THERE’S REAL POETRY in the way the very best performers move. Think of the seemingly effortless grace with which US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles defies the laws of gravity before landing back on earth with a smile, or French footballer Kylian Mbappé gliding past defenders at warp speed at the 2018 World Cup.
Athletes like these have the power to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and it’s easy to admire and talk about their ability without taking into account all the planning, training and ‘grunt work’ that goes into it each and every day, far from the TV cameras and adoring fans. Behind every world-class performance is a schedule that has been put together with pinpoint accuracy to achieve this goal.
So, what can we learn from the elite to use in our Energy Plan and enhance our own training and nutrition? There’s only one place to start, with a simple-seeming question:
The philosophy of clearly thinking through and detailing why we’re doing something rather than jumping straight into it works very well with nutrition and training. Every athlete I work with has their ‘why?’. They have specific goals to meet and their training and nutrition are tailored to meet these goals.
In a sport like football, it’s easy to have the perception that the team just trains together each day, working on technical elements of the game such as attacking and defending, as well as fitness work. But the reality is that all of the players are assessed as individual athletes to determine what can be done to improve performance on the pitch and ensure that this can be repeated as many times as there are games over the season. So across a squad, each player will have different goals – each athlete starts with their own. They are able to answer:
●What is your goal?
●Why are you using a particular type of training?
●Does each of your training sessions contribute to the overall goal?
As soon as there is a goal you can write down, all of your training and nutrition can be aligned to meeting this. We will look at how you can go about establishing your own goals as part of your Energy Plan at the beginning of Part II. For now, whether you’re lacing up your running trainers for the first time in forever or you’re well into an established exercise regime, I want you to start thinking about your own ‘Why am I doing this?’.
The physical activity that makes up part of your Energy Plan – the part of your ‘energy out’ that we can exercise most control over, as we discussed at the end of Chapter 1 – will inevitably involve some of the following types of training to allow you to make the adaptations necessary to reach your goals. It’s likely that your current regime already involves at least one of these; for many people it’s aerobic exercise.
Often described as cardio (short for cardiorespiratory), aerobic exercise causes an increase in heart rate, which pumps oxygenated blood to the muscles and uses fat as its source of energy. It typically describes lower-intensity exercise such as walking, jogging, cycling, swimming and the various cardio machines in the gym.
Aerobic training improves the delivery of oxygenated blood to the working muscles to produce ATP (as discussed in Chapter 1). The heart becomes more efficient, increasing its stroke volume and reducing heart rate, and within the muscles it increases the density of capillaries to deliver oxygen. It also increases enzyme activity and the number of mitochondria – those power generators that melt fat down and change it to your muscles’ energy currency, ATP – meaning more fuel, specifically fat, can be burned to produce energy at lower exercise intensity, improving exercise capacity.
As soon as the intensity of exercise increases it crosses the anaerobic or lactate threshold. At this point oxygen can’t be delivered to the muscles quickly enough to meet energy needs, and becomes ‘anaerobic’. At these higher intensities the body starts to use more carbohydrate as a fuel, but by-products such as lactate and hydrogen make the muscle cells more acidic. For many elite and sub-elite runners, a focus is to raise their lactate threshold and allow them to use more fat ‘aerobically’, which both preserves valuable carbohydrate fuel (for a sprint finish, for example) and reduces acidity within the muscle, which can interfere with muscle contraction and cause fatigue.
Often referred to as resistance exercise, strength training is when stress is placed on muscles against a given resistance, and the contraction causes micro-tears in fibres (otherwise known as muscle breakdown), which subsequently grow and repair, resulting in increases in strength and muscle mass. An increase in the size of muscle fibres (which has the grand-sounding name of hypertrophy) is due to an increase in size and number of fibres.
Resistance training is a crucial component across almost all elite sports to increase strength and power, allowing the muscles to produce greater force – whether this is a sprinter bursting out of the blocks or a golfer on the first tee with a driver in hand.
Working on your muscles not only makes you stronger, but also stimulates bone growth and repair – muscles feed off blood glucose and muscle glycogen stores, lowering circulating levels, and there is an increase in metabolic rate thanks to increased muscle mass. Increased muscle also makes the body more efficient at burning fat, and improves balance and posture.
Elite team players in sports like football train to improve both strength and endurance adaptations, to support the repeated sprints needed over the 90 minutes of a match. We call this concurrent training and it means, in general, that on-pitch training sessions and gym work are separated to minimise the ‘interference effect’, which reduces the effectiveness of the training for both objectives. Intermittent training also includes the popular HIIT, which combines high-intensity exercises with short recovery periods within the same session.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget the other types of training such as flexibility (mobility), which is an important part of warming up and down after training, and neuromotor exercises such as bounding lunges or hops, which form a part of many training routines. Yoga and Pilates are particularly effective forms of flexibility exercise.
As we will see during this chapter, what you eat before or after these different training sessions will either enhance or reduce how your body adapts (your gains) from the training session.
If you’ve ever seen a sprinter train or perform at an Olympic Games, you’ll know it’s quite a sight. They explode out of the starting blocks with such power, and move off at a rate that you might have thought only belonged in wildlife documentaries filmed in the Serengeti.
Because sprinters work at such a high level of intensity, they need sufficient rest between efforts to allow their body to recover. Get the balance right and you have an athlete primed to perform at their best in competition. Prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing, however, we weren’t quite getting it right with one sprinter. No matter how many changes we made to his nutrition, we couldn’t quite get him lean enough. So we sent him out to Jamaica to do some training with Usain Bolt’s coach Glen Mills, and he came back a different athlete, having shed some four or five kilos of body fat. So what had he been doing differently? He’d increased the volume of his activity.
His training sessions had expanded from just doing the explosive work with rests in between to doing more base conditioning (running longer distances), so his overall daily energy output increased. In other words, he stopped being a sedentary athlete.
When I work with any client it’s important that I not only see an account of the food they eat (energy in), but also learn about their exercise or training regime (energy out). They usually fill in a form, which my team then analyse, and without fail there is always one thing missing: incidental activity. Our brains are so hard-wired to see energy output as ‘formal’ exercise – yesterday’s HIIT session, our morning swim – that we miss the low-hanging incidental fruit.
What I will usually do is ask to see the client’s phone – I want to know if they have a health app that tracks their step count, and whether they’ve been taking the stairs or the lift.
I know, the data on your mobile phone or tracker won’t be 100 per cent accurate, but it doesn’t need to be. Increasing your daily step count from 5,000 to 10,000 steps can be a significant step towards creating a sustainable energy deficit to lose body fat; and that’s before you’ve even addressed your nutrition. It doesn’t just have to be death by treadmill.
Increasing incidental activity can involve something as simple as walking home from work instead of catching the bus or taking the stairs instead of the escalator. It all adds up. Obviously it’s easier to decide to walk home on a lovely warm spring day, but the real test comes in the middle of winter, when it’s cold and the rain is lashing down. Think about the benefits your incidental activity brings, wrap up warm or take your umbrella and walk home anyway.
In order to achieve a balance in your physical activity, it’s useful to treat training and incidental activity as two separate entities, and break them down into 24-hour periods. So, when training is high, incidental activity levels outside of training should be moderate; when training is low, activity levels can be increased to maintain volume. In a way we’re not only looking to balance our fuel in with our energy out, but also to find the right balance to maintain the necessary levels of energy out so you can work towards your goal. This is the same principle used for planning athletes’ training – manipulating the intensity and the volume.
There’s no point going into a heavy training session with an empty tank, just as there’s no point in looking good if you can’t deliver a performance. With our athletes, the main focus of their nutrition programmes is to prioritise what they eat before training or performing (fuelling) for energy supply during said training and performance, and then what they eat after, for recovery. With your Energy Plan, the same principles apply, with the type and timing of your food, which we’ll return to at the end of the chapter, being of paramount importance.
The first question to consider is where do you sit on the continuum below: are you adapting or performing?
This is the question the coaching staff and I consider with each sports team I work with because it dictates what the athletes eat before the training session. With a football club during pre-season training, carbohydrates are often restricted before some sessions to improve fat metabolism. This is with the understanding that it will feel harder for the players, so the session intensity will be lower.
What to eat before your workout depends on whether your objective is to adapt (improve endurance adaptations, such as fat burning) or to perform (ensure sufficient energy supply) to maintain intensity. Your training week will often include the need for both, depending on your goals. All of the examples in this section give an insight into how athletes fuel pre- and post-training. How to personalise your fuelling plan to meet your goals is covered in Part II.
The pre-training meal should be scheduled between two and four hours before training to allow time to digest your food. As the goal is performance to maximise your output in the training session, you will need to be fuelled (training before breakfast as part of adaptation is below). Examples of meals are included below. Snacks may also be included, less than two hours before training, depending on the time of training in relation to your schedule (if training is late morning or late afternoon, for example – a long time after breakfast or lunch).
For competition, for professional footballers, it is recommended that they have the pre-match meal three to four hours before kick-off, usually at the hotel before travelling to the ground. Snacks containing high-GI carbohydrates are then consumed during the warm-up to top up blood glucose. A meal containing 1–3 g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight is the standard practice (and see the competition section in Part II). So for a hypothetical 75 kg midfielder, a meal containing around 1 g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight (75 g) could be a bowl of pasta.
EXAMPLES OF FUELLING MEALS
●Porridge oats with milk of your choice
●Quinoa porridge with chopped banana and milk of your choice
●Tomato and basil omelette with rye bread
●Mexican beans and avocado on rye bread
●Homemade muesli with mixed nuts and seeds
●Chicken or tofu stir-fry with noodles
●Baked sweet potato with tuna
●Cajun chicken with avocado and quinoa salad
●Vegetarian chili with rice
●Wraps: (salmon and avocado, chicken, falafel)
●Buckwheat salad with prawn, chicken or tofu skewers
●Spaghetti with meatballs or sardines
FLUID INTAKE GUIDELINES
Guideline recommendations are to consume 5–7ml of fluid per kg of body weight in the two to four hours before training (with the pre-training meal is an ideal opportunity). This will ensure any excess fluid is passed before the start of the session. So for a 70 kg person, we’re looking at between 350 and 490 ml. As with all the measures in this book, you don’t have to measure them out to the nearest gram or millilitre: with time, you’ll get a feel for the right amount, and I’ll show you how to get better at estimating these amounts in From Plan to Plate, Chapter 10.
For some training sessions, the aim is to train the body to adapt and become more efficient, rather than to perform at full capacity. A primary tool to achieve this is called ‘training low’. As we’ve discussed, there is a vast reservoir of fat in your body, in tissues, cells and your blood… and for many of us, that reservoir might be a little too large. Our engine has a wonderful ability to use two fuels, switching between carbohydrate and fat depending on the intensity of activity. This ability is called ‘metabolic flexibility’ and it means that your metabolism uses different fuels depending on the demands placed on the body. And where there’s flexibility there is, of course, the opportunity to manipulate it to our own ends. In my work with elite athletes I encourage and teach them to match their eating to these demands, and here we’ll look at how you, whether you’re in training or you just want more from your exercise classes, can use this flexibility too.
I’m often asked by clients how to prime their body to burn more fat. And the answer is that you restrict carbohydrate. There is a but coming, however…
Marathon runners and triathletes have been using this approach for years, because they want to make their body use fat as a fuel and preserve the limited stores of carbohydrates for when it’s ‘eyeballs out’ time and they need that quicker currency of energy for a sprint finish. If they get it right, their engine becomes very efficient at using both fuels; but get this wrong and they’ll hit the wall as the finish line approaches, all jelly legs and expended effort. (In Part II of the book, I’ll show you how to get it right.) Recently, low-carb high-fat (LCHF) or keto diets have received a lot of attention, and though this may be useful in some weight management scenarios, the ability to use both fat and carbohydrate as fuels during different sessions is important to maintain exercise performance.1
When muscles’ glycogen stores are reduced and the supply of carbohydrates restricted through training low, they become more efficient at using fat stores as fuel. There are various ways to train low:
●Exercising twice a day
●Prolonged training (over 90 minutes)
●The dreaded low-carb diet
●Exercising before breakfast, the most popular way. However, recent research has shown that training after a low-carb, protein-based meal will have the same effect.
TRAINING-LOW MEALS
●Greek yoghurt and handful of nuts and seeds
●Omelette or eggs (poached or scrambled)
●Smoked salmon and avocado
●Mexican spiced beans and avocado
●Whey protein shake
It should also be noted that training low isn’t a magic bullet to burning fat. It increases the strain on muscles and bones and your immune system when exercising, and can reduce the quality of harder sessions. It needs some careful planning and should be first trialled on shorter, lower-intensity training sessions. Also, as we have discussed, this is focusing on the fuel used during training, and to reduce body fat you will need to be in an energy deficit over the course of a day.
Sometimes it’s necessary to take on fuel during activity too, depending on your goal so here are some guidelines:
| Exercise Length | Carbohydrate Amount |
| < 45 minutes | Nothing |
| 45–75 minutes (high-intensity) | Small amounts |
| 1–2.5 hours (endurance) | 30–60 g/hour |
| 2.5–3 hours (ultra-endurance) | >90 g/hour |
30 g of carbohydrates are provided by the following:
●500 ml sports drink (isotonic)
●1 carbohydrate gel
●1 large banana (if you’re a tennis fan, you’ve probably seen a lot of players eating these during matches)
●1 sports nutrition bar
●1 cereal or breakfast bar
These are all high-GI (easily absorbed) sources, for when high-GI is a good thing for a quicker spike in energy.
For most people, taking on extra fuel during training isn’t necessary. For example, in football taking on carbohydrate during the match is advised, as the goal is to be fuelled and maintain energy supply and performance levels. But carbohydrate isn’t used during training sessions; instead players are fuelled before the session. For harder training sessions, you should do likewise, fuelling beforehand in the form of a carbohydrate-based meal.
ENDURANCE NEEDS
If you are training for a marathon, Ironman or other endurance events, some of the sessions will involve training low so your body can better adapt to using fat as a fuel, but leading into a race it is important to practise consuming carbohydrate during longer training sessions (to practise your competition strategy). This is because it is possible to ‘train the gut’ so that consuming carbohydrate during a longer run increases the absorption in the intestines and then oxidation (use) for energy.
This should start around eight weeks before the event, when you are bringing together your competition strategy. Long weekend training sessions are a staple for many preparing for an endurance event, and this longer run (or bike for cyclists and triathletes) provides an excellent opportunity to practise this strategy.
Starting with smaller amounts – around 30 g per hour – and building tolerance is a good approach. Usually the biggest issue on marathon day is GI discomfort from taking on too many carbohydrate products without previously using them.
Fluid intake during a training session should offset sweat losses and prevent you from getting dehydrated. As individual sweat rates can vary hugely, depending on session intensity, duration, fitness and environmental conditions, you will need to personalise your hydration strategy, which you can do in Chapter 8 on monitoring.
For athletes the period directly after training or competition is crucial, especially when there is limited time before the next training session or match. And it’s the same in your own life. Applying the 4 Rs of recovery can mean the difference between skipping into work the next morning or limping in, grimacing every time you walk up the stairs.
Refuel glycogen stores (around 1 g per kg body weight per hour for up to four hours, depending on intensity). For a 75 kg professional midfielder this is a bagel and a fruit smoothie or a plate of pasta each hour for up to four hours; for most of the rest of us, one fuelling snack or meal afterwards – see Chapter 10).
Repair muscle tissue and stimulate muscle protein synthesis (around 0.3 g per kg body weight) – a 20–30 g dose such as a pint of milk (for more options see here).
Rehydrate and replace fluid losses from sweat (drink 150 per cent of sweat losses from exercise).
And finally Rest.
Refuelling is top of the list for a reason. During the first two hours after exercise, glycogen resynthesis (your body’s ability to refuel) is at its most rapid – around 150 per cent of normal rate – so it’s no wonder that this has been termed the ‘window of opportunity’.2
Elite athletes use sports food such as carbohydrate and protein recovery drinks directly after performing, followed by a meal in the changing rooms an hour later. Higher carbohydrate intake through meals and snacks eaten every three to four hours is then maintained for the rest of the day, to fully refuel [see competition day in Part II].
These regular meals and snacks should include protein, as discussed here, to maximise muscle repair and adaptation (muscle protein synthesis).
Context is important here. The bigger the dose of exercise, the more important the recovery nutrition. For a lighter training session, which hasn’t drained your fuel stores (think about the fuel gauge in the previous chapter), you don’t need to add extra recovery drinks or snacks – a meal containing carbohydrate and protein is sufficient. It is important that training is organised so that the next meal can also be used for recovery (so for example, dinner would be the recovery meal for a late-afternoon training session) – especially when reducing body fat and keeping to a daily energy budget (we’ll explore this more fully in Chapter 10).
EXAMPLES OF RECOVERY MEALS
●Couscous salad with meatballs
●Mediterranean fish parcels with ginger, spring onion and sweet potato
●Hot and sour fish soup
●Mexican stew with quinoa and beans
●Black bean, tofu and avocado rice bowl
●Fettucine with beans or chicken
●Spinach, sweet potato and lentil dhal
Adequate rest is critical to continued progress, and a period of at least 48 hours is recommended between resistance-training sessions to stimulate the adaptations in muscle cells for hypertrophy and gains in strength.3 We know that the muscle is more sensitive to protein intake in the 24 hours after training, so what is eaten over this period has the ability to enhance training gains – it’s that powerful.
Rest days are also important for both a psychological and a physiological break. And the dangers can creep up on you if you get the balance between stress and recovery wrong. This is something we know all about in elite sport, where athletes are often treading that fine line between training stress and recovery.
Feeling fatigued in the 24–48 hours after training is normal (sore muscles, reduced energy levels), but when this continues for longer it starts to be more of an issue.
First comes ‘overreaching’. This is when it can take a couple of days to fully recover from harder training, to adapt and come back stronger. It’s more severe when this crosses into a syndrome called overtraining, which can last for months. The changes to the body’s physiology may include increased resting heart rate, increased muscle soreness, hormonal disruption (e.g. low testosterone, high cortisol), weight loss and reduced immunity and appetite.4
So we’ve started to look at how to manage your eating around your training sessions, which with the Energy Plan is part of a broader question examining your overall energy balance over 24 hours. On some days you will have no training, of course, and on others you will have harder or lighter sessions. Finding that balance between your fuel in and your energy out is the key to reaping the benefits of your Energy Plan, enjoying sustained energy to meet the challenges in your life and to look and feel your best. But it’s important to get the balance right, and not to let the scales tip too far in one direction or the other.
A positive energy balance sounds like a nice place to be, but don’t let the word ‘positive’ fool you: depending on your goal, it could be a negative result. This is where you have an excess of energy, after consuming more than your body has used. You’ve filled the car up and taken her for a ride, but at the end of the day there’s still plenty left in the tank.
A limited amount of carbohydrate can be stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver, but any further excess, along with excess fat and protein, all suffer the same fate: they are stored as fat. Surplus carbohydrate and protein can both be converted into fat for storage (the process doesn’t work in reverse, nice as that would be).
There is no protein store for the body to dip into; protein is instead contained within your muscles, liver and other tissues. So if you’re on a resistance-training programme to increase your muscle mass, a positive energy balance can be a good thing for you as, provided you have sufficient protein intake within that, it will help build new muscle tissue.
And for those for whom a positive energy balance isn’t a good thing, it’s important to remember that you don’t put on 10 kg overnight. It comes from days, weeks, months and years spent in a positive energy balance. It’s habitual, something we fall into without any real conscious thought. We have the same breakfast, go to the same sandwich shop at work for lunch, grab those same ingredients from the supermarket on the way home. Our nutrition becomes rigid as we blindly follow one plan. In Part II, we’re going to look at how you can break those habits and develop new, sustainable practices with your nutrition.
Once the body is expending more energy than it’s taking in, weight loss should – theoretically – occur. But it won’t necessarily be the kind of weight loss you want, as you could be losing anything from body fat to muscle glycogen, water bound to glycogen or muscle mass. Much of the initial weight loss following a low-carb diet is likely to be a reduction of fuel stores – stored water and glycogen in the body – not body fat, as you might be hoping for.
Losing weight in the short term isn’t too difficult. There are a host of weight-loss diets on the market that will help you do this, and all of them work on the same principle: putting your body in an energy deficit. However, few of them can realistically promise that they are sustainable – ultimately that would be bad for business, after all! – and it’s important to realise that being in an energy deficit for a prolonged period of time is not enjoyable or healthy. If you only put a little fuel in the car and take it out for a long ride, you’ll be running on fumes with the fuel gauge screaming WARNING! And these warnings now come with a name…
Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) is a relatively recently identified phenomenon. It was previously known as the Female Athlete Triad, and was, as the name suggests, thought to occur only in women when there was insufficient energy available for the body. This was known to lead to irregular menstrual cycles, leading in turn to a decrease in oestrogen and other hormones and a low bone mineral density (BMD). Low BMD means an increased risk of injury, often in the form of a stress fracture thanks to the weakened bones, but also has broader consequences for the body and mind.
The problem is now known to be no longer confined to women – men are susceptible too – and it isn’t just athletes who suffer from it either. If you’re running on an energy deficit and you’re pushing too hard, you might be in trouble.
Think about this. You’re currently in the middle of your exercise programme, pushing hard whilst restricting your energy in – but how do you know when you’ve gone too far? The diagram overleaf, from a recent paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, describes the symptoms of being energy-deficient.
If you’ve ever been on a diet in the past, do any of these sound familiar? In Part II of the book we will explore how you can achieve your goals without suffering these consequences.
Having looked at some of the principles around when and what to eat when exercising, we now look towards Part II, the more practical section of the book. It’s time to introduce the TTA model, which features the core principles of performance nutrition:
●Type of fuel
●Timing of food in relation to exercise
●The total Amount per meal or snack and over 24 hours
These three overlapping factors are the backbone of using nutrition as part of your Energy Plan, and we will now put them into practice.