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Nutritional Recovery – Don’t leave it to chance
By Greg Cox
Sports Dietitian, APD
Recovery from training and competition is an integral part of being a serious athlete – that is, if you’re trying to improve your performance. The key requirements for optimising your nutritional recovery are to be:
(1) Planned and integrated. It doesn’t happen by accident and needs to be integrated with other recovery modalities such as your recovery run, massage, immersion in cold or contrasting water temperatures or sleep. Alternate recovery modalities complement, but don’t replace nutritional recovery strategies. Suitable foods and fluids for recovery don’t just appear when you’ve finished exercise. You need to plan ahead, as many available options at sporting venues are less than optimal.
(2) Targeted. Some athletes are at greater risk of failing to meet immediate post-exercise recovery nutrition goals than others. Haphazard eaters, athletes with especially high demands and limited time between sessions, and weight conscious athletes or restrained eaters that count every morsel of food are all at risk.
(3) Aligned with other nutritional goals. Recovery nutrition guidelines need careful interpretation to ensure they are aligned with other nutritional goals and challenges you face. For instance, if you need to lose some body fat or gain muscle mass then the following guidelines need to be adjusted accordingly.
(4) And lastly, accommodate everyday eating. You don’t only eat to optimise performance, so when socialising with fellow athletes after training at the local bakery or café, it’s important to be flexible and make the best available choice!!
Nutritional Recovery – Don’t leave it to chance.
By Greg Cox
Sports Dietitian, APD
Why should you consume carbohydrate during exercise?
Carbohydrate from blood glucose and muscle glycogen (stored glucose in the muscle), is an important fuel for your muscles during exercise. The relative contribution of carbohydrate as a fuel for you muscles is influenced by the exercise intensity, exercise duration, how much carbohydrate is available during exercise, your training status and environmental conditions. In short as the intensity of exercise increases, the contribution of carbohydrate as a fuel increases – hence, it’s an important fuel.
During extended endurance exercise as muscle glycogen stores decline, the relative importance of blood glucose as a fuel for the working muscles increases. To that end, the primary purpose for consuming carbohydrate during endurance exercise (that is, exercise lasting longer than 90 minutes) is to maintain blood glucose in order to maintain the use of carbohydrate as a fuel by the muscles in the latter stages of prolonged exercise.
In terms of performance, the benefits of consuming carbohydrate throughout endurance exercise are a consistent and reproducible finding in performance based studies (i.e. where researchers have employed a time trial). So, in endurance events, consuming carbohydrate enhances performance by maintaining blood sugars and providing a source of fuel for the working the muscle.
Is there a ceiling as to how much carbohydrate your body can use from sports drinks and other carbohydrate sources (e.g. gels) consumed during exercise?
Your muscle’s ability to use carbohydrate from a single carbohydrate source (i.e. glucose) appear to be ~1.1 grams per minute. However, when different types of carbohydrates are combined, most commonly glucose and fructose, it appears this ceiling can be increased to ~1.75 grams per minute – almost a 50% increase.
So what should make of all of this?
In races where you’re trying to maximise your intake of carbohydrate when provided with sufficient opportunity and tolerance (i.e. the cycle leg of an Ironman Triathlon) using products that contain mixed carbohydrate sources (i.e. glucose and fructose) will allow a greater delivery of carbohydrate to the working muscle.
PowerBar Gels, PowerBar Performance Bars and PowerBar Blasts are based on C2 Max technology, which is a carbohydrate mix of glucose and fructose. In situations where you’re consuming high amounts of carbohydrate (>60 grame per hour), these products offer a benefit over products sourced from single source carbohydrates.
Performance Benefits of Altitude Exposure
Athletes are always looking for a competitive edge, and tri-athletes are no different. The benefit of altitude exposure for sea-level or non-altitude competitions, however, is a matter of controversy.
The lure of altitude exposure is in the physiological changes that occur in the body as it adapts to the lower levels of oxygen available at high elevation. Because the air is thinner, each breath you take contains less oxygen, and so you get winded much more quickly than at sea level. Your body compensates in the short term by decreasing the fluid circulating in the bloodstream.
This effectively concentrates red blood cells, which are the cells that carry oxygen to your muscles and tissues. Over a period of weeks, your body makes more red blood cells and increases the haemoglobin concentration within red blood cells. Haemoglobin is the molecule in red blood cells that binds with oxygen. These adaptations are just some of the changes that can occur as you train in high-altitude conditions. They are important because, if you then return to sea level for a competition, you can have extra red blood cells and haemoglobin in your bloodstream and be able to carry more oxygen to your muscles. This can lead to better athletic performance at sea level. Of course, the effect wears off if you no longer expose yourself to altitude.
The controversy lies in the question of how to best gain altitude exposure. There are a number of schools of thought. For example, you could live and train at high altitude, or live at low altitude and just train at high altitude, or live at high altitude and train at low altitude.
It turns out that elite athletes who tried living and training at high altitude for 63 days weren’t able to train as intensively as at sea level, and as a result they experienced some degree of de-training when they returned to sea level. Moreover, their performance times over distances of 805 metres, 1.6km, and 3.2km were 3% to 8% slower.
Scientists decided to subject athletes to three different altitude exposures for 28 days and then measure their physiological adaptations and resulting performance times. After first spending 28 days at sea level, athletes were assigned to live high (at 8,200 feet) for 22 hours per day and train low (at 4,000 feet) for 2 hours, or live and train low (at 500 feet), or live and train high (at 8,200 feet).
Changes in red-blood-cell volume, haemoglobin concentration, and treadmill (VO2 max) at sea level were highest for those athletes who lived high and trained low and those who lived and trained high. Changes were smallest in athletes who lived and trained close to sea level. When the three groups of athletes completed a 5km run, it was only the athletes who lived high and trained low that showed demonstrable improvements. The performance benefits were maintained for about three weeks after the athletes returned to sea level.
Select U.S. Olympic endurance athletes have been following a variation of the living high/training low approach since 1999, with great success. The athletes have lived and performed their moderate-intensity workouts at 8,200 feet and completed their high-intensity workouts at the 4,000-foot lower elevation. This approach has led to unprecedented Olympic success for long-track speed skaters and marathon runners on the U.S. team.
Thus, altitude exposure does seem to offer performance benefits for endurance athletes. Something akin to living high and training low is probably the best approach. It takes three to four weeks of living at altitude to achieve the desired adaptations, and the effects can last for about three weeks upon return to a lower elevation.
The question is, are these living and training conditions realistic for you? Unfortunately, for many of us, living and working at altitude and training at or near sea level isn’t practical.
At the Musashi High Performance Centre in Melbourne, partners Bodyology have installed an altitude chamber that is accessible to the public with Ironman Melbourne under 10 weeks away now could be the perfect time to see the benefits of training at altitude. If you book in before the end of January they are offering a special 6 week Ironman Melbourne package so contact Michael at Bodyology to take your training to the next level.
Michael Chiovitti is currently studying his PhD in Altitude training and has worked with a number of leading AFL players and Olympic Athletes.
Contact him here now to receive this fantastic deal. michael@bodyologypps.com.au
References
Febbraio M, Martin D. Nutritional issues for especial environments: training and competing at altitude and in hot climates. In: Burke L, Deakin V. Clinical Sports Nutrition. 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill. 2006;765–784.
Wilber RL. Application of altitude/hypoxic training by elite athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2007;39:1610–1624.
Nutrition Periodisation: Specific Preparation
Nutrition periodisation is the concept of having a nutrition plan that begins on your very first day of training and then adjusts as your training plans change. You’re just coming out of the first periodisation cycle — general preparation — where the focus has been on building endurance by gradually ramping up training volume and intensity.
| 29 weeks to Ironman | |||
| Cycle: | General preparation | Specific preparation | Competition |
| Training weeks: | 1-12 | 13-26 | 27-event day |
Specific preparation is the next cycle. In this cycle, you will continue to build your endurance base while adding a hard workout each week. You’ll also be performing sport-specific strength work by incorporating hills on the bike and run.
As the weeks progress, you’ll continue to build or maintain your endurance base, while incorporating a couple of hard workouts each week in the same sport. You’ll also spend concerted periods of time with increased volume in a single sport while reducing volume in the other two, and you will have periods where you are balancing your training across all three sports. To accomplish all of this, two training sessions a day will be common.
High-volume training combined with increasingly higher intensities demands full recovery each day. That means paying close attention to consuming adequate calories. This is not the time to be cutting calories in an attempt to lose weight.
As intensity increases, you rely less on your plentiful fat stores and more on your limited stores of carbohydrates. If you run out of carbohydrates, you will fatigue, and your training will suffer, too. For moderate to heavy endurance training consume 7-12 grams of carbohydrate per kg of body weight per day1. On those four-plus-hour training days, carbohydrate intake needs to be up to 10-12 grams per kg of body weight1.
Hill training to build strength will increase your need for protein to repair and build muscle tissue in response to training. Consume 1.5 to 1.7g of protein per kg of body weight daily, or about 105 to 119 grams of protein daily for a 70kg athlete2.
Fat intake should be in the range of 1 to 1.5g per kg of body weight; this is between 70 to 105 grams of total fat for the day if you weigh 70 kg2.
Hopefully you’re becoming well-versed on your sweat rates under varying training conditions and are using a well-designed sports drink and/or energy-gel-plus-water combination. Regular monitoring of hydration status by weighing yourself before and after workouts is a must, and remember to adjust your fluid intake accordingly.
It’s time to refine and zero in on the pre- and during-exercise hydration and fuelling strategies that you’ll use on the day of the event. These are suggested starting points:
- Follow your hydration schedule.
- Consume a high-carb meal about two to four hours before training if possible, or at least a high-carb snack about an hour before3.
- Consume 30 to 60 grams of carbs every hour during exercise4, or up to 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour6 if you are using PowerBar® sports nutrition products with C2 MAX carbohydrates (2:1 glucose to fructose ratio)
Rapid recovery is vital to keeping up with the demands of your training:
- As soon as possible after exercise, and again two hours after exercise, consume 1 to 1.2g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight1. Carbohydrate sources should have a moderate to high glycaemic index (GI)1, as this will help speed up the process of replenishing glycogen stores. A recovery beverage and/or energy bar is ideal.
- Consume 10 to 25 grams of protein as soon as possible after exercise, to help with the repair and building of muscle tissue in response to training5.
- Post-exercise, a loss of 1kg on the scales is equivalent to 1L of fluid. Fluid losses will also continue during the recovery period; hence athletes should aim to gradually consume a volume of around 150% of the post-exercise fluid deficit5. For example a loss of 1.5kg equates to a need for post-exercise fluid intake of around 2.25L.
- Consume sodium sources along with fluids, to help restore sodium lost through sweating.
About PowerBar
PowerBar is committed to helping enhance the performance of athletes by providing cutting-edge sports nutrition products, information, and tools. Backed by decades of sports nutrition experience, the POWERBAR product line includes a full spectrum of great-tasting food and beverage options developed to meet the nutrition, hydration, and recovery needs of athletes. PowerBar proudly sponsors Ironman Triathlon events in Australia. To learn more about PowerBar, go towww.powerbar.com.
References:
1. Burke LM, Kiens B, Ivy J (2004) Carbohydrates and fat for training and recovery, J Sports Sci, Vol. 22, pp. 15-30.
2. Stellingwerff T, Boit MK, Res PT. (2007) Nutritional strategies to optimize training and racing in middle-distance athletes. J Sports Sci, Vol. 25, pp. S17–S28.
3. Burke, L. (2010). Preparation for competition. In: Burke, L and Deakin, V Clinical Sports Nutrition. 4th ed. North Ryde : McGraw-Hill Australia Pty. Ltd., 304-329.
4. Maughan, R. (2010). Fluid and carbohydrate intake during exercise. In: Burke, L and Deakin, V Clinical Sports Nutrition. 4th ed. North Ryde : McGraw-Hill Australia Pty. Ltd., 330-357.
5. Burke, L. (2010). Nutrition for recovery after training and competition. In: Burke, L and Deakin, V Clinical Sports Nutrition. 4th ed. North Ryde : McGraw-Hill Australia Pty. Ltd., 358-392.
6. Currell, K. & Jeukendrup, AE. (2008). Superior endurance performance with ingestion of multiple transportable carbohydrates. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 40(2), pp. 275-281.
