You can eat
- Carbohydrate at every meal: rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, sweet potatoes, couscous, oats and pulses; it is muscle fuel
- Fruit: three portions a day, choosing riper fruit in the hours around training
- Protein spread across every meal: eggs, chicken, turkey, fish, dairy, pulses and tofu
- Dairy: milk, yoghurt and fresh cheese; protein and calcium in one serving, and useful liquid recovery when solid food does not appeal
- Healthy fats: olive oil, avocado, nuts and oily fish, in meals away from training
- Vegetables and salad: at lunch and dinner on normal days, and in smaller amounts on competition day
- Your pre-training meal: rice or pasta with chicken, bread with turkey or tuna, a banana
- During long efforts: a drink with sugars and sodium, dried fruit and, if you have tested them in training, gels
- When you finish, if the next meal is far off or you train again within a few hours: a sandwich, a milk-and-fruit shake or yoghurt with cereal
What to avoid
- Fried food, breaded food and rich sauces in the meal before training: they take longer to leave the stomach and feel heavy.
- Whole pulses, lots of raw vegetables and high-bran bread just before a hard session: keep them for easier days.
- Fasted training as a rule: it is a deliberate manipulation for specific sessions, not a way of eating [1].
- Taking fat below 20% of the day’s energy: it does not improve performance [1].
- Alcohol on the evening afterwards: it interferes with recovery and sleep.
- High-caffeine drinks late in the day: they cut into sleep, your best recovery tool.
- Trying a food, gel or drink for the first time on competition day: test it in training.
- Taking supplements on your own: there is a risk of product contamination and an inadvertent positive test.
Changes that help
Everyday eating
Instead of saving carbohydrate for dinner, spread it over four or five meals: bread or oats at breakfast, rice or pasta at lunch, bread for an afternoon snack. Reaching your daily total in two meals is almost impossible, and people who miss it train with half-full stores.
The meal before training
Instead of a stew, breaded food or a large salad two hours beforehand, have white rice or pasta with grilled chicken and bread. Fat and fibre are still in the stomach when the session starts, which is what causes discomfort halfway through training.
Long efforts
Instead of water alone on a three-hour ride, have a drink with sugars and sodium. Drinking the same amount also replaces some fuel, and sodium helps retain what you drink rather than urinating it out.
Getting home
Instead of waiting for dinner because you cannot face food after training, have a milk-and-banana shake or yoghurt with cereal. Liquids and cold food go down when solids do not, and the first hour is the easiest one to use.
Double-session days
Instead of coffee in the gap, have a small turkey or tuna sandwich with fruit. The time between sessions is what costs most: you reach the second one without reserves and train worse, not less.
When fat loss is the goal
Instead of cutting dinner or carbohydrate on the day you train, reduce meals further away from the session and increase protein. Taking away fuel just where muscle expects it is what makes performance fall before fat does.
Habits that help
- Weigh yourself before and after a hard training session: each kilo you lose is about one litre of sweat [1]. That tells you how much you need to drink
- Drink through the day, not only when you train: arriving hydrated is decided in the preceding hours, not in the warm-up
- Sleep as much as you can: this is when muscle is repaired and what you have trained is consolidated
- Eat between the two sessions on double-session days, even if you are not hungry: this gap is the one that costs most
- For two weeks, note what you eat and how you feel in training: this is the information almost always missing when someone comes to a consultation
“Sports nutrition” sounds like a lab and a tub of powder. In practice it is much simpler: eat enough, have the amount of carbohydrate your training requires, spread your protein, drink to a plan and sleep. Everything else is detail that matters only once this is sorted, and it almost never is.
Almost everyone who sits down in our consultation room trains seriously without making a living from it. They arrive with a tight schedule, two or three sessions to fit between work and home, and the feeling that they eat well and perform less than they expect for all the training they do.
What does an athlete eat on a normal training day?
Your performance is decided in the five or six days when you are not competing. The joint consensus document of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine sets carbohydrate by training load [1]. These are its ranges, in grams per kilo of body weight per day.
- 3 to 5 g for light activity or skill work
- 5 to 7 g with around one hour a day
- 6 to 10 g if you train for one to three hours at moderate to high intensity.
- 8 to 12 g for extreme loads, with more than four or five hours a day.
Translated into a plate, someone weighing 70 kilos who trains for an hour and a half needs between 420 and 700 g of carbohydrate a day. You do not get there with one portion of rice at lunch. You get there with bread, rice, pasta, potato, oats or pulses at every meal, breakfast included. And fruit is the easiest carbohydrate to carry with you.
Fat stays between 20% and 35% of the day’s energy, and going below 20% does not improve performance [1]. There is a basic condition that is rarely mentioned: eating enough overall. We speak of low energy availability when what you eat, after subtracting the cost of training, falls short over a sustained period. Periods, bone, hormones, immune defences and performance itself then suffer [1].
What should you eat before training or competing?
The meal beforehand has one job. To fill the tank without sitting in your stomach. For efforts longer than sixty minutes, 1 to 4 g of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight is recommended, taken one to four hours beforehand [1]. The closer to the effort, the smaller the amount and the more fluid. The further away, a normal plate.
Anything high in fat, protein or fibre takes longer to leave the stomach, and that is what causes discomfort halfway through a session [1]. That is why the meal beforehand is the most boring of the week. White rice rather than brown, grilled chicken rather than a stew, a ripe banana rather than a big salad.
And what about fasted training? It is a tool for specific sessions. Training with low carbohydrate availability, fasting included, is described as a deliberate manipulation of some sessions [1]. It is not meant as a daily way of eating. Glycogen, the muscle’s carbohydrate store, is filled by high-carbohydrate diets, 8 to 12 g per kilo per day [2]. And what drains it most is high-volume training [2]. If you train fasted because someone told you to and you do not know why, it is worth reviewing why it is in your plan.
A rule without a figure is worth more than none. On competition day, you try nothing new: not a gel, not a drink, not the hotel breakfast. What you test, you test in training.
How much should you drink, and what?
Drinking is planned just like eating. Before the effort, 5 to 10 ml of fluid per kilo of body weight is suggested in the two to four hours beforehand [1]. The reference is light yellow urine. During the effort, the aim is for the fluid deficit not to exceed 2% of body weight [1]. A rate of 0.4 to 0.8 litres per hour suits most people [1]. Afterwards, for each kilo lost, 1.25 to 1.5 litres are replaced, spread out and with sodium [1].
Sodium is needed during the effort in three cases. When you sweat a lot, above 1.2 litres per hour. When your sweat is salty. And when the effort lasts more than two hours [1]. That is the difference between a sports drink and a bottle of water.
The warning you hear least is about drinking more than you need. Drinking above what you sweat is the main cause of hyponatraemia, which is when the sodium in the blood falls too low [1]. It happens mainly to people who go slowly, sweat less and think they need to drink more [1]. In the heat there is another emergency worth knowing about. According to the American College of Sports Medicine consensus on heat illness, exertional heat stroke is a medical emergency [3]. What decides the outcome is recognising it early and cooling quickly [3].
What should you eat after training?
There are three things to replace: fluid, carbohydrate and protein. And not everyone needs to hurry equally.
If you are training normally again tomorrow, the next lunch or dinner is enough. Rapid refuelling is reserved for when there are fewer than eight hours between two demanding sessions. In that case, 1 to 1.2 g of carbohydrate per kilo per hour is recommended for the first four hours [1]. A tournament, a day with two sessions or a training camp are those cases.
The protein afterwards is set at 0.25 to 0.3 g per kilo of body weight, or 15 to 25 g, within the following two hours [1]. The International Society of Sports Nutrition gives a very similar figure, 0.25 g per kilo or between 20 and 40 g [4]. Both agree on something more useful than the number. What changes the result is reaching the day’s total, well spread out.
In practice, a turkey or tuna sandwich, a banana and a carton of milk or milk drink cover all three and fit in your bag.
How much protein does an athlete need?
It is the question with the most noise around it and the easiest to answer. There are two reference ranges for daily protein. One runs from 1.2 to 2.0 g per kilo of body weight [1], and the other from 1.4 to 2.0 [4]. They come from two different societies and are not averaged.
For a person weighing 70 kilos, that is between 84 and 140 g a day. It can be covered with food if protein is in every meal. Eggs or a dairy product at breakfast, a generous portion of chicken, fish or pulses at lunch and another at dinner, and a yoghurt or a glass of milk between meals. It is better to spread it evenly, every three or four hours, than to concentrate it at dinner [4].
And two warnings. Above those ranges, more protein adds nothing, except in specific situations. During an energy-deficit phase with strength training, going up to 2.3–3.1 g per kilo is considered, to preserve muscle [4]. Also, protein does not replace carbohydrate. Someone who eats a lot of protein and little carbohydrate trains worse.
How to build your weekly athlete menu
It is what people search for most and what makes least sense to copy. A fixed menu cannot get it right when the amounts depend on your weight and on what you train that day. Someone weighing 60 kilos in a recovery week and someone weighing 90 in a competition week do not eat the same. The difference is hundreds of grams of carbohydrate.
It works better to build the week by type of day, with the same skeleton and a different portion.
- Easy day. Normal meals with carbohydrate in each, such as toast at breakfast and rice with chicken and vegetables at lunch.
- Hard day or two-session day. A bigger portion of carbohydrate, something between the two sessions and recovery sorted as soon as you finish.
- Competition day. Your usual meal beforehand, the planned drink and the first hour afterwards covered.
- Rest day. You eat normally, because that is when you recover what you trained.
With those four templates and the two lists above, the week fits on one sheet of paper. What does not fit on one sheet, how many grams are right for you, is what we work out in consultation.
If you want to lose fat or gain muscle without losing performance
It can be done, with two conditions. The change should be moderate, and it should not coincide with the hard part of the season.
To lose fat, the way is a moderate, sustained deficit, with protein in the upper part of its range and strength work left alone. These are the same criteria as the weight-loss diet, applied to someone who also trains. An aggressive cut is expensive. When available energy is chronically short, endurance, strength and the response to training fall, and injury risk rises [1].
To gain muscle mass, the approach is the opposite, with a small surplus, strength work and patience. It is covered in the fitness diet. The scales alone are misleading. If you want to lose fat, weigh yourself once a week at most. Waist and hip measurements, or a belt you wear often, are a better guide than weight. What is lost and what is kept also matters.
Sports with a weight category are a case apart, and they come up a lot in consultation. Dehydrating to make the weight leaves a fluid deficit that sometimes there is no time to replace before competing [1]. The detail is in the martial arts diet.
Do you need supplements to perform?
You will not find a list of what to take here, and that is deliberate.
The International Olympic Committee consensus on supplements says three things that are best read together. Of everything sold to athletes, only a few products have good evidence of adding anything [5]. They are caffeine, creatine, nitrate and certain buffering agents, substances that cushion acidity in the muscle [5]. The response varies widely from one person to another, because of genetics, gut microbiota and usual diet [5]. And before deciding anything, a full nutritional assessment is needed [5].
One warning weighs more than the list. Some supplements may contain substances banned by anti-doping codes without you knowing, and this is a known risk [5]. The athlete’s health comes before any gain [5]. And no sports supplement is recommended for minors [1].
The useful version is short. Eat what you need, drink to a plan and sleep. If there is a real reason to take something, your doctor or your dietitian-nutritionist will recommend it.
If you are a woman, or if the person training is a teenager
This is the part that conventional advice covers worst.
In women, the clearest sign that something is off is the period, more than weight. The International Olympic Committee consensus describes relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs). It is a set of health and performance problems that appears when what you eat does not cover what training demands [6]. It affects women and men [6]. If your period stops while you train hard, it is a reason for a medical consultation, even if you feel fit.
In teenagers the sum is double, because the needs of growth are added to those of training. No diet makes anyone grow more than genetics and the timing of maturation allow. What nutrition does is help that boy or girl reach where they are meant to. When energy falls short, bone, maturation and performance suffer [6].
In recent years, low energy availability in men and its link with mental health have been studied more [6]. In men there is no sign as visible as the period, which is why it is detected later.
Which mistakes do we see in consultation?
Some mistakes are heard every week in consultation, in people who run in the mornings as much as in those who compete every Sunday.
- Eating “clean” and too little. The plate looks impeccable, but it does not reach what training demands, and the tiredness is put down to something else.
- Replacing the meal afterwards with a protein shake. The protein arrives, and the carbohydrate and fluid are left unreplaced.
- Copying the plan of a professional or someone on social media. They have a different weight, a different load and a different calendar, and the amounts do not transfer.
- Training more when performance drops for weeks in a row. Before adding sessions, we look at how much is eaten and how much is slept.
- Trying a fashionable diet in mid-season, low in carbohydrate or with long fasts. If something big needs to change, it is done in pre-season.
What changes depending on the sport you play?
Less than it seems, and mainly the “when”. The principles above apply to everyone. What shifts is how long the effort lasts, whether it is continuous or intermittent, how many times you compete each week and whether there is a weight category.
Carbohydrate during the effort is ordered by duration, not by sport [1].
- Under 45 minutes, it is not needed
- Between 45 and 75 minutes, small amounts are enough, even rinsing your mouth with the drink.
- Between one hour and two and a half hours, 30 to 60 g per hour [1].
- Above two and a half hours, up to 90 g per hour [1]
With that table in front of you, a match, a long bike ride and a bout largely work themselves out. Even so, each sport has its quirks, which is why there is a guide for each sport. In the basketball diet, the problem is rest and the journey home. In the footballers’ diet, it is the double session and the weekend match. In the cyclists’ diet, it is eating on the bike for hours. And in the fitness diet, it is protein distribution and body composition.
When you want the number that applies to you (how many grams, at what time and on which days), our team of sports registered dietitian-nutritionists will work it out with you. We start from your weight, body composition, schedule and competition calendar, in Barcelona and online.
If something has to give one week because time is short, let it be the detail. Eating enough is the last thing to cut.
So where do I start this week?
A pre-training plate in five minutes
Rice or pasta cooked the night before, a tin of tuna or grilled chicken, bread and a banana. It takes as long as getting changed and contains nothing new.
Liquid recovery
A carton of chocolate milk or a milk-and-banana shake. Carbohydrate and protein in one serving, cold, with no preparation and no fridge. It works when food does not appeal.
Dinner after late training
If you leave the gym at ten, dinner is already planned: an omelette with bread and fruit, or pasta with tuna. What does not work is going to bed with a yoghurt after two hours of work.
When to see a doctor
When to see a doctor
We adjust energy, hydration, schedules and recovery to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury. We do not diagnose an injury, assess your heart or treat an eating disorder, which in sport can disguise itself as discipline.
Book a medical appointment without waiting to change your diet if you notice any of these signs:
- You feel pain or tightness in your chest, severe dizziness, faint, or your heart races during exercise [3]
- In exertion with heat, you feel confused or disoriented, or stop sweating [3]
- After a long event in which you drank lots of water, you have nausea, headache and swelling [3]
- You pass very dark, cola-coloured urine with severe muscle pain after unusual training [3]
- Your periods have stopped, you have had several stress fractures, or your performance has been falling for months with marked tiredness [6]
- You train fasted because you feel compelled to, are afraid of eating certain foods, or diet controls your social life [6]
Chest pain, fainting, confusion in heat or cola-coloured urine: emergency care today, or 112 if you are competing. Absent periods, stress fractures or falling performance: see your GP or a sports doctor this week, before changing your diet. If your relationship with food is the problem, seek specialist psychological support.
Training hard and eating enough go together. These signs nearly always appear when the second falls behind.
Tell us how you train and what you want to change
At the first visit we talk about your training, what you eat in a normal week and what you have already tried. At the second you receive your written plan.
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Guides to organise your questions about food, strength training and recovery.
ConsultationDietitian to gain muscle mass and reduce fat in Barcelona and online
Eating to gain muscle and lose fat without losing energy in the gym, in Barcelona and online.
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Sources
- Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: Nutrition and Athletic Performance. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2016;116(3):501-528. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2015.12.006
- Kerksick CM, Arent S, Schoenfeld BJ, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: nutrient timing. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2017;14:33. doi:10.1186/s12970-017-0189-4
- Roberts WO, Armstrong LE, Sawka MN, et al. ACSM Expert Consensus Statement on Exertional Heat Illness: Recognition, Management, and Return to Activity. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2023;22(4):134-149. doi:10.1249/JSR.0000000000001058
- Jäger R, Kerksick CM, Campbell BI, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2017;14:20. doi:10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8
- Maughan RJ, Burke LM, Dvorak J, et al. IOC consensus statement: dietary supplements and the high-performance athlete. Br J Sports Med. 2018;52(7):439-455. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2018-099027
- Mountjoy M, Ackerman KE, Bailey DM, et al. 2023 International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). Br J Sports Med. 2023;57(17):1073-1098. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2023-106994
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