HOW TO NAIL YOUR NUTRITION AS A TRIATHLETE

At Smarter Tri, nutrition is one of our 5 key focus areas for a happy, healthy, successful athlete (along with quality training, mindset, rest and recovery, and strength, mobility and flexibility).

To help make sure you’re on the right path, I wanted to share my golden rules with you.

Have a race nutrition plan

Race nutrition isn’t just about what you consume during the race. It’s also the day before, morning before the race, during and post-race recovery. As part of your monthly one to ones we’ll work out your optimal nutrition strategy for all of your major races to make sure you know exactly how to fuel yourself best.

Hydrate!

Drink at least 2 litres of water a day plus 500ml of water for every hour of training you do that day. If your training is a turbo session, you may want to increase that a little as we all know they can get sweaty!

Better yet, complete the sweat tests that may be scheduled into your plan, then we know exactly how much you sweat when you ride and run.

Sweat tests

You may find that I schedule sweat tests in your session plan. This is so that we can establish how much you sweat per hour, and we can then devise the best hydration approach for you, both for training and racing.

Be aware of your calorie need

On some days your calorie needs will be higher than others to support your training and it’s important to fuel our training well to ensure that we can deliver that quality training, support adaptations that make us stronger and faster, and to avoid over train, burn out or injury.

Training Peaks shows your calorie burn for each session so we can use that to decide which days will need a little more fuelling.

Look at the quality of your food

Your day to day nutrition should, wherever possible, be made of good quality food, with lots of veggies, good quality lean protein like chicken, fish, seafood, tofu, and lots of high fibre carbs so we’re eating brown rice, granary bread, oats and so on.

Bonus points for getting extra protein into your carbs by eating things like beans, chickpeas, lentils and chia seeds.

We also need good fats so include some good quality oils, avocado, nuts, seeds and oily fish.

As an athlete it’s really easy to get our carbs from processed food or simple carbs but the more we can get it from veggies, whole foods, and complex carbs the better!

Nutrition is a huge part of performing well so if you have any questions or would like to talk about your specific needs, please do let me know.