Nutrition is of huge importance. You are what you eat, and you train and race what you are. The decisions that we make about what to eat and, as you'll read below, when to eat it, are pivotal to our immediate performance (e.g., hitting targets in a workout or race), long-term performance (e.g., getting to an ideal body weight and composition, recovering from and adapting to hard training), and overall general health (e.g., feeling good everyday, and setting ourselves up for long and high-quality lives). With so much going on here, I am going to make an initial cut to make this all a little bit easier to digest (no pun intended) by breaking this discussion of nutrition for athletes down into 2 parts:
1) Fueling: What we eat right before, during, and right after a workout
2) Nutrition: What we eat the rest of the day
1) Fueling
First I will introduce the concept of a "workout window," which is the period of time encompassing the 30 minutes before a workout, the total time of the workout, and the 30 minutes after a workout. The baseline understanding everyone needs is this: muscles run off of carbohydrates, and can store enough energy to get through between 70 and 90 minutes (depending on the individual) of training. So, if you have a longer workout, you have to refuel yourself as the training session goes on. If you are under that 90-70 minute mark, you may not need to fuel during your workout, but should still focus on the "right before" and "right after" portions of this post. Even if your workout is short and you don't need to take in calories, you should be drinking water for hydration during any workout, about 24-32oz/hour (if you want a more exact number, Google "sweat rates for athletes" and perform a sweat test.
- 30 minutes before a workout: 2 things are most important about this. The first is that whatever you eat, your gut needs to be able to tolerate it easily and digest it fast. No one wants to enter a workout feeling bloated, with a stomach ache, or nervous about having to poop. The second thing is this meal should be dominated by simple carbs. Like I said above, your body runs off of carbs, so proteins and fats in this time period are pointless. And, within carbs, the importance of simple carbs is huge. Complex carbs (e.g., brown rice, brown anything) take longer for the body to breakdown whereas simple carbs (e.g., most white things, sugars) are available for use by the body much quicker. In this instance, right before training, we want to top off our muscle stores (from the previous meal) with readily available carbs that we can use asap.
- During a workout: Same 2 things mentioned above (tolerable and simple carbs) apply, but with even more importance on both. To those ends, we have an array of sports drinks and sports solids (Gus, Powerbars, etc) -- giving us what we need in an easy way to digest -- to choose from. While there are many equations out there, a good general rule here is to aim for between 2 and 3 calories (again, dominated by simple carbohydrates) for every pound of lean adjusted body weight. So, for an athlete that ways 160 pounds and is 10% body fat: 160-16=144, 144*2/3 = between 288 and 432 calories per hour. Ideally, you want to aim for the upper end of this threshold, but meeting the first criteria; it has to be tolerable. Much like sport-specific training, this also takes practice (and a lot of experimentation to find out what works) but you have to train your gut to be able to digest while exercising. Since those caloric requirements can be kind of high, I almost always recommend using a mix of sports drinks and solids to hit the requirements. Since you generally want to chase solids with water, this requires having some sort of hydration plan that allows you to carry both sports-drinks and water. Lastly, you don't want to take down all your calories at once, but rather, break up your consumption over the course of an hour. Most athletes either eat/drink every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, depending upon preference for size of intake (the latter obviously mandates a greater intake per time you eat/drink). Finally, waiting for that 70-90 minute mark to "start" this process is *not* what this means. If you know you will be training longer, then start your in-workout fueling immediately. So, for a simple example, in a 100 minute workout, I will start fueling 15 minutes in, and by the end of those 100 minutes, have probably consumed around 600 calories.
- 30 minutes after a workout: Your muscles are starving for fuel (even if you did everything above right, you can only replace about half of what you burn) and this is the time to give it to them. So many athletes don't eat after workouts, and it makes no sense. Refuel in this period with a mix of simple carbs (again, muscles are hungry, don't make them wait, keep it simple) and proteins. The ideal combo is 4 grams of carbs for 1 gram of protein. This is why Chocolate milk gets so much hype, as it is nature's (with some tweaking by man) perfectly formulated recovery drink (4:1 ratio, mostly simple carbs thanks to the added sugars). If you have the $$ to spend, the specialized recovery products may be even better, because they don't include anything that you can't use right away, and thus focus on maximizing the value of every calorie to fulfill what your body needs following a workout. 300-500 calories for this snack is ideal, followed by a proper meal a few hours later. I don't want to go into too much detail, but force yourself to take in this snack immediately after a workout. It is so important for realizing the gains from the workout and recovering so you can be ready for the next one. This completes the "fueling" portion. Onto general nutrition.
2) General Nutrition
If you train regularly, you will notice that the act of "fueling" really requires you to take in a lot of simple carbohydrates. Here is where things get interesting: Simple carbs are really only good for one thing, fast energy. Otherwise, they really are not good for you at all. So, with that simple principle in mind, throughout the rest of the day, an athlete wants to focus on proteins, "good fats" (e.g., unsaturated, olive oil, fatty fishes, etc) and complex (brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole grain stuff) carbs that take a long time to breakdown and thus provide the body with sustained energy to get one through the non-training parts of the day. The exception to this rule is fruits, which are often high in sugars, but their benefit in anti-oxidants and other critical nutrients by far outweighs the "sugar" hit.
I am not going to touch on this in much more detail, since I am in no position to make caloric recommendations and don't want to dish out general daily nutrition advice since this is very personal. What I will do is leave you with a simple overview for general nutrition:
Get your simple carbs and splurge on your sugary cereals, granola bars, pop-tarts; just make sure that you time this splurge correctly and in the fueling "workout window." Once this window closes, stay away from simple carbs (outside of fruits) and the focus should shift to the other macro-nutrients (proteins, good fats) and complex carbs for sustained energy.
So, when you evaluate your overall nutrition as an athlete, think in terms of fueling and general nutrition. Go over what you currently do, and determine the things that need to change. Be patient, and remember, much like training the rest of the body, the gut needs training too. Start slow, and experiment with fueling techniques to see what works best for you. In terms of general nutrition, it may seem hard to stay away from simple carbohydrates, but once you get in the habit of doing this, it actually becomes quite easy, even in our modern day fast-food era.
I also want to stress that this is a broad overview and there is just too much on this topic to cover in any one blog post. Feel free to contact me for further questions, etc.
