How important is sports nutrition for endurance athletes? VERY VERY.

This was driven home to me about a month ago when I was training for an ultramarathon and running about 40 miles a week. My fitness was improving, but I was ignoring other areas of my health.

During that time, I got caught up in socializing, staying out late, going to shows, going on multiple dates a week, and drinking lots of IPAs. Now I’m not saying you should never have fun as an athlete, but I was totally overdoing it. I was so busy, I didn’t have time to prep healthy meals.

As always happens when you don’t take care of your health during endurance training, it all came back to bite me in the ass! I caught a cold that lasted for a month and flared up any time I ran hard. In fact, it set my ultramarathon training back by weeks.

The lesson here is that health doesn’t just support training. Health IS training.

You can’t sustain tough endurance training for months on end when you’re eating junk and drinking too much.

This is actually good news for those of you whose fitness training has been sidelined by the pandemic. When you’re not able to work out normally due to quarantine, injury, illness, or travel, health is a worthy place to focus your training energy.

So today, let’s take a deep dive into everyday sports nutrition for athletes. I’m going to hit you with a ton of info, so consider bookmarking this post so you can reference it when you need it.

• If you’d like to read more about sports nutrition before, during, and after a hike or climb, check out my post on fueling for a long hike.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

Sports Nutrition Myths and Misinformation

Unfortunately, sports nutrition is an easy target for those who want to sell pseudoscience — or outright nonsense. These show up in the form of questionable diet plans, supplements, and other products that really have no basis in science.

Part of the problem is that nutrition is still emerging as a science. Those of us who were around in the 80s and 90s actually learned in school that all fat was bad and that carbs were the foundation of a healthy diet. This disastrous advice from “experts” sparked an epidemic of heart disease and obesity that remains with us today.

So if we can’t trust science, we might as well turned to jacked gurus on the internet for nutrition advice, right? I certainly don’t blame people for thinking so!

But as a consumer of sports nutrition advice, here are some things to consider:

• Nutrition science has come a long way in the past 20 years. Thanks to long-term studies that follow individuals for decades, we now have a much better idea which diets lead to improved performance and lifelong health.

• The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans — which inform nutrition education in public schools and also the foods served in schools, prisons, and other federal institutions — are influenced by the food and agriculture lobbies. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been an outspoken critic of the guidelines and has created alternate guidelines grounded in scientific evidence.

• It’s important to realize that diet, fitness, and weight loss are weekly regulated industries. As you peruse your social media feeds, keep in mind that literally anyone, including your grandma’s dog, can write a blog post or sell a diet plan online.

• Beware of magic bullets and one-size-fits-all advice. As we’ll discuss below, absolutely no diet works for everyone. Your physiology, your genes, your sport, your lifestyle, and even your personality all impact your ideal approach to nutrition.

• The best thing that can be said about restrictive fad diets is that they don’t work. The vast majority of crash dieters regain all of the weight they lose within three years. Many fad diets are quite restrictive and eliminate whole classes of nutrients, like carbs. This is not a winning formula for endurance training.

The bottom line: be very skeptical of diet advice on the internet, including mine 😆. Be a good fact checker and keep up on the latest academic research. Long-term studies that follow a group of people for many years generally provide the most reliable information about diet.

Keep It Simple

So given all of this noise, how do you find the right diet as an endurance athlete?

First, remember that the best diet for you will be simple, flexible, and individualized. Rather than adhering to rigid rules and fitness trackers, start with the following fundamentals:

• Focus on food quality over quantity. Eating foods rich in fiber, protein, and fat will fill you up, take longer to digest, and control your appetite naturally.

• Eat a nutrient-rich diet. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, and legumes all pack a big nutritional punch of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other good stuff.

• Avoid processed and fast foods. The fresher your food, the better. If you do eat packaged food, check the nutrition label and ingredient list. The fewer ingredients, the better.

• Limit refined carbs (white sugar, white flour, white rice) and trans fats. Enjoy saturated fats in moderation.

• Learning to cook and meal prep can change your life as an athlete. Shalene Flanagan, the first American woman to win the New York Marathon in 40 years, says that learning to cook was one of the best things she did for her career.

How much should you eat?

My number one tip is to make sure you eat enough! Research suggests that too many endurance athletes are chronically underfueled, and that this is especially true for women.

Over time, underfueling can lead to chronic health problems, including decreased immunity, bone loss, and loss of menstruation in women. Underfueling also slows down recovery, reduces lean muscles mass, and can keep you from reaching your full performance potential. (Check my post on overtraining syndrome for more info about how this can play out.)

The good news is that eating a nutrient-rich diet helps to regulate appetite so that you can follow your body’s natural hunger cues. Because fats, proteins, and whole grains digest relatively slowly, you’re likely to eat less throughout the day — even if each meal is higher in calories.

If you have weight loss goals during endurance training, be aware that underfueling can actually sabotage your efforts. When you’re not eating enough food, your body feels stressed and may actually store more fuel as fat. It’s best to err on the side of eating more than you need. Often, if you are eating well and exercising regularly, your body weight will begin to regulate naturally without any “restricting” on your part.

Balance your macros

Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are macronutrients — broad classes of food molecules your body uses for fuel and structural building blocks

Fad diets tend to villainize certain macros. Like fashion, these cycle throughout the years. (Think of low-fat diets in the 90s versus low-carb diets today). However, all three macronutrients play an essential role in your health and athletic performance. So don’t restrict any one macro completely.

What’s the ideal macronutrient balance?

The National Academy of Medicine recommends the following ranges for macronutrients.

• Carbohydrates: 45–65% of daily calories

• Fats: 20–35% of daily calories

• Proteins: 10–35% of daily calories

Rather than doing a lot of math, you can use a fitness tracker like MyFitnessPal to track your macro balance (available in the free version). I recommend doing this every once in a while or whenever you feel like you need a nutritional tune-up, because tracking every meal every day becomes labor intensive.

The ideal macro mix for you depends on your sport and physiology. For example, when you’re building muscular strength, you may want to eat in the high end of the range for protein. Likewise, some endurance athletes perform well on a high-carb diet while others have a hard time tolerating this type of eating.

Don’t Fear Carbs

Carbs are an important energy source for endurance athletes. During endurance training, you may actually benefit from a high-carb diet (50 to 65% of your daily calories), though this varies from person to person.

Keep in mind that not all carbs are created equal. Refined carbs like white sugar, white flour, white rice, and white potatoes can cause spikes in blood sugar levels that stimulate your body to produce insulin. This can actually work to your advantage when you need fast energy during or right after a strenuous hike. But eating too much of these foods in your daily life can promote fat storage and also increase your risk of developing prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.

A better strategy for your everyday diet is to get your carbs from whole food sources like fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains. When choosing packaged products like whole grain bread and pasta, check the ingredient label. If the first ingredient is a whole grain (for example, whole wheat flour), that’s a good sign that the product will help to balance blood sugar.

Don’t fear the fat, Either

Those of you who were around for the 80s and 90s remember the low-fat diet craze! Low-fat goodies like Teddy Grahams and Snackwells snack cakes flooded the market. It’s hard to believe that these sugary, highly refined products were once considered health foods.

Sadly, recommendations to eat a low-fat diet sparked an epidemic of heart disease and obesity in the United States. Through long-term nutrition research, we now realize that some types of fat can balance blood cholesterol and promote heart health. Because fat digests slowly, it can also help you feel fuller for longer, which means you eat less throughout the day.

Here’s a run down on the types of fat:

• Monounsaturated - raises good cholesterol (HDL) and lowers bad cholesterol (LDL). Found in olive oil, canola oil, olives, nuts, and avocados.

• Polyunsaturated - also raises HDL and lowers LDL. Found in fish, flax seeds, walnuts, green veggies, and many plant oils. Omega-3 fatty acids are specific kinds of polyunsaturated fats that are essential to prenatal development and help to prevent chronic disease.

• Saturated - May raise LDL when consumed in abundance. To be safe, keep intake below 10% of daily calories. That’s actually quite a bit (about 23 grams saturated fat for a 2,000 calorie diet). Plant-based sources like coconut oil may have less impact on cholesterol than animal-based sources like red meat, dairy, and butter.

• Trans - This manmade fat found in processed foods raises LDL and lowers HDL and should be avoided whenever possible. Public awareness and labeling laws have drastically reduced the use of trans fat, but it’s still found in processed foods, fast foods, and commercial baked goods. In the United States, processed food can contain up to 0.5 grams of unlabeled trans fat. To be safe, check the ingredients and avoid anything that starts with “partially hydrogenated.”

Protein: Aim for quality

Endurance athletes strain their muscle and connective tissues on a daily basis. In order to fully recover and repair the damage, your body needs a steady supply of protein. Eating plenty of protein also helps to prevent loss of lean muscle mass when you’re doing lots of cardio.

The average adult requires a minimum of 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day. However, endurance athletes and people who are actively building muscle need more: about 1.2 to 1.7 grams per kilogram, depending on training load.

One tricky thing about protein is that it’s actually an umbrella label for many different nutrients called amino acids. Your body needs 20 different amino acids to function well. Some of these it can synthesize, but nine (the essential amino acids) can only be obtained through diet.

The quality of a protein source depends in part on the number of amino acids in contains. Whole proteins contain all nine essential amino acids, including the essentials. Examples include meat, eggs, and soy products. (Some whole grains, like quinoa, are very close to whole proteins.)

If you follow a plant based diet, you’ll need to combine protein sources to create whole proteins. Some examples of complementary proteins include:

• Grains and legumes (beans and rice, peanut butter on whole-wheat toast)

• Grains and dairy (macaroni and cheese, whole-grain cereal and milk)

• Seeds and legumes (sunflower seeds and peanuts in trail mix)

Note that complementary proteins don’t need to be eaten in the same meal.

While the market is flooded with protein powders and bars, most endurance athletes can get enough protein through their everyday diets. However, a protein product can be a convenient way to kickstart your recovery after a workout.

Follow a common Sense hydration strategy

While hydration is essential to good performance, there’s no need to overdo it. In general, you can drink when you feel thirsty and stop when you feel hydrated.

Good news! Decades of research suggests that drinking moderate amounts of coffee won’t hurt athletic performance and actually has many health benefits. Only partake if you tolerate coffee well (no upset stomach or anxiety).

Plan and Prepare Meals in Batches

How can you get more consistent about cooking and eating healthy? And how do you fit these disciplines into a busy life? Here are a few time management tips.

• Set aside 30 minutes each week to plan your meals and write your shopping list.

• Put shopping and meal prep times on the calendar and keep them sacred.

• To save time, cook up a big batch of something healthy and separate it into meal prep containers.

• Freeze a few meals from every batch, then mix and match so you’re not eating the same stuff every night.

Should You Supplement?

Supplements are a huge, money-making, poorly regulated industry that may not give you much return on investment. For example, drinking branched-chain amino acids for recovery probably is going to make less of a difference in your performance than eating extra veggies and getting plenty of sleep. And the veggies and sleep cost a lot less!

It’s also possible to go overboard with supplements. Getting too much of some nutrients can actually harm your body. It’s a good idea to check with your doctor or dietitian before taking a new supplement, especially if you have any chronic medical conditions.

Generally, if you eat a varied and nutrient-rich diet, you don’t need sport-specific supplements. If you like, you can take a multivitamin for extra insurance.

Unlike food, supplements aren’t regulated by the USDA, so it’s possible that pricey supplement is nothing more than a sugar pill. For this reason, look for supplements certified by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), which independently verifies nutrition information.

My Favorite sports nutrition Books

This is an amazing cookbook for busy athletes! The recipes are simple and ready fast — even if you’re a beginner in the kitchen.

One caveat: these authors are definitely not afraid of saturated fat, so keep an eye on your intake. It’s fine to substitute low-fat dairy or lean meat to keep your saturated fat intake under 10% of daily calories.

This nutrition manual from the Harvard School of Public Health is a fascinating read that will make you a more savvy consumer of nutrition information. I especially enjoyed reading their critiques of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans and their alternative recommendations.

Note that most of the advice is geared toward non-athletes, so not everything will apply to you. You may need a higher-carb diet than they recommend, for example.

So there you have it. Everything you need to know about sports nutrition for endurance athletes.

If you want to continue the discussion, be sure to hop in the Facebook Group.

Originally published May 8, 2020.