How to nail your nutrition around your training
By Gabby Ward | 2IC Sports Dietitian of The Sports Dietitian Co
Your nutrition is a big player in how to get the most out of your training, but it can be confusing knowing how to eat around your workout to give you energy, but not make you feel sick! Then, refuel and recover well enough that you can stick to your regular training program!
A phrase I say a lot is “The harder you train, the harder you need to recover”. To break this down, we need to be able to push hard in the session, which is where the fuelling comes in. Training isn’t where you get better though – it is where you cause stress to the body. And then, recovery nutrition is a key player to ensure you adapt well to the stimulus, as well as be able to roll into your next session as well.
To keep it simple (as best as possible), we will focus on the hours surrounding your session and cover daily nutrition strategies in the future.
When looking at pre-training nutrition protocols, the time until your session needs to be considered. Ideally, if you have the time, we would have a meal 2-4 hours prior to your session, followed by another snack within the hour of training. When you nail your pre-training meal, it not only gives you fuel for the work you’re about to do, but it decreases the level of stress on the body, supports your immunity and allows you to push harder for longer.
Our body’s main, and most efficient source of energy is carbohydrates. Carbohydrates include bread, wraps, bagels, crackers, rice, pasta, noodles, beans, legumes, potato, sweet potato, corn, cereals and to an extent fruit and dairy (yoghurt, milk). >4 hours from training, we want higher fibre, minimally processed, wholegrain carbs to keep us feeling fuller for longer and slowly release that energy. Although, <4 hours of training we want to start choosing options slightly lower in fibre to ensure our bodies aren’t competing to send blood to digest our food and sent blood around the body to exercise.
The number of carbs would be relative to your daily requirements, and the duration and intensity of your workout. During exercise, both carbs and fats are used as fuel during exercise, but the type of exercise duration and intensity dictates which substrate you will be using more of. As the intensity increases, carbs are the main fuel source due to carbs being able to rapidly produce ATP (our energy), compared to fats which are a lot slower and therefore inefficient at higher intensities. Having appropriate fuelling maintains adequate carbohydrate substrate for the muscle and central nervous system. Training with high carb availability can upregulate your nutrient transporter function in the gut, to improve carb uptake and exogenous oxidation. It also appears to reduce bone resorption and possibly loss of bone mineral density over time.
We also want to include some protein which will moderate how fast the meal is broken down, keep you satisfied (so you don’t feel hungry during the session!) and falls into our recovery nutrition by eating protein regularly (more on this soon). Aim to choose cooking options such as grilled, baked, boiled, air fried, and roasting. Examples include chicken breast, fish, eye-fillet/lean steak, extra lean mince and sausages, turkey breast, tofu, tempeh, beans, legumes, eggs, protein powder, high protein yoghurt, low-fat dairy and low-fat milk.
Fats fit into the meal as these also help with satiation, but nutritionally have health benefits for supporting immunity, absorbing fat-soluble vitamins, and supporting hormone production and regulation. Fats sits into the bigger picture of health, rather than fuelling specifically for a training session – but benefit by meeting your daily requirements and ensuring you are healthy… and, the better your health, the better you will function and perform.
The rest of the meal can be your colourful plants like fruit, salad and veg. Antioxidant and fibre-rich plant foods and important for optimal performance. The closer to training, the smaller volume of these, again to ensure we aren’t feeling too full.
Starting exercise is also important, as ensuring we are hydrated, allows our body to better use our energy and cooling systems more efficiently during exercise, and if we consume food/fluid during our exercise, it is likely to be tolerated better. Even 2% dehydration can see decreased performance outcomes.
If we fall short on our pre-training fuel, in extreme cases you may end up breaking down your muscle mass to turn into carbs, to fuel the session, as after carbs – this is the most efficient way to create fuel (so no, fasted exercise doesn’t burn body fat, sorry!).
To ensure we are primed to perform, we can include a little ‘top-up’ from our pre-training snack. A good time frame for your pre-training snack is typically 30-60 mins before a session, and we are aiming for easily digestible carbs.
Easily digestible carbs means low in fibre and low in fat so that we get the energy from them fast and we don’t have any digestion issues. Immediately prior to training, we don’t want food hanging around in our stomachs needing to be digested for reasons listed in the pre-training meal.
The guide of 0.5-1g / kg bw is a good start, but when individualising recommendations, maybe relative to how close to training you are, what your requirements are for the day, and how comfortable your gut is to having carbs pre-training.
Protein can be included in some situations, but ideally, protein is within our meals/snacks >90-120 mins from training, and our carb-rich snacks are a top-up!
As for caffeine, it is a stimulant that reduces your body’s recognition of fatigue and allows your body to be more efficient when using carbs. But don’t just rely on caffeine pre-workout, as caffeine doesn’t give you energy. Food gives you energy. Food is fuel and a good analogy is you can’t drive a car without fuel.
Intra-training nutrition is easily digesting carbs which can be used to top up your fuel tank before it goes on empty. Intra-training really only needs to be considered for people exercising for 90 minutes, or over, at a moderate to high intensity. The types of food would be following the same principles explained in the pre-training nutrition section, although ensuring they are easily portable. Portability and convenient to eat, depending on your exercise, could be some dried fruit, sports drink, energy gels or lollies, compared to some toast or a bowl of cereal. If we are including intra-training, we look at implementing this per hour of training.
As you see in the diagram, the longer we expect to be exercising, the higher our carb requirement is per hour. Although, evidence suggests your body can’t effectively absorb any more than 60g/h of a single carb source e.g. glucose etc due to the transporter requires to absorb this. If requirements call for >60g carbs per hour, we would need to be recruiting various forms of carbs to utilise multiple transporters. i.e. combining glucose + fructose. This is due to fructose having a different transporter to glucose, therefore we could increase our intake to 90g/hour if we had 60g coming from glucose and 30g coming from fructose. One thing to note is this is generalised information, and individuals would need to determine and train their bodies to tolerate an appropriate dose.
After our training finishes, it is ideal to get a meal or snack in within 1-2 hours as our body is more efficient at absorbing that food to refuel in this time frame, BUT your whole “recovery” window maybe 24-48 hours, so this whole time period needs to be considered. For the portioning, you can refer to the portions outlined in the pre-training meal recommendations. How aggressive the recovery nutrition needs to be, depends on your goals and training schedule. The closer your next training session, the sooner we need to replenish your fuel stores.
A simple explanation follows – The 4 “R’s” to recovery:
- Refuel: carbohydrates to replenish our fuel stores such as bread, fruit, muesli, rice, pasta, etc.
- Repair: protein for muscle repair such as chicken, Greek yoghurt, tofu, eggs, protein powder, etc.
- Rehydrate: replacing fluids lost throughout the workout such as simply water, but if we need some extra electrolytes as we are salty sweaters it could include milk, sports drink or electrolytes.
- Revitalise: fats, vitamins and minerals to give us the micronutrients and a hit of anti-inflammatory properties through aiming for the rainbow from our plant-based veg, salad, nuts, seeds, avo, extra virgin olive oil and more.
As mentioned previously, recovery maybe 24-48 hours, so therefore these principles need to be continued across our week. Some useful principles would be within your Calorie (total energy from protein, carbs and fats) budget for the day, to eat every 2-5 hours following the plate model, to ensure our nutrition foundation comprises of high-quality food, and high fibre food away from the start our training session, to stay hydrated, and get adequate rest (sleep, training program, etc.).
Harnessing your nutrition around training will be your secret weapon to meeting your goals and staying healthy! As mentioned throughout, these are guidelines, and if you are interested in chatting about how these can be individualised to you please get in contact with our team to organise a one-on-one consult.
The Sports Dietitian Co Team.
