Episode 197 - How I’d Upgrade Your Nutrition If You Were My Athlete

How I’d Upgrade Your Nutrition If You Were My Athlete

Think you're doing everything right with your training and nutrition, but the results just aren't stacking up? You're not alone.

In this episode, Taryn walks you through the four most powerful nutrition upgrades she'd make if you were her athlete. These are the exact strategies she uses inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy to turn underperforming athletes into high-performing machines.

Whether you're feeling flat, struggling to recover or just guessing your way through race day fuelling, this episode will help you identify what to fix and where to start.

What you'll learn:

• Why most triathletes are unknowingly underfuelled

• The problem with generic race nutrition plans and how to build one that actually works

• What effective recovery nutrition really looks like

• How your day-to-day meals could be sabotaging your goals

Links:

Check how well you’re doing when it comes to your nutrition with our 50 Step Checklist to Triathlon Nutrition Mastery

Start working on your nutrition now with my Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course 

It’s for you if you’re a triathlete and you feel like you’ve got your training under control and you’re ready to layer in your nutrition. It's your warmup on the path to becoming a SUPERCHARGED triathlete – woohoo!

Connect with me: 

To learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy, head HERE | dietitianapproved.com/academy

See behind-the-scenes action on Instagram: @dietitian.approved

Follow along on Facebook: @DietitianApproved

Join our FREE Dietitian Approved Crew Facebook group

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Episode Transcription

Episode 197: How I’d Upgrade Your Nutrition If You Were My Athlete

Taryn Richardson (00:00)
I want you to imagine for a second that I'm your sports dietitian and you and I are working together. You've come to me and you're feeling tired and despite training hard and what you think is eating well, you're not really seeing the results that you'd expect from that. Maybe your body composition is not where you'd like it to be. Hands up, 99 % of triathletes are in that boat. Maybe your energy levels are inconsistent.

You know, maybe they're up in the morning, you get that post-training euphoria or high and you think, yeah, I'm going to smash today, I'm going to win today. But then after lunch, they just quickly crash and fade and it ends up in a nap or searching for some really fast acting sugars to get you through the afternoon. Maybe you've come to me because you're not recovering properly, or you actually have no idea if you're recovering properly. Or maybe it's just that you're guessing your way through nutrition and you're hoping for the best. Crossing fingers and hoping you get there.

You think you're doing all right, but you're not really sure because you've never worked with a triathlon dietitian before. Does any of that sound familiar? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I'd do for you if you were my athlete. So these are the first things that I look at when someone joins the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, because honestly, you can train hard and still feel rubbish.

All the time. You can eat really healthy and still be under fueled. And you can spend years racing without ever really knowing if what you're doing is the right thing for you. So if you're ready to stop guessing and start upgrading your nutrition like a high performing triathlete, then let's dive in.

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the TNA podcast. Thank you so much for wrapping me around your ear holes today. I have one quick shout out to Wayne Atherton to say thank you so much for supporting the podcast. You can go and support the show too if you go to dietitianapproved.com/legends. Thank you so much, Wayne. I hope you're getting lots out of it. Now today's episode, I have four fixes for you. Four things that are some of the biggest bangs for your buck when it comes to nutrition and things that I would upgrade with your nutrition if you were my athlete. But before we dive into those, I want to go through some of the things that I need to know to be able to help you with your nutrition.

I want to give you a bit of context and a bit of background around what I do with somebody because to really help somebody to actually solve their nutrition problems, I need to know a whole heap of information and probably more than you think I need to know.

It's not just about what you eat or what to eat. It's about everything that is going on around that and your lifestyle as well. So to start with, I need to know, I guess, what type of triathlete you are and what your goals are in this sport for your body composition, your health, any of those sorts of things. Are you trying to lean up? Are you trying to build muscle mass? Are you trying to maintain your energy throughout the day and stop that afternoon crash?

Are you trying to qualify for Kona? Are you trying to win Kona? Are you looking at setting your sights on a three day multi-stage event like Ultraman?

Or are you hoping to just get to the finish line? This is just a pure hobby and being able to do the training and race and get to the start line and the finish line, still with a smile on your dial, is the type of athlete that you are. It doesn't matter what type of athlete you are. I just need to know what type of athlete you are to help you because my advice is different for each of those categories that I just listed off. It's not generic, everyone do blah.

It really does depend on the type of triathlete that you are and how you train and your goals as well. And my advice for you will change as a season progresses or your goals change or we get closer to your goals. It's not a set and forget, this is your generic advice forever. It is an adapting evolving thing based on what we're trying to achieve.

And your goals are going to completely change the way that we plan that. The second thing I need to know or understand is your training program. Are you somebody that does 20 hours of training in a week? Are you somebody that fits in eight? Like where do you sit in the training hours per week spectrum? And then where are your sessions situated in a day? Are you only a morning trainer? Are you an evening trainer? Are you somebody that squeezes in a session in your lunch hour?

When are your peak weeks for your A-race? Because timing and the way that you train is everything when it comes to nutrition. And the more I understand that, the easier it is for me to help you.

I need to understand your body composition. Maybe confronting, but I need to know your height, I need to know your weight. And if you have it, any other data like Dexa scans, BIA scans, skin folds, anything like that. Is your body composition stable or has it been changing? And what does that change look like? What's the story there?

All of that information gives me an understanding of your metabolic needs, your requirements and where we can focus your fuelling based on that information.

I also want to know about your medical history, anything in your previous medical history or family history that is going to affect my nutrition guidance for you and any blood work that you've had and the results from that from the past or present. Any of that stuff is super valuable to help me guide nutrition interventions based on where you're at and what we're trying to achieve.

Are there any past conditions or things that we need to be mindful of? What are your iron levels? What's your thyroid doing? Do you have any gut health issues? All of that matters when it comes to piecing together your nutrition as a triathlete.

Are you a female going through the menopause years where your body feels like it's doing things that you just can't control despite your best you have any food intolerances, any allergies or any just preferences of things that you will and will not eat?

I also want to understand your lifestyle. Are you a busy parent managing a full-time job and juggling the family responsibilities and a busy household? Are you retired with all the time in the world to train and eat? Are you working part-time?

All of that plays into what your nutrition needs to look like. There's no point me giving you particular advice and structured plans if you just cannot fit it in. My job is to make your life with nutrition easier, not more stressful and overwhelming.

And then of course we dive deep into your current fueling habits. Are you using sports nutrition products? What are they? Are they working for you? Do you have any struggles or issues when it comes to fueling? Gut issues, cramping, bonking, fading, or maybe just feeling flat and you're not actually sure why or what the problem is and how to fix it. So that is just a brief snapshot. There is a lot of information that I gather to make informed evidence-based decisions for you, which is why I can't give you really specific advice on the podcast, PS, because I don't know enough about you to do that. And I know that a lot of athletes get a lot of value from the podcast and I get messages all the time, thank you, I do love them, of how listening to the podcast has changed your nutrition and changed your results. And I love that. And I will always share what I can on the podcast.

But just so you know, the podcast is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your sports nutrition compared to what it's like to work with me properly inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy where I can pull all those pieces of data together for you in a way that makes sense for your training, your life and your goals so that your nutrition is your secret weapon. It's working for you at every step of the journey. So with that in mind, let's dive into the first big fix that I would make if we were working together.

Okay, the first fix that I would make to upgrade your nutrition, and this is a big one, is that you are probably under-fuelled without actually realising it.

It is so common, especially in age group triathletes trying to juggle training, work, family, body composition goals on top of that. So you might be doing things like skipping your pre-training nutrition because you've heard that faster training is good. It's good for fat loss. I'm going to lose more weight if I do faster training. You might be onto eating carbohydrate because carbs make you fat and you're trying to lose some of that. You might be eating the same way each day, day in, day out, there's not a lot of shift, there's not a lot of periodisation to your nutrition to support training. And it's not something that you really know how to do without some good quality education to be able to be adaptive with your nutrition. But the problem is that your training is not particularly effective if your tank is empty all the time. And I say this all the time, but we're not adapting if we haven't got the right nutrition building blocks in our plan to support the training program. So often I see athletes like smashing themselves in training without the right building blocks of nutrition and just getting nowhere feeling flat, hitting the wall in tough sessions, so you're not actually able to push through and fight through those really hard intervals. And you just don't progress like you should if you're doing that. And nine times out of 10, a lot of that can be fixed by actually fueling properly. Seems really simple and you're like, yeah, cool, Taryn, I got this, I can do that. But the practicalities of getting that right and the nuances to that day to day can actually be quite challenging if you don't have the right tools and resources to understand what's going on and then how to actually build your plate and what to put in your pie hole to support that training.

So inside the Academy, that's actually the first thing that we do in our whole first phase. We fix your day-to-day nutrition and get that fueling working for you, not against you.

So that you've actually got energy to train and adapt from that training, which is where the magic happens. Yeah. The second fix, number two, is you're winging your race day nutrition.

If I had a dollar for every triathlete that said to me, just take two gels an hour, one gel every 30 minutes, because that's what the packet says, that's what somebody told me I should do, and I hope for the best, I would be a very rich dietician.

Because then when I ask them to dive deeper with me, okay, tell me what the ingredients are. What's the type of sugars that are in that gel? What's the different ratio? What's your electrolyte load? What's your sweat rate? Like so many questions and things that we can dial in with our race nutrition that people have no idea how to do. And it makes zero sense to me when everything in your life, everything else is so structured. You've got a perfectly structured training program that you follow. Why?

Do you not then have a perfectly structured and dialled in for you day-to-day meal plan and race nutrition plan? You spend so many hours doing the damn training to race. I don't understand race plan wouldn't be perfect. Like we can do better. I know you can do better.

We heard from Troy on the podcast last week, he was DIYing his own gels, making his own gels for training, but because he didn't have confidence in that approach and what he was doing, he then raced on something completely different. And it wasn't until I pointed out to him like, mate, this makes zero sense. Why are you doing this? And, you know, the cost is a big factor with a lot of the on-course nutrition products at the moment. They are quite expensive. I get it. I get why you'd want to save some money on your sports nutrition products, but he didn't have the confidence that what he was doing was right for him. And so he, he wasn't winging it on the day he was using a commercial product, which honestly is not the greatest for him either.

So if you were my athlete, we would fix all of that, okay? We would get a fully dialed in race nutrition plan for you that is custom to you and that particular event, because you shouldn't be replicating the same 70.3 plan for every 70.3 that you do. There are lots of nuances that we can dial in for different courses and different events. Environmental conditions is another example. Your fitness levels, there are so many things that we can manipulate to give it the best shot we can.

And what I love to teach my athletes, if you were my athlete, I would teach you how to actually understand your race nutrition plan so that you can build it time and time again and pull all of those levers and dial all the bits in for yourself so that you don't need me to hand you a plan on a silver platter every time you race and have that cost involved. I'm going to teach you how to do that for yourself and you can manipulate it for a lifetime, for every race, for every distance and every lifestyle change that you might have across your triathlon career.

Because race nutrition is not one size fits all. You will never find a generic race nutrition plan on my website because that just makes me cringe thinking about that. And nor should you follow one.

Your body, your event, your gut tolerance at that time, your sweat rate, all of those things are different and will change over time as well. So I would teach you as my athlete to figure out exactly what you need for your races, how to fuel, when to fuel, how to take it, what products are going to be best for you and how to practice it properly in training as well so that it is just bulletproof on race day. I have lots of tools to help you calculate things easily. So it isn't this big, gigantic job and stressful and overwhelming. As an example, Kelly uses one of our tools to build his race nutrition plan when he travels internationally for events. He built himself an entire carbohydrate loading plan when he came to Australia for Sunnycoast 70.3 last year. And we did a lot of groundwork.

When he was back on mainland USA before he arrived, but he wanted to go to the shops and was confident enough that he could do it in the days heading into the event based on the foods that he could get access to easily. Now, how cool is that to be able to do that? I know a lot of people struggle with things like challenge Roth where you're carb loading, your race nutrition is in Germany. How are you going to access the normal things you have at home? Same as doing things like Nice in France.

Like there is amazing foods that you can have in your plan in France, but we don't necessarily have the ability to purchase those in Australia before you go. So when you know how to do the things, then the ability to do that on the fly, when you travel and go to cool race venues, then that's so much more valuable.

The other really valuable tool that I would teach you if you were my athlete is how to troubleshoot things on race day. So if shit hits a fan, things go pear shaped. I've heard many examples of things where race nutrition plans have needed to be adapted on the fly. Like your teeth get kicked out in the swim and you can no longer chew any of your bike nutrition. You drop all of your fueling bottles and you have to figure out how to catch that back up with whatever's on course. Like there are so many things that can go wrong. And when you have the ability to troubleshoot, then it doesn't derail your entire race.

It means that you are unlikely to suffer from mid-race gut issues at all, like, and no more bonking.

Ideally, no more cramping, like any of that stuff that can be problematic and derail us. I can show you how to avoid that or if things are starting to go south, how to come back as well. So it doesn't end up in a just a solid, fully tested race nutrition plan that gives you confidence to go from towing the start line all the way to the finishing shoot, no matter what the day throws at you.

Okay, fix number three that I would tackle, and this is a big one and a big rock, is that you are potentially not recovering between your training sessions. Now, most people think that they are, and recovery is not just a protein shake. It is also not just, you know, eating dinner at some point after training in the evenings. If you're backing up for another training session in less than 24 hours, and most triathletes are doing that, we don't have a lot of time to recover between training sessions, then that approach to your recovery just doesn't cut it. It sucks. Recovery is more than just protein. You need to nail so many different components to get it right, like the timing, the carbohydrate, your hydration, to quickly back up after exercise to go again and recover as best as you can between those sessions. Otherwise, you're starting the next session in the red already and we just don't want to do that because that fatigue and that red zone is just going to build up more and more as the week goes on.

So if you are my athlete, I would teach you all about the four Rs of recovery and how to dial those in custom to you, how to tweak your recovery plan depending on your type of session that it is, your overall training load, your hours of training that you're doing in a week, your goals, including body composition goals, whether that's for performance or just consistency or even just staying injury free.

So that you were confident that you were doing the best that you could to get your nutrition recovery building blocks in.

And the fourth and final fix is that your daily nutrition isn't supporting your goals. Now this is a big one. Even if you train for four hours a day, call it six, that's still 18 to 20 hours outside of training that you could either be sabotaging or supporting your performance. And this is where most triathletes struggle.

I see so many triathletes eating what they think is right, what they think is healthy, but it's not actually matched to the training demands that they're in. You might be eating too little on your big days. You might be eating too much on your light or rest days, or just completely missing key nutrients and key ingredients that are going to affect your recovery, affect your immunity, affect your energy why if you were my athlete, I would teach you how to build your everyday plate to match your training so it's dynamic, so that it's responsive and it's just not the same old meals on repeat and you think that it's about right.

I would also give you lots of practical tools to help you save time and save money on the whole grocery shopping, meal prep, cooking experience so that you can eat well even when life gets hectic.

And this is where your habits and your behaviours and your routines around food matter. Are you changing those and or do we need to change them? And if we do recognise that that does take time, it's not something that happens overnight. You don't need to eat like a monk, but you do need to eat with purpose when you're a triathlete.

And I fully recognise that food is emotional. It is tied up in decades of conditioning, what you learnt when you were growing up, your beliefs about foods. It's maybe even your relationship with your body and how you talk to yourself.

Which is why the real value in working with a sports dietician isn't a one-off consultation with a generic plan that's rushed and, you know, a polite good luck, see you later. It's about having someone in your corner for the long haul. Someone who sees your patterns, your behaviours and challenges your thinking, hold you accountable every week so that things do change and things actually progress forwards and helps you make that actual behavior change, not just bandaid quick fixes.

I won't dive into the full example of Tony's transformation, you can call it, but I set him a challenge through his TNA program that did last about six months. And you can listen to his story on the podcast if you like, but he lost a significant amount of body fat, including a significant amount of visceral fat and his diabetes is now much better controlled. The big part for why he achieved such epic things was the weekly accountability. He showed up to Power Hour every week. We checked in with how he was going. He was accountable to the other people in his group as well. And he has seen massive change to his performance in triathlon, but also most importantly, his long-term health.

And that is what I love to do with athletes. If you're an athlete, we would do the exact same thing because it is about your next race. Yes, that's often how people will find me, but it's also about creating those sustainable long-term habits and behaviours that are going to support your training long-term and your racing, your health and your long-term performance because it's about creating sustainable long-term habits that are going to support your training, support your health, but ultimately your long-term performance as well. So you're not burning out, you're not getting injured and you're not just scraping by.

I'm going to help you build your health span as well as chase some PBs.

And that I think is one of the things that sets the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program apart. It's not a one and done nutrition plan. It is ongoing education, coaching from me and support. So you can actually change the way that you eat, the way that you train, the way that you recover for life.

There's no quick fix when it comes to understanding fueling for three sports, staying injury free, having consistent energy levels and still showing up for the rest of your life unbroken. It takes time and I understand that it takes structure and it does take somebody in your corner who actually gets triathlon. And that's what I want for you.

So if anything I've shared today has struck a chord and you're sick of doing it alone, or you're just curious about what's actually possible when your nutrition finally clicks, then now is the time. Doors to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy close this weekend.

So if you're ready to upgrade your nutrition with evidence-based guidance and a program built specifically for triathletes, I would love to welcome you inside.

You can head to dietitianapproved.com/academy to check it out or shoot me a demo or shoot me a DM on Instagram at dietitian.approved with the word TNA and I'll make sure you've got everything you need to get started.

And remember, if you were my athlete, these are the exact things that we would work on right now. 

So why not become one?
 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smashed in the fourth leg - nutrition!