Coaches Corner - Beginner Sports Nutrition
In the past few weeks, we’ve gotten geared up, learned how to ignore heart rate as a beginner and started working on speed with some strides. How do we fuel it all? With so many options on the market, where does a beginner runner start to decide how and what works for them?
As usual, I’m in camp keep it simple. Sports nutrition begins in the kitchen. Making sure you are eating balanced meals that contain real food while avoiding processed food is a great place to start. Running and ultra running require large amounts of energy and if the food fueling your muscles is low quality or junky, you should expect low quality and junky results.
Garbage in, garbage out.
If you are eating a well rounded diet, you shouldn’t have a bunch of excess calories floating around in your system and it is probably time to think about fueling the work. Some coaches will put a time limited factor on the choice about fueling a run or not.
Most coaches use the rule of 60. No nutrition needed unless you are moving for 60 minutes. While this works on paper, it neglects the slowest and fastest runners out there. A 15 minute mile and an 8 minute mile put very different stresses on the body. This is why I look at total effort and distance along with total running time.
Faster athletes will, as a necessity need more sports nutrition. That doesn't mean a beginner can completely ignore it though! Runs progress to 5+ miles pretty quickly once one gets through a couch to 5k into a weekly repeating running program. Whether that 5 miles take you 40 minutes or an hour, this is a good distance to start thinking about extra calories.
The phrase ‘sports nutrition’ often conjures images of gels, powders and expensive drinks that are a cause of stress for beginner athletes. The first aspect of choosing your nutrition is making sure its made of real sugar. A calorie free sports drink is simply helping with electrolytes and not energy. At all.
Premade sports drinks are a great place to start. Gatorade and Powerade have been making sports nutrition products for decades and have settled on a great mix for beginner athletes. Full disclosure, Gatorade powder is my main source of athletic calories!
Cyclists love living off of gas station candy such as Swedish fish and gummy worms. Anything with full sugar ingredients will be good enough. Don’t fall into the sports marketing trap. For a beginner, all sugar is largely the same so go cheep and easy for your first foray into performance nutrition.
I like to recommend 40-60 grams of carbs per hour for athletes starting their sports nutrition journey. This is more than enough to turbo charge your system, but not enough to stress your gut. That isn’t to say you will completely avoid gastric distress. Starting your workout well hydrated and having enough water on board to digest your sugar is important to keeping a happy stomach.
Now that your mileage is increasing and you need some additional calorie support, keep it simple and start with accessible sugars.