everything. A fasted reading of 95 to 105 across all athletes tells him the prep has been consistent and their response will be predictable.

When an athlete shows up on day two with a baseline that has climbed to 115 or 120, the number isn't just a data point. It tells Nathan how much cortisol is still elevated from the prior day's work. The higher the reading, the more beat-up that system is. From there, he adjusts.

Cortisol is the variable most people don't account for. After a maximal effort event, most athletes assume their blood sugar will be low. The instinct is to push food and recovery nutrition immediately. Nathan doesn't do that. After Martine Lee finished one of the most grueling events of the day and needed help walking off the floor, the medical team assumed his glucose would be tanked. Nathan already knew it wouldn't be. He checked right there in front of the doctor.

Nathan says this constantly. On Table Talk, he backed it up with specifics.

Nathan doesn't lead with food when he takes on a new athlete. He leads with their day.

He asks when they wake up, when they go to bed, what their spouse's schedule looks like, whether they have kids, what their job demands, when they train and for how long. A diet that doesn't fit your life doesn't work. Not because the diet is flawed, but because consistency is the variable that drives results. You can't be consistent with something that requires you to fight your own schedule every day to execute it.

The athletes who get the most out of this approach are the ones whose baseline diet is already disciplined. When the body is conditioned to run on clean, strategic nutrition and insulin sensitivity has been trained high, a Rice Krispie treat mid-competition creates a noticeable effect. Nick Gardion described it after two weeks on Nathan's program: one treat, and he couldn't sit still. Not because it's a stimulant. Because his body had become efficient enough at processing carbohydrates that a simple sugar hit translated directly into usable energy.

Every diet, regardless of the label name, works because of how it influences insulin. Keto and carnivore suppress the body's insulin response by removing carbohydrates. High-carb approaches leverage insulin's role in driving nutrients into muscle cells. The downstream mechanism is always the same.

The danger he's watched unfold, both in strongman and from his work with NFL athletes, is athletes who chronically overhydrate with high-volume electrolyte drinks. You're not hydrating more efficiently. You're diluting. The body detects excess fluid and dumps it. Electrolytes go with it. The muscles are left less capable of the contractions being asked of them.

You're probably not competing at the Arnold. But the principles apply whether you're a competitive powerlifter stepping onto a platform or a serious lifter trying not to fall apart during a long training session.

The full conversation with Nathan Payton is Table Talk Episode 404. If you're serious about how nutrition intersects with performance at the highest level, it's worth two hours of your time.