Episode 198 - Three Triathlon Nutrition Myths Costing You Performance – Stop Doing Them!

Three Triathlon Nutrition Myths Costing You Performance – Stop Doing Them!

Still chasing race weight? Skipping food before training to burn more fat? Meticulously tracking every calorie?

In this week’s episode, I’m calling out the three biggest nutrition myths that are still messing with triathletes in 2025. If you’ve been feeling flat, frustrated or just not seeing the performance gains you expect—this one's for you.

Learn why these outdated beliefs are holding you back and what to do instead, including:

• Why fuelling beats weight loss for real results
• When fasted training helps (and when it hurts)
• Why tracking calories isn’t the silver bullet

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!

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Episode Transcription

Episode 198: Three Triathlon Nutrition Myths Costing You Performance – Stop Doing Them!

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.

Taryn Richardson (00:00)

Welcome back to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. Today's episode has a little bit of rant energy. I'm not going to lie. I have crossed into the forties threshold and I feel like my patience for this stuff has diminished significantly.

Because it's 2025 and triathletes are still falling for the same old nutrition myths that are slowing you down.

So I wanna call out the top three that I see every single week that are costing you speed, that are costing you energy, and honestly, just holding you back from becoming the triathlete that you could be.

You might've picked these up from a coach, a training buddy, something you've read online, a free podcast you've listened to, YouTube.

We have no shortage of free information online. It's hard to know what is helping you and what is hindering you. And on the surface, these things sound okay. They sound like they should work. But when you look under the hood, they could be completely misaligned or just missing the big picture of what you need to do to feel properly as a triathlete.

So in this episode, I'm gonna dive into why chasing race weight is not the golden ticket to your performance.

How fast the training could be messing with your energy and your results.

And why counting calories is not particularly serving you.

So if you're listening and you're thinking, hmm, I'm doing one or maybe two of those, good, I'm here for it.

We're gonna clear through some of the confusion, cut through the noise and help you feel smarter like a triathlete that trains for three sports, because I want you to train harder. want you to recover fast. I want you to have a really good health span and actually enjoy the sport for a long period of time to come. All right, so let's bust some myths. Let's do it.

Okay, let's start with a big one to kick us off. That the idea that you need to be and hit your perfect race weight to perform well.

It is one of the most persistent myths and you're probably still thinking, what on earth are you talking about, Taryn? I need to lean up.

But the belief that's floating around that if you just lose a few kilos or lose a few pounds, you'll magically run faster or get up that hill faster or finally hit your PB is probably doing you more harm than good as an age group triathlete.

So I need to be really clear. I'm talking to you as an age grouper. I'm not talking to you as an elite Tour de France rider.

Your weight on the scales is not the number that determines your performance.

You could be the lightest you've ever been and still feel like absolute shit, because you aren't fueling properly. You're probably under-fuelled. You're probably doing some negative things to your health. You're probably carrying a whole lot of fatigue around. And I know that if you're doing that, then you're not recovering properly. You're not adapting from the training that you are putting yourself through.

Now I've seen this over and over again with triathletes. I'm saying this, it is the first big myth because I know that 99 % of people listening right now will be thinking that they need to lean up to go faster, but I want to give you a couple of real world examples of triathletes who have performed better and not dropped any body composition on the scales.

Let me introduce you to Erin Byrge. You may have heard her on the podcast a couple of times. She's an absolute rock star and has gone from strength to strength by understanding how to eat for the type of training that she's doing. Now, when she first started the program, she will openly say that she's not in a body composition that she wanted to be in. And she had spent the first seven to 10 years of her triathlon career trying to lean up. Trying to get lighter to improve her performance. Now she joined the program and actually took the gas pedal off of trying to drive body fat loss. She's like, I'm just gonna roll with it, follow the system, trust in the process and stop chasing a lighter weight on the scales. I'm going to understand how to eat for my triathlon training fuel for performance.

And so what she did was she took on board everything I had to teach her. She fuels properly. She knows how to carbohydrate load. She has fully dialed in her race nutrition plans now.

Throughout the first 12 months of the program, she didn't really shift her body composition at all, but every time she towed the start line, she did a PB in something. Whether that was overall race time, whether it was running the whole run leg and not having to stop and walk, to then doing run PBs, to doing bike leg PBs. Every time she raced, she performed better without losing any numbers on the scales. So her weight did not equal performance.

Another real world example of an age group athlete was Jason.

Jason was the ultimate endurance athlete. The longer it was, the better it was for Jason, but he had never had nutrition support before. And he was also constantly trying to lose some body fat, to get lighter, to get faster. That was his whole methodology. If I can only do this, then I will therefore run faster.

But just like Erin he learned how to eat to support his training without trying to drive body fat loss constantly, to fuel for performance. And he raced Sunny Coast and did a massive one hour PB. And he even said to me once, I'm the heaviest I've been in a while, but I'm performing to the best I've ever performed in my entire career. And that is because your number on your scales does not equal performance.

And for both of them, they were both eating to support their training. They were fueling like a triathlete without constantly trying to starve themselves and put themselves in a deficit.

And when you start to flip that script and fuel for performance and you start feeling for what your body actually needs, honestly, your body composition will eventually sort itself out without you having to obsess over it and constantly strive for that. I want to throw one more example in the heart and that would be Kelly, who is also the lightest and the leanest he has ever been and performing to the best of his ability.

Now he was in the same boat. had no idea how to eat for triathlon. Through the program, he understood how to eat on a day-to-day basis. He's learning how to cook for himself. He's doing all these things to make nutrition for triathlon more of a lifestyle choice than anything else.

And there's a period of time where his body composition didn't really change, but he was getting faster. He was landing himself on the podium. He was doing PBs and pulling those out of the hat constantly.

And now, because he's been working on his nutrition with me for a longer period of time, his body composition has started to change. He's gained muscle mass, he's lost body fat, and he's eating more than he ever has in his life before. Because he did the work to fuel properly first. When you're trying to do both at the same time, they just bash heads and it's a recipe for disaster.

If you're always focused on fat loss or weight loss, then you are restricting something. You're skipping meals or skipping snacks. You are avoiding, you are holding back and your performance is going to suffer. You're to feel flat. You're going to feel tired. You're going to feel fatigued. You're potentially not putting the right building blocks in your body and all those nutrients that it needs for it to work as effectively as it can.

This is what I call the tired triathlete. You're starting to feel flat, your sessions aren't as good as they could be, or you're not hitting the targets, or you can't progress, your recovery sucks. And it's just this big vicious circle of trying to drive body fat loss, feeling rubbish, eating more, trying to lose weight, cutting calories. It doesn't make any sense.

And you're still left wondering what on earth is wrong with you and why is this not working out?

So let me say it loud and clear for the people in the back, the number on the scales does not define you as a triathlete.

Your strength, your endurance, your power.

All of that stuff matters. And for me, your long-term health matters. This is not just a now problem. This is a forever problem. So let's actually fix your nutrition for the long-term, not a short-term quick fix.

So if you want to race faster, then don't aim to weigh less constantly, aim to fuel better, because that is what's actually going to move the needle for you and help you reach your goals eventually, just not yesterday.

So if you've been constantly chasing a magic number on the scales for as long as you can remember, maybe it's time to stop for a second and actually chase better fuelling for triathlon instead. 

Because constantly under-fuelling in the name of increased performance is actually one of the biggest performance killers out there.

And if you're listening along thinking, shit, Taryn, okay, that's me, and you don't have any idea about how much to eat to support training, what to do before, during and after.

Then I created the Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course for you.

It's designed to help you build a really solid foundation with your everyday nutrition, including what you do before your sessions, what you do during them and what you do to recover after specifically dialled in for you where you're at.

This is the stuff that really moves the needle, even though triathletes tend to just disregard it. It's practical, it's step-by-step, it's built specifically for triathletes like you who want to stop guessing and actually start fuelling properly.

So if you're ready to take that guesswork out of your nutrition and feel much more confident that what you're doing is helping your performance, then head to dietitianapproved.com/kickstart to get started working on that today. There's a link in the show notes if you want to go and get it.

Okay, rant number one done. Let's move on to the second myth that I think is one of the most misunderstood practices I see triathletes still doing or still having no idea how to do.

And that's the idea of faster training helps you burn more fat and therefore makes you a leaner, better endurance athlete.

All right, I get it. I totally get where this comes from.

Training became the holy grail by biohackers, fat adapted people, and probably misinterpreting some of the literature in this space as well, just because you are burning more fat proportionally in that session, doesn't mean that you're losing more body fat overall.

What actually matters is your overall total energy balance across the day. And it's not just about what you do at five o'clock in the morning.

And really importantly, we need to consider that faster training can sometimes do more harm than good, especially if you're doing it too often or you're not strategically leaning on it in the right way for the right type of training sessions.

We know so clearly that when you don't feel before training, your performance is going to tank.

Your power output won't be as high. Your perceived effort increases. Your recovery is going to be slower. And you're more likely to get crazy ravenous and put yourself into a hole later in the day.

And that is where it honestly backfires for so many triathletes. You end up hungrier, you end up having more snack -cidents, and you spend the afternoon chasing fast acting sugars for quick energy to get you out of that slump.

So while you might think you're getting ahead by skipping your pre-training fueling in the morning, what you're actually doing is setting your whole day up on the back foot.

Now there are situations where faster training might be used strategically. Sure, yes, let's do it. I'm here for it. But it is a tool for specific situations and it absolutely requires the entire rest of your fueling plan to be on point.

It has to be rock solid first because what I see often is triathletes skipping that and using that as a strategy because they're short on time or they have no idea what they're doing or somebody told them that it was good or they really struggled to eat before training or they're trying to lose weight and drop body fat. So it's just one way of keeping calories at bay.

And that is why so many age group triathletes do feel flat, do feel rubbish, aren't performing to what they're capable of in their training sessions and under recovering to not get the most out of that training block. And you spend so much time training and you spend so much money on everything in this sport. It makes no sense to me why you then wouldn't align those whole training strategies with the nutrition strategies that go with it, to maximally support it, maximally get the most out of it.

But before you even look at faster training as a strategy to burn more fat or whatever it is we're trying to do, you need to get the foundations right first. Otherwise you would just digging yourself a bigger hole. So you need to understand what to eat before training. If you're fueling.

How to fuel your sessions properly, and what recovery nutrition actually looks like specifically for you.

And those three key things are something that I can teach you inside the Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course. It is a step-by-step way to fuel your body properly so that you can get the most out of your training session, so that you can recover to back up again and go the next day. And start to set your whole Triathlon Nutrition foundation up right and build it solid from the ground up.

So head to dietitianapproved.com/kickstart  to get started doing that today.

Okay, moving on to myth number three. This one is a goodie. I'm happy to round out with this one. And that's that you need to track every calorie to get results.

I get this as well. The type of athlete that is a triathlete can often be type A personality, loves the data, loves to track everything and be in control. And that's something that is controllable.

You plug in your numbers of what you're eating, your Garmin or Strava or whatever tells you, your Garmin tells you what your energy expenditure is for that section. And as long as you hit your targets each day, that should all work out okay, right? Wrong. 

There are so many limitations with firstly estimating your energy input, how much you're eating. Don't get me started. That's a whole other topic for the podcast of the limitations of estimating what's going in. And there are also a lot of limitations with estimating your energy output in a day.

So already we're starting with numbers that are not particularly accurate. Like sure, they might be ballpark, but the only way to get as accurate as possible would be to be involved in a research study, have everything weighed, everything perfectly dialed in and bomb calorimetry all the food in duplicate, as well as live in a tent and have that gas exchange 24 /7 Nobody's going to do that. So it is a best guess. is close, but not close enough when it comes to periodised nutrition for triathlon. If you're a sedentary person and your daily needs are very similar, it works better. But when you're training for three different sports, each training day is different.

It just adds a bigger margin of error and it's really hard to get that right.

Because you think about how much your training fluctuates in a day, across a week, across a month. No two days are ever the same really. There's always nuances to what's going on. Your hunger levels vary as well.

Your performance needs shift and change as you go through your training program and as you head closer to your race, as you head into your post-race period.

And calorie tracking just doesn't account for all of those nuances.

And my biggest crux with this and why I'm quite vocal about teaching athletes how to eat without it is that it doesn't teach you how to eat. It doesn't help you understand what to put on your plate and how to set yourself up for long-term health and performance. If you're just blindly following this random generic target, some app has set you that knows nothing about you, because you're ignoring what your body is telling you and you are confined to this stationary arbitrary number that in probably most instances is too low anyway.

We know that it creates guilt, creates restriction, creates disordered eating behaviours.

And it creates this false sense that there is a perfect number for you to be hitting. And if you just hit it, you'll get faster, you'll get leaner.

And I don't believe that tracking calories is going to get you results.

It is a tool that we can use and we can lean on, but it is not a long-term strategy for the majority of athletes.

So here's what actually works and what I've seen in my two decades of practice as a sports dietician, learning how to eat to support different training days. You know, a lighter day, a rest day, off season nutrition versus like I'm in full peak long course training mode right now.

You also need to understand how to fuel your different types of training sessions, whether they're long, whether they're short, whether they're easy, whether they're hard. You're blanketly following a 90 grams carbs an hour fueling strategy is not serving you the majority of the time.

And what also works for long-term success is knowing what your plate should look like based on training and based on whatever's going on in your life, not how many kilojoules or how many calories it contains.

That is real nutrition knowledge that is going to push the needle and set you up for a long term success in this sport and nutrition. Not a quick fix six week plan that is destined for short gains maybe, but definitely not long term variety. And that is what I love to teach athletes, this long term nutrition change.

And that's not what you're going to get from MyFitnessPal or your garment.

Now look, if you enjoy tracking and it doesn't make you go crazy, then that's fine. I'm here for it. I will help you with whatever method you enjoy doing and whatever is working for you, but don't feel like you have to do it because

it is a useful tool in bursts but if it's your only strategy then, and you feel anxious without it, or you feel like you're failing or you track it from Monday to Friday when you're being good in inverted commas and then it's just yolo free for all on the weekends. That also is not serving you. That's just trying to cheat the system.

There is much easier ways than wasting all that time trying to do that in a way that has limitations anyway. We know that when you track, you change your behaviour or you eat things that you don't put into your diary. So let's just stop pretending and do things properly.

Oh, loving this ranty vibe energy today. Apologies, my blood is getting a little bit hot. So let's recap those three big myths that are still holding triathletes back in 2025. Number one, race weight is the holy grail, when really your performance is not defined by the number on the scales.

Number two, faster training helps you burn more fat when a lot of the time it can leave you under-fuelled and in a hole and then chasing your tail afterwards.

And number three, you need to track every calorie and every gram to get results. What you actually need is to have a solid understanding of how to eat like a triathlete.

And if any of those hit a little bit too close to home, I'm sorry, but also good. That means you're starting to see where the gaps are and how you can do something about it to fix it.

You can't DIY performance nutrition by trying to cobble together free advice from podcasts, from YouTube, from blogs, from the internet, from your training buddy, from your coach, Dr. Google, the list is endless. That's a very slow, tedious and confusing pathway. You need a real plan.

You need a clear evidence-based plan, one that actually supports your training and your recovery, your long-term performance and your long-term health over time. And that is exactly my friend, what is inside the Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course. Inside, I'm going to show you how to build balanced meals that will set you up for health and performance. I'm going to show you how to fuel your sessions properly, both before and how to set them up, whether you wanna do faster training or not, but I'm gonna show you when is a good time to do that and when is a terrible time to do that, as well as how you fuel during those sessions, because the blanket 90 grams of carbs in our advice is rubbish. 

And I also want you to nail your recovery nutrition targets that are specific to you. As well as understanding how to piece all this together into what you actually eat, how to look at a food label to determine if something's good or not, where we head for sports nutrition products so we don't get waylaid by the weeds and all the details of all the products that are out there. I will fast track your research and help you understand what is actually going to work for you. It's online, it's self-paced, and it's designed specifically for triathletes who are ready to stop winging it and start putting those fueling foundations in place properly. If that sounds like what you need, then go to dietitianapproved.com/kickstart, or click the link in the show notes and start taking the course today. Thank you for tuning in, Legend. I'll see you next week.

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!