Full transcript of the episode:
Hey everyone. And welcome back to another episode of The Fuelled Triathlete. I’m your host, Andrea. And today we are talking all about carbohydrates. So for the next three weeks, I’m going to be doing a three part series on macronutrients. Now the three macro nutrients in our diet are carbohydrate, proteins and fats.
So next week is going to be all about protein. Two weeks later all about fats, but today let’s focus on carbohydrates. I’m going to be breaking down. What exactly are carbohydrates? Why do we need them as endurance athletes, how much you should be getting in your diet, good sources of carbohydrates, and also when you should be eating them.
So we’ll talk about carbohydrate needs before, during and after training and also throughout the day.
Before we get into that, I did also want to talk about my new program, the fueled for endurance academy is now open. So if you are listening on to this, when this podcast comes out, It is February 22nd.
The enrollment for the program is closing on Saturday, February 24th at midnight. So what exactly is this? The fueled for endurance academy is a nine week program. And I put together everything that I teach my one-to-one clients into a group format. So we meet every week and you’re going to learn a new topic on endurance nutrition. That’s going to teach you how to fuel your body on a daily basis, fuel your training and fuel your race.
So you’re going to learn exactly how to put together a nutrition plan. That’s going to meet your needs and learn how to eat before, during and after training to really make sure you’re getting the most out of your training sessions and you’re recovering well. And also how to put together a race nutrition plan.
So if you are a runner or triathlete and you have a spring race coming up, this is going to be great for you. It’s going to teach you everything you need to know to really crush it on your race. If you want to finish feeling strong, maybe you have PR goals. This will help you do that. Nutrition is so important. And this is going to give you the step-by-step tools to help you do that. So you meet with me weekly, you’re part of a private Facebook community where you can connect with others in the group and get access to all of your trainings and resources and recipes. And if you have any more questions about it, or you just want to learn about it, you can go into the show notes of the podcast. So if you’re listening on apple or Spotify in the show notes, click on the link, learn more about the program and you can enroll. You can also send me a message on social media.
So let’s get back into the episode. Today is all about carbohydrates. So essentially what are carbohydrates? Carbohydrates are the primary energy source for our body.
So the simplest form of carbohydrates is going to be glucose. And this provides fuel to our brain and to our muscles. And like I said, it’s one of the three main macronutrients. There’s carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. And these are what give our body calories or give our body energy. Now carbohydrates have an important role during exercise. The higher, the intensity of your swim or your bike or your run then the more that our body is relying on carbohydrates as fuel and less on fats. During very low intensity exercise, your body may rely more on fats. But probably most of your training you’re using at least 50% or more of your fuel from carbohydrates. And I like to use this analogy of carbohydrates being like gas in your car. So we need gas in her car to drive.
And the more that we drive our car, if you’re someone who commutes a lot for work, or you go a lot of trips on the weekends, Driving out of the city, you’re going to need more gas. Just like us as endurance athletes, we train more, we move more probably than the average person .
So you’re going to need more carbohydrates.
So when I ask people, what foods have carbohydrates in them, what do you think?
A lot of the common answers that I get are bread and pasta, and yes, these are carbohydrates, but so many foods have carbohydrates in them. And we’ll talk and I’ll kind of give some examples of what are all our mean foods or categories of foods that have carbohydrates.
So there’s three main types of carbohydrates, sugar starch, and fiber. Any type of carbohydrate that we eat, our body is going to break down to sugar or glucose. And that’s what our brain and our muscles use as fuel. So a lot of times, you know, we hear things like, oh, don’t eat this. It’s going to break down into sugar. All carbohydrates are breaking down into sugar.
That’s the goal. That’s how our body uses that. So, like I said, there’s three main types of carbohydrates. We have sugar starch and fiber., sugar, again, simplest form. You might think of things like some sweets or our gels or a sports drinks or some candy fruit, even, maple syrup.
That’s sugar. And then we have starch. So starch is kind of basically sugar molecules attached together to kind of create a more complex molecule. But again, our body ends up digesting that into sugar. Starches can be things like breads, pastas potatoes.
And then we have fiber. Fiber is more of a complex molecule and our body can’t actually break down fiber into sugar. It doesn’t have the enzymes to be able to do that. So fiber just kind of passes right through our digestive tract until we go to the bathroom and let it out of our body. So even though we don’t get energy or we don’t get our sugar from it, it’s still a very important part of our diet. When you think of fiber, you may think of digestion. So it helps keep us regular, fiber can also help stabilize our blood sugar and lower our blood sugar.
It can also help to lower cholesterol. And it’s also plays a role in gut health. It feeds that those probiotics or those healthy bacteria in our gut. So again, we need all of these types of different types of carbohydrates in our diet at different times.
If you’ve heard me talk about how to reduce runner’s trots or talk about pre-workout nutrition, we probably don’t want to have fiber, right? It’s not giving us a fuel source and it’s kind of maybe could result in some GI issues, but at other times of the day, it’s really important to be getting fiber. So those are the kind of three main types.
What foods actually have carbohydrates in them. So one is fruits and vegetables. So fruits contain sugar. They also contain fiber. Vegetables are pretty low in carbohydrates that provide fuel and energy, but they contain a lot of fiber in them. Except for those starchy vegetables. Right? So potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and peas.
These provide starches . We also have beans like lentils, chickpeas, black beans, these contain carbohydrates. Yes, they also contain protein. Some foods are going to contain a mixture of different types of macronutrients. We also have our grains.
So we talked about bread, pasta we’ve got rice, quinoa, sorghum, millet. gRains can be in there kind of more whole form in terms of like rice or oatmeal. And then sometimes these grains can be used. To make a flower to be made, to use, to make other types of products.
Right? So pasta or bread or cereal or crackers. All these types of things are grains. And we have also whole grains and refined grains, which we’re going to talk a little bit more, but a whole grain just basically means that it keeps the whole part of the seed. So a grain contains an outer layer. Called the bran, which is where you’re going to have your fiber.
It contains the germ, which kind of has some healthy fats. And then it contains the middle section, which is called the endosperm, which has your starch in it. So a whole grain, when you think of whole grain, you may think of like whole grain or whole wheat, brown bread, brown rice, whole wheat, pasta, oatmeal.
These contain all the parts of the grains. There’s a lot of nutrition in there, but because there’s a lot of fiber and it’s whole, it just takes a little bit longer to digest. Then we have more of our refined or processed grains, like white bread, white rice, instant oatmeal, crackers, cereal, those kinds of things.
These may be more refined or processed, meaning that they’ve taken out the bran, the outer layer, the fiber, sometimes the germ is removed and you’re kept with the middle layer all the starches. So you lose some of those nutrients, but it digest more quickly. It digest easily.
It’s a quicker source of energy and it may be better at certain times. So we’re going to come back to this concept, but just know that grains there’s, our whole grains and processed grains. They both tend to have similar amounts of carbohydrates. They may have different amounts of fiber.
Then we also have dairy. So dairy is like milk, and yogurt. Cheese is very low carb, even though it is is dairy. But yogurt, our milk, chocolate milk, some plant-based alternatives, I would say more of like a soy milk or oat milk is going to be carbohydrate based and more, and that is a non-dairy alternative.
Then we have sweets and snack foods. Right. So candy, chocolate, granola bars, chips, pretzels, snack foods.
So those types of things also have carbohydrates. They may have sugar, they may have starch. They do tend to be lower in fiber. And then our sports products. Things like gels, chews, sports drinks, these contain sugars. So these are really important as a fuel source in and around exercise. So again, lot of foods have carbohydrates.
If you’re trying to go low carb, you got to cut a lot of foods out and it’s not necessarily the best because with a lot of these foods comes a lot of other types of nutrients. So if we think of these foods, we’re not just getting carbohydrates, we’re not just getting fuel. We’re also getting a ton of vitamins and minerals.
So fruits, vegetables, dairy beans these are great sources of potassium and some of them have magnesium. So we, last week we talked about electrolytes and these are really important in our diet. From yogurt and milk and some plant-based alternatives we can also get calcium, which is really important for bone health. Fruits, vegetables, a lot of these whole grains are great sources of vitamins. So vitamin C, E, a and K. Vitamin C and E are antioxidants. They help our body recover from exercise. They help our immune system, help us stay healthy. And then not to mention that antioxidants and phytochemicals, these are found in plants. So our beans, our fruits and vegetables, and our whole grains.
These are so important for keeping us healthy, reducing cell damage and recovering from exercise. Some of these as well, especially lentils and whole grains have iron in them. Iron is a super important nutrient for endurance athletes, helps keep our energy up. It helps our body carry oxygen to our working muscles, so it can play a role in how much energy we have and our performance during exercise.
So tons of different nutrients. Again, if you think about cutting these foods, you’re not just losing out on carbohydrates and a fuel source. You’re missing out on a lot of key nutrients.
Carbohydrates are so important to, for an endurance athlete because they are our fuel source. This is what helps drive our training and helps us reach higher intensities in our training. You can find that if you’re not getting enough carbs in your diet, There’s many side effects that you can feel, you can start to feel low energy.
You can start to feel more fatigued. You’re not recovering as well. You’re getting hangry, you’re having sugar cravings. We don’t want to have that. We want to make sure that we’re getting fuel in our body. And really when we look at the diet of an endurance athlete, most of those calories should be coming from carbohydrates.
So I talk about how carbohydrates break down into sugar, but carbohydrates also do provide calories. One gram of carbohydrates provides for calories. Okay so what I’m trying to get at is there’s different types of carbohydrates and they may be needed at different times. So one way to look at carbohydrates that can be helpful is knowing that they, we have slow acting carbohydrates and fast acting carbohydrates.
So when I say slow acting and fast acting, I mean the speed at which they break down into sugar or break down into fuel in our body. So fast acting carbohydrates are great before training, during training and sometimes afterwards, so they’re going to provide a quick source of energy. So if you think about, you want to eat something close to training or eating something within that 30 minutes within an hour, maybe even a few hours before probably want these fast acting carbohydrates.
We want something that’s not going to just be sitting in our stomach before training. We want something that is going to digest quickly and into glucose or into sugar and get to our muscles and our brain for fuel during that training. So here’s where you want to look at certain types of fruit. So fruit does have some fiber in it, so it’s not as fast acting as some types of carbs. But lower fiber fruit, apple sauce, bananas. These can be great pre-training or one thing I use a lot and talk a lot about with my clients and share is baby food pouches.
So they have, I love this one blend that has apple and banana tastes delicious, but you can find different blends and it’s more fast acting because it’s partly digested it’s broken down already and blended for you. This is where you might use Graham crackers,
again, things are a little bit more processed, a lower fiber cereal. These are fast acting.
This is where we also may use, not necessarily your brown rice. Brown breads whole grain pasta. We may use the white options, right? Like a white bread, white bagel.
Let me look at fueling during training. There’s a reason why we’re using sugar. We’re using sports drinks. We’re using gels. We’re using chews. There’s not a lot of digestion that needs to go on. It’s its simplest form of sugar and that’s being used for training. Afterwards, if we need to recover from our training really quickly, maybe if it’s a, been a really hard, intense training session, or we have another training session coming up, you want to go for those fast acting carbohydrates.
So fast acting carbohydrates tend to be a little bit higher in sugar, or they just tend to be lower in fiber. So, like I said, breads Graham crackers, cereal. They don’t necessarily only have sugar, very high in sugar, but they’re low in fiber. The little more processed. Other times of the day. Outside of training is a good time to get more of our long acting carbohydrates.
These provide a lot of nutrients and because there’s more fiber in them, they’re more whole, they are, it takes our body more time to break them down, to use as fuel. So it kind of provides a more steady stable form of energy through the day. So this would be things like including adequate fruits and vegetables with all your meals throughout the day. This would be having yogurt, dairy beans, whole grains.
We don’t necessarily want to have these right before training, but we want to have them as you know, our breakfast, lunch, or dinner as snacks, outside of training to keep our energy levels up through the day and to be fueling us through the day .
If you’ve ever heard the word of low-glycemic or high-glycemic, this is another word to describe that.
So low-glycemic foods are slow acting carbohydrates they break down into sugar less quickly, and then high-glycemic index carbohydrates, meaning that they are fast acting or they break down to sugar more quickly.
Okay, so that’s all great, but how do we know how much carbs to be eating during the day? The amount of carbohydrates really varies from athlete to athlete and it also can vary depending on the day. So the type of training day that you have, it can vary where you are at in your season. What your goals are, so it’s variable, but you can figure it out based on your body size and your training load. So I’m going to kind of talk right now about how much carbs you need at different times.
Right? So first looking at your overall carbohydrate needs, how to figure out how much carbs you want to get per day. And then we’ll talk about how much you want to be getting during training. And then a how much to have before and after training and the variables that can affect that.
So I’m going to give you some examples of how to figure out about how much carbs you need on different types of days and I’ll use the example of someone who weighs 70 kilograms or 154 pounds.
These recommendations are in grams of carbs per kilogram of your body weight. To figure out your weight in kilograms you’re going to take your weight in pounds and divide that by 2.2. So 154 divided by 2.2 is 70 kilograms. Okay. So for a light, low intensity, Training day ,something shorter duration, maybe 30 minutes or you’re focusing on skill. So maybe in the pool, you’re kind of just working on drills. It’s an easy training session. A rest day, you would want three to five grams per kilogram of body weight for those types of days. So I’m going to take that 70, multiply it by three and then 70 and multiply it by five. That gives us a range of 210 to three 50 grams of carbohydrate on those days.
So then looking at your days where you have about one hour of training at a moderate intensity.
So it’s not so an hour run, maybe more of an hour recovery run, it’s not super high intensity. That would be 350 grams of carbs to 490 grams of carbohydrate. So this might be more like zone two. Maybe early zone three work.
Now, if you have a training day, that’s one to three hours and it’s a moderate to high intensity. So looking at probably more like zone three and up your needs six to 10 grams per kilogram per day.
So that is going to be up to 700 grams of carbohydrates per day. And then when we have those very high training days, you’re training for an Ironman. You have four to five hours per day, out of moderate to high intensity then your needs are eight to 12 grams of carbohydrates per day.
So you can see that are really increases as your training increases. And you can see it’s also based on your body weight. Higher body weights is going to require more carbohydrates to fuel that body.
Now one way, I translate this into how your meals should look, is looking at the performance plate. So low, kind of the lower end, three to five grams per kilogram body weight how that kind of looks like is when you’re looking at proportioning, your breakfast, lunch, and dinners, carbohydrates are taking up about a quarter of the plate, or maybe slightly less. So those starchy high carb foods Like breads cereals, pastas, rice. Half a plate of vegetables and then a quarter protein. Moderates days where you kind of need some are in the middle five to seven we’re looking at those carbohydrates, taking up about a third of the plate. And you’re cutting into your vegetable. So decreasing the vegetables to about a third or so, and they still keeping protein there at a quarter.
And then those high intensity training days, carbohydrates are taking up a majority of the plate, at least half the plate. Less veggies and still a quarter of your plate of protein. So our protein needs stay pretty consistent. Our carbohydrate needs are increasing and less room for those veggies on the plate because yes, they’re great lot of nutrients, a lot of fiber, it’s not providing a lot of calories and fuel to fuel your training.
Back to the car analogy, the longer you’re driving, the more gas you’re going to need. It’s hard to, as a triathlete, I think, stick to the same eating every day or the same amount of carbs every day, because your carb needs vary so much. You’re going to have a lot better time fueling your training and recovering when you adjust your carbohydrates each day.
And this is also a good strategy for looking to manage your weights. If you have a very light day and you have the same high amount of carbs as you do on a high day, Then you may be over fueling those days. So take a look and kind of see how you can adjust those carbohydrates. One way is looking at the overall day, but then also your carbs are going to adjust because you’re adjusting how much you have before, during and after training, which we’re now going to get into., If you’re to have training less than an hour in your well fuelled, going into that, you don’t necessarily need to take any additional carbohydrates.
It’s not going to hurt you, but it’s not necessarily increasing your performance. An hour to two and a half hours, you want to look at getting 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. And remember, these are pretty much from sugars. And then prolonged duration, so over two and a half hours, you can look at 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour. And at some points you may benefit up to 120 grams of carbs for hours, especially on race day. This can be beneficial for a half or full iron man getting up to this amount of carbs at certain times in the race. So again, you want to be practicing this in your training though. I’ve talked about this before in other podcasts where I have people say to me, you know, I. I don’t need to be fuelling my training sessions. I can get through it just fine. Now it’s it totally depends. Maybe you have a long training session and it’s not a super high intensity is light.
Sure. You can probably get through less carbs per hour. But do you have a race coming up? Do you have a race coming up in a couple of weeks? Are you building, you want to be fueling during your training because we’re practicing our race nutrition fuel, we’re training our gut to be able to absorb and tolerate these carbohydrates.
So it’s so important to be doing that. So while these are some guidelines for performance, you can look at where you are in your training phase. I find it’s also for just keeping up on top of your energy needs.
If you are in training four or five hours, and you’re not consuming a lot of fuel during that, there’s just so much more you have to catch up with later in the day, it can be really difficult. So it helps prevent that deficit and help start your recovery process earlier. Now carbohydrate needs after training are going to vary. If you had a lighter, shorter training session versus a longer harder training session, you’re going to want to adjust your carbohydrate needs there. So general range, I would say for after training, in terms of carbohydrates would be point five grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight up to 1.2 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of your body weight. You can look at this as at least around 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrates or more. And then
similar for pre-training. We’re going to need less carbs for shorter duration and higher carbs for longer, higher intensity duration. So you can use that similar example as a starting point half to one gram per kilogram body weight in terms of carbohydrates, but just know longer duration, higher intensity races we’re going to need more than that, but starting to get in the habit of okay looking at the training that you have coming up, maybe you’re heading out for 45 minute, easy run. 30 grams of carbohydrates could be a good start. That’s like a slice of toast with a tablespoon of jam on that. But you’re waking up and you’re doing a longer run.
You’re doing double that an hour and a half start with looking at, okay. Let’s try to get about 60 grams of carbohydrates. That could be two slices of toast with two tablespoons of jam, or even just adding a banana to your one slice of toast in your one tablespoon of jam is 60 grams of carbs. So again adjusting those carbohydrates before and after training is going to be really important to make sure that you fuel that training and you recover from from it properly. Adjusting those carbs, fueling your training.
You’re going to have better energy in your training sessions. You’re going to have better training sessions over all. This is going to really reward you on race day because you’re going to be fit. You’re gonna be fast and you’ve been training with fuel. So you’re going to be able to have a race nutrition plan that you’ve practiced in advance, you know, can work, you know, you can tolerate and just an extra level of confidence and less stress on race day.
So, what about those people are those things that you hear of, you know, train low carb. Get fat adapted. And then on your race fUel with carbohydrates.
So this necessarily isn’t a good option because one. You may not actually be able to utilize or tolerate those carbohydrates as well on race day. If it’s not something that you’ve done in training or you’ve done in practice.
So I think it’s a much better strategy to adjust those carbohydrates to your types of training days, higher carbs on heavier days. Lighter carbs on lower days, but definitely not low carb or no carb. And then we’re adjusting how much we’re having in and around training. So I am not of the proponent of a low carb, high fat diet for endurance athletes.
We see a lot in the research that just doesn’t help with performance, especially in the high intensity. So I think that’s another great episode to cover it’s in itself. Maybe after this series looking at, low carb diets versus. Adequate carb diets. If you have any more questions, you have other things you want to know about carbohydrates. Send me a message and let me know. Stay tuned for next week. We’re talking all about protein. And just a reminder. The fueled for endurance academy is open. I’m super excited for this group. So, if you want to learn more about it, click the show notes, read about it’s all about and join if you’d like. And, message me if you have any questions. Thanks so much for listening guys have a.