The next few editions of the newsletter will be dedicated to a hot-button topic: How to eat.
Why is it important?
Where to focus
A worked example
Race day recommendations
If there is an area that is subject to debate it is nutrition. There are countless ways to approach eating for performance.
High carb
Low carb
Fasting
100 grams of sugar per hour
etc, etc…
If you look hard enough, you will find someone successful with nearly every approach.
What you can’t deny is the important role that diet plays for an athlete. This series aims to highlight that importance and make it a simple way to enhance your training and racing results.
Fuel the training—What is the purpose
The food that an athlete eats is the fuel that is used during the many hours of training. Low-quality fuel leads to low-quality training and low-quality training will impair progress.
Athletes are often unconsciously taking in too little and there is some wiggle room with how clean the diet needs to be. Sometimes, you just gotta eat!
For triathletes, nutrition is the 4th discipline.
The key to rolling through many consistent weeks in a row is to avoid energy depletion.
For a training session lasting one hour or less, it is usually not necessary to take any nutrition supplementation during the session. Eating a snack or meal before and replenishing afterward is plenty.
In sessions that range from 90-120 minutes, a drink or snack containing 30-60 grams of carbohydrate might be warranted. Part II of this series will touch on when supplementation is worth considering.
60 grams of carbohydrate per hour is a value that has long been reported in the literature and can be applied to longer training sessions as well. Athletes competing in Half or Full distance Ironman events will regularly have 3+ hour sessions on the training menu. Some athletes do well with supplementing at 70, 80, 90, or even 100 grams per hour. The higher end of the carbohydrate intake range is usually reserved for a long and intense session or even a race.
Where to focus—breaking it down by sport
Swim nutrition
It is difficult to take in solid food during a swim session, thus a liquid form of calories is typically recommended. Most athletes will be able to get by having no calories during a swim, making sure to monitor intake before and after. If there is a run session or bike session soon to follow the swim, having liquid calories in the form of juice or sports drink products is a sound strategy to maintain energy levels throughout the training day.
Bike nutrition
The bike is the one discipline where eating is made easy. There is not much upper body movement like in swimming or up and down movement like in running, so intake can be quite high. There is also easy storage of food either in bottles on the bike or in jersey pockets.
A skill worth mastering on the bike is training the gut to handle a steady intake of carbohydrates. Many products are intended to be fast digesting, but if an athlete is unfamiliar with slamming 60-100 grams of carbohydrate in an hour for a few hours, it can result in cramping or vomiting once reaching the run portion. This is due to the body not being trained to have sufficient uptake capacity.
It is worth mentioning that an athlete competing in sprint distance or Olympic distance races may not need to be too concerned with training the gut. It takes about 2 hours for the body to completely exhaust carbohydrate stores, thus minimal supplementation if any is needed for races lasting 1-3 hours. The real eating contest begins in longer distance racing.
Run nutrition
If the athlete has worked consciously on training the gut, the nutrition intake on the run becomes less of an issue. Due to the up and down movement in running, liquid calories are often recommended to avoid any stomach “sloshing” that may come with solid food. Avoiding gastrointestinal distress is crucial both in daily training and in a race.
Stay tuned for Part II, where you will get to find out more about how to use sports nutrition products and see a worked example of how to make a day of eating more simple.