About Me

The aim of Energy Gel Central is fairly simple: to disseminate in-depth and unbiased information on a very specific area of sports nutrition: energy gels. Why? For one, it’s what I know and what I know well after being entrenched in the gel industry for almost a decade. Second, and more importantly, what I’ve witnessed over the years is the fact that sport nutrition companies are the ones feeding most of the current nutrition and performance information to endurance athletes. This can be a problem. So much of the material out there is full of marketing hype and heavily biased—it’s extremely difficult these days for athletes to wade through the bombardment of nutrition products to make intelligent (and cost effective) decisions.

There are plenty of self-professed experts online these days, and although I don’t claim to be one I hope that my background and experience at least makes me somewhat credible for posting the information on this site. In short, my educational background is in exercise physiology (M.S) and biology (B.A). Professionally, I worked for a small sport nutrition start-up company as the director of the research and development arm for eight years. My expertise lies in developing sport nutrition products with gel based applications, drink mix applications and other products with unique vehicles of delivery (gummies, etc). My athletic background is mainly in running and soccer (competed in both at the NCAA Div I level at Brown University), but sports in general have always been a love of mine. Being a competitive athlete has been integral in many different facets of what I do professionally, particularly in the area of designing energy gels.

Thanks for taking the time to visit Energy Gel Central.

Holly Ortlund