The Titans swapped Steeden's for spatulas on Wednesday night with several squad members undergoing a cooking class to help enhance their on-field performance.
Learning to finesse an important life skill, nine Gold Coast players including young guns Jayden Campbell, Jojo Fifita and Keano Kini attended Griffith University to brush up on their prowess in the kitchen and support the countless hours of training they undertake as professional athletes.
Titans head of performance nutrition Dr Ben Desbrow said the short course which featured a number of simple and versatile recipes to help refuel is an important step in increasing performance.
"Food is critically important and the whole idea here is that we have a food-first policy," he said.
"Before we start looking at supplements or before any sort of functional foods, we start with basic foods. We want to get the nutrition right with good, healthy whole foods as the basis for a good training diet, and then things can go up from there.
"What we're dealing with is boys who will stay with us for years.
"These guys are often having five or six meals a day, including snacks; so if you multiply that by 365, that's a lot of eating occasions and we want most of those eating occasions to be positive and health promoting occasions that really get the best adaptation from the training that they're doing.
"If you can cook that yourself - which is what we're teaching - you're well and truly on the way to elite performance."
With food being a passion and priority for the Titans high performance team, Dr Desbrow is eager to continue increasing the nutrition literacy of the playing group with courses such as what he hosted on Wednesday.
"Some people have a natural affinity for food and some people run away from it," he said.
"My job as the head of performance nutrition is to meet everyone at where they're at and try and take them along that journey a little bit further.
"Everyone will benefit from having a healthy diet. For some people, that will occur automatically for them. They come to us with great food literacy, they understand food and they know how to cook, others are at the commencement of that journey.
"It's really up to us to meet them and then take them further down that path, and I really enjoy it.
"We've got a passion for food within our performance department and it's not just me.
"We have our strength and conditioning team, rehab and physios all pro-food, so it's a really positive environment to work in."
