As your training load increases, be mindful to increase energy intake from carbohydrates like pasta, rice, breads, potatoes, legumes, and cereals.

Rest days are equally as important as your training days, so give your body time to fully recover to ensure you are getting the most out of your training.

Even on rest days, remember to fuel with three meals and snacks in between. If you are concerned about RED-S or have questions about your nutrition, meet with one of our Sports Dietitians to empower your fueling strategy and optimize your performance! Click here to fill out our Intake Form and a Training HAUS representative will follow-up with you.

Phone Email [email protected]. Email Address. Supplement your meals with snacks. Prioritize rest and recovery. More recently, it has been suggested that athletes should train with low carbohydrate stores but restore fuel availability for competition "train low, compete high" , based on observations that the intracellular signaling pathways underpinning adaptations to training are enhanced when exercise is undertaken with low glycogen stores.

The present literature is limited to studies of "twice a day" training low glycogen for the second session or withholding carbohydrate intake during training sessions. Despite increasing the muscle adaptive response and reducing the reliance on carbohydrate utilization during exercise, there is no clear evidence that these strategies enhance exercise performance.

We find that those who eat more frequently have better energy and prevent themselves from becoming overly hungry, which can help them make better choices.

Hydrate It is vital to stay hydrated because the body is percent water, which performs numerous vital functions, including: Providing life and shape to every cell; Delivery of fuel to muscles; Lubrication and cushioning of joints; Aiding in muscle contraction and tone; Aiding in metabolism and digestion; Brain function; Shock absorption for the spine and brain; and Regulating temperature.

Consequently, dehydration causes these functions to suffer, impairing your health, ability to recover from illness and athletic performance. As little as a 2 percent decrease in weight, due to fluid loss, can impair both your physical and mental performance.

Recover Nutrition can help to speed the recovery process. After a workout, your body has emptied its fuel stores and the muscles have been broken down. To gain the most from your workout and perform at high levels, you need to repair your muscles and replace your fuel stores as quickly as possible.

Getting a combination of carbohydrates and proteins within 30 minutes of your training session will ensure that you are recovering as quickly and efficiently as possible, which will minimize the time needed between sessions and decrease the risk of injury. All of the education in the world does not matter if it doesn't lead to behavioral change.

Providing simple lists of the "best" foods to choose, easy guides on portion size and presenting material in a concise and action-based way will help to give you the tools to immediately start making changes.

As a society, we have become enamored with diets. The word diet has many different definitions and is typically associated with managing the calories that you consume or eating in a prescribed or particular way. The word nutrition has a more positive connotation and is typically associated with nourishing the body.

The goal of the Fueling Series is not to give you a diet plan. It is to help you focus on your habitual intake and the results of your nutrition habits.

We recommend that you try to consume foods you know will give you the nutrients and sustainable energy you need 80 percent of the time, and then consume whatever it is you want the other 20 percent of the time. Everything can fit into your daily "diet," your habitual intake.

As water is involved in the majority of chemical reactions involved in athletic performance it is therefore important that athletes are hydrated before, during and after physical activity to achieve their maximal physical performance.

Hydration enhances your motor neurons. Your muscles move only when they receive commands from your brain. These commands move through neural pathways, which depend on adequate hydration to function at their best.

When exercising, you need your motor neurons at their top potential — otherwise your speed and strength can decrease. Your body needs fluids to transport energy nutrients.

Hydration helps regulate your body temperature. Your body is put under stress when its core temperature rises above normal. This stress interferes with the energy systems your body uses, which has negative effects on performance and recovery.

Good sleep is essential to an athlete for maintaining high performance, body composition and general good health. Restricted sleep leads to hunger, impaired athletic performance, reduced psychomotor ability and a decline in health.

Forget your elaborate rehab machines, ice baths and compression garments. Regular, good quality sleep is the best recovery tool for athletes there is.

Athletes should aim for at least hours each night for optimal performance. More in periods of intense sports training and competition. Several previous studies in team sports have demonstrated that competitive success in competition is related to increased sleep duration and quality.

In a recent study, elite male and female Brazilian athletes were asked to describe their sleep quality and mood immediately before a national or international competition. Despite increasing the muscle adaptive response and reducing the reliance on carbohydrate utilization during exercise, there is no clear evidence that these strategies enhance exercise performance.

Further studies on dietary periodization strategies, especially those mimicking real-life athletic practices, are needed. Abstract Availability of carbohydrate as a substrate for the muscle and central nervous system is critical for the performance of both intermittent high-intensity work and prolonged aerobic exercise.

If you fail to eat after about two hours of intense aerobic exercise, your performance will start to gradually decline until the dreaded bonk occurs. When blood sugar drops, your body will burn through its remaining muscle glycogen rapidly. Then, a few nasty things will happen:. The longer and harder the session is, the more carbohydrates you need.

Consuming plenty of calories during training will also help you to meet caloric requirements for the day and enhance recovery for the next bout of exercise. Finally, remember that training is a catabolic process that causes damage to your body.

Providing plenty of calories immediately after training will give your body the energy it needs to begin the repair process quickly and help you recover faster. Carbohydrates and proteins signal hormones in your body that will tell it to begin the repair process.

Without a post-workout meal, this response will be impaired; you will struggle to fully recover. Your muscles will also be depleted of glycogen.

Remember that during the recovery window immediately following training, you will be able to synthesize new muscle glycogen more effectively. The rest of the day, your body still needs carbs to replenish, but you do not want to cause a spike in blood sugar.

Focus on fiber-rich, complex carbs rather than simple carb sources for your other meals of the day. Good examples would be fruits, vegetables, sweet potatoes, brown rice, and quinoa. This is also a good time to consume some lean protein and healthy fats.

There has been increasing popularity of low-carb and ketogenic diets within the sports world recently. They have been touted as a great way to get lean and improve your performance.

However, unless you are an ultra-endurance athlete, it is unlikely you will find any benefit from low-carb training. Some low-carb training protocols have been shown to increase levels of mitochondria, but performance improvements remain equivocal.

These low-carb protocols can be difficult to properly implement and may have negative implications that can offset any potential performance gains.

However, most are far better off fueling for optimal performance with a balanced carbohydrate-based diet. Amateurs especially tend to have a lot of room for improvement that can only be realized through continual training. The demands of this training are best met with proper fueling rather than experimental diets.

To summarize, low-carbohydrate training is only a good idea if your training demands longer and more steady aerobic sessions. But if you are training for explosive, high-intensity events such as criteriums, time trials, and road races common in the amateur scene, low carb training is not a good idea.

These sorts of efforts require a quick energy source such as carbohydrates. Going into these training sessions and races with optimal glycogen levels will allow you to recruit all your muscles to their full capacity and put out the maximum amount of power.