What should an athlete eat before, during, and after exercise? This is a question to which athletes have sought the answer for as long as there have been competitive sports. In the days of the Roman Empire, gladiators ate the heart and muscle of lions before the contest, believing this would give them the ferocious qualities of the animal. As late as the 1960s, athletes were still eating prodigious quantities of red meat before engaging in “battle.” In the 1970s, there was a swing toward consuming carbohydrates on race day. That trend still continues, but recently there has been an increased interest in protein and fat in the athlete’s race-day diet. And so the pendulum swings the other way once again.
While the role of carbohydrate ingestion before, during, and after exercise has been studied extensively over the past 40 years, only recently has there been much research into the role and timing of dietary protein and fat relative to exercise. Since such research is still in its infancy, there is a great deal not fully understood, and, further complicating the matter, there are contradictions in the limited research available.
Training for endurance sports such as running, cycling, triathlon, rowing, swimming, and cross-country skiing places great demands on the body, putting the athlete in some stage of recovery almost continuously during periods of heavy training. The keys to optimum recovery are sleep and diet. Even though we recommend that everyone eat a diet similar to what our Stone Age ancestors ate, we realize that nutritional concessions must be made for the athlete who is training at a high volume in the range of 10 to 35 or more hours per week of rigorous exercise. Rapid recovery is the biggest issue facing such an athlete. While it’s not impossible to recover from such training loads on a strict Paleo Diet, it is somewhat more difficult to recover quickly. If it is modified before, during, and immediately following challenging workouts, the Paleo Diet provides two benefits sought by all athletes—quick recovery for the next workout and superior health for the rest of your life.
Such high training loads require a great intake of carbohydrate for short-term replenishment of expended glycogen stores, perhaps as much as 1,200 to 1,500 calories. Eating low to moderate glycemic index foods in the Paleo-approved categories of fruits and vegetables may certainly replace such deficiencies, but will be accompanied by several pounds of fiber. Such a diet will also be slow to replace expended glycogen stores in the muscles following hard workouts or races, thus delaying or substantially affecting a subsequent workout or race in the next few hours and days. This is when modification of a strict Paleo Diet is beneficial to the serious athlete.
While highly fit and athletic, our Stone Age ancestors never ran 26.2 miles at the fastest pace possible or willingly took on any of the other racing challenges of 21st-century athletes. Evolutionarily, today’s athletes are pushing the limits of physiology. Their diets must be adjusted to meet these demands.
In this and the next two chapters, we will examine the times when eating in ways other than the more conventional Paleo Diet is appropriate for the serious endurance athlete. But we can’t emphasize strongly enough that these are exceptions to the standards discussed in Chapter 9 and are limited to specific time windows relative to training sessions and races. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we discuss the five recovery stages through which the athlete passes on most days that include exercise. By dividing the day into the following stages and eating appropriate foods in adequate amounts in each, you can enhance your recovery and maximize performance.
Stage I: Immediately before exercise
Stage II: During exercise
Stage III: 30 minutes immediately following exercise
Stage IV: A period equal to the duration of the preceding exercise session
Stage V: Long-term, postexercise recovery preceding the next Stage I
Before getting into the details of these stages, let’s take a look at diet during a time when most athletes seem to be unsure of what to eat—the week of the race. To differentiate the importance of all of the race events on your schedule, we classify them as priority A, B, or C. Priority A events are the most important on your schedule. Normally an athlete will have only two or three of these planned for a given season since each involves cutting back on the training load for several days to a few weeks prior. Such reductions, while allowing the athlete to fully realize race readiness, may well lead to diminished fitness if done more frequently than a few times per season. Priority C races are the least important events on your schedule. There may be many of these because they are considered little more than challenging workouts done, for example, to test fitness or to make final preparations for a higher-priority race. As you might expect, priority B events fall between A and C in terms of importance. You want to do well at these races, so you may rest for a few days before them, but you won’t taper your training over the longer period as is done for the highest-priority events.
This is not a time to make wholesale changes in your diet. Stick with the foods you’ve been eating, but be aware that if this is a priority A event, you will probably need to reduce the amount of food that you eat this week, as your training volume is reduced, so you may avoid excessive weight gain. You might still put on as much as 2 or 3 pounds, but most of that is water. For every gram of glycogen your body stores away in the muscles, it also packs away 2.6 grams of water. Having extra water on board may well be an advantage, especially if you’ll be racing in hot or humid conditions.
The day before the race, if you’ve been carefully following a Paleo Diet, shift your food choices by taking in slightly more carbohydrate than usual to ensure that your carbohydrate storage sites are full. With the reduced volume this week, your body is primed to store glycogen, so this last day of shifting your diet to increased carbohydrate should be adequate.
Now is a good time to eat more fruits such as bananas, peaches, cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew melon, along with vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams. Snack on dried fruit today. To moderate the glycemic index of these foods, include protein and fat with each meal. Examples of good fats to select today are olive and flaxseed oils as salad dressing along with cold-water fish such as salmon, halibut, haddock, herring, and mackerel. Such fish, as always, will satisfy both the protein and fat needs the evening before the race. Skip the pasta party.
In addition, reduce dietary fiber to allow for easier digestion of foods in preparation for the next day’s race. Otherwise, eat at usual times and keep food types as normal as possible.
It happens all too often: An athlete prepares meticulously for weeks and months for an important event. There is no workout that is too demanding, no sacrifice too great. Then comes race day, and an error is made in the prerace meal: choosing food that takes too long to digest or digests too quickly; eating too much too close to the race start; taking in too little fluid; or eating nothing at all. The result is a disastrous performance—all that preparation for naught. We’ve seen it happen too many times. In fact, we’ve experienced it ourselves. Live and learn.
How could this have been prevented? How, indeed, could the athletic performance have been enhanced by the foods eaten before a demanding race or training session? The purpose of this section is to help you establish a dietary routine that serves you well, whether for a workout starting at your back door or a race a thousand miles away. Of course, it’s easier if you’re at home than on the road. Our goal here is to establish a select menu of foods that you can find whether you’re in Hometown, USA, or traveling to Hobart, Australia, for a race.
Let’s start by examining the goals for preexercise foods and fluids. There are five major objectives we are trying to accomplish with nutrient intake just before the race or workout.
Satisfy hunger. This is pretty basic, so it’s a wonder that some athletes ignore food first thing in the morning. If it’s race day, you may be too preoccupied to be aware of telltale signs at first, but your body will soon cry out for food. The longer you put it off, the greater the risk of starting exercise underfueled. The biggest downside of such a mistake is what cyclists call “bonking” and runners call “hitting the wall.” You simply run very low on muscle and liver glycogen—the body’s storage form of carbohydrate. When that happens, you’re forced to slow down or completely stop.
Realizing that you’re hungry in the last hour before exercise may well be too late. Eating so close to starting is likely to do more harm than good. Don’t start hungry and don’t put off eating. If possible, eat at least an hour in advance of exercise. The higher the intensity of the workout or race, the more time is necessary for digestion. At first you may find it difficult to eat right out of bed, but this aversion is mostly mental. Get used to taking in food of some sort early every day and it will be much easier on race day. You may find that a liquid meal is the best option if you dislike eating early in the morning.
Restock carbohydrate stores depleted by the overnight fast. During the night, as you slept, your body was busy repairing and replacing tissues in an ongoing maintenance routine it has been engaged in since your conception. And, of course, there were energy demands throughout the night simply related to being alive—breathing, cardiac activity, movement, digestion, and other life-sustaining functions. All of this takes energy, and one of the most available fuel sources for this activity is the carbohydrate stored in your muscles as glycogen. So when you awake after several hours of sleep, your carbohydrate stores may be depleted by as much as 140 to 260 calories, depending on your body size and fat-free mass (muscles, bones, hair, fingernails, organs—everything other than fat). Replacing these expended calories, roughly 10 percent of your carbohydrate stores, is important to your immediate athletic performance, and the longer the race or workout session, the more critical this becomes.
Reestablish normal body fluid levels. Besides expending energy as you slept, your body also lost water in your breath, through your pores, and during any bathroom visits. First thing in the morning, your body may be down several ounces from normal hydration levels. Failing to replenish fluids prior to exercise could set you up for a substandard race or workout.
Optimize performance. This is a big one. Other than simply restoring your fuel and fluid levels, proper preexercise nutrition has a lot to do with how you perform. Certain nutrients have been shown to boost performance for some types of events. We’ll examine these possibilities later in this chapter.
Prepare the body to recover quickly postexercise. The better your hydration and fuel levels are going into the race or workout, the faster you’ll recover, assuming you refuel and rehydrate adequately during exercise. But if you start with a low tank, even if you eat and drink as you should during activity, recovery may well be delayed. This means it will take you longer to return to a high level of training in subsequent days. It’s even more critical if you are working out two or three times a day or if you are stage racing, as road cyclists often do.
There is little doubt that preexercise nutrient intake can help your athletic performance. The big question has to do with what you should eat and drink. We can offer several guidelines that come not only from the research but also from our personal experiences as athletes and from coaching hundreds of others in several sports over the past 30 years. In a nutshell, here are the guidelines that will help you make decisions about what to take in before starting a race or workout.
Consume 200 to 300 calories per hour prior to exercise. The amount you need is determined by your body size, how much you ate the night before, what time that meal was eaten, and your experience with eating before exercise. We recommend eating no less than 2 hours before the race or workout when possible. Three hours is usually better, especially if you tend to have a nervous stomach on race days. If you eat 2 hours before, take in 400 to 600 calories. If eating 3 hours before, you could eat 600 to 900 calories. Your body size and experience should help you narrow the range.
Take in mostly carbohydrate. As was explained in the previous section, during the multihour fast of your night’s sleep, your body’s stores of glycogen were reduced. The fastest, most efficient way to restore this vital fuel source is by eating carbohydrate. If chosen wisely, carbohydrate also has the advantage of digesting fairly quickly so that you won’t be carrying a load of undigested foodstuffs early in the training session or race. The type of foods to eat will be addressed shortly.
The more time before the start of the race or workout, the more you should reduce the glycemic index of the meal. The glycemic index of a food indicates how quickly a carbohydrate’s sugar gets into the blood. A quick release of sugar from the meal triggers the release of the hormone insulin by the pancreas. This results in a rapid decrease in the blood sugar level, followed quickly by increased hunger shortly before the race begins. That’s not what you want to happen. But by eating a lower glycemic index food 2 or more hours before starting, your gut will have time to digest it and slowly replenish glycogen stores. Fruit, for example, is a good choice because its sugar, fructose, is slow to digest, lowering the glycemic index.
Keep the meal low in fiber. There are several ways to reduce the glycemic index of a food. One of the most effective is the addition of fiber. But this may be too effective for a preexercise meal; the fiber in some foods, such as coarse, whole-grain cereals, is so dense that it could well sit in your gut for several hours, soaking up fluids and swelling. That’s not a good feeling to have at the start of a race or hard workout.
Include protein, especially the branched-chain amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Certain amino acids, the “essential” ones, are critical for your health and fitness and must be in the foods you eat because the body can’t produce them. Research out of the lab of Peter Lemon, PhD, at the University of Western Ontario reveals that three of these essential amino acids, those called branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), have benefits for performance when taken before aerobic exercise. (If you study protein for athletes, you’re sure to come across Dr. Lemon’s name often, as he is considered one of the leading authorities in the world on this topic.) In this study, cyclists were given 6 grams of BCAA or 6 grams of gelatin 1 hour before an exhaustive session on a bicycle. Compared with the gelatin feeding, the BCAA significantly improved time to exhaustion and maximum power output, while lowering heart rate at submaximum efforts. Blood sugar and lactate levels did not differ between the two trials.
Other research has revealed that a mixture of the essential amino acids and carbohydrate taken before strenuous exercise not only improves endurance performance but also effectively stimulates protein synthesis after exercise. This is great news for the serious endurance athlete, as time to recovery is critical for performance. The faster you recover, the sooner you can do another quality workout; the more quality workouts in a given period of training, the better your subsequent performances in races.
Finally, an additional benefit of adding protein to a preexercise meal is that this lowers the glycemic index of the carbohydrate ingested along with it. A lowered glycemic index means a longer, slower release of sugar into the bloodstream during the subsequent exercise session, thus delaying the onset of fatigue.
Drink to satisfy thirst. You can prevent dehydration during exercise by making sure that you are well hydrated before starting. Furthermore, research has shown that consuming adequate fluids relative to thirst reduces protein breakdown during exercise. Anything you can do to spare protein or prevent its use as a fuel during a race or workout benefits both performance and recovery. You don’t want to use muscle tissue to fuel exercise. Drinking to satisfy thirst before exercise is one simple way to help ensure this doesn’t happen.
Take in water only in the last hour. The purpose here is to prevent a rapid influx of sugar to the blood, followed by the release of insulin to control it. Such a sugar-insulin (hypoglycemic) reaction is likely to leave you low on blood sugar at the start—just the opposite of what you intended—so you feel slightly dizzy and light-headed within a few minutes of starting exercise.
The exception to this guideline is that in the last 10 minutes prior to exercise, high glycemic index fluids may be consumed. This is explained in greater detail below.
Foods to eat before exercise should be those that can be found in grocery stores, no matter where you are racing, or easily be carried during travel. The following are examples of such food sources to eat prior to the last hour before starting exercise. You should select those that appeal to you in the morning and are well tolerated by your body. Try them on the days of race-simulation workouts and priority C races, well before the targeted priority A event for which you intend to use them. You may want to combine two or more of these to create some variety in your preexercise meal.
Fruit with eggs. Eggs are loaded with protein and easily digested by most people. Boiled eggs may be taken to a race venue if they are kept chilled, or you can order scrambled eggs at a restaurant. One large, whole egg contains about 6 grams of protein and 1.5 grams of BCAA. Combine this with fresh fruit, especially fruit that is low in fiber, such as bananas, peaches, cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon. Fibrous fruits to avoid include apples, berries, dates, figs, grapes, pears, mango, papaya, and pineapple.
Applesauce mixed with protein powder. Look for unsweetened applesauce. This is low in fiber and has a low glycemic index primarily due to its fructose content, and it’s well tolerated by most people. Stir in 2 or 3 tablespoons of powdered egg or whey protein to further slow the glycemic reaction and to add BCAA. The BCAA content of protein powders varies with source and manufacturer, but they contain roughly 2.2 grams per tablespoon. Carry protein powder in a plastic bag when traveling to races and purchase applesauce at your destination. While this doesn’t exactly sound like a gourmet meal, realize that you are eating before the race only to provide fuel for your body. Be sure to try this in training or before a priority C race.
Baby food, including animal products. This may sound strange, but it works well. Chopped and pureed baby food can be found anywhere and is easily digested by the human gut at any age. Good choices are fruits or vegetables, along with chopped meats such as turkey, fish, or chicken.
Liquid meals. If you tend to have a very nervous stomach prior to races, blending foods may produce a liquid you can more easily digest. Blend low-fiber fruit, such as those listed above, with fruit juice and 2 or 3 tablespoons of powdered egg or whey protein.
Commercial meal-replacement drinks, although not optimal, are an option when you are away from home and don’t have any other options for real food. Look for products with added protein, such as Ensure High Protein. It’s best to avoid those drinks that use milk as a base. Whey protein as an ingredient, however, will meet your protein needs for the prerace meal. Be aware that these drinks are becoming so popular with endurance athletes that stores in the vicinity of races often sell out days in advance. Bring your own or shop early.
Sports bar with protein. This is the least attractive of the options, but it’ll work in a pinch. Protein bars, sometimes called meal-replacement bars, are easily carried and available almost everywhere. While primarily a carbohydrate-based food source, they contain just enough protein to slow the glycemic reaction and add some BCAA to the meal.
Fluids, especially water. You may also use coffee or tea, which have known benefits associated with caffeine. As little as 1 or 2 cups (depending on body size) of strongly brewed coffee, which has about 3 times as much caffeine as tea, before exercise has been shown to improve endurance performance in athletes who are not chronic users. However, be aware that there are potential downsides with caffeine, such as upset stomach and increased nervousness. Most studies have found that caffeine is not a diuretic. The need to urinate after drinking caffeinated drinks probably has to do with drinking beyond thirst. The World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) does not consider caffeine to be a prohibited substance, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as of 2008 enforces a limit of 12 mg per liter of urine. It would take most athletes 6 to 8 cups of strong coffee to reach this level.
Fruit and vegetables juices may also be taken in before exercise, but not in the last hour prior. Be sure to experiment with these during training sessions. Good choices are tomato, apple, and orange. Tomato juice often has added sodium, which may increase your thirst and need for fluids (there is more on sodium in Chapter 3).
Taking in carbohydrate within the last hour or so of starting exercise, not including the final 10 minutes before, may cause hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) during the first several minutes of exercise in some people who are especially sensitive to sugar. For them, carbohydrate, especially a high glycemic load source, causes an almost immediate increase in blood insulin levels to reduce the blood’s sugar level, resulting in hypoglycemia. Many athletes may well experience light-headedness or dizziness in the ensuing exercise because of this reaction. Why doesn’t this happen when high glycemic index carbohydrate is taken in during the final 10 minutes before starting? The answer is that there just isn’t enough time for the body to respond by pumping out insulin. By the time exercise occurs, the body immediately begins to down-regulate its need for insulin. During exercise, sugar intake produces smaller increases of this hormone because the muscles become more sensitive to insulin and permeable to glucose, reducing the need for large amounts of insulin that normally are required to escort the sugar into the muscle.
Taking in 100 to 200 calories from a few ounces of sports drink or gel, followed by 6 to 8 ounces of water, may well give you the energy boost needed right before starting, without any negative effects. This is especially beneficial for those early-morning workouts when you get out of bed within an hour of heading out the door. It may also prove helpful to the athlete who just can’t eat first thing in the morning.
Just as with the preexercise meal examples offered above, the purpose of this 10-minute topping off is to replenish glycogen stores while ensuring adequate hydration levels.