Episode 229 - The First 4 Things I Fix With Every Triathlete’s Nutrition

Training hard but still flat, fatigued or constantly hungry?

If you dropped into my world tomorrow as a triathlete, there are four things I would fix immediately and no, it’s not your supplement stack, your race day gel plan or your power to weight ratio.

In this episode, I walk you through the four big rocks of triathlon nutrition that almost every age group triathlete gets wrong. We’re talking about the foundations that make everything else work: your recovery nutrition, your pre-training fuel, your daily performance plate and your during-training carbohydrate and sodium strategy. When these aren’t structured properly, you end up with inconsistent energy, slow recovery, snack-cidents, stubborn body composition and performance plateaus. When they are dialled in, your session quality lifts, cravings settle, sleep improves and you feel supercharged instead of wrecked by Sunday.

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 229: The First 4 Things I Fix With Every Triathlete’s Nutrition

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: If you dropped into my world tomorrow as a triathlete and needed some help with your nutrition, there are four things that I would look to fix immediately. No, it's not your supplement stack. It's not your race day nutrition strategy, and no, it is not your power to weight ratio.

[00:00:16] These are four functional things.

[00:00:20] almost every triathlete that I've ever worked with gets at least two to three of these things wrong, Triathletes, love to follow a structured training plan. they know their 100 meter freestyle pace. They know their average watts on the bike. They know their five and 10 K run PB times.

[00:00:39] But when it comes to nutrition, triathletes love to DIY it and hey, that is not a bad thing. I actually think independence is great, but it becomes a piecemeal approach. This way. You take a bit from Instagram, you take a bit from your mate, a bit from your coach, a bit from a podcast.

[00:00:56] Some days are really high carbs. Other days are really low carbs.

[00:01:00] Recovery is whatever's in the fridge or whatever you can order and what looks tasty on the cafe menu. long rides, can be under fuelled, under hydrated, and not salted correctly. Dinner is healthy, but it's not necessarily performance based it kind of works, or at least you feel like it kind of works, but you end up with these fragments.

[00:01:22] Your energy is inconsistent. Your recovery is slow. You are constantly hungry. body fat won't shift and your performance plateaus.

[00:01:32] And it's not because you lack discipline. Gosh, as triathletes, we need a lot of that, but it's more that you lack structure.

[00:01:39] What you need is not more random tips. You need a rock solid nutrition foundation to stand on.

[00:01:47] So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the four things I fix With every triathlete that I work with.

[00:01:55] Taryn: We are not talking about advanced race nutrition strategies. We are not diving into complicated macro maths. gonna talk about the foundations that just make everything else work.

[00:02:07] Because before you worry about gels, supplements, 

[00:02:11] and fancy fuelling strategies, you need to get these four things right first.

[00:02:17] Hi, I'm Taryn Advanced Sports Dietitian and former Sports Dietitian for Triathlon Australia Over the last two decades, I've worked with age group triathletes just like you to help you level up your nutrition. And what I've learned is that you don't build performance on top of chaos.

[00:02:34] If you stop for a second and focus on those big rocks of triathlon, nutrition, everything else falls into place.

[00:02:44] So the very first thing that I look at is your recovery nutrition this one is huge.

[00:02:50] I see athletes nail their training session and then have a complete brain fart for the couple of hours after training, and they really mess up their recovery. Recovery is not just neck, a protein shake and rush to work. It is strategic carbohydrate to refuel. It is protein to repair. It is fluid to rehydrate, and it is nutrients to help replenish and dampen down the stress of exercise and a timing that's gonna support your next session as well.

[00:03:22] And that is especially important for triathletes that are juggling the busy family, busy work life, and that is where consistency often breaks down. But when you get your recovery targets right, your energy levels increase, your cravings and snack accidents reduce your sleep improves.

[00:03:42] And your performance just compounds so that you can back up again and again and again.

[00:03:48] The second thing that I would fix is what is happening before your training sessions? Morning triathletes, especially because you've been fasting all night while you're asleep.

[00:03:58] Your pre-training fuelling is about giving your body the right building blocks to perform. In that session,

[00:04:05] it might look like an easy to digest carbohydrate sauce like toast, banana, oats, not too high in fat 

[00:04:13] and not too high in fibre.

[00:04:15] Sometimes it's intentionally training fasted,

[00:04:19] but that needs to be planned and not accidental.

[00:04:22] Your pre-training nutrition is not about eating for the sake of eating or fasting because you really struggle to eat before training. it's about strategic carbohydrate timing in the right amounts to give your body what it needs to perform.

[00:04:37] And when you get that right, your session quality changes almost immediately. It's like a switch.

[00:04:45] The third thing that I look at is what your daily plate looks like. Not your race nutrition. It's not your gels. It is your lunch on a Tuesday double session day.

[00:04:56] Most triathletes have no idea how to periodise nutrition to training

[00:05:01] because it's not something you've probably ever had to do If you've come from a gym or a swim, or just a general fitness background, it is nowhere near important as it is compared to triathletes who swim, bike, and run all in a training week.

[00:05:17] So your triathlete's plate needs to have a carbohydrate base with enough energy to support the session that you just did or are about to do and your overall fuelling needs. It also needs a solid protein serve that goes towards your daily protein target,

[00:05:34] along with nutrients and colours from our fresh fruits and vegetables to help meet your micronutrient needs.

[00:05:41] and to keep us healthy so we have good longevity in life and our sport. And finally, it needs to include some healthy fats for an energy source, but also our health.

[00:05:52] And so often I see triathletes eating a big ass salad with some protein and nowhere near enough carbohydrate, skimping on the healthy fats or flip side, a really high carbohydrate meal with probably not enough protein and definitely not enough of the micronutrients. It

[00:06:10] both are really problematic and we need to get the balance right. So if your daily nutrition structure is not proactive to support your training, you are absolutely leaving performance, health and body composition on the table.

[00:06:25] And finally, the fourth thing that I would fix is your during training fuelling.

[00:06:30] There are sessions that you are going to want to fuel versus others that don't necessarily need to be. And where these issues often rear their ugly head is in our long sessions, our long rides, our long bricks, our long runs. This is where fuelling errors show up most clearly.

[00:06:48] If you are a piecemeal triathlete, then you are potentially taking in too little carbohydrate, or the trend at the moment is just for more, more and more. So maybe you're actually taking in too much carbohydrate for what you need.

[00:07:02] You potentially have no idea how to get your carbohydrate ratios right? You have no idea what's in your sports nutrition products and I don't really know how to look at that label to figure it out.

[00:07:13] You leave fuelling during training too late because you're waiting until you feel hungry. 'cause you don't wanna have the calories 'cause you're trying to drive some body fat loss. I see you. You get the sodium piece wrong because again, the trend in this space is more, more and more. But if you don't know what your sweat sodium concentration is at that session on that day in those environmental conditions, then it's highly likely that you are either underdoing it or overdoing it.

[00:07:39] Something else I see with DIY athletes is they train on different nutrition compared to race day, But if you are in season, all of your long training sessions become race rehearsals

[00:07:52] and if you are not fuelling properly during your training sessions. Your performance absolutely suffers. You increase your risk of GI upset. You may struggle with your nutrition outside of training, so lots of some accidents. Your energy levels will tank and it can be hard to reach your body composition goals.

[00:08:12] But what happens when you nail these four fundamentals? They're not very sexy, but they are big rocks of triathlon nutrition. Your energy will absolutely stabilise and you will feel what I call supercharged at the end of the week instead of feeling like a tired triathlete all the time. your session quality will absolutely lift and you will feel amazing.

[00:08:35] Your cravings will potentially reduce, your body composition will improve without you really having to try. Your sleep gets better, your recovery is faster. You build consistency and better longevity in this sport that we love. But most triathletes don't do this because they don't know how much is enough for them. What are their numbers? What are their targets? They don't actually know how to scale carbohydrates to the training load.

[00:09:02] They've never been shown how to build a training week nutrition plan.

[00:09:06] They copy what others are doing and they jump straight from the big rocks to the sand and the small rocks. The more advanced strategies that don't really work, if we haven't got the big rock sorted first.

[00:09:18] Now, I don't think any of these four fixes are particularly complicated. In isolation,

[00:09:24] but very few triathletes have all four working cohesively together in a structured way, and that is where I see the DIY approach just fall apart for so many people.

[00:09:37] if you want these foundations laid out step by step, your performance plate, your pre-training nutrition, your during training, nutrition, your recovery, nutrition, explained impractical language for triathletes, then that is exactly what I can teach you inside the Triathlon Nutrition kickstart course.

[00:09:55] It walks you through building your triathlete's plate, fuelling before sessions, and how much and what to have exactly based on you, your fuelling targets during training, your bespoke recovery nutrition plan to hit all of your targets, as well as understanding food labels to figure out what on earth is in your products and what you're putting into your temple.

[00:10:17] and a bonus module to help you systemise it across your entire week.

[00:10:22] It's self-paced, it's practical, and it is built specifically for triathletes.

[00:10:28] You can find it at dietitianapproved.com/kickstart.

[00:10:32] And if you wanna dive deeper and want ongoing support and accountability from me, you can register your interest in our upcoming cohort of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy Program dietitianapproved.com/academy. but start with these four and fix the foundations. 

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!