Christopher Curtis has joined the Department of Sport Science at Reykjavík University. Chris has previously worked in the department as a visiting lecturer but has now moved across the sea from his hometown of London and settled in Iceland.

Chris has worked both in academia and within the sports world for the last 15 years, specialising in sports nutrition. Having played sports when he was young, mainly team sports, and realising, he says quite cheerfully, that he would never make it as a professional, he developed his interest in supporting athletes.

I took more of an interest in the knowledge of how somebody runs faster, or how they get stronger or achieve a particular marathon time and the training behind it.

He then went on to pursue more understanding and knowledge of nutrition science in his studies.

For me, it´s about learning what the individual needs and wants. You must balance that particularly well in terms of what their training routine and competition look like. A footballer, for example, is very different to an endurance cyclist, who is very different from someone who plays golf, and so on. They all have different requirements and different demands. It is very important to have as much understanding as you can about those demands to be able to guide the nutrition practices of that individual and be able to enhance their performance, their recovery, or whatever goal they might want to achieve.

Chris has worked in academia for about a decade, teaching both in the UK and abroad, and as a nutritionist for about 15 years, working with Premier League football clubs, weight-cut athletes (professional boxers) and strength/power athletes (Powerlifting), to name a few. He considers himself very lucky to be able to have had a foot in both camps.

I have been able to kind of bridge the two, which for me is very fascinating because one enhances the other and helps guide each other. As a practitioner, you must be aware of the latest research, but working in academia, you are aware of that research perhaps more quickly than you would be as a practitioner. My different roles bridge the gap very nicely between the two fields.

Chris says that both among athletes and in general, the knowledge and understanding of nutrition and sports science have massively improved in the last 20 years.

People have become a lot more aware of the role nutrition can play. A simple philosophy I think about, whether it is related to sports or general day-to-day living, is that you need nutrition from the moment you are born to the day you die, and so it just varies how that nutrition looks at various time points in your life. It is about understanding how that nutrition might change, and certainly, people are becoming more aware of that in terms of the benefits to their health and their performance, whether that be a professional athlete or somebody who wants to get more physically active.

Finally, Chris says he is looking forward to starting to teach, finding himself at a point in his career where he really enjoys seeing the younger generations of practitioners developing their knowledge and skillset.

To be able to be a part of that and help shape some of their understanding of these areas is very interesting, and I find it personally a very big, exciting thing in my career. I really enjoy lecturing and helping people develop an understanding of certain concepts related to sports science and nutrition.

Studies:

• PhD Sport & Exercise Science, Leeds Trinity University, UK
• MSc Sport & Exercise Science, Sheffield Hallam University
• Postgraduate Diploma in Sports Nutrition, International Olympic Committee
• BSc (Hons) Food & Human Nutrition, Newcastle University

Research Interests:

 • Physiological responses in exercising populations and high-performance athletes

• Nutritional considerations to optimise performance in exercising populations and high-performance athletes

• Anthropometry and body composition testing methods in high-performance athletes