Push Your Possible.
Our motto at Gnarly Nutrition embodies being the best version of our selves. This looks different for every person. For you, those goals might include going to the Olympics (okay, maybe as a spectator) or maybe it’s breaking through a plateau on your morning runs. It could be finding that puzzle piece that probably fell under the couch last week. Big or small – this is what counts: set a goal and get after it.
We want to give you, our athletes, a product you can trust. So we went after NSF certification, a gold standard when it comes to consumer safety. Now, the majority of Gnarly products carry the NSF certification label. This quality assurance means that the ingredients listed on the label are exactly the contents you’ll find inside. There are no secrets and you know the exact ingredients and how much you’re ingesting.
As a partner with USA Climbing, USAC, and recognizing that some of our Gnarly athletes compete at an elite level, we wanted to give even more. USAC and many of our athletes perform at levels that have strict anti-doping rules in place. So we took our products to a higher level and got NSF Certified for Sport. NSF Certified for Sport products go through a rigorous testing process to ensure they’re free of over 270 banned substances. Products are also screened for stimulants, narcotics, steroids, diuretics and masking agents. Gnarly products that carry the NSF Certified for Sport label ensure those supplements are safe for athletes competing in sports that require anti-doping testing. NSF Certified for Sport products are tested on a lot-by-lot basis, meaning every batch we produce gets tested and our manufacturing facility is inspected several times each year.
Professional sports organizations like the NFL and MLB and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) consider NSF Certified for Sport as the only third-party certification program established that mitigates the risk of doping with supplements. USAC only recommends its climbers take supplements that carry the certification which ensures a doping test will come back with no unexpected results.
Marc Norman, the President of USAC, is familiar with the drug testing USAC athletes are subject to. But he also has a personal familiarity with anti-doping testing. Marc’s wife is a four-time Olympian speed skater. During her competitions, he’s been woken up at 2 a.m. to a phone call from USADA (U.S. Anti-Doping Agency) saying they’ll soon be over to collect her test sample. The familiarity with clean training for clean testing that Marc experienced with his wife, who avoided even cold medicine and over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, led him and team USA into only recommending athletes take supplements that carry the NSF Certified for Sport label.
“Knowing at all times what you’re taking, especially in the supplement field where it feels a little Wild West, that the product has been through rigorous scrutiny ensuring that it will not have a positive test result for the athlete is super important.”
The Wild-West environment Marc mentions is certainly true in the world of supplements. While the FDA definitely regulates the dietary supplement industry, the organization simply doesn’t have the ability to test every supplement on the market today.
“You spend your entire life training toward your goals—to have it derailed by mistakenly taking something or having something in a product that you didn’t know was there or wasn’t clearly delineated as being there—that’s a tough pill to swallow.”
That’s a pill that Team USA is avoiding. As one of only three countries to do so, USAC filled their country quota for the Tokyo Olympics, sending two males and two females, including Gnarly athletes Kyra Condie and Nathaniel Coleman. USAC holds nutrition and supplement training for all of its athletes and recommends taking only NSF Certified for Sport products. The risk of taking anything else could spell disqualification from competitions, and in the case for Kyra and Nathaniel, from the Olympics.
“It’s important especially as we get closer to the games,” Nathaniel said. “NSF (for sport) is one of the few organizations that can guarantee that you won’t test positive for all sorts of different substances.”
USAC’s partnership with Gnarly was established, in part, thanks to the products carrying the NSF Certified for Sport label. To Marc and athletes at USAC, the certification proves Gnarly’s dedication to providing clean fuel to athletes for clean testing results. Marc said without the label, the partnership wouldn’t be possible.
But NSF for Sport isn’t just reassurance for elite athletes. It’s transparency that Gnarly products are clean for every athlete. If you’re a weekend trail runner, the queen of post-workout protein smoothies, or a beginning climber getting comfortable on slab, the NSF for Sport certification ensures transparency in the products fueling your body to nail that weekend run. You deserve to be fueled with clean nutrition.
Clean training with clean fuel for clean testing results—another motto we can get behind here at Gnarly.
