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 you’ll 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, you’ll 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 can’t 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 shouldn’t be full, but you shouldn’t 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 don’t 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 you’ll 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. That’s why any discovery in this direction is very welcome as it may help us understand this problem much deeper.
Dr.Romanov
