Optimal Nutrition Fuelling Strategies with Professor Louise Burke

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. Professor Louise Burke is a prestigious recipient of the Order of Australia Medal and is a pioneer and leader in the nutrition industry for athletes worldwide. We're proud to say she's an Australian sports dietitian, academic, an author and also a very old friend of Udad. She was the Head of Sports Nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport throughout her time there from 1990 to 2018 and in 2018 was appointed chief of AIs nutrition strategy, although she has mentioned that the actual nutrition side of the AIs has folded, hence her new appointment as Chief of AIs. She's held the position of team Dietitian for the Australian Olympic teams for the Games in 1996 in Atlanta, 2000, Sydney, 2004 in Athens, 2008 in Beijing and 2012 London Games. She's authored and co authored more than 250 peer reviewed articles and her research is, as we said before, recognized worldwide. She's a former Ironman athlete herself, competing in Hawaii on five occasions, as well as an accomplished marathon runner and she's still running marathons every year to this day. Dad, it was very good to welcome an old friend of yours back on the podcast and someone that has created such a career for themselves that you were kind of there at the start of, in the beginning, back in your Ironman career.

Yeah, it was really lovely to reconnect with Professor Louise and she's just Louise to me. But I've just watched her career from afar and just admired her passion for what she does. And as you know, Jord, if you love doing something, you'll be very good at it. And she absolutely loves her work and she's looked at it from both sides. She's looked at it from an athlete's point of view because she was, you know, she was a really. She's done five Ironman, she's done I don't know how many marathons, you know, 15 or 20. She's still running marathons now and she said she's going to be running until she's 80 apparently. But, but these are the things that she's done as an athlete and she's also been heavily involved with elite athletes and almost befriended coaches. So she's got the three things that are so important is understanding how an athlete functions, how a coach has a relationship with the athlete and the nutrition that's involved between the athlete, the coach, and the nutritionalist. And so she's. She's got all three sides covered, and that's. That's incredible. And look, her experience. And we go a long way back. We traveled together to Hawaii. She was on the team to Japan that we were on Team Australia, and we went to Reunion, the island of Reunion where the Northern hemisphere competed against the Southern hemisphere in triathlon. And Louise was a pioneer in all those events. And she was such a good friend to me, and she was such a really helpful person to guide me with my own nutrition in my own competing. And, yeah, I'm so grateful that she's. She's really done well with her own career and she's given us some time. I know her time is very valuable. She gets requested to do a lot of podcasts, and so we're really grateful that she's given us her time. So thank you.

As always, nutrition is one of the most popular topics, and this was no different. And we were really pleased to be able to ask her such specific questions on recommendations around nutrition strategy, both from training and a racing perspective. So you'll hear all that and more in this episode. Here is Louise Burke. Enjoy. Louise Burke, thank you so much for joining us on the Travelo podcast. We're really, really stoked to have you here. We'll launch into the first question we want to know. What does nutrition mean to you?

Oh, it means so many things, but the first thing it means is, is just fun and pleasure and social activity. And it's one of the reasons I get up in the morning, and it's one of the reasons that I feel happy. So when I'm working with an athlete and we're trying to think about what the nutrient needs of their sport are, I'm always really keen to make sure that we can manage it and still maintain all those great things that make food so wonderful so you don't have to give up everything. You don't have to be sort of always fussing and stressing about it. There's ways in which you can meet nutrition goals in lots of different ways so that you can make it work in your real life.

That's a great answer. I'll jump in, Jordan. Sometimes, Louise, Jordan and I just jump in on each other because we're so excited about asking the next question. So right from the outset, I want to frame this discussion that we're going to have tonight. I'm so excited to talk about this because it's such a key component. You can be as fit as you like. And if you don't fuel yourself, say this to our athletes all the time, you're probably not going to get the result you want. It doesn't matter how fit you are, if you don't fuel, especially for endurance races, it's catastrophic. And. And it's so disheartening to do all that preparation and just be, you know, ripped apart by incorrect fueling. And the one thing I want to get across is I and Jordan are absolute cane advisors of a balanced food plan, one that can be sustainable for your whole life. And we want to know just what you just said then. What does it mean to you? We don't want to be a person who's boring and goes to a party and can't drink and can't have any dessert and can't enjoy themselves because they're doing the Ironman and they can't have that particular food. Can you just talk about that a little bit and the balance that you try to achieve?

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing you wouldn't want to be doing is lecturing everybody else, like making everybody else feel sad about the whole thing. So there's lots of ways in which we can use nutrition to eat more of the things that are going to help us and less of the things that aren't so great. But you can still manage to do it in a way that makes you able to eat with other people, that you can socialize, and that some part of your diet's there for just things that you enjoy. And that doesn't mean they have to be sort of like the junk foods. You can really enjoy some of the healthier foods as well. But part of what you should be doing with your nutrition to make it sustainable is to make it enjoyable and make it fit in so that it's practical to conduct in your life. You can't make it so complicated or so time consuming that it's hard, or you can't restrict so many things so that when you go out publicly, there's nothing that's available that's on your diet, and you can't spend so much time putting it together that it's just not feasible to be used. So that's the first thing and the next thing. I think that's a really good thing to know in ways in which we've evolved. Sports nutrition is that I think when I started as a sports dietitian, I had this idea that there's going to be this perfect athlete's Diet and you've got it and then you just repeat every day, you know, so you train and you just do the same thing. Once you've got the magic secret ingredient of your menu, it's just repeat. Whereas now we know, just like the training, you do something different every day and every training session you do, even at a sort of recreational level, it's got different goals. And so you need to keep manipulating and adapting what you're eating from day to day so that it's really thinking about what am I trying to achieve today and how does my training differ from yesterday, so what do I need to eat differently? So the amount that you eat, the amount of carbohydrate that you eat, how you space your carbs and where the protein is, it all changes not just between athletes, but, but within the same athlete from day to day depending on what their goals are. And so if you can understand that principle, that's really sustainable as well, because then you're never going to set yourself up to overdo it or under do it. It's going to always sort of track what you're doing with your food plan. And you said before that athletes can come unstuck when they don't fuel themselves properly, but they can also try and look for too much from nutrition. Like, I know lots of athletes that under train and then they think that if they just feel more during the race or buy some special supplement or sports food, that that's somehow going to translate all the mistakes or the lack of training that they did and overcome it. So you've got to think about it. You've got to really hit those targets properly. And neither over emphasize nutrition where it's not a limiting factor, or underestimate how much nutrition is going to play a role in your performance.

So in that you mentioned there are some specific things you can do with food to make it easier, to make it easy to follow a more balanced diet. What are some specific tactics that you can think of off the top of your head that actually do help people in terms of food choices or carbohydrate amounts or fat or protein amounts throughout their day?

Yeah, so the first thing is a principle is that I like to include as many different foods that are available as possible. So look, I understand that some people would like to be vegetarian or vegan for sustainability reasons, and I applaud that. And some people have food intolerances that mean that they may not be able to eat other foods. But in general, the more different foods that you include in your menu plan the better. And that's for both the nutrient composition, but also just for the availability of things. You know, if you're a fussy eater, you get situations where you can't find what you need to eat from the available food supply. So the more flexible you are and the more that you can embrace a whole lot of foods better. And that means that in terms of sustainability, you know, you could do things like have some meals a week that don't contain meat, and you could certainly eat produce that's in season rather than looking for things that have traveled the long way, et cetera. So there's lots of ways in which we can meet kind of other principles of food, but still keep the nutritional aspect of it as maximized as possible. So that's one thing, but then the next thing you think about is what's your training sessions for the day and more training load and intensity that you have, then the more carbohydrate becomes your friend in terms of the fuel supply. And so we try then to think about putting meals together that either before, during or after that session where we want to be well fueled, contains some carbohydrate. And that might mean that you thinking of carbohydrate rich foods, whether it's bread, pasta, breakfast cereal, rice, potatoes, they're just some of the common ones that people think of with carb supply. And so sometimes you might be thinking about having the night before that carb rich meal. So you've got fuel being stored overnight in your muscle called glycogen, so that it's there for the next day. Sometimes you might be taking it out with you on the session if you're doing a long bike ride so you can top up with more carbs. And sometimes you might be thinking, well, I've got two big sessions in a row, so I'm going to eat more carbs after the first session so I can refuel for the second session. So modulating the amount of carbohydrate that's in the meals is one sort of key principle of that dietary manipulation. And then another one might be about protein. So there's been a huge fight in nutrition for years about do athletes need more protein? In most of the cases they don't need more, but they could do a better job spreading it out. Because most of us, we tend to not eat much protein for breakfast and sometimes for lunch. And our snacks aren't usually protein rich, but then we eat half a cow at night for dinner and so we get enough protein, but it's just not spread well enough so that our body's got access to the amino acids that it needs to keep synthesizing protein over the day in our muscles and other parts of our body. So what we want to do is to try and think about having some protein after key training sessions, particularly if you're doing weights or you're doing strenuous exercise, so a high intensity or a long session where you're causing some muscle damage. After that you'd like to have some protein in the recovery snack and generally just spreading it over the day. So a bit more at breakfast and making sure that your lunch is. There's probably a bit more protein for most people and you can then afford to cut down a little bit of the evening meal so that there's more room for the carbs that you might need for the next day. So that's just an example of how you might think of two of the important nutrients and just spreading them a little bit differently according to what you need.

That's absolutely brilliant. I guess the golden question then follows, and I don't know how you can go about answering this, but let's talk about any type of training day. How much do I have pre training, how much do I need during training and how much after? How do you even go about working that out for an individual?

Yeah, well, it's a bit about what the training session is and what you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to perform as well as you can in a session and you want to have some intensity, some quality or some duration there, then the carb story is important. So, you know, it might be this morning's training session, it might be that you're going out and doing a long run on Sunday morning. So that means Saturday night's meal should really then start thinking about the fueling process and then you can choose whether you have breakfast or not in the morning. If you want to be totally well fueled, then having some recce before you go out and do the training session makes sense. And you might even take some more carbs with you on the run or ride or whatever the session is. But there's another sort of approach to carbohydrate, which is to say that if you try and do the session without carbohydrate support so that you're under fuelled, that actually provides an extra stimulus to your muscles to make them adapt to that session better. Now they don't train as well, so you wouldn't be choosing a high quality session to do that. We call this, the train low idea. So if you were doing that longer session, I wouldn't go too long because you probably wouldn't finish it and it'd be just so miserable that you'd probably give up sport altogether. But if you said to yourself, what I'm going to try and do is train smart with this session, it's just a recovery session, it's just going to be like an hour ride or a 40 minute run or whatever. But what I'm going to do is I'm not going to have a lot of carbs the night before. I'm just going to eat sort of meat and chicken, whatever and veggies for dinner. And that next morning I'm going to get up and I'm going to do it fasted, get that session done. Then because you've done it without so much carbohydrate being available, you might feel a bit less sippy. But the muscle adapts and gets more out of that session than if you'd had the carbs. So what we do with sport these days is try and think about sessions and periodize what the type of session is going to be and periodise the nutrition support around it. And it's kind of this new idea that sometimes taking away the nutrition support can help the muscle adapt, even though it's not doing a great job of doing the session. So then you balance it up with having other sessions where you really well fueled so that you're getting the quality from those sessions. And it's a bit of mixing and matching. And you guys as coaches know how important it is to have all these different kinds of sessions that you do. Because what you're trying to do is build up your perfect race day athlete with a whole lot of characteristics and each of those characteristics comes from a different type of training. So you're sort of like the conductor of the orchestra and you've got all these different instruments all working together to finally produce the music on the day. And so just as you choose the training sessions to do that, we can help that a little bit more with the way that you put nutrition around it.

It's a really good concept and it almost resembles your selection of fueling, doesn't it? When you're. Whatever you're going to eat on any given day, breakfast, lunch and dinner or the snacks in between, you're giving, like you said earlier, giving yourself as much variety each day as possible, not trying to replicate the same food each day. Because our requirements in our, because we're talking to everyday athletes out There at the moment, the requirements are they have some sort of training that's going to happen each day and it may be a recovery day, it may be a high intensity day, it may be an endurance day, maybe a tempo day. So just like we want variety in our food to get all of the right nutrients, we have variety in our training sessions. So they almost have to mimic each other, don't they? And. And then we can manipulate, is what you're saying here, if I'm trying to summarize it so that people can really get a. A really good idea of what you're getting across here, that we're trying to. We're trying to manipulate it so that some days we do the endurance ride without the carbs so that we're teaching our body to burn fats a bit better. And some days, on a high intensity days, we would also go in under carb so that we may struggle to hit the high intensity that we're aiming to, but it's giving us a different stimulus when our muscles fatigue. So you would want to do this a lot, would you? Would you say that or.

Yeah, absolutely. We've got to build all those different characteristics in, because at the end of the day you want the muscle to be able to move as fast as possible at some point. So you've got to do those sessions that allow it to learn to do that. You've also did the sessions that allow you to be able to tolerate consuming carbs and fluid and being able to learn the behavior of them, as well as learn to tolerate gastrointestinally that you can absorb them and get them to the muscle. And so that's all practice as well. We sometimes forget that our gut is just another thing that can be trained. And so you really need to practice all those sessions, even down to what actual things you're going to have during the race, because there's evidence that we tolerate and we learn to absorb an empty, the things that we're used to having most. So even though you might say, I'll just have calves, doesn't matter what sort this training session that's good. But then other times you might want to think what's going to actually be in that race? You know, what is the brand of sports drink or what are the things I'm going to carry in my pocket, so that those are the things that you trial and then you know, both behaviourally that you can manage it and from the point of view of your gut, that it can tolerate and empty it. And so all this stuff's got to be practiced. And I mean, I think back to some of the sessions we did back in the day, Jared, you and I, where, you know, we really did do that. I can remember the first Ironman that I did. There wasn't any such thing as sort of sports drinks and gels and things, but we found out that in Kona they had guava jelly sandwiches at the aid stations and I can remember getting guava jelly, just jam made from guavas, making up sandwiches and taking them out on the bike and because you wanted to actually practice the real thing.

Yep, that's such a good point. And not only practicing what fuel you're going to do on race day, but practice it against the exact intensity of your race day. Can you talk to that a little bit? Because I think people are really underestimating how important that aspect of the practice session is.

Oh, absolutely. And look, some of its behaviour and some of it's physiology of your body and don't underestimate the behaviour because another funny story from way back. I remember when I did my first Ironman and I didn't really ride bikes prior to that. And I remember developing a sports drink because, you know, there really weren't a lot of commercially available ones then. And I felt so smug on my bike, you know, when I got to the bike at the swim with my special sports drink on it. But I hadn't learned to ride the bike well enough in a group so that I could take one hand off the handlebar and get it out drink. So I didn't drink a thing for the whole bike because it hadn't occurred to me just to learn the behavior of doing it or doing it under the pressure of that intensity and with all those other people around me where I never had really good bike handling skills. So you've got to learn those behavioural and time and concentration tactics. You've got to train yourself to remember to do the feeding and then at the same time you've got to train your body to be able to like it, to swallow it, to empty it from your stomach into your intestine and then absorb it from the intestine and send it down to your muscles. So if you haven't done any of that stuff over and over again, it's not going to happen on race day because you haven't adapted your body to all that stuff.

A bit of the advice around gut tolerance can come off as generic and even just trial and error. Is there any. I know you've done so many studies. Are any of them on how long it takes your gut to learn to tolerate something. Is there any kind of framework around how that process actually works?

Yeah, look, I don't think the studies have been done so systematically that says 13.5 days or 12.6 times is the magic number. We've certainly looked at two weeks as an ideal, and it does work in that period of time. But that's for athletes who probably came from some background and over that two weeks had a large number of training sessions to trial it in. So it might take a bit longer for a recreational athlete who's not doing that many sessions, and also for someone who's done no eating at all during exercise. It may take longer, and it may be that you start off with smaller volumes or lower concentrations of what you're trying to have and then gradually build up so that you can tolerate the full load. And that's, you know, it is a lot of trial and error. And not everyone's individual like we do find. Even when you put people on a gut adaptation program, you'll find that some people are just much better than others at the end of it. But everybody can improve. And so that's the. That's the idea. Finding the level that's comfortable for you, that you can manage in the race scenario.

That's really great to know. And before we continue with a lot of the scientific advice, I do want to circle back to what we just spoke about with some of your experiences in the 80s and early 90s and talk us through. I asked you off air, do you remember some of the studies you did with dad? And you jokingly said, how could we forget? I know the listeners will be dying to know what was some of the stuff you were doing back then? What were you trialing? Like you said, it was all very new. Sports drinks were barely even on the market. What was that experience and why was it so memorable?

Well, I probably got the opportunity to apologize to your father because I had lots of ideas, but I wasn't a very good scientists then in terms of implementing them in the lab. I had this idea.

Can I just say. Can I just say before you start, that we were at the mercy of Louise because we knew nothing and she knew something, and that was better than knowing nothing. So we totally trusted whatever she told us we were blindly following. And little did we know that at the time. Everybody is learning, everybody's experimenting. We don't actually know until we try it. So I just want to put that out there before you start this story anyway.

And you're very generous, let me say. So back in the 1990s, the options with sports drinks were few, and they were both mostly based on sugar, so glucose and maybe some fructose. But it was these very simple carbohydrates. And one of the problems that people were experiencing was that emptying large concentrations or very concentrated drinks often led to gut upsets. And so the problem was then that you felt terrible and you could have been sick during a race, but also it was stopping what you were drinking from actually getting to the muscle. If you couldn't empty it from your stomach to your intestine and then absorb it, then it was kind of not really being nutrition. It was just making the road colored. So there was some evidence that if we could use more complex carbohydrates to use what was a polymer, so glucose is all joined together, then they were emptied from the stomach into the intestine more quickly, because even though the same concentration was in the two drinks, the one that was made up of the polymers had less individual bits to it, and it would empty more quickly and then in the intestine, break down and send all those carbs to your muscles. So there were some drinks being produced, and they were made from these glucose polymers. So I had the idea, what if you could go even more complex, like a starch, so that these concentrations of carbohydrate would seem to have lots of carbs, but few individual components of it until it was in the intestine. And so I came up with the idea. Let's develop a drink that was based on starch. So we bought some potato starch and had to boil it up to make it first of all tolerable. And we made a sports drink based on this. And I had some colleagues, some very, very trusting friends come in, and we did two trials, one where we had this new drink, and we were looking to see could it allow the athlete to go longer, but could all the extra carbs coming in from the drink rather than from the muscle help you to save the muscle glycogen stores a bit longer so that you could have more of them towards the end of the race when they might be useful. So I actually talked Gerard into having a muscle biopsy to see whether the amount of glycogen that was being used during this exercise was spared when we had the. The starch drink. So I had, I think, 10 of very trusting, very elite athletes come in, and we had wind trainers all set up, and we had people in a sort of a circle trying to do the time trial drinking and of course I'd cooked up this stuff on the stove that's amazing how it doesn't taste very good. So what can I do? Oh, just put some lemon essence in it. That'll do. Thinking that there's, there's food companies that have experts in food technology who spend months and years coming up with the perfect flavor and that's how they make normal sports drinks and soft drinks. But I just sort of dreamed it up on an afternoon on the stove at home. So anyway, we found there were some benefits to having the starch and we then were able to get a sports gin company to make it up in real life.

So if we what find some benefits. The two weeks one just to help the listeners understand what Louise put us through was I think it was 120k on a. On an old Minolta wind trainer. And you made it a competition which was very clever of yourself. And we were in teams and I remember you saying that the fastest two and you didn't know who your partner was. That was one of the other things you did. You went into this in very good detail so that we were, we were just making sure that we were competitive and really pushing ourselves. And one week we were on the placebo and one week we were on your cooking from the kitchen concoction. And the first week I remember crawling off my bike after 120k and Andy having to drag me to the car somehow because I could hardly walk and thinking, I hope like hell I was on the placebo this week. Because if this is what's going to happen next week and I'm. I was on the calves, I'm in trouble and I don't even want to do it next week. Anyway, the result the next week was. Was incredible. I. The difference between week one and week two was, was unbelievable.

Surely you knew from the first sip that you. There wasn't.

No, because she'd fly.

Yeah, that was similarly horrible.

She's done a great job.

It's so fun to listen to this revolutions because I look now and think of all the things that you do as a scientist. The hardest thing you'll ever do is measure performance accurately because you really have to trust your participants to put 110% on the line. And so often in studies, you know, you know that people come in and they sort of just dial in the performance. They do enough to make it work on, on the day of the trial so that everyone's kind of happy. But you know that if, you know, if a tiger Came in the back of the room in the middle of that. You could go faster. That's right, yeah, yeah. And so the fact that even back then I was thinking of all these kind of tricks to make people really competitive and to perform fully as hard as you can get, you know, that's the fun thing I like doing now.

And then talking is tin to having a muscle biopsy in the middle of the test. So for those who don't know what a muscle biopsy is, explain Louise.

Yes. So we have a well trained doctor put some local anesthetic in your leg. So we go to the vastus lateralis, the thigh, and they put a little bit of local anaesthetic and then they put a scalpel, put a hole in it. And then a needle about the size of a ballpoint pen goes into your leg and there's some suction on the end of that that sucks up a little bit of muscle inside that ballpoint pen and then a blade chops it off. So you get a tiny bit of muscle. It's large enough so that you can measure a lot of things on it, including glycogen, but small enough so that you're not going to miss it. You'll still be able to have a normal life afterwards. And that's one of the ways that scientists have learned so much about fueling and all the adaptation that happens in the muscle when we exercise and eat in different ways. So it was very, very generous. It's very, very unusual to get high level athletes being so generous to give up that kind of blood, sweat and tears. And it's because of that generosity that we know so many things. So thank you, Gerard, you were a pioneer yourself.

And was that it. Was your hypothesis correct with the starch?

Yes, yes, yes. So we now know that it probably doesn't have to be starch, that those polymers do a good job as well. And now we've even moved on further with the commercial sports drinks. There's now these hydrogel ones where it's not so much the carbohydrate that changes, but they're now manufacturing them so that they're coated in a gel which allows them to sort of slip through the stomach. And then when they get into the intestine and the ph, the acidity of the intestine is different to the stomach. The gel breaks down and then the carbohydrate can be absorbed. So it's amazing when you think about it's just carbs, like it's something. It's not rocket science. If you like. But the amount of technology that's going into trying to make those carbs get through the body to the point of fueling the muscle more quickly with, with better gut tolerance. There's a lot of work that's still going on in there and still, still new things to find.

It's really, it's absolutely brilliant. And I'm sure I found the study today. I was googling Louise Burke's study from 1990, 91 trying to find. I'm sure I found it because I found the one with the vastus lateralis biopsy in there. So although the participants are obviously anonymous, so you can't know for sure, but.

I'm sure I tell you what's really fascinating these days in that, you know, in the old or still now when you set up your study, you have to go through an ethics committee and you get permission to do it. And part of it is about keeping the subjects participants anonymous. These days when I'm doing studies, particularly with elite athletes, they're all on social media and they're blogging and tweeting whatever about what's going on. And so this anonymity has just got out the window. Everybody knows what's going on and sometimes you're still study becomes famous because of the stories that people are writing about it.

So taking back to the training and I really want to hone in on this point of the idea of figuring out how much because you can search for, you know, calorie calculators online and you don't find much about, you know, what should my race day calculations be? But we'll stick on the training for now. When you do decide to get enough fuel in the night before or the morning of to really make sure it's a high quality session. How do you figure out how much calories per how many grams of calories or carbs per kg you should be having?

Well, that's a great question. And there's sort of different levels of answers to it because when you're working as an expert like I do, when I'm thinking about that, I'm not just thinking of the carbs that you need for that session. I'm probably thinking bigger as well. And so I'd be thinking about integrating other parts of your nutrition goals into the solution. So if I was just thinking about it the day before a marathon or a day before an ironman where the goal is just to be fueled, I might kind of overdo a little bit or I might go err on the side of more than enough so that we do get that fuelling right. And you know, somewhere if I'm doing carbohydrate loading over a day before a race, I might be trying to eat 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram body mass. So 70 kilo athlete would eat 700 grams of carbohydrate. If I was doing it in a training day, something I'm doing over and over and over again, you probably couldn't eat that much all the time because as a recreational athlete, you just wouldn't be burning all those calories. And so you might have to find a balance between how much does my fueling need, but how much calories do I need for the total day and how much that needs to be protein and how much it needs to have other things in it. So I'd be sort of saying, well, if I put everything together, it might be enough to have six grams of carbohydrate over the whole day and maybe two or three of those grams per kilogram of having been eaten in the evening meal. So it's sometimes difficult. But remember, you know, when you have these complicated questions and things that you're trying to put a whole lot of stuff together, there are experts like me that you can go and consult and have, you know, have those conversations to get it done for you. You know, you don't expect to do your own plumbing or do your own legal stuff. You know, when you get to the point where it's getting complicated, you get the expert that knows how to put it all together in. So it's good to know some things yourself. But sometimes when it gets to the, to the bottom line of, well, how am I going to make this all work? It's easy just to go and get the expertise so that you can. And that's a conversation. It's not like I've got a diet sheet. Everybody says, right, you have to do this and that's the only thing you have to do. I'd be thinking, I'd be sitting and listening to you and I'd be saying, what else do we need to achieve in the day and what are the foods that you like to eat and what does the family situation look like? What sort of things do you. Or how do you have your meals spread over the day? And so we come up with what you need for that kind of a training session, but we build in all those other things with it.

That's great. That is actually really good advice. I want to just get away from the training a little bit and hone in a little bit on the actual race and the preparation you've done with the training and with your practicing your fuel plan. I want to, I want you to talk to if the intensity that you've trained at for some reason on race day. And look, we've got, we've got people who are just new to Ironman, we've got people who may have done 20, we've got people who are elite, we've got mid packers, we've got age group leaders. So we've got such a variety of athlete who is listening to this podcast. And I know that you can fit yourself into one of those five or six categories. The intensity that you compete at will will make the requirements of your nutrition differ, won't it? So can you speak to that a little bit for race day? Just some general advice to the guys that are listening about, you know, if, if, for example, if you think you're going to be riding a 6 hour 30 for the 180k compared to someone who's riding a 4 hour 20, the intensity of those two athletes is going to be one's riding at 80%, the other one's riding at 62% of their FTP. How is that affecting the rate of fuel burn and the requirements that they need?

Yes, so obviously the higher the intensity, the higher the rate of carbohydrate utilization. So you need to be taking in more per unit of time to try and manage that. The other thing you've got to think about too is the fluid that you're probably going to be sweating more so that you're going to think about your fluid and fuel requirements at the same time. And so it might be that you've got different choices of things that you might consume to get the sword and the fuel, but you also might think about the, you know, the quantity that you're having. And sometimes people who are moving at lower intensities forget and they sort of over fuel if you like, or they over drink because they're trying to do everything as well as possible. And the irony is that sort of the slower you go, even though relatively it's as fast as you can manage, it just becomes easier when you're moving at a slower pace to eat and drink. So sometimes the people who are moving more slowly can overdo it and that sometimes it's not the disaster, but it can mean that they over hydrate and it can mean that they're over fueling and they're just getting causing themselves some gut problems just because they don't need all the stuff that's going in but the fact that you're going slower and it's just easier. And sometimes people who are recreational and doing some early things and they're just happy to finish, they stop for a chat at the feed zones because you know, they like to sort of pace themselves a little bit. And sometimes you sort of get yourself to from one aid station to the next and when you get there you like to have a bit of a stop just to get yourself back feeling better. But that can sometimes make it more likely that you're overdoing the food and fluid intake just because, you know, it's easier to do it. Not always, but that's just sometimes a thing that people don't think about. It's, it's much easier to think that athletes always need to be pushed to have more. But there's often situations where you're suggesting to athletes that they've really got plenty and that maybe even backing off a little bit might be more helpful.

I had that exact experience, dad, I don't know if you remember at, at one of the Gran Fondos in Europe where we rode 160k and I was so packed, it was one of my first times riding that distance in those conditions and I was so paranoid about under fueling and we were riding as a group so we were actually stopping at the aid stations making sure that we were riding together and I absolutely over fueled and I had you know, the worst gut problems from the first third of the actual event and it lasted all day until that night. And it's just crazy how easy it is to do when you're, you thinking you're doing the right thing but there's no need for it.

Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great anecdote and you know, it's amazing how often it does happen. As I said, we're sometimes thinking that our role is to tell people to do more, to do better, but sometimes it's, you know, pacing yourself more appropriately.

You probably find that the more elite the athlete is, they're the ones who are actually under fueling probably because they're, because they're riding. You know, we're talking about the Ironman here just as an example and you know, they're riding at 42ks an hour and from all the evidence that Jordan and I have collected over the years it is around 80 to 82% of their FTP and that's quite intense for X hours.

It's extraordinary. There's been Some interesting work that's been published in the last year about the elite marathon runners, particularly those that trained up for the attempt on the two hour marathon. And they're working at sort of 85 to 92 people of their VO2 max. And it's incredible that you can imagine the human body being able to sustain that. And it's both like a high relative intensity, but the absolute intensity is also, you know, it's incredible. I love going to some of those big city marathons where some of the shoe companies bring trucks and they have a treadmill on the back and they'll offer people from the street the chance to. How long can you stay on the treadmill at the pace?

Some people last 1k and some people last 400 meters.

Yes, I know. So just the. And you know, so when people say to me, oh, you know, marathons are endurance events and they're fat burning exercise, no, they're not. Not for the top people out. And you know, it's phenomenal, the body's ability to be able to sustain that intensity, but it means that they're really chugging through the carbs to do that. So that's when it becomes important to be fueled well.

And I think one K is generous, dad. Not many people can bust out a 253k on its own, let alone 42 of them in a row. And most people last 100 meters, let alone a K. In terms of. Louise, your advice on Once we start getting to the complications of how to work this out yourself, going to find a consultant like yourself to help work this out for you. How do you go about finding the numbers for a person? Is it a test that you have to do to find out where you, how much you're burning as well as hydration, how much you're sweating?

Yeah, look, you can do that. There's lots of dietitians and physiologists, sports scientists that can do those kinds of exercises with you so that you can, in terms of sweating, you can weigh yourself before and after a session of exercise and use the change in your body mass as a sort of a guide to what sweat losses you're incurring. And, you know, you can have some measurements of the car burning you can do on a treadmill or a bike, and you can collect the gases just like you do in a max test. And that'll tell you what fuels are you burning. So you get a bit of a feel for that. But, you know, sometimes it's just through trial and error of how you alter your diet and then see how the quality of your training and your ability to recover goes as well. So, you know, sometimes you need both pieces of, of information because you can work out what's happening in one session in lab and work out what the fuel cost of it is, but that's just one session. So when you're thinking about how it all goes together and integrates into the periodised plan, you know, sometimes it's more the outcomes of how the training is going and where you're able to recover and you know, it's putting it, putting both the inputs and the outputs together.

You're a big believer from all of the stuff that I've been listening to over the years that, that it's, it's a learned thing. Everybody's individual and what works for you may not work for the person training for the same event at the same level or standard. And, and you're correct me if I'm wrong, you're absolutely saying it's, it's you finding out what works for you along your journey and you're learning as much from the coaches as you are from the nutritionalists and you should be working together with each other rather than the nutritionalists saying here's your information, not even talking with the coach. The coach is giving the strategy for the intensity you're going to ride or run or swim at. And the nutritionalist is. And they're like, they're working separate and your philosophy is no, they need to work together to get the right outcome.

Absolutely. I love coaches and I love athletes. I mean, I learn just as much from them as I do from the science journals. It's, you know, putting all the bits and pieces together. The thing about coaching that's never really appreciated is just how much it is an art as well as a science. You know, getting it right for an individual athlete and putting the whole program together as a decipher conductor of the orchestra. It, it's such a special experience when you get the whole thing humming and that comes from not just the numbers and trying to make everything cookie cutter signs. It's really about that individual and all of the idiosyncrasies they have and getting it right. And one of the great experiences of working at the AIs was just having day to day contact with athletes in their training environment. So it's lovely being a private practitioner and having athletes come and see you in your office, but it's so much more rewarding going out and seeing the athlete in their environment. I mean, it's funny how I'VE over the years, I have started doing a lot of work with race walkers because I can run at their walking speed, so I can go out and train with them and observe. Observe that training session. So it's not. And I can be part of the training session. I mean, I'm doing more than observing it. I'm seeing it from the bird's eye view. And I learned so much about the athlete and not just what they're tolerating, but a little bit about what makes them tick. And that helps you with the working together to get that plan right. So don't underestimate what the coach knows and what the athlete is experiencing as part of the ingredients to getting the plan right.

I couldn't agree with that sentiment more. And I'm obviously biased to Dad's coaching, but I tell people all the time that I'm constantly shocked at how much wisdom and experience plays a part in the art of coaching. And like you said, it is an art. And just having so many decades of experience in the industry just counts for so much. And that cannot be discounted when you're trying to compare what the science is saying compared to what you're actually experiencing in the field.

Absolutely. I love all these gadgets, you know, I love the training peaks and the Garmins and all the metrics that can be collected and that's, you know, part of your toolbox. But it never replaces that personal interaction that you have with the coach and your fellow athletes. And I think the best thing that you can do is to, to have that coach relationship and, you know, be part of the squad and get everything out of it. Because all the stuff that you can collect on yourself with wearables and download on a program and look at, etc, that's one part of it. But you just cannot replace, like as you said, I mean, I've just remembered a whole lot of things that Jerry's taught me today that I've forgotten. But, you know, all those, those experiences and insights. Insights. And just as you said, the wisdom, that's, that's the bit that you, you can't get with some of the modern science stuff. And I sometimes feel a bit sad that, you know, people just sort of taking up platforms as being the replacement for the human interaction rather than seeing it as just a tool to aid that human interaction to be better.

So you've given us a great starting point. For example, pre race day, you know, 10 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight, for example, and it could be 6 to 10, depending on the requirements of the event the next day. But that is a great starting point because you have to start somewhere, especially when you go to see a consultant and there is going to be some trial and error involved, we want to know whereabouts we can start. So what about pre race in the morning and during the race, what are some of the benchmarks we can start with? With grams of carbs per hour, total calories per hour.

Yes. So, look, it depends with the pre race what time of the day the race is and how much you're trying to use that to keep fueling. So, you know, somewhere between 1 to 4 grams per kilogram is sort of the scientific benchmark. And if you've got an early event, you know, one might be enough. But if it's a. If it's a long event, like if you're doing a marathon or a 50k race walk, I'd probably get up a bit earlier and have two to three, just so you've got a little bit more fueling still happening. And then during the race itself, you know, we aim for anything between 30 and 90 grams an hour, depending on the duration of the race and how much fuel is going to be burnt. So if I was, if I was doing, you know, say a long ride and. But I'm only doing it, as you said, the 6, the 60% of VO2 max or FTP that you talk about, then I probably would aim somewhere between more 3 to 6, 30 to 60. But, you know, when I'm working with some, the really elite athletes who are working at such a high intensity, we, you know, we're trying to get the 90 grams, which is easy enough, not easy, but it's more easy to do in cycling and race walking than it is in running. Running, because you've got that constant joggling of your gut makes it quite difficult to tolerate that amount. Not, not impossible. But, you know, sometimes you have to say, well, that might have been nice on paper, but the reality of what I can manage is going to be a bit less. And so that, you know, you put that to perspective also of what the event is, because if you're doing, say, a cycling tour, then not only is that fuel that you're having on the bike contributing into today's fuel, it's also adding to tomorrow's fueling as well. So you might be a little bit more aggressive because you're trying to just keep the total calories and fuelling up for the bigger picture. So there's a bit of modification that can happen, but they're generally the sort of the ballpark figures that we start with and then just keep manipulating until we get it right for the individual. Individual.

Is that. Sorry, Dad, I know you're about to ask something, but is that, that's maintained based purely on intensity and not duration of the race?

Well, they go together sort of because, you know, if, if you're moving at a higher intensity, the race is going to be shorter for you, if that makes sense. So. Because like sometimes people think, oh, ultra endurance, you know, I'm doing a, I'm doing a 10 hour tour hour or 24 hour event, I've got to keep the 90 grams up per hour for that period of time. But of course, you know, the intensity is much lower, so you really don't need to be that aggressive. So you've got to, you know, there's sort of a happy medium some and it depends on the race. But you know, when I work with the 50k race walkers, they're doing a three and a half hour event and the 90 grams per hour is really needed for that period of time. Whereas, you know, when I'm doing a marathon, it's taking me three and a half hours and I'll not go anywhere near their intensity. So perhaps don't need as much going in. But look, that's sort of trial and error that you learn and it's about what you can manage and how would you feel and what your performances are looking like and, you know, whether you're able to keep the intensity upright to the end. If you're starting to tyre in the race, it could be that you don't have enough fuel towards the end. So it's a whole lot of things together.

Yeah, good. Well, I think that's, that's a good point to, to get to this next level of what we want to discuss now. And, and one of the like, there's a whole lot of questions I'd like to ask, but one of the key ones is just your opinion of solid fuel, carbohydrates versus liquid and the pros and cons of having it during competition.

Yes. So you've got to think about fuel and fluid being separate needs that often go hand to hand, but sometimes don't. So if you're doing an event that's in really poor conditions, then you might have carbohydrate requirements that are greater than your fluid needs. And then if you're doing an Ironman in Kona, you know, you need to have more fluid than the fuel requirements that you have in other races. So when, when you're having a liquid form of something, you're sort of getting more fluid than fuel, if you like. And then as you start concentrating it, I mean, some of the sports drinks, some of those, the, the newer sports drinks made for the ultra or, sorry, the high caliber athlete, are getting very concentrated. You know, we're getting 16% concentration drinks rather than the 6 to 8% that you'll see as the general sports drinks. So the, but the liquid still contributing to fluid needs. Once you start getting into things like gels and the, and the confectionery, the sports chews and gummies, then you're starting to get more carbohydrate than fluid side of things. Now, you can obviously just have some water with it so that you can get it back into alignment again. But sometimes people like the concentrated carb sources because you can, in a very short period of time, just gobble it down. Like a lot of the cyclists like to have things in their back pocket. And rather than having to drink a whole 600 mils of the sports drink to get that fuel concentration, they can just have a gel and it's something that can be really quickly got down when they're trying to really concentrate on the fuel side of things. And then of course, the duration of the race and the length of time since you've had your last meal sometimes means that you can get hungry if you, if you've got long periods. So a lot of longer distance athletes like the cyclists, or if you're doing an ironman, you know, in the cycle, particularly the cycle leg, where it's easier to eat things because you can sit up and you can hold things and eat them, then sometimes people like to eat real food. So you might be having the banana or the guava jelly sandwich. Under those situations, in the really long events, the ultra endurance events, sometimes it becomes sort of flavour fatigue. If you've drunk 12 hours worth of sports drinks and gels and things and you. All you've been having is lemon, lime and orange and you're just really sticky and it's all sweet, then you can really look forward to having something that's savoury. So Vegemite sandwich or something might be a form of carbohydrate that comes along just at the right time because it's providing a different taste and a different texture and it's just getting you more interested in eating again. You know, you're trying to keep the carbs going in, but you're just sick of what you've been having. And so mentally you might like something that's a bit different, just to keep it interesting. So it's a whole lot of things that you put together about what's behaviourally appropriate. Like, you know, as I said, sometimes people can't manage things. It's sometimes hard to peel a banana and eat run when you're going that fast, so that's not a good choice. But a gel where you just bite the top of it and squeeze it, or a drink that's giving you the fluid, you're thinking about all the different things you're trying to build into that opportunity to eat what needs to be there. How can I do it? Where's it coming from? That's the other thing, because it's hard to carry all your fluid needs with you in one go. But you can put a lot of stuff in the back pocket if it's concentrated, if it's the gels and the chews. So sometimes people have the idea that they'll carry as much carb with them, but then they'll get the drinks along the way from the feed zones.

One last question on the the 30 to 90 gram kind of range, depending on the intensity. What about if we go shorter, like a 60 to 90 minute road race on the bike, or even an Olympic distance triathlon, which is two to two and a half hours, but the intensity is a lot higher than a half Ironman or Ironman. Does that go to the lower end of that 30 gram recommendation because it's so short you don't need it, or does it go higher because of the intensity?

Yeah, well, it depends on how much you've been able to store in your muscles. So your glycogen is probably going to be much more important there in terms of the fuel source. And then it's about what you can manage. But the other side we haven't talked about is what your brain's doing. So we're talking when we're fueling up until now, about getting things that are going to be absorbed and delivered to you, your muscles. But one of the most interesting things about sports nutrition in recent times has been the understanding that simply putting something in your mouth creates a reaction between receptors in your mouth and your brain. And you know that, Jerry, because, you know, in those really early days, you know, you would go out and you'd bonk on the right and you'd have something, and immediately, within, you know, 15 seconds of having something, you feel better. Now, there's been no opportunity for that to be emptied, gone to your muscles to make a difference to fuel. But your brain said, wow, this is good. I'm going to feel better. And it immediately just makes you just feel like you can go a bit faster or overcome that fatigue. So sometimes the role of nutrition in the race is not so much to have a fuel effect, it has a minor fuel effect, but it's to keep your brain happy. And the interesting thing about that is that it, it's just going to continue to happen. Your brain's like Homer Simpson. It just gets what it knows. And so every time it sees a donut or every time you put that carbs in your mouth, it says, wow. And then, you know, eight minutes later you can do it again and you'll still get that little kick. So sometimes what we're doing in those shorter distance races is just dribbling in the carbohydrates so that you're just feeling happy and you just, your brain is telling your muscles, yeah, we can do this, keep going. And it's not going to run out of fuel in the muscle so much, but it just needs the brain to keep engaging the muscle to keep going.

That's really, really cool. I mean, we don't want to keep you too long. I think one final question I had was, and again, this is just one of those ones that's going to be hard to answer, which is always the case with nutrition. But what's something that you can offer as advice that's just going to be the biggest bang for your buck with nutrition? Because I know there's a lot of things the elite athletes will do that will give them the 1 percenters, and they're looking for every single edge. But for the age grouper, what's going to be most worth their time in terms of nutritional change?

I reckon the best thing you can do is learn how to cook and put foods together so that you enjoy what you're eating, but get all the ingredients in there. You know, it's. I think it's really hard if you haven't got familiarity with food. And it's not just reading food labels, it's understanding how to put meals together so that they kind of work and that you can get the carbs in. And the amount of carbs, like, you know, we talked about these grams of carbs, but what you haven't said to me was, what does that look like if I was going to have any mashed potatoes? Or what does that look like? It's going to be rice. And so I, you know, I'd invest in just, you Know, spending time learning how to cook and reading what's in things and learning what this amount of carbs looks like in different food forms and so that you can translate these ideas that you're reading into what might go on your plate. And, you know, part of that's going to be appreciating it more like you, you'll really start enjoying the meals if you contributed to putting them together. And you might find that there's things you like better than others. And, you know, there's nothing like the satisfaction of sort of thinking, ticking off all those goals being met and knowing that you contributed to yourself. It's good. So that would be my starting point, just getting to the point where you can be practical and understanding how to put the food together, whether it's selecting it, whether it's cooking it, whether it's making it taste a bit more special. But that would be a good investment.

I'm really glad you said that because I've been in the fitness kind of industry and this industry for a while, so I do have that knowledge of what food actually equals a certain amount of, of grams of carbs or fat or protein. But I would recommend, and I would wonder if you would agree with this, that you do learn how to calorie count and that's not, not to keep track of your calories, because that can be a kind of downward spiral mentally sometimes for people, but just to learn what's in each food. Because when you cook dinner, if you actually learn what got this amount of potatoes equals in terms of grams of carbs and total calories and this amount of meat and this amount of veggies, then you do learn what's actually in it, all these foods. And like you said, when you do put them all together, you have that knowledge. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, look, not just the calories, I think all the different sorts of things, like understanding what the protein looks like. We know what does 20 grams of protein, if we say that's a target, look like, and where am I going to get the calcium, et cetera. Because then. Because I think sometimes if you just thinking about calories, you can end up thinking, oh, I could have four tin tans or I could have this meal with vegetables and meat and it's got lots of different contributors and it's still the same number of calories. And if you're just the calorie person, you think, oh, what's the difference? Whereas if you think about, oh, look at all that great protein and that great iron and I'm getting some calcium and there's some B vitamins in your. When you, when you're sort of thinking how much bang you're getting for your buck with that other meal, then you might be more interested in it than if you just. If you just. The bottom line, if it's only just calories, sometimes you miss out on some of the other.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, I guess, I guess to clarify that it's, it's learning the basic principles of, you know, 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein is, is 4 calories and then 1 gram gram of fat is 9 calories. So those basic principles are really helpful. Dad, did you have anything you want to finish off with?

It's a pity we're finishing off. That's the one thing I wanted to mention.

But.

Invite me back again.

Yes.

So many more questions that I've got for you, Louise, and a lot of it revolves around my experience as an athlete from the 90s to now and how my requirements have changed personally. And I think that would be really helpful for the listeners who are, you know, who they may be 40, they may be 50, they may be 20. Who's listening? And, and what the requirements are, A for male versus female, B for a 20 year old versus a 60 year old. And they're the sort of things that I want to ask your advice on. And I'm sure there's people out there, you know, we talk about sodium and should, should we be taking salt tablets and. And there's just so many other questions that we haven't got, you know, already been going probably too long for you tonight, but, but these are the things that I'd really love to get into and, and from this first podcast that we've done with you, if we have questions, I mentioned that people will be dying to get you to answer their questions, if you don't mind. It would be fantastic. So we're really wrapped that you could give us this amount of time so far, but it would be great to have you back on if you could.

I'd love to come.

That's amazing.

I think I, I think I took four biopsies from you, so at least, at least I. That much back.

That's long forgotten. Don't worry.

That's a great way to finish. Louise, thank you so much for coming on. If anyone wants to look up any of your hundreds of articles, you can online and they'll all appear. But yeah, we've massively appreciated it and we're sure everyone will enjoy the episode. So thanks for coming on.

Our pleasure.

That's it for us.

And we'll see you next time, Sam.