HOW TO EAT BEFORE TRAINING
Needless to say, how important this topic is for runners
of all levels. It usually takes one quite a long time to figure
out his best individual diet through positive and negative
experience of using tons of advise from different sources
(books, magazines, web sites, coaches, athletes and friends).
I am not going to advise you any certain diet, but I would
like to set up your mind in a certain direction to help you
find out the essence of this problem.
During your experimental time you could find something suitable
for you, but youll still want to have something better during
your progress. Only one thing is certain your search for the
best will never end, but of course, youll have to start somewhere.
There seems to be several questions most important for every
runner:
What to eat before training?
How much to eat?
How long before training?
The last questions are much easier to answer because they
mostly require just a common sense. We can start from a simple
statement that the questions of how much to eat and how long
before your training session are in the inverse relation to
each other: the less time before the training session the
less amount of food we are talking about. The reason for this
matter is obvious. Your organism cant spend its energy simultaneously
for your physical activity and for digesting food.
It is known from ancient times that after a good meal only
mild physical activity is advisable to help you digest your
food. So, the time immediately after a good meal is not a
good time for a rigorous exercise. The less time before training,
the smaller your meal should be. The essential thing to remember
is that your stomach shouldnt be full, but you shouldnt feel
hungry, either. Otherwise, your mind will be preoccupied with
thoughts about food, but not training. So your best condition
before training should be somewhere between not a full stomach
and not being hungry, either.
Nutrition science suggests that a usual time frame for digesting
a relatively heavy meal is about 2 hours and longer. So, when
you dont have such a period before your training, you have
to go with smaller snacks and easy drinks. Again the important
thing to keep in mind is that food is not an immediate provider
of fuel for your body it takes some time to break it down
to some usable level and digestion is an energy consuming
process by itself.
The most difficult part of food consumption skill is the
question of what to eat before training? What is optimal for
you personally, and what is good for different kind of workouts?
Is the same food good for the short and long distance running?
Making your first choices about the food we have to make
sure that this or kind of food will not upset your stomach.
You may not know it at the beginning, but using your common
sense would help you a lot. You could start with something
well-known and tried from your previous experience and only
after that move to some new foods slowly, step by step. Any
significant deviations from your normal food choices could
cause you stomach problems.
Another generally important thing is to never use food which
is a good absorbent of fluid. Dry fruit is a healthy snack,
but taken before training or racing it can absorb water from
your internal tissues and cause dehydration of your body.
Spicy food can increase your thirst without any real need
for it and youll end up with too much liquid in your body.
Another important part in nutrition is the necessity to have
a proper condition of proteins and carbohydrates before different
type of workout. The conventional approach usually emphasizes
carbo-loading before long running. From my point of view,
long distance running requires more proteins to maintain our
muscle ability to contract and relax and also water/electrolytes
balance, rather than carbohydrates loading. Of course, it
is a very interesting topic to discuss, but at the present
time we have more questions than answers. Thats why any discovery
in this direction is very welcome as it may help us understand
this problem much deeper.
Dr.Romanov
Pose
running website
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