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Tips to Eat Like a Champion

Tips to Eat Like a Champion

August 20th, 2024

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Tips to eat like a champion

A diet can make the difference between performing at your best or coming up short. The benefits of a healthy diet are not limited to fitness. In today’s newsletter, we highlight the benefits of a good diet and share tips to help you eat like a champion.

The benefits of a good diet

A good diet has benefits beyond improving your run performance. These benefits include:

Helping you live longer.
Keeping skin, teeth, and eyes healthy.
Supporting muscles.
Boosting immunity.
Strengthening bones.
Lowering risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
Supporting healthy pregnancies and breastfeeding.
Helping the digestive system function.
Helping achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

6 Tips to help you eat like a champion

Here are 6 of sport nutritionist Nancy Clark’s takeaways from Dr. David Dunne’s recent webinar discussing the nutrition strategy that powered 4 Tour de France wins. Thank you David and Nancy!

Tour de France losses are commonly linked to inadequate carbohydrate intake. Fatigue related to training hard vs. fatigue related to under-fueling is difficult to distinguish. Experimenting with eating more grains, fruits and veggies can help identify and resolve an under fueling problem. To optimize the availability of fuel (carbs), runners who exercise intensely should:
- carb-load the day or two before the endurance event.
- consume adequate carbs during the endurance event.
This will reduce the risk of bonking/hitting the wall plus will improve stamina, endurance, and overall performance.
Create a meal-by-meal plan that offers high, medium and lower carb meals depending on the demands of the day. Not every day requires a high carb intake. For a Tour de France cyclist, flat stages require fewer carbs compared to mountain climbs, with further adjustments needed for heat.
Tour de France cyclists have their own kitchen truck with three performance chefs who guide the cyclists' food intake during the Tour. The four main meals are breakfast, on-bike fueling, post-bike fueling, and dinner.
- Overall daily targets are 2.5-9.0 grams of carbohydrate per pound every day to fuel muscles, more than 0.9 grams of protein per pound everyday to preserve muscle mass, and minimal dietary fat intake so the athletes fill up on carbs, not fat.
- During hard efforts that last longer than 2.5 hours, the goal is to consume 90 to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That's about 350 to 500 calories from carbohydrates every hour.
- For a 150 pound cyclist doing extreme work, 9 grams of carbohydrates per pound translates into 1,350 grams of carbohydrate. That's 5,400 calories just from carbohydrate alone— about the amount in a 2-pound bag of uncooked white rice.
Tour de France cyclists must train their guts to be able to comfortably digest and absorb up to 120 grams of carbohydrates (~500 calories every hour). In training camps, they not only do on-bike training but also gut/ digestive training. They practice eating as they would for a race. Gut training can take years, as the cyclists gradually increase their intake of carbs per hour.
Note: Cyclists report less GI distress than runners, in part because they train their guts better (and in part because runners have more intestinal jostling).
In the first 60 to 90 minutes of recovery, a cyclist may consume cherry juice (carbs + antioxidants), quickly absorbed carbs, and a whey + carb recovery shake. When traveling back to the hotel, they eat a meal (such as salmon and pasta with extra salt) and sweets (cake, fruit). If they have a hard ride the next day, they eat and refuel as much as possible. At the hotel, they snack, have a massage, eat another dinner, and go to bed with a full belly!
At the elite level, some endurance athletes practice carbohydrate periodization (training with depleted muscle and/or liver glycogen stores some of the time) for selected workouts at the start of a training block. Sleeping low (with low glycogen stores) and then training on empty (no pre-exercise carbs) a few times a week can enhance cell signaling and induce adaptations that can improve performance. These train low sessions get phased out as training intensity increases.