📍 Welcome to the Fueled Triathlete Show. I’m your host, Andrea Docherty, registered dietitian and fellow triathlete. I specialize in coaching endurance athletes to fuel their body to have more energy, PR at races, and improve their relationship with food. This podcast will give you practical and actionable strategies to help you transform into a well fueled triathlete.
Now let’s get into today’s episode.
📍 Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the field triathlete today. We’re talking all about eating before training. Should you do it and what should you eat. Now, as a sports dietitian I’m focused on two different things when I answer this question. One is looking at performance. So I know probably as a triathlete, you’re looking to continue to perform better, continue to improve, make the most of your training.
If that’s something that you want to do, then yes, you want to be fueling before your training. I’m also looking at this through another lens of health and fueling our body properly. So, we don’t want to have the risk of under fueling, not taking in enough energy intake as that going to have a lot of negative consequences as well.
So in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about why it’s important to fuel before training and what are some of the negative consequences that can come out of not fueling. We’re then also going to get into different factors that affect what to eat.
So it’s not that we necessarily are going to eat the same foods or the same amount of food before every different type of workout, because you want to ask yourself a few questions. You want to ask yourself, what kind of training session am I heading into? Is this a more recovery, lower intensity workout or is it something that’s a longer session, higher intensity.
These are things that we’re going to get into. And we’re going to talk about how that affects what you eat. And then the other factor is timing. How close to that training session are you eating? If you’re eating just before you head out the door, then that food that you eat is going to look a lot differently
if you have a few hours to kind of let a meal digest. So we’re going to talk about that as well. We’re also going to talk about what foods to choose and what to avoid to try to minimize any GI discomfort or stomach issues that can happen. And what to do if you don’t feel hungry or you’re not used to eating first thing in the morning.
So, yes, as I mentioned, we should be fueling and there can be some drawbacks to fueling fast or working out fasted. So meaning waking up and heading out for your training session. So fasted training before you have a longer or more intense training session, planned probably means that you’re not going to get the most out of that workout. You’re not going to have a good quality workout without that fuel.
Higher intensity training sessions are going to require more carbohydrates for fuel carbohydrates from glycogen and our blood sugars. And without that fuel, we’re not going to be able to perform as well. The other risk is that, when we do a training session first thing in the morning, and we’re fasted that can increase our cortisol levels.
So our cortisol levels are highest in the morning and working out fasted is adding in more stress into the body.
Now some of the benefits of fueling before workout is that you’re probably going to perform better because think of trying to go head out and drive your car. You can’t drive your car without putting gas in the car. So we want to put some fuel in our body to get some energy. It’s going to help top up our fuel source for our carbohydrates. It’s going to help us maintain good blood sugar and energy levels when we’re choosing the right types of foods, which we’ll get into. And it can also help you prevent you from feeling hungry during workouts. This can be really distracting if you’re trying to do a workout and feeling hungry, feeling tired. So it’s important to fuel beforehand. And we’re going to talk about all, about what to do and how much.
So as I mentioned what you eat before training session and how much depends on a couple of factors. So the first one depends on the duration, the intensity and the type of training session that you have planned. So longer, harder runs should have more carbs or more fuel than shorter runs. So I want to talk about how our body, what fuel sources our body uses during different types of training sessions to help understand how to fuel and what foods are going to be important.
So there’s some studies to show what fuel sources our bodies used at different percentages of your VO2 max. So your VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can use during intense or maximum exercise. When you’re at your a hundred percent VO, two max, you’re working at the highest intensity that you can do. So if you’re doing something at 25% of your VO, two max. This may be going out for a walk, very light type of exercise, walk, maybe yoga.
What your body is primarily using for fuel is fats and that’s fats that are found within your bloodstream. So those free fatty acids, a little bit is coming from triglycerides in your muscles. And a very small amount is coming from the sugar in your blood. Pretty much nothing coming from our muscle glycogen. So these very low, intense exercises you know, if you’re waking up going for a walk, something light, you don’t necessarily need to have some fuel there.
But above that, we do want to start having some fuel. So at about 65% of our VO2 max, this might be something like heading out for a run, or heading out for a bike, but it’s a little more of a recovery session. And you could have a conversation during this, or this could be during a certain type, some swim workouts.
So at this point, our body’s using about 50% fats and 50% carbohydrates. So these type of sessions, especially if they start getting longer over an hour, it’s still very important to be consuming carbohydrates beforehand. And then if we do very high intensity training session, so intervals at 85% of our VO2 max, our bodies using primarily carbohydrates and much lower percentage of fats. A lot of those carbohydrates are actually coming from our muscle glycogen stores.
So muscle glycogen stores are the carbohydrates that we can store in our muscles. And during high intensity, long duration workouts, those muscle glycogen stores are going to be broken down into sugar for our muscles to be used for fuel. So our muscle glycogen stores are really impacted by what we eat, not really just before training, but in that 24 hours before training. Then we also have higher percentage of carbohydrates coming from the sugar in our blood, which is essentially from the foods that we’ve eaten before.
As you get into higher percentages of your VO2 max in the higher intensity you’re also burning more calories per minute. So your body is requiring more fuel anther reason why it’s really important to be eating before training. So essentially the more intense that training session or the longer the training session, the more carbohydrates you’re going to want to fuel with before that training session.
So the other factor that determines what to be eating is, the timing before your workout.
So if you’re eating within 30 minutes, maybe you wake up and you like to head out the door as soon as possible, the fuel or what you eat is going to look different than if you could wake up, have breakfast and head out your long run two hours or so after that. Regardless the main fuel that we’re eating before training and what we want to focus on is carbohydrates. So carbohydrates help to maintain our blood sugars, and they’re also giving fuel to our muscles. So it’s really important to be primarily including those foods.
I’m going to run through a couple of different scenarios in terms of what to eat. If you’re eating within 30 minutes, what to do, if you’re eating something one to two hours before, and then what to do if you’re having a meal beforehand. So we want to think of the digestibility of food in these different scenarios.
So if you’re eating within about 30 to 45 minutes of heading out for your training session, so let’s say it’s an hour or less swim, run, or bike, then try to aim for about 30 grams of carbohydrates to start. If that is increasing. If your training session is going longer than that, then you’re going to want to bump this up, at least double it or maybe more.
And if that’s too much food to be able to tolerate within that 30 minutes, then you may want to consider trying to eat, something a few hours before to let that digest. Or if that’s really not possible, what you want to do is really focus on that dinner the night before bump up the carbs there, as that can help to provide fuel for that early morning training session.
So some good examples though, of the types of foods. You want to choose very simple carbohydrates, easy to digest, low in fiber. So some good examples are Graham crackers or saltine crackers. You could do an English muffin or some toast, half a bagel with some jam or honey, frozen waffles with some syrup can be great as well or jam on there.
Handful of some dates or dried fruit like raisins or apricots, a banana. If you’re not a huge banana fan, maybe try something like mango it’s a little more higher in sugar, lower in fiber, pretzels or other low fiber crackers. I mentioned saltines earlier, this also gets some sodium, some electrolytes. A dry low fiber cereal, so think like rice Krispies or corn flakes. Check the label that per serving there’s two grams of fiber or less. You could do some rice cakes with some honey or jam. See if you can put a little bit of peanut butter on there if you tolerate it, but that’s more of a protein and a fat. You could do fig Newtons or nature’s bakery fig bars. I love using the baby food fruit pouches, or like an apple sauce.
The nice thing with that is that if it’s applesauce the skin has been removed, so the area with the most fiber. It’s blended up, so it’s already partially digested for you. So it’s going to get that sugar , from your stomach and your digestive tract to muscles a lot more quickly. If you’re someone who really can’t tolerate anything in the morning, you could also do liquid.
So if you’re someone who in the morning can’t really tolerate anything yet, you can also get your carbohydrates in the form of liquid, like a sports drink. So a sports drinks that primarily contains carbohydrates and electrolytes but does not contain protein.
Now these also work, not necessarily just in the morning, but if you need to eat 30 minutes before heading out the door. So if you have a workout sometime in the day, and it’s been a while since you’ve eaten, you’re starting to feel a bit hungry or want a top-up of a fuel source.
Then these can work at any time. A lot of these are non-perishable, you can keep in your car, especially if you’re someone who maybe goes and trains right after work, or maybe on your lunch break.
If you are also somebody that, feels like they can’t tolerate food, doesn’t like the feeling of having food in their stomach, or maybe you feel nauseous in the morning or just don’t like to eat. Then what I would say is you can start to train your gut and you can start to do this slowly. So I mentioned kind of maybe starting around 30 grams of carbs, maybe start with 10, 15 grams of carbs. Maybe just start with a couple crackers, you start with the Gatorade option, just a couple sips there. So start small and then work your way up to the portion or half a banana.
. Now, let’s say you’re eating one to two hours before, so this could be you wake up, you’re able to have breakfast and then head out an hour or two later. Or maybe you’re someone who trains, at lunchtime before you have lunch. So you maybe have breakfast, you have a mid morning snack, and then you can go do your workout. If you’re someone who trains after work, this could be examples of what you could have for an afternoon snack. So we need a snack that’s going to be a little bit higher in carbohydrates, because it is a couple hours before we’re actually doing our training session. So you may want to double those carbs at least to start.
So for these, we still want to make that snack primarily carbohydrates, but we also want to include a little bit of protein along with it. So we’re eating about an hour or two before a training session, if we just eat some very simple carbs, we’re going to digest that too quickly before we actually get to our training session. So some good examples could be a bagel with some peanut butter, maybe some banana on that as well, instead of one frozen waffle and heading out the door, having two with a banana and some honey or some peanut butter. You could do some oatmeal and a glass of milk or some yogurt in there. You’re someone who likes to have a dry cereal have it with some milk and have some raisins in there, or some dried fruits. So we’re kind of having some carbohydrates, maybe in the form of different types of breads cereals. I do have some of my clients have some potatoes, have some rice. These are also carbohydrates. Depending on your tolerance of fiber, you may want to choose white as opposed to whole wheat or whole grain, same thing goes for just before your training sessions.
So choose on the carbohydrates. Um, I would say at least very minimum 30 grams of carbs. If it’s a very light workout that you have planned, but I would probably more so see that as like 60 grams of carbs or one to two grams per kilogram of your body weight. And then we’re going to pair that along with some protein. So we want to have some proteins that are going to be low in fat, so they’re more easily digested and tolerated. So if you’re going to do a milk , try and choose a low fat milk, a bit of peanut butter, some nut butters can be good too, low fat yogurt.
Keep in mind that, you may tolerate different types of foods, but for different types of training sessions, For example, a run maybe more sensitive to that because your stomach’s moving around, jostling a bit more versus on the bike when you’re seated.
So I just want to also stop and shout out that in the show notes, I do have a pre and post-workout nutrition guide, it’s free, you can download it, it’s got all of this information.
Okay, now let’s say we’re eating three to four hours before a training session. So this would be a good example if you like to have enough time to let your meal digest, or you just like to head out mid morning. I know some of my clients like to do their runs or training sessions after dinner. So a couple of hours after you eat. So this is what you would want to do. If you have more time to let that meal digest.
So we don’t want to just have very simple carbs for three hours out from our run and then go. We want to pair it into actually a well-balanced meal. So that meal three to four hours out, we want to include some carbohydrates and this can be some more long acting carbohydrates, not as simple, so that can mean things like rice, potatoes, pastas breads. If you want to try to see if you can tolerate a whole grain, you can do that. But if you are a little bit more sensitive to fiber before training, you can choose a lower fiber options. Then we’re going to pair that with some protein. So that can be a Palm sized piece of say chicken fish meats, eggs, dairy beans, tofu. And some salad, some fruits or vegetables or cooked vegetables to go along with that. So, for example, in the morning, you could do a couple of slices of toast, some eggs scrambled with some veggies, a banana, apple piece of fruit along with that. It could be a bowl of oatmeal with some berries, some nuts and yogurt or eggs. It could be a Turkey, and cheese or tuna sandwich with some veggies and hummus. A chicken stir fry with vegetables and rice and pasta with ground Turkey or meat sauce and a side salad. It’s a roasted tofu, vegetables and sweet potatoes.
So these are all examples of kind of well-balanced meals. And depending on the type of training session that you have that day, you can vary up the amount of carbs or vegetables that you have. So if it’s a very high, intense training session that day it’s long, I would make this meal primarily carbohydrates, at least half plate carbs, a small amount of vegetables or fruits because, yes, they’re providing us with antioxidants, but they’re not providing us a lot of carbs or calories.
And then a quarter of your plate that protein. If it’s more of a moderate type of training day. Around an hour, then about a third of your plate carbohydrates, a third. Vegetables and a quarter protein. So again, we’re kind of scaling those carbohydrates based on the duration and the intensity of that training session. So the higher intensity that it is, and the longer that it is, the more carbohydrates that we want to have before that training session. So learning to scale up or down those carbohydrates before your training session is going to help fuel that training session properly.
Now, keep in mind that if you eat a meal three to four hours before your training, that doesn’t mean you still can’t eat again.
You could still have that snack one to two hours before, or within 30 minutes, just make sure you choose those types of foods. So, as I mentioned, head to the show notes, you can download this, resource that I have for you. It’s got examples of what to eat before training. And then also it includes recovery nutrition, and recipes.
And then as I mentioned beforehand, I know we’re kind of talking about today, what to eat just before training, but for those longer sessions or those high intensity training sessions, I also suggest looking at what you’re eating kind of the night before that meal, even before that.
So this maybe a mindset shift for some listeners where the focus is on fueling your body and giving your body the right type of food that it needs to be able to perform well. So, especially I find sometimes, people who may be looking to manage their weight, we’re wanting to work out fasted thinking that we’re going to be burning more fat. It’s not necessarily the case.
If you are training at a low intensity, you’re going to be burning more fat, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good for helping improve your performance, or that’s not necessarily good for burning more calories to help you with your weight loss goals. So fuel your body, get a good quality training session so you’re not wasting your time feeling like garbage during your training sessions. It really sucks when you can feel you get distracted by hunger or you can’t hit those paces that you wanted to giving your body. Some fuel beforehand will help you feel so much better.
So the other thing I wanted to touch on as well is that some of us may experience negative things happening when we eat before training, so getting Runner’s Trots, getting GI issues, stomach upset, nausea, those types of things. A couple of things to avoid eating before training one can be very high fiber foods really close to training, so within that two . Some people may need to avoid it that day of, or the day before. Really high fiber foods can take long to digest, so when you’re heading out for your training, it kind of feels like it’s still sitting in your stomach, you can get some gas, pain, bloating. We also want to avoid very high fat foods, things like large amounts of say nuts or trail mix, chocolate, deep fried foods . High-fat foods take a long time to digest, probably not going to empty from your stomach. And again, it’s not giving you that fuel that you need. High fiber food examples would be things like beans, raw vegetables, large amounts of berries, chia, seeds, beans.
And if you do want to learn more about that, I do have an episode all about how to solve runner’s trots issues. And it talks about the types of foods that you want to eat or avoid before
. So just to kind of summarize, yes, you want to feel your training, you want to avoid fasted training for anything that’s not a super low level, low intensity, like a walk. So as we start to increase the intensity of our training, then we start to require carbohydrates for fuel. Our body uses a higher percentage of carbs coming from our muscle glycogen and our blood.
You also want to factor in how close to your training that you’re eating. Are you eating 30 minutes before an hour or two hours before or three to four hours before? So all that’s going to kind of vary based on how much time you have to let that food digest and make sure that we’re scaling those carbs up or down, depending on the length and the intensity of that training.
So, thanks so much for listening today, guys, I would really appreciate if you share this podcast with your fellow triathletes or runners. And, if you could leave a rating or review, that would also really help me grow the podcast and help more people find this. Have a great day!