Planning to fuel or fuelling to plan?
Every year, nutrition and its strategies take centre stage in our conversations with athletes. It's a subject that sparks genuine curiosity and interest. Yet, the challenge lies in translating this knowledge into effective race strategies. Coach Philip delves into some common pitfalls in nutrition strategy, emphasising the potential for significant performance improvements.
Nutrition science is a tricky topic to understand. There are simple guidelines which people talk about. However, the science is based on averages, and everyone has their own needs. Precision Fuel and Hydration simplified many approaches by highlighting the three levers of sports nutrition: Fluids, sodium and energy. This is part of why nutrition can be so tricky to “nail” because those three levers, as they call them, impact each other. They are different for each person, and two of them can vary between individuals day to day, race by race!
Over simplification has meant many people don’t spend the time to understand their body’s needs enough to be flexible within a race and make good nutritional decisions.
Our aim has always been to provide athletes with simple, adaptable strategies, extensively covered in our online courses. Nutrition is not a rigid science; it's an art, and each athlete is unique. Therefore, it's crucial for athletes to have a basic strategy and a deep understanding of the topic, empowering them to make adjustments if circumstances deviate (and in endurance sports, it is only a matter of time before they do) from the plan.
A strategy should have three components: fluid, electrolytes, and fuel. A straightforward strategy will simply apply these to the individual, the conditions, and the race. Oversimplifying a strategy to just one thing often means the athlete fixates on the singularity, misses the big picture, or removes some helpful flexibility in a nutrition strategy.
After every event, there is always an athlete who looks back with disappointment at their race and realises that they didn’t perform because they hadn’t quite stuck to their nutrition strategy or had made an adjustment to the nutrition strategy that ended up being unhelpful. Even with the ability to set reminders on their watches to eat or to drink, they still failed to fuel themselves adequately and, therefore, missed out on performance.
From an objective perspective, it is very frustrating because everything else went to plan, and it’s a control that the athlete has. It’s like an athlete has forgotten everything they learnt about this most talked about topic. Therefore, making fuelling and hydration second nature is integral to your race preparation. Often, we see that the people who aren’t as meticulous in everyday nutrition and fuelling through training are the ones who fail to stick to the plan. There is a fantastic quote from the US Olympic Committee: “Not every four years–every day”, which can be applied when discussing nutrition and training. It needs to be something you are thinking about and aware of every day and every session.
If you are serious about performance, saying that you forgot to eat or making mistakes is an unforced error and is easily rectified. Unlike many sports where unforced errors are counted through a match, in endurance sports, these unforced errors interfere with a whole season because they can’t compete as often. So it seems that having a good knowledge of this topic and applying it to your own needs on any day at any race will be a critical component of performance, not just an afterthought. Even if you aren’t following a complete nutrition strategy for training (to save money or to allow yourself everyday foods), remind yourself that it is as essential as the step you’re about to make or the pedal stroke you are pushing so that you have an edge on race day. Keep asking yourself the following questions: How much fuel and fluid have I had, and where are my electrolytes coming from? You can cross-reference that against your estimated needs and keep course-correcting.
Plan to fuel and fuel to plan.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.
The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.
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