Episode 238 - Stop Optimising the 5% You Haven't Earned Yet

You’re obsessing over gels, supplements and race day strategy… but still feeling flat, fatigued and stuck? This might sting a little.

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on one of the biggest mistakes I see age-group triathletes make after 20+ years in the field. You’re trying to optimise the final 5% of your performance without locking in the foundational 95% that actually moves the needle.

I break down why your daily nutrition is likely the real limiter, not your choice of gel or the latest supplement stack. We dive into the common traps triathletes fall into like supplement overload, copying the pros, chasing nutrition “hacks” and being inconsistent across the week. Plus, I walk you through what actually works when it comes to fuelling for three sports, including the key building blocks that support better recovery, stronger training sessions and long-term health.

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 238: Stop Optimising the 5% You Haven't Earned Yet

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: After two decades of working with triathletes, I can tell you this with absolute confidence. Most triathletes are focusing on the wrong things. There is so much noise when it comes to triathlon nutrition. There's different strategies, different products, different opinions, and it can be really hard to know what actually matters.

[00:00:21] But a little bit of a hard truth bomb from me. Triathletes are trying to optimise the last 5% when they haven't even nailed the fundamental 95%.

[00:00:33] And until you fix that problem, nothing else is going to move the needle. So in this episode, I wanna break it down for you and talk through what actually works, what doesn't, and what I've learned after working with thousands of triathlete over the last two decades. 

[00:00:50] Taryn: So let me start by getting really clear with you. You do not have a, which gel should I use? Problem. You don't have a supplement problem. You probably don't even have a race nutrition problem. You have a daily nutrition problem. And I have seen this over and over and over again. As a triathlete, you train for three sports and you're probably putting in huge hours of training across those disciplines In a week

[00:01:18] But unless you are one of my Triathlon Nutrition Academy athletes, you are probably completely underestimating how much your nutrition is either supporting the goals of that or completely sabotaging that. And what I find is one of the most frustrating parts, in my job, is that it's really not that complicated. Once you know what you're doing. but when you dunno what you're doing, it is so overwhelming and it's so confusing and there's so much information. It's really hard to distill it all into, okay, what do I actually put on my plate? What do I put into my mouth at this time of the day to support this training session?

[00:01:56] But that is why, I'm an Advanced Sports Dietitian. I've done the hard yards to get to where I am, and I wanna share some of that today so you can fast track your nutrition when it comes to training for three sports. So what do most triathletes do? I would suggest that most kind of default to what is easy, what is passive? What is the least amount of work and effort on your part? They buy the latest gadget, they buy the latest supplement. They they're getting ads for on Facebook. They copy what someone else is doing instead of actually stopping for a second And fixing the thing that matters for them. 

[00:02:32] I had an athlete come in to see me in private practice clinic once, and he bought an entire duffle bag full of the supplements that he was taking.

[00:02:40] Not a couple, not even five, an entire duffle bag and dumped it on my desk.

[00:02:47] Every supplement that you've probably ever heard of, he had it and was taking it. So things like fat burners, recovery powders, branch chain, amino acids, magnesium, random performance blends, nitrate, beetroot juice, things he'd seen online, things I'd never even heard of and I had to look up. Honestly, if it existed, it was probably in that bag.

[00:03:10] And this guy was not a beginner triathlete. He was actually quite a high performing triathlete. But when we actually sat down to look at what he was eating on a daily basis, He was a complete beginner. He had no idea how to eat for triathlon. He had no clear structure whatsoever.

[00:03:28] He was very much in reactive mode.

[00:03:31] He had no strategy for his pre-training fuelling. He definitely had no recovery nutrition strategy. No matter the distance, no matter the intensity, no matter the goals of that session, no matter where he was in the season, he literally had no idea what he was doing. He was just doing the same thing on rinse and repeat bonking at the end of his rides, and then stuck on the couch for the whole rest of the day, completely useless to his family.

[00:03:55] he was spending thousands of dollars on supplements that weren't doing anything meaningful for him. So we didn't add more things. What we did was we stripped it all back and focused on the big rock fundamentals that are actually going to improve his performance. And with just a couple of weeks and a few targeted changes, his training improved exponentially.

[00:04:22] His energy levels improved, and he could actually function after his long training sessions. He could go to work, he could be a parent, he could live his life, and hopefully his wife was way happier with his productivity after training. And he saved a lot of money through that process. And this is what I would love you to understand with all the things that get thrown at you as a triathlete, There's probably only a handful that are actually going to move the needle in your triathlon nutrition. But because they're not sexy, they're not flashy, they're not little shiny objects, and you don't get the dopamine hit when a package turns up on your door because maybe it's not marketed so well because no one's selling it to you. With an ad on Instagram, they absolutely get ignored and athletes stay stuck as a result.so I wanna call out a couple of things that I've seen over the last two decades that just don't work, Any form of random hack not gonna work. Fad diets. We've gone from paleo, we went to then vegan, low carb, high fat, had a resurgence, and now we are seeing this carnivore diet where people only eat meat. Whatever is trending at the moment, put your blinkers on and just concentrate on eating for you without having to put a label or some sort of random guidance on, I can have this and I can't have that. Supplement first thinking does not work. There is a paper that talks about multis supplement use, and the more things you take, the less effective they are. So you're better off having a very structured supplement plan once, but only after you've got all of your foundations of your nutrition built First. I talk about supplements being the sprinkles on the icing on your cake. They have nothing to stick to if you haven't baked your sponge and then iced it. Otherwise, you're just sprinkling sprinkles onto the counter and nothing's gonna stick. So very targeted supplements 

[00:06:23] Can definitely be performance enhancing. There's a few that we talk about in the TNA program that I get people to use and to implement, but there are plenty of others that are not going to do anything and they're just going to be making expensive urine if you're not absorbing them.copying what others do. Is not gonna work. It might work for a short period of time. And then you quickly realise that, hang on, my life's not like that, or I'm way more stressed, or I've got kids to wrangle. Copying other people's nutrition, particularly someone like your coach or a more experienced athlete is not gonna work for you unless you are that exact same person with the same genetics, the same training program, the same lifestyle, the same goals, same body composition, all those sorts of things.

[00:07:06] Stop copying what others are doing. Stop copying what the pros are doing. They are in a completely different ball game to you as an age group triathlete. No offense, do you know what else doesn't work? Being inconsistent. You cannot have a perfectly dialled in plan for Monday to Friday. Then free for all it on the weekends. You have to be consistent day in, day out. You want your nutrition adaptations to build over time. You want your training availability to build over time as well.

[00:07:38] Rather than having these big peaks and troughs and getting sick and getting injured, and being out from training, the more available you are to train, the better you will be as a triathlete.

[00:07:49] So none of those things are going to get you where you wanna be,

[00:07:53] and I've seen it time and time again over the last two decades. A lot of triathletes go down that path though. So [00:08:00] let's stop doing that. So what does work? After working with thousands of triathletes, I've simplified this into a really clear system because I feel that's what triathletes actually need. You don't need more information. You have a plethora of information at your fingertips, but you need a system. I call it 

[00:08:19] the supercharged triathlete formula. This formula is the big rocks. It is the pieces of your nutrition that are actually going to move the needle.

[00:08:28] It's not a checklist. It is a progression, and the first thing that we start with is your recovery, nutrition. 'cause you only adapt from the training that you recover from now. You need to do a good job of sleeping. I can't do that for you unfortunately, 

[00:08:42] But I can help you put the right building blocks in place in the right timeframe, day after day, session after session, so that recovery and adaptation compounds over time

[00:08:53] because this is where you're going to get the biggest return. Straight away. If you are not recovering [00:09:00] properly, nothing else matters. Once you're doing that really well, we build in your pre-training nutrition so that your bookends around training are perfectly dialed to support that session. And it's different depending on the type of training that you're doing.

[00:09:15] You would fuel and recover differently from a 45 minute easy run compared to a four hour ride with a 30 minute run off the bike. Your nutrition needs to adjust based on your training program, but you need to understand how to do that. Once we've got your bookends around training sorted, then we can layer in your periodization to your training week. So how to eat on your lighter days, how to eat on your really hard days, how to eat on your double session days or your long endurance session days. As a triathlete, when you train for three sports and your hopefully doing some strength training as well, your nutrition cannot be the same day in day out.

[00:09:53] We have to have some flow to it. To meet the needs and fuel for the work required, as well [00:10:00] as recover from that to back up again and go that afternoon or that evening or the next day. Like we don't have the luxury of time to recover as triathlete, so we need to make sure our days are set up to do as best as we can with our nutrition, and then you need to sleep seven to nine hours a night as well. Then once you've built your daily fueling and nutrition strategy, we layer in what you're doing on the bike for your bike fuel, and then also on the run for your run fuel.

[00:10:29] That will cover the majority of your training sessions and build you towards your race nutrition strategy. Once you've done those things and you have your daily fueling system set up, and it doesn't mean you have to spend 10 hours meal prepping on a Sunday to survive your week. There are faster ways to eat properly when you are time poor.

[00:10:49] It's then and only then that we layer in things like your carbohydrate loading strategy, your hydration strategy, and those performance enhancing supplements I talked [00:11:00] about earlier. They're called ergogenic aids, but some of those strategies are the last 5% of your overall nutrition strategy. They are not the first percent.

[00:11:11] And the problem with so many triathletes is that we are focusing on that 5% without having any respect for the big 95% that goes into that. 

[00:11:21] I love the analogy of the jar with the rocks and the sand. When you wanna try and fill up the jar and put everything in perfectly so it fits. You cannot start with the sand first and then the small rocks, and then the big rocks. It all just overflows. You have to put the big rocks in first. Then fill it in with the little rocks and then pour the sand in, and then it all fits perfectly.

[00:11:45] You need to think about that strategy when it comes to your nutrition, and most triathletes are building it the wrong way around

[00:11:52] and something I don't think enough people are talking about. I'm happy to be the one that is the bearer of bad news is that if [00:12:00] you get your nutrition wrong, you can actually do some serious damage because you can't do a 10, 15 training hours a week and under fuel and expect that to not catch up with you when you're older.

[00:12:14] Think things like your bone mineral density. Is a big one. If you haven't got your nutrition right, that 95%, then you could wake up in your sixties or seventies, get a bone mineral density scan and go, holy crap, what happened to my bone Mineral density, that's not easy to fix either. So we need to be really diligent about getting enough calcium in our younger years so that we're not eating away at our bone mineral stores. Hormonal health is another big one that can smack us in the face, unfortunately. And if you are under fuelling and your hormones are not doing what they are meant to be doing because you don't have enough energy to support your daily functions, let alone training, then again, that can be doing some serious long-term damage to your body.

[00:12:57] And this is rife within the [00:13:00] triathlon community. I have done a number of episodes on relative energy deficiency in sport. Dive back into the archives if you wanna understand a little bit about what that is, how to identify it and make sure that you are not actually making that worse, and how to fix it too, if that is something you struggle with.

[00:13:18] Chronic fatigue is another big one. We burn the candle at both ends as triathletes often 'cause we are high performing, high achieving type individuals. We are type A, we love to do everything right. I say this with love 'cause I am one of you. I am the exact same person and you have to be careful that you don't burn yourself out. Because we wanna achieve so much in the day. We wanna get all of our training, we wanna make it go green, and we've ticked all the sessions off perfectly. Potentially you're working full time, potentially you're trying to win the parenting game. And make sure you raise decent humans as well as you know, look after yourself and do your self care and eat your two serves of fruit.

[00:13:57] Five serves of veggies every day, and do all the [00:14:00] things. And there's only so much time in a day. So being really careful with the type of personality that we have, that you aren't leading towards chronic fatigue. ' 

[00:14:11] Cause that's gonna take a long time and a lot of care and nurturing to pull yourself out of that hole as well. So these are some real challenges and real struggles I see with triathletes in particular when you don't get your nutrition right for an extended period of time, not talking about a couple of weeks. Here I'm talking about like season after season, year after year. Your nutrition is not particularly supporting training for three sports. And especially important as you're getting into your forties, your fifties, your sixties, your seventies, you might feel fit. You might feel quite highly functional, but that doesn't mean you are healthy.

[00:14:51] And by the time you do find out that something's wrong or something went awry 10 years ago or 20 years ago, it's a lot harder to [00:15:00] fix, like bone mineral density.

[00:15:01] Now I know a lot of triathletes are spending a lot of time thinking about nutrition, googling nutrition, asking chat, GPT about nutrition, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube, picking up some little nuggets here and there, trying to implement them. Not sure if it's working. Second, guessing back to still being confused and unsure.

[00:15:22] If you gave me one to two hours of your life each week for nine months, I guarantee I could save you 10 hours because you'd actually have a system you'd know what to do. You'd know how to do it, when to do it, and why you were doing it. It becomes automatic and habitual so that we're not spending hours and hours trying to figure this out for ourselves.

[00:15:46] And honestly, this is why I built the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program. I was spending hours and hours each week in private practice repeating myself to age group triathletes. Every day who are making the same [00:16:00] mistakes, have the same confusion, same overwhelm, and same problems as you do

[00:16:05] And I hit a point where I physically couldn't help any more people one-on-one.

[00:16:11] So I took everything I've learned after two decades of experience working with age group triathletes, as well as being the sports dietician for Triathlon Australia of age group triathletes. And I built it into a structured system. That takes you through step by step, everything that you need to know in the right implementation order, as well as the application of how to do the things. It is the education piece that is so much more valuable long term, as well as the practical nature of, okay, cool, what do I then do to eat?

[00:16:46] What do I put on my plate? What do I put in my mouth? How do I plan my carb loading? What's my hydration strategy? All of the practical applications of the education theory.

[00:16:55] If you don't fix this at some point in your triathlon career, doesn't [00:17:00] need to be today. But if you don't fix it, at some point you are just gonna be continually spinning your wheels. You'll keep training 'cause we're really good at that, but you're not gonna be getting the return out of that training time and investment.

[00:17:13] You'll continue to feel pretty exhausted and fatigued all the time. You will plateau and keep plateauing and you'll keep wondering why this is not clicking and potentially underlying all of that could be some sort of health issue. Simmering you are slowly digging yourself into a whole.

[00:17:33] So if you are listening and you're thinking, holy shit, Taryn, this is me, then this is your opportunity to pull your finger out and fix it. This is exactly what we do inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program. we take all the elements you need to know about triathlon nutrition, the 95% and the 5%, so you are a hundred percent dialled. Give you a clear structured system to follow and implement into your life that is custom to [00:18:00] your needs, your genetics, your training program, and your lifestyle. Plus you get access to me every week in Power Hour to troubleshoot anything, to finesse, anything to use my brain and my critical thinking to get to the root cause of what the problem is, what is actually going on here, not just surface level. And after only one week together, when we talk about recovery, nutrition, so that you can start fuelling and recovering in a way that actually supports your training and your long-term performance. If you're ready to do that, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy and come and join our next cohort because the best time to fix your nutrition was 12 months ago, but the second best time is now.

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!