Episode 222 - n=1 The Power of Personalised Nutrition for Triathletes

n=1 The Power of Personalised Nutrition for Triathletes

Still copying someone else’s nutrition plan? It’s time to stop.

In this episode, I’m diving into why your fuelling, hydration and daily nutrition should be as unique as your training program. Because no two athletes are the same — even if you’re the same age, gender or doing the same race. You are N=1, and a cookie-cutter approach just won’t cut it.

I unpack the four key areas where personalisation really matters:

• Hydration: sodium losses vary massively between athletes

• Fuelling: it’s not just about grams of carbs, but what you can tolerate

• Race day strategy: your pace dictates your needs, not the distance

• Day-to-day nutrition: aligned with your training, preferences and goals

You'll hear real examples of how athletes in the Triathlon Nutrition Academy have dialled in their own unique plans — and the game-changing results they’ve seen.

If you’re done with guesswork and ready to train and race with confidence, this one’s for you.

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 222: n=1 The Power of Personalised Nutrition for Triathletes

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)
Hey legend, welcome back to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast and welcome to a brand new year.

It is that time where motivation is high, your goals are super fresh, and you’ve probably already mapped out what your racing and training blocks are going to look like for the entire year. Today, I want to talk to you about you. Not your training buddy, not that random dude on the internet that thinks that you need to take salt tablets every 20 minutes. I want to talk about you.

Because when it comes to your nutrition, you are N equals one. Now that is sciencey speak for you are a sample size of one. And it’s why your nutrition plan should be as unique as your training schedule, your sweat rate, your gut, your goals, even your finishing times.

So if you’ve ever been tempted, or you currently do copy someone else’s plan, or what someone else is doing, or you look to the pros to see what they’re doing and apply it to yourself, and you are still winging it on race day with a hope and pray strategy, then this episode is for you.

We’re going to break down what it actually means to personalise your nutrition. You cannot follow a cookie cutter generic plan. And I also want to explain how understanding your own needs is really key to unlocking your next personal best.

Because this is exactly what I teach inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy: how to stop guessing and start feeling smarter for our sport, with a plan that actually fits you. Make sure you go and register your interest in our upcoming cohort at dietitianapproved.com/academy.

Alright, let’s do it.

Let’s kick off this episode by talking about what actually is N equals one. In research, N equals one means a single subject. And in triathlon, that subject is you. Your genetics, your sweat rate, your GI tolerance, your food preferences, your lifestyle, your goals, all of that makes you uniquely you.

That’s why someone else’s nutrition plan, their hydration strategy or their fuelling strategy isn’t necessarily going to work for you. Even if they are the same gender, the same age group, they do the same race distances. Even if you’re an identical twin, it doesn’t matter, because they are not you.

And yet so many triathletes are still following generic advice and following what works for the pros. Doing what their mates told them to do, doing what their coach told them to do, or even worse, trying something new on race day. Because someone at the expo or someone at the start line swore that this was the best gel ever made and you need to try it.

Now, I totally get it. The internet is just full of nutrition noise. And when you are training your guts out and you just want to race well and you want the competitive edge, you will do anything to get that.

It is so easy to grab at any shiny strategy that sparks your interest and add to cart. But nutrition is not one size fits all. You are your own experiment. N equals one.

And if you want to actually feel good in training, recover properly, avoid gut issues and perform at your best, you have to figure out what works for you. That is the power of N equals one.

Now I want to dive into four main areas that explain why personalisation is so important to your success as a triathlete. They are hydration, your fuelling strategy, your race nutrition plan, and your day to day nutrition.

So number one, hydration, and why it varies so widely. Some athletes lose lots of sodium and others lose very little. You could be losing 300 milligrams of sodium per litre or over 2000 milligrams of sodium per litre. Now that is a huge range, and if you don’t understand where you sit, you could be under, you could be over-salting, or just making things up as you go along, which is where most triathletes are, to be honest.

The same thing goes for your fluid needs. Some athletes sweat out a small swimming pool while they’re sitting on a wind trainer, and some athletes barely break a sweat.

Take Chris, for example, self dubbed the human sprinkler. He was following generic advice for his sodium and hydration needs, and he was DNFing all over the place. Fast forward to now, and us working together to really understand what was going on for him. He now has a personalised hydration strategy for racing so that he can finish a race and not need the medical tent, and can actually get to the run and finish the run because he now understands his personalised sodium needs and his personalised hydration needs.

Now, the amount of fluid that you need to drink in training and racing depends on so many different factors. Definitely the environmental conditions: the temperature, the humidity, your body size, the intensity of the session, your daily diet, and even how fit you are.

What’s really important to understand is your sweat rate and your sweat sodium concentration are not fixed numbers. You can’t do one sweat test, get a beautiful looking report, and use that data for every single training session and race from then on.

It’s also really important to understand the different types of sweat tests because not all of them are actually validated for use during exercise. And in fact, some aren’t even validated at all.

If you have no idea what your unique needs are, then you absolutely run the risk of DNFing and worst case scenario, ending up in the medical tent.

You also need to think through what the plan is for the race. You might check the race website and it says, okay, it’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to be 21 degrees Celsius or about 70 Fahrenheit. And then on race day, some heat wave comes through and it ends up being 35 degrees Celsius or 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you have the knowledge about you and your unique needs, then you can adapt your strategy to compensate for that extra heat and it’ll be okay. But if you have no idea, then how are you going to adapt? That’s where most athletes really struggle.

If you know what your numbers are, and practically what that means for your training and your racing, then you absolutely have a competitive advantage. Inside the TNA program, I help athletes understand their unique sweat profile and adapt their fluid and sodium plans specifically for them, and all of the nuances that will go into somebody’s hydration strategy. And it is not a set and forget.

It’s not a generic template. Everyone has their own specific plan unique to them.

Secondly is your fuelling strategy.

Physiologically, what are your unique fuelling needs? How much do you tolerate? Do you prefer solids, gels, real food? Can you eat on your feet? Can you open gel packets or chews and blocks while you’re moving on the bike? Can you fill up your water reservoir while you’re moving on the bike?

You’ve heard of gut training, but what does that actually mean for you? It’s about testing, tweaking, changing timing, doing the process of gut training and finding out what works for you through some guided strategic trial and error.

Everyone wants to know how many grams of carbs they need per hour. But again, that is not a set and forget number. Some triathletes can handle 60 grams of carbs an hour, others 90 or above, even above 100. But it does take time, it takes planning, and the right types of fuel to make that happen without gut issues, which often triathletes have absolutely no idea about.

But if you have the knowledge and understanding about all of the strategy and the science that goes into your race fuelling strategy, then you have the ability to adjust it for every single race if you need to, every condition you might face. And I love to teach my athletes how to troubleshoot, which is so valuable when things go pear-shaped out on the race course.

Thirdly, your race plan needs to also fit your pace. A 70.3 at three hours, give or take, is very different to a 70.3 that takes somebody seven hours. And that duration can dictate your fuelling strategy. It is not the distance alone.

Because whether you’re out there for five hours or eight hours, that is definitely going to dictate how much you need to eat, how much you need to drink, when you need to do it, and how to set up your plan to avoid that slow death march to the finish line.

Can we please all stop blanketly trying to just aim for 90 grams of carbs an hour, please, and dial that in specifically for you.

And the fourth thing is your day-to-day nutrition. Your daily nutrition needs need to fit your lifestyle. They need to fit your food preferences, your intolerances, your goals, your nutrient needs, all of that is unique to you.

You cannot pull a generic meal plan off the internet, off AI, and expect it to perform as well as something that is custom and personalised to you, that has had a brain to critically assess it and go, that’s actually correct. Not, that is not even right.

You need to understand the nuances of your training program. If you’ve invested all of that time and energy and money into it all, then you need to layer in all of your nutrition principles to maximise the benefits of that training program.

And that really is where this compounding effect kicks in. You will recover faster, adapt better from your training, and actually absorb that training stress that you’re putting your body through. And that’s how you go from just completing a session, ticking it off, yep, done, to maximising the benefit from every single one.

So let’s move on to why generic advice can backfire.

So you jump into a Facebook group or you chat to someone in transition, or at your training group, or at your triathlon club, and suddenly you’re hearing: you have to try these gels. This drink mix is next level. I took on 120 grams of carbs an hour and I felt amazing. My coach says I should skip breakfast before training to teach my body to burn more fat.

Any of those sound familiar?

Following generic advice like that? Absolutely. If you are doing that, doing mid-race experimentation, blindly following what the pros are doing, doing what your training buddy has told you is great, or even doing what worked last year without adapting to your current body, your current level of fitness, your current goals, then you really do run the risk of blowing up on race day, which is not what anyone wants. Cramping, bonking, dehydration, poor recovery. All of that is not the experience that you’ve been training for and you spent all that money on.

Nutrition is so personal to you. What you need depends on so many factors: your body, number one, your genetics, your goals, and absolutely your race calendar. And unless you are testing it, tweaking it, and tailoring it to you, you will always be relying on guesswork.

And that is why I created the Triathlon Nutrition Academy. Because it’s not enough to know what to do. You need a system to apply it to your situation and be able to adapt it, and have the knowledge to be able to adapt it. You need the support to apply that to yourself and figure out your hydration strategy, your carb needs, and to build a race plan that you can trust on race day, not one that you’ve copied from someone else or you did it last time and it seemed to have worked.

I love to help triathletes get so clear on what is going to work for them and cut through all of that noise, not just on paper, but in real life, during training, when you’re under pressure, when the conditions change last minute, and when your gut is not behaving.

So you can stop second guessing, stop winging it, and start showing up to every training session, every race, fuelled and confident in your fuelling plan.

So let’s bring this to life with one of the TNA athletes, Christine. She’s a vegetarian, a self-proclaimed fussy eater, and also a physician. So someone that lives and breathes evidence-based science. But even with all of that knowledge, Christine knew that she needed a personalised approach. If she was ever going to make real progress in this sport, she didn’t want to muck around.

Here’s what she had to say.

So Christine, why did you join the Academy, particularly with your background as a physician who really gets the importance of tailoring advice to the person sitting in front of you?

Christine (12:52)
Yeah. So I joined the Academy when I was getting ready to start doing longer course races, you know, the 70.3s and maybe fulls. And, you know, obviously there’s tons of information out there on the internet. Lots of them are just people’s blogs saying, “This is what I did and it worked for me,” or “It didn’t work for me.” And like, there’s no evidence there.

And as a doctor, I follow science and evidence and want to know what the evidence says you should do, and not just someone’s off the cuff advice. That may work for them and that’s great, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for someone else.

So I really wanted specific guidance that could be tailored more for me, not just for some other random.

Taryn Richardson (13:44)
And what’s changed for you now that you’ve got a plan that’s personalised to you based on your training, all of your weird food preferences and your lifestyle?

Christine (13:53)
Everything’s great. I mean, I still need to execute the plan, which I don’t always do perfectly, especially in my day to day life, because you know, day to day life is crazy.

I execute the training and racing nutrition plans pretty well. Like you said, I’ve got lots of weird food preferences. I’m a vegetarian. So any kind of cookie cutter meal plan would just not work, because I would look at it and be like, well, no, I won’t eat that. I won’t eat that. I won’t eat that.

So it really needs to be able to personalise for me. And now that I know, okay, how many grams of carbs per hour I’m supposed to have, how many millilitres of fluid an hour I’m supposed to have, I can’t remember the last time I had a nutrition problem in a race. It’s definitely over a year, probably longer.

Taryn Richardson (14:37)
Christine gets it. Even as a health professional, she recognised that generic advice only gets you so far. You need a plan that fits your body, your values and your life. And that’s exactly what we do inside the Academy.

In the Triathlon Nutrition Academy, I help you build a tailored strategy for you. Not some template, not a generic plan that everyone gets. It is custom and bespoke for you. And you get the support to really understand your pre-training fuelling, your hydration needs, how to read a label, your recovery nutrition plan, and most importantly, how to adjust to your life, your training, your goals when those things change.

And here’s how we do that. It is a combination of education, tools and resources to help apply the science specifically to you, to make it so practical and easy to do what you need to do. Plus you have access to me in Power Hours, and we work together on your N equals one in Power Hour.

As an example, when Kathleen first joined the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, she thought gels just weren’t her thing. They didn’t agree with her, they weren’t working, and she thought that they were the problem for her gut issues.

But in Power Hour, being able to have that back and forth conversation and speak together to dig deeper, I discovered pretty quickly that gels weren’t the problem. Firstly, she wasn’t consuming her gels properly. And secondly, it was the big ass salad she was eating the day before her long runs that was the problem.

But without access to that evidence-based information and an expert to bounce her ideas off, she would have never figured that out by herself. And she would have forever never had gels. And she would have continued having a big ass salad the day before her long runs and still wondering why things weren’t working.

So where are you at right now? This is the perfect time of year to think about this. Are you still piecing together your nutrition from bits and pieces from podcasts, YouTube, the internet and online, and still crossing your fingers and hoping it all holds up on race day?

Still unsure if what you’re eating on a daily basis is actually helping or hindering your performance, and having no idea if it is or not?

Or are you ready to stop guessing, to finally understand what you need based on your training, your goals and your life, and get a proper system in place to figure it out?

Because nutrition is not one size fits all. You are N equals one. And the sooner you start treating yourself like the unique athlete that you are, the sooner you will unlock the results that you are working so hard for in training.

Imagine what you could achieve if you had a nutrition system that was built specifically for you.

Now, if this episode did hit home and you’re ready to take the next step, then come and register your interest in our upcoming cohort of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program.

Head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Doors are opening soon and this is your chance to learn how to fuel smarter, train harder and finally perform at your best with a plan that is built for you.

Because following someone else’s plan is only going to take you so far. So let’s build yours together. N equals one is the only way to perform at your best.
 

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!