Competitive athletes have no business with intermittent fasting. Competitive athletes have no business with low-carb, no-carb, high-carb, fat-free, or see-food diets either. Competitive athletes probably shouldn’t even read books about nutrition. Skip the supplements, skip the hormones, and skip the health food stores.
That’s my take. Making things complicated is profitable…and the “nutrition” industry, especially its sports arm, is unbelievably profitable. How about making things simple for a sec?
Before we begin, three essential ideas:
- Health is NOT fitness or performance.
- You have to fuel your work.
- Unless you’re a professional, it’s health THEN performance.
The absolute basics of eating for health
Get, prepare, and eat plants. When you buy plants, they should be raw. Then you do some of the following steps before eating: wash the plants, break the plants, heat the plants.
Getting your plants raw guarantees you aren’t buying processing steps that degrade the nutrients or add unhealthy ingredients. Ideally, you get your plants grown locally and organically, but that just doesn’t matter as much as (1) getting plants at all and (2) preparing them yourself.
Cook your own meats. If you buy it ready to eat you have either paid a heavy tax for its preparation (like the cost of a dish at a restaurant) or you’re buying preservatives. Spend money on someone else doing your food prep if you want, that’s just an issue of finances and sustainability, but don’t buy preservatives. They’re bad for you.
Steep your own tea or brew your own coffee. If you like these things, make them yourself. It’s cheaper and it avoids added sugars, artificial sweeteners, or flavor additives. It also gives you control over dilution, whether you want your herbal/caffeinated beverage strong or weak, so allows you to customize for a happy digestive system.
So what have we done so far? You’ve bought plants, like leaves, stems, roots, fruits, and berries, and maybe beans or a few grains. You’ve either eaten them raw or you’ve prepared them yourself. You’ve cooked your own meats, if you eat meat. You’ve had your roasted or fermented warm beverage and know exactly what went into it.
If you’ve just done that, you’ve done nearly all of the work of nutrition for health.
What have we not done? You haven’t bought cereals or breads or cheese or deli meat. You haven’t bought cookies or pizza or alcohol. You haven’t indirectly bought added sugar and corn syrups and chemical additives.
That’s it. Just do that every day. Make a plan for your food needs, prepare your meals in advance if necessary, eat as much as you are hungry for, then go to bed early and repeat. That’s eating for health. As the mottos of “The Dark Side Of Fat Loss” and “F*CK Calories” went, ‘just eat real food!’
But if you’re a competitive athlete, eating for health isn’t the whole story. You also want to eat for performance. Let’s briefly unpack what I’m not saying there.
Health is neither fitness nor performance
There are inactive people, active people (including recreational athletes), and competitive athletes.
Inactive people often have one or more metabolic diseases. They need dietary intervention and medical guidance. For them, intermittent fasting and low/no-carb diets and certain other highly structured eating plans can be the difference between advancing disease, managing disease, and restoring health. I don’t write for inactive people.
Active people are exercising “enough”. They are already beyond the #1 risk factor for metabolic disease, which is physical inactivity. Active people need to eat for health and moderate their indulgences. As I explored in the article ‘Well, Are You Playing To Win?‘, what I write can benefit active people, especially in terms of coaching yourself or basic strength training templates, but it isn’t built for you. Play your game, eat for health, and carry on.
Competitive athletes are seeking performance. They train more and more often and harder than is necessary for health. Those excesses in training come with risks. Those risks need to be managed with recovery activity and with nutrition. Undernourishment compromises performance. Avoiding undernourishment is the only thing I’m really talking about in this article.
Athletes have to fuel their work
Idea 3 comes first here: unless you’re a professional, it’s health THEN performance. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize food and supplements for performance, but some of them compromise overall health. Much like working long hours or traveling frequently to earn the money to feed your family isn’t good for your health, optimizing your entire nutrition strategy for performance will absolutely be bad for your health to some degree. If your sport doesn’t pay your bills and feed your family, you don’t need the complexity or the risks of such a plan.
So with Idea 3 fully in place, as a competitive athlete, your first job is to eat for health. Your second job is to fuel the work.
What It Means To Fuel The Work
An active person or recreational athlete should be targeting 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity plus 2 strength training sessions per week, per the American Heart Association. It doesn’t matter whether I believe that is adequate for optimal health; it matters that a competitive athlete may reach that full activity recommendation in a single day of training!
Training with intensity while striving to achieve performance goals is a source of stress on the body. High-intensity work (not HIIT as a cardio source; I mean work near the limits of your force production capability) drains resources quickly. Those resources must be provided through the diet in order to recover quickly enough to train again 1-2 days later.
So “fueling the work” mostly refers to what you eat after performing and slightly refers to what you consume while performing. Performing includes both hard training and competition. How you fuel the work depends on the duration and intensity of the work.
When, With What, and How To Fuel The Work
Go back to my articles about the difference between cyclists and weightlifters. Here’s part 1 and here’s part 2. Keep those concepts in mind as you consider the following parameters:
- Every competitive athlete needs nutrients after training
- If you play a burst-and-repeat sport (field and court sports, combat sports, gymnastics, combined events in athletics, multiple relays in swim or athletics), you need nutrients between rounds/events or at breaks
- if you play an endurance sport or power endurance sport (cycling, distance running, rowing, XC skiing), you probably need nutrition during your sport
- if you play a power sport (jump or throw specialist, lifter, gravity), you probably only need nutrients after training
Your body runs on ATP (adenosine triphosphate). A small amount of it is stored directly in your muscles for immediate use. During normal life, you use tiny quantities of ATP during every movement, then your aerobic system replenishes it.
But when you amp up intensity and duration (maximal effort for 5-7 seconds; large efforts for around 20 seconds; moderate efforts for up to 20 minutes; or relatively small efforts for longer than that), the rate of consumption of ATP exceeds its rate of replacement by just the aerobic system.
The fastest path for “restoring” ATP is with extra creatine…but that’s more of a boost to your ATP storage and usage. Creatine supplements are used in the hours and days prior to competition. Most athletes don’t need this and the ones who benefit from it already know.
The fastest actual path for restoring ATP is for your body to smash up glycogen, which is a storage form of glucose. So most during-activity sports nutrition focuses on the simple sugar glucose.
After hard training, muscle cells are uniquely sensitive to blood glucose. So carbs are still needed, but they can be more complex. Further, the rebuilding actions which make you stronger need amino acids. So you also need protein. This applies to every athlete, regardless of the during-activity nutrition needs
During play…
- burst-and-repeat athletes benefit from 0.50-0.75 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram bodyweight across or after a full match (assuming there will be another match within an hour or so)
- endurance athletes benefit from 1.00+ g/kg per hour of sustained work
- power athletes benefit from 1.00 g/kg 30-45 min before performing
Sports drinks are acceptable for hitting these carb numbers. Bananas, mangoes, berries, and dried fruit are also excellent for hitting these carb numbers. But as wild as it sounds, you can get away with just about any simple sugar, including table sugar in water and soda and bagels with jam, as long as it isn’t loaded with fat. So maybe don’t have pre-comp donuts. (It hurts my feelings too, believe me.)
After play…
- get 20-40 grams of protein (preferably from meat or legumes you cooked yourself, but a supplement can be appropriate here)
- get 1.20-1.50 g/kg carbohydrate (preferably from grains, roots, or stems you cooked yourself, but this is the rare “good” place for bread and pasta and the like..)
- get a liter of water
Then, the rest of your day, ‘just eat real food’ according to your hunger signals.
That’s it. Do a few calculations on how many carbs you might need around/during performance, then add that to your meal planning. Plan for a bit of extra protein and water right after training.
Takeaways On Sports Nutrition
What have we done here? You’ve arrived at first principles for eating to optimize your health and support your performance IN THAT ORDER. You’ve planned and prepped your own meals, so you have control over every step.
What have we not done? You haven’t wasted mental energy on supplements, fad diets, or endless macro tracking. You haven’t made a simple thing complicated. And you haven’t served the profits of an industry exploiting your ignorance.
Just eat real food, eat as much of it as you’re hungry for, and fuel your work.
Sports nutrition really doesn’t have to be complicated. Get to bed early and get back to work tomorrow!
P.S.: if you really want to go deeper, start with this podcast, then visit sportsrd.org.