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Use the endurance- sports nutrition hierarchy to eat and compete

This is an excerpt from Practical Fueling for Endurance Athletes by Kylee Van Horn.

It wasn’t really until 1965, when Gatorade first released its sports drink, that the importance of endurance-sports fueling really came into focus. Gatorade provided the means for an athlete to get calories, fluids, and sodium all from one source. It set the tone for what was to come in the sports nutrition world, where conventional wisdom is so saturated with both information and misinformation that it can be hard to discern the right way to fuel the body for performance.

Think of the most recent messaging you’ve heard or seen about sports nutrition. I’m going to guess that only about half of it was grounded in science or had practical applications to your life. While the baseline level of knowledge tends to vary in endurance-sports nutrition, you must focus on the foundational nutrition skills to fuel the body well and recover properly before homing in on the finer details.

I liken it to building a house. Without the proper foundation in place, the rest of the details don’t matter because it will ultimately crumble. It’s the same with your foundational nutrition skills. That’s not to say that your foundation won’t look different from another endurance athlete’s foundation, but the skills must be in place. At the end of the day, nutrition must work for your lifestyle, and that’s where the athlete disconnect often comes in. To put it more clearly, while there might be certain nutrition recommendations and practices for endurance athletes to follow, if you can’t actually make the changes in a way that feels doable in the long term, then there is a disconnect between recommendations and reality. That gap between education and application is where this book becomes most useful. It provides a bridge and offers practical solutions to some of your toughest nutrition challenges.

Overwhelmed and confused, many endurance athletes struggle to wade through the ever-evolving world of sports nutrition to create a clear path forward. In a society where instant gratification is preferred, many athletes constantly waver between fad diets, the newest nutrition “hack,” and dietary supplements to gain an extra advantage instead of actually investing time and resources into bettering their nutrition skills. Unfortunately, this can lead to a whole host of unintentional health and performance side effects, including hormonal imbalances, increased injury risk, decreased training adaptations, micronutrient deficiencies, and gut imbalances.

Endurance sports include a wide range of disciplines, intensities, and distances of activities, which can affect daily and intraworkout nutrition specifics and should not be presented as a one-size-fits-all recommendation. Because of the sheer amount of time and energy endurance athletes spend training and racing, their nutrition requires close attention to overall energy intake, since it can be all too easy to end up underfueled. And with high amounts of stress, micronutrients such as iron, calcium, and magnesium become even more important to include as part of an overall nutrition strategy. These micronutrients provide support for the body’s endurance machine, allowing for proper energy production, muscle contraction, and structural support for bones and muscles. The intraworkout fuel plan must be approached like a puzzle with an intricate interplay of fluids, electrolytes, and calories all coming together to influence performance.

Most endurance athletes are not training for competition year-round and, therefore, go through different microcycles and macrocycles to periodize their training. A training microcycle is a shorter, more focused period that allows the body to be trained and overloaded. A training macrocycle is essentially your whole season with all the different periodized training components included. Similarly, nutrition can also be periodized to maximize training adaptations. On a micro level, nutrition can be adjusted daily to account for different training sessions. Macro-level nutrition can be adjusted based on the current part of the athlete’s training cycle and on competition-specific goals.

Quite often, endurance athletes approach their nutrition haphazardly without a plan or any intention for what they’re doing. They turn to supplements as a crutch to gain a performance edge, when what they really need to focus on is nutrition periodization and timing, hydration, and sleep before trying supplementation. That’s what this book will help you sort out, with visuals such as the endurance-sports nutrition hierarchy of needs shown in figure 1.1. It stresses the importance of nutrition and lifestyle changes before introducing supplementation.

To prioritize this hierarchy appropriately, athletes must shift away from the hyped-up marketing of quick fixes and extreme methods and take a more rational approach to fueling that combines practicality and intention with intuition. Due to the busyness of everyday life and the push to keep doing more, more, more, many athletes have lost their innate ability to recognize and respond to hunger, fullness, and thirst cues. And while it is important to be able to fuel with intention to meet energy demands, our bodies are not calculated machines, and remembering that is also important for long-term physical and mental health.

More Excerpts From Practical Fueling for Endurance Athletes

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