Pre-Exercise Nutrition Tip

Reading Time

If your guts are often upset during exercise, take a look at your pre-exercise meal.

For obvious reasons, discomfort can and will impact your ability to perform in sport and exercise training.

One of the most common causes of discomfort for athletes during exercise is gastrointestinal stress. [1]

If you feel 'heavy', bloated, gassy, and maybe feel like you're going to throw up, there can be a number of potential causes. It's certainly worth an audit of any foods/meals you typically consume in the hours prior to exercise. Your guts ability to deal with food is impaired during hard exercise.

In laymans terms, when you're exercising hard, the body is preoccupied with providing fuel and resources to the working muscles. Digestion isn't a big priority, so gut function is 'put to the side' and therefore becomes impaired. Your guts can't deal with much of a workload so in the hours before exercise it's a good idea to only burden it with nutrients that will actually provide fuel for the upcoming work.

Anything that isn't that, or 'fluff' that'll get in the way, should be eliminated.

Fats, fibre and solid protein-dense foods provide the gut with a pretty big burden to deal with, and if it's in an exercise-induced impaired state, it simply might not be able to deal with it.

So what can you do about it?

Reduce and even eliminate fibre, fats and solid proteins from any meals consumed in the hours prior to exercise [2].

Fibre, micronutrients and all that 'health stuff' can wait. The primary role of pre-exercise nutrition is to fuel the machine and nothing else.

It's worth mentioning that the above is only really a consideration, and cause for potential concern for athletes who have really high fueling needs, who do a lot of very hard exercise.

For more information and nutritional strategies to improve your exercise performance, we have an online community that you can access for $5 per week. In our Team FNC Online Community, you’ll have access to our video lesson library that includes athlete and exercise specific videos. You’ll also have a chance to ask questions to our team, be inspired by nearly 100 meals that have been shared and tune in to a weekly webinar.

For more information on how you can sign up to improve your knowledge and understanding of nutrition for the price of 1 coffee a week, follow this link

[1]Training the Gut for Athletes

[2] ‘I think I’m gonna hurl’: A Narrative Review of the Causes of Nausea and Vomiting in Sport

Calorie Targets for Athletes

Reading Time

Working out how many Calories to eat can be a tricky task as an athlete. Your situation is not normal, you don't do 'normal' amounts of physical activity and there is also such a large variation in energy requirements within different sports. A marathon runner is going to churn through more fuel than a jockey.

Not eating enough can not only be detrimental to your sports performance but also your health. Low energy availability or 'not eating enough Calories and suffering the health consequences of that' can occur more often in sport than you might think. This is because Calorie requirements to fuel energy demands can often far exceed auto-regulated hunger levels especially when a dedicated athlete adopts a 'clean food only' mindset.

If sufficient energy and fuel for the work required are not available, poor health, illness and injury can result, taking time away from productive training weeks and impairing best performance in competition. If training takes place with limited energy available, work capacity can be impaired and so can the adaptations from training (getting better from training).

Having anything outside of 'an abundance of fuel for the body' as an athlete is sort of like putting your car in 'eco mode'. Sure it’ll drive, and it's more efficient, but it'll never perform as well as 'sport mode'. If you want to perform your best, don't seek efficiency.

You're not a Toyota Prius. Instead, give the body all the fuel it can handle and be a Formula 1 car.

Athlete: Tim Good - Torian Pro 2019

Image: Jess Chia of Essence Images
www.essenceimages.com.au

How do you actually come to a number of Calories to eat?

There are predictive equations out there that will provide you with a ball-park starting point to monitor and adjust from. They're never really going to be anything more than that, so using a complicated formula probably isn't warranted, and you'll find they all end up giving you just about the same answer.

The issue with this is that equations are based on norms or averages. Putting the fact athletes are not normal, even within 'the general population' large variations within individuals needs to be considered.

To work it out, use a simple baseline Calorie formula to make things easier. From there use an 'activity factor multiple', that gives a reasonable starting number. The process would be the same for anyone only as an athlete your activity multiples will be hugely elevated compared to the average.

Step 1: Predict resting energy expenditure.
- This is where you aim to obtain a rough resting energy requirement per day.

23 x BW (in kilos)
23 x 75 = 1725

Step 2: Multiply by activity level
- As mentioned this is the same for everyone, only as an athlete likely with higher energy demands the multiple will therefore often be higher. For most people with general activity levels, a multiple of 1.3-1.4 normally provides an 'about right starting Calorie amount'. 1.6-2.2 can be an appropriate range for an athlete depending on their sport and training load. It takes a bit of 'time in the trenches' as a nutritionist to assess the situation and select an appropriate multiple.

Either way, it's only going to be a start point so don't stress too much about this.

1725 x 1.8 = 3105

Step 3: Monitor and adjust until you find the 'sweet spot'.
In many sports gaining weight that carries no additional strength and disadvantages 'power to weight' is not desirable. The aim is to have as much fuel available without sending weight in an undesirable direction. This means continuing to slowly bump up Calories by ~5-10% each fortnight when your average weekly scale weight stays the same or drops. Of course, if weight loss or weight gain is required you'd factor that in, but essentially the more you can eat and maintain weight the better. Keep bumping it up until notable weight gain occurs. By that point, you've found 'the max Calories you can eat and maintain weight'. Having ample energy available will give the body 'the green light' to do whatever it wants as best as it wants. There will be no 'eco mode', there will be no 'conserving energy by 'half-assing' functions that continue to health and performance. The fuel is there, it's always going to be there, so the body turns up 'full boost', to crank out that peak performance.

An example of how this 'monitor and adjust period might look, is below.

Week 1-2
Calorie target: 3100
Average weekly scale weight: 75.5kg

Week 3-4
Calorie target: 3250
Average weekly scale weight: 75.4kg

Week 5-6
Calorie target: 3400
Average weekly scale weight: 76.8kg

Week 7-8
Calorie target: 3250
Average weekly scale weight: 75.6kg

From the above 8 week 'monitor and adjust phase', with a reasonable level of confidence, 'optimal weight maintenance Calories', or 'max weight maintenance Calories' probably sits somewhere around 3250 Calories per day.

It's finally worth mentioning that the monitor and adjust thing continues. Situations change, training volume and goals change. It'll get easier over time and the required level of reliance on accurate tracking will often reduce as the athlete finds their 'eating routine groove', and gets familiar with eating to their targets.

To learn more about sport and athlete-specific nutritional requirements, contact us today to start working with a sports nutritionist.