What To Eat Before and After Training with Taryn Richardson

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 Trivelo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. Taryn Richardson is an accredited practicing dietitian and advanced sports dietitian with qualifications that include a Bachelor of Health Science, Nutrition and Dietetics International Olympic Committee Diploma in Sports Nutrition and more specifically worked at the AIs in and very specifically for Triathlon Australia for a number of years working with triathletes with regards to sports nutrition. In today's episode we're going into a little bit more of a specific topic with sports nutrition and that is talking about pre training and post training nutrition which majority of athletes are getting wrong. Majority of athletes are potentially losing fitness gains and quality of training and quality of fitness improvement because they're not training or fueling properly pre and post training sessions and races. So we really dive deep into these topics today and help you get a really specific guideline about what you should be doing pre training and post training with your food intake, what to eat, how much to eat and when to eat it, which is some really key points. And Taryn goes right into this, gives us some great detail, gives us some really generous information. If you stay to the end of the episode, she gives gives away a free nutrition download link as well. So it was a really good episode and dad, it was great to dive into such another specific topic with nutrition again.

Yes, we do get to talk to some really impressive experts in their field and this is another example of someone who is absolutely dialed into and loves what she's doing. We don't get a lot of specific nutrition triathlon type coaches in the world, really. And it's great to have someone who's really specifically dialing themselves into swim, bike and run nutrition. And there's a lot of things we could have spoken about, but we really do stick to pre activity nutrition and post activity nutrition. And the one thing I can say is it's not one fits all. There is so much that we can still learn about how we can improve our performance. And as she says, it is the fourth leg of the triathlon which is often ignored and it's something that shouldn't be. And I'm really an advocate for getting most of the listeners out there to really get on board with getting their nutrition right. Not just on race day, but, you know, whilst they're training hard and trying to recover, they're the things that really are going to help you train better, which will eventually help you on race day because you've actually not got to the a race of your season exhausted and under fuelled. So there's a lot to get out of this. I know that we could have talked about a lot more things, but it's a really well worthwhile podcast to get your teeth into and actually do something about.

So here is the episode with Taron Richardson. All right, Taryn, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We're very happy to have you here. We want to start off with a bang. First question, can you tell us why you're so passionate about nutrition for triathletes?

Straight into it. Thanks for having me, guys. I love it. No messing around. Good question. I love it. I know that sounds really weird, but I don't get up any day and hate my job or have to drag myself to the desk. I really love translating deep science into practical information that people can walk away with. Like I'm happy to do the hard work and read the papers and weed through all of that to get people to understand what they actually need to do with it, I guess. I've worked with triathletes for more than 13 years now in private practice, but also with my work for Triathlon Australia. I worked with the elite team for more than six years. And I love helping triathletes understand how to actually unlock what they're truly capable of with the power of nutrition. Because I always talk about it being the fourth leg. You know, we've got to swim, we've got to ride, we've got to run. And most people know how to do that quite well. You know, you have a good coach, have a good training program. But people miss out that fourth discipline of layering in their nutrition to actually get what they need to out of their training sessions and race to what they're truly capable of.

That's a great starting point. I really like the language you use, and this is a lot of the language that you use on your website as well is unlocking the triathlete's potential, which is if you don't get the nutrition right, it really would be blocking the athlete's potential. So I guess we want to start diving into today's topic and that is really specifically with nutrition. We're talking about pre and post training food because nutrition is a very broad spectrum. Like you said to me on the phone, we could just talk about every topic for 12 months and that's kind of the detail that you go into yourself on your website worth of actual nutrition knowledge. So we're really diving into pre and post training nutrition here today and I guess I want to start by addressing the purpose of why this is important. So can you give us a bit of an overview about why nutrition timing around your training sessions is so important?

Yeah, I guess it's going to help you get what you want out of your training session. Right? You think about sessions where maybe you don't feel properly or you haven't slept enough, or you're not recovering properly between sessions. They're not going to be your best quality sessions, are they? You're going to maybe drag yourself through it, not be able to push hard in the back end. And as you both know, like the back end is where that magic happens. And we know that layering in the right nutrition and fueling can help you do that and maximize your performance in a training session in array. So I, I talk about pre training nutrition and recovery nutrition as probably two of the key things that triathletes need to get the handle on. First, I find that triathletes like to go down weird rabbit holes and get distracted by shiny objects and like to do all of the 1 percenters really well, but don't have the foundations of what their day to day nutrition should be like first and foremost. And I think ticking the boxes, pre training and post training nutrition off before anything else is where you're going to really maximize your results.

That's a great answer and you're dead right. People spend so much time getting the bling factor of having themselves look fantastic. They've got the latest bike, latest aero helmet, latest disc wheels and yet you know, as a percentage wise, you know you're swimming, biking and running. In nutrition, they're probably equally as important in terms of percentage out of 100. You know, nutrition is as as equally important as how well you train and it's not so important compared to a disc wheel where it could be the difference between 5 or 10 seconds. Whereas nutrition will stop you completing the event and will stop you from improving in your training, it will stop you from recovering as an athlete. So it's a really great start. So let's dig into it a little bit. Let's start with the pre training. If you've got high intensity session, what are your advice to the athletes as compared to when they're doing a recovery session or a Tempo Zone 2 session? Have you got specific things that you direct them to go to with those particular differences in training styles?

Yeah, I talk about periodized nutrition all the time. It's something I bang on about. And if you've heard me talk before, you will have heard me talk about that concept. You might be bored of me talking about that concept. But it's the number one thing that you need to get right as a triathlete. You're not training for one sport, you're not going to the gym. Your everyday training looks completely different. So you might have days where you just do a light, easy recovery session and your nutrition and particularly pre training on that day would look different compared to a day where you're doing a double hard session day, like a hard run, quality run in the morning and then maybe backing up that up with a hard swim in the evening. Your nutrition on that total day plus what you do for pre training, I think should be different. And that'll help you actually maximize your training results. Just like you periodize your training programs for people, you need to layer in your nutrition so that that's periodized with that. And then the outcomes that you're trying to drive with training are more likely to happen if you've got your nutrition right for that. So when it comes to pre training nutrition, I like to get people to think about what their strategy is for a lighter, easy session. You know, zone two recovery, maybe it's short. It's not what I call performance session. You might have a different name for it. This is my, like hack dietitian mind. But a light, easy recovery session, do you have to fuel that session really well? Potentially not. It depends on a couple of factors. I think it depends on who you are and what your goals are, where you are in your season. Like, are you right in the peak of race season? Are you right in the peak of race season? You need to be fueling every session. Or are you in your off season where we might be looking at maybe trying to shift some body composition, like are we trying to drop a little bit of fat here in the off season? I can't say off, I can't say season today.

The tongue twister. Yeah.

Been doing a lot of speaking lately and the voice is feeling croaky. What was the last thing I said? Can't remember.

Yes, Being specific about the actual fueling for the particular session where it might be a zone 2, but you are in the middle of an off season zone two session compared to a race ready zone two session.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice segue. Yeah. Off season. In your off season, does your zone 2 recovery sessions need to be fueled Potentially not. So I'd like to think, I like to teach my athletes to understand that so they're not following the same strategy blindly all the time. So off season, light, easy recovery session and you're not a growing body and you're not in low energy availability. That's also two important factors when it comes to fueling. My strategy for a growing body is different to somebody that is a matured body that, you know there's no more growing happening. But some sessions fasted, we can actually get some adaptations out of doing sessions without any fuel. So we know that if we do a session in the morning, it has to be morning because you can no longer fast. If you are doing an evening session, you've been eating all day, you're out of fasting, but doing some sessions fasted. So nothing to eat or drink except for water. You could have some black tea or coffee if you wanted to. And that helps us to utilize fat as a fuel source. So when we're going slower and shorter, that sort of strategy can be useful to help our whole fat oxidation pathways work more effectively and help us to use fat as a fuel source, but also lose some if we need to. So I would only do that though for an easy, slow aerobic recovery session where we're not trying to get a metabolic adaptation out of that training session. But when we go to talk about more performance sessions, hard sessions, race specific sessions, then we need to flip our thinking into more of a performance mindset and look at fueling those types of sessions. So anything with, you know, efforts in it, quality work, bricks, anything that's race specific and also heading closer to a race that our nutrition strategies all gearing up for that key event. And we want to look at fueling before those types of sessions as well.

I want to continue down the path of periodization a little bit and really get a clear kind of definition of that as we move forward. Because you're talking about periodization on a daily level, whether it's a hard or easy training day. And then you're probably looking at it a weekly level depending on what's happening throughout that week. And then like you said, that that whole block level or macro level, which is what season you in. So, uh, is there any more definitions we need to get clear on to understand periodization and how that works?

Yeah, good question. It's not the easiest concept. What I find commonly with triathletes though is that they have the same nutrition strategy all the time. Like, you probably see that from your end too, right? We See people turn up day to day eating the exact same things. Particularly if you have a job and you have like a Monday to Friday work week structure, you've got that rhythm and routine of whatever happens Monday to Friday. So you might eat the same breakfast, breakfast every day, you might pack the same lunch, you might have similar sorts of dinners. And then we get to the weekend and it's a bit more free for all. We lose that structure and we lose that rhythm. And it goes two ways. People either just completely like eat the house down or people don't get hungry, they don't have that set time where they usually eat, so they forget or they're out and about busy. So what I see commonly is triathletes do that, but that doesn't coincide with what training looks like in a week. Like you don't have Monday to Friday, that's the same. And the weekend typically is longer sessions for people. So periodization for me from a nutrition perspective is just trying to layer in nutrition on a daily basis to that training load. So that light day nutrition looks different to what more of a moderate training day might look like versus a really hard, high intensity day. And then our long training session days as well. Your nutrition needs to match that training load so that we're not overeating, but we're also not under fueling too.

Now that's really good and it's a really good summary of how particular every day should be. And I love the analogy you've given with your work and your weekend because, you know, the majority, there are still exceptions. The majority of athletes have the most free time on the weekend, so they're going to do the most endurance type training on the weekend. And there are obviously people who do that during the week because they've got different styles of jobs which are more aligned along those, those hours. But, but certainly if you're thinking about your Monday and Friday being an easier day, your Saturday, Sunday being a longer day, you can't just eat the same. And, and, and they're things that I think 90% of the people we coach do that. And I've been myself in that rut of just eating the same, regardless of how long my session is or how intense it is. So let's just talk a little bit about the duration of the session and how that impacts. And obviously the duration might have some intensity, it might not. Can you just speak to that a little bit about. We've talked about the intensity and the requirements of that. What about the duration of the session?

Um, for shorter Sessions we can potentially get away with not fueling so aggressively. Again, it depends on where you are in your season and if you're using your training sessions as race nutrition practice, I don't think you should have the same in session strategy. You know, week in, month out, year out. It needs to evolve. As you evolve and get better as a triathlete too, right? You become more efficient and more sort of well oiled machines the longer you're in the sport for compared to somebody that's fresh and brand new and has never done this style of training before. So your nutrition needs to evolve with your experience as an athlete. Duration. The longer we go for, the more fuel we use. So we know that around sort of 90 minutes ish, we start to use up a lot of our muscle glycogen stores. Now glycogen is our storage form of carbohydrate in our muscle. Unless you're a fat adapted athlete, which I'm assuming most of the listeners are not, then you are a carb fueled athlete. And we know that your fuel tank of glycogen is going to last you about 90 minutes depending on the intensity that you're going. The higher the intensity, the more muscle glycogen we use. So if we're doing quite aerobic, you know, aerobic base training, building that diesel engine type sessions, we are drawing on about 50% carbohydrate fat. 50% fat. As the intensity climbs though to some sort of more like 85% VO2 max and higher. We still burn a little bit of fat, but because we don't have as much much oxygen present, it's much harder to use fat as a fuel source when, you know, when we're getting huffy, puffy, we can't breathe. If I ask you a question, you can maybe give me a one word answer. That's it. It's like shut up Taryn. That's where we are drawing on much more carbohydrate as a fuel source. Now that will help you understand how to fuel aerobic sessions versus anaerobic sessions where we don't have a lot of oxygen available. We need more carbs for the higher intensity stuff. But as we go longer, it just means that we're using up that fuel in our tank more. So we need more carbohydrate even if it's lower intensity because we need to go for a long period of time without bonking or hitting the wall.

That's awesome. And we're really getting a good picture now of the purpose behind I guess this pre training timing and importance of it and then the principles around the differences, why you would do it for different sessions. And I guess the golden questions, and I don't know how you want to answer this, you can kind of take us down the path that you think will suit most listeners. But the golden questions are, okay, what do I eat, when do I eat it and how much do I eat before these sessions?

It's so hard to answer that question because I don't believe there's a one size fits all with nutrition, like n equals 1. You need to be your own experiment. And like I said in the beginning, there's so many variables that will dictate what you're doing for your pre training nutrition out of all the things that you need to do with your nutrition. So I'm not, I don't think I want to give you some hard and fast rules because people will run with it and then that may not be right for you. But if you're a carb fueled athlete and you're fueling training, then you need to focus on carbohydrate rich foods. So our carb foods come from our breads and cereals, our fruit, dairy, our starchy veggies, so potato, sweet potato, corn and legumes, lentils, those sorts of things. Now I'm not saying eat a can of chickpeas before you go training, you know, not going to end well. But some really easy to digest carbohydrates before training are useful. I love fruit toast and it's something I'll suggest to a lot of people if they like it. It's pretty quiet and quick and easy to make as well. Yep, there you go. Particularly the thick slice stuff. It's much more carbohydrate dense than the thinner sliced stuff. So things like that, bananas up and goes, toast with some spread. So if you're a jam lover or honey lover or Nutella lover, that's your one opportunity in your day to consume it. Glass of milk, some smoothies. It really just depends on your preference and how much time you have and how much noise you can make in your house at like 4 o' clock in the morning.

Y yeah. And something I wanted to ask and I read a little bit about the insulin spike response from higher sugar carbohydrates. And for example, if you were having a piece of toast with a whole bunch of jam or honey, is that a problem because it's so high in sugar that you're creating kind of that high peak response and then potentially A crash later or is that kind of a myth? How does that work?

Depends if we're talking about the response like during exercise or outside of exercise. So those foods are not foods that I would recommend on a daily basis. They are like you said, high gi. What happens is they're really easy to digest and break down. So we pull the carbohydrate molecules apart really quickly and that causes a quite a rapid spike in our blood sugar levels. Now when you're exercising that's not such a bad thing because you can then use that carbohydrate as fuel. It's in there really quickly. You can use it for energy to contract your muscles while you're exercising. It's the problem when we're doing that outside of exercise.

That makes sense. So I guess is it a problem then if you're having a piece of jam or honey toast again and using that example or any kind of high gi, high sugar food an hour and a half before training or two hours before training, are you potentially creating a crash before you even start exercise? And then how does it affect you after the training session as well?

Yeah, potentially. Timing of your pre training nutrition is important, but timing again is quite personal. Depends how much time you have and your tolerance to having food before you exercise. You might be somebody that knows that they can't eat like four hours before exercise. And if that's the case, then I wouldn't suggest having something like honey on toast four hours before because it's going to cause that massive spike in blood sugar levels and then a crash before you train. But you could have much more slower digesting, low GI carbohydrates that far out, knowing that the body's got time to digest and break them down and have them still useful for energy through that session.

Can you give the listeners who are frantically taking notes here about what foods I should be having, can you just give them an example of high GI and low GI so that it's really clear in their mind what foods to avoid and what foods to go to.

So I think it's important to understand that in the context of inside and outside exercise because if you think about what we have during exercise, sports drinks, gels, blocks and shoes, lollies, all of that stuff is high gi. We want that in exercise because it doesn't take too much effort to digest it and break it down. So the fuel is there available for energy as quickly as possible. Ironman's a little bit of a different story because we have got the time out there exercising for Hours and some low GI slow release carbohydrates are okay as long as your gut is tolerant of digesting that while you're moving. That's really important because a lot of people struggle with that. But outside of exercise we want to have our low GI carbohydrates. So these ones are much more complicated structures of carbohydrate chains all joined together. The more complicated the better. And this takes a while for our body to pull them apart to digest and absorb them. So it causes that slow sustained release of blood sugar levels over time. So a high GI food would be things like any sort of simple sugar, honey lollies, soft drink, sports drink, junk food, basically like chocolate, really easy and quick to digest. There are some other foods like say a watermelon that's more of a high GI carbohydrate. And then we've got our low GI carbohydrate, those more complicated structures. So things like whole grain breads and cereals, legumes, those things take quite a while to digest and break down. But again, I think it's important if we're talking about those foods in exercise versus outside of exercise. So in exercise high GI is good, definitely don't avoid them. But outside of exercise we want to be careful with our timing of these things so that we're not relying on our carbohydrates coming from those really high GI sources all the time.

I know you said you didn't want to give a hard and fast rule, but you've done a great job already of giving everyone some real clarity on what to eat, which we love. And then you mentioned the importance of timing then. And so can we go into some principles around timing and what do we need to be aware of with, like you said, whether you're eating something an hour before, hour and a half before compared to four hours before a session. Yeah.

So it depends how much time you've got. If you are getting up at 4:00 clock to get to a session at 4:30, then you're not looking at having a full cooked breakfast. It's probably going to be something really quick to make. So fruit toast, I love it. Might be something like some banana. Some dates. Those big medjool dates are about 15 grams of carbs per date. A lot of people that struggle with volume at that time of morning, that could be a good addition to bump up your fueling. Um, and then think about like a pre race, you've probably got two, three hours before you actually tow the start line so you can have more complicated things here like some quick oats, maybe a couple of pieces of toast, a smoothie. So it, yeah, it depends on personal preference but it also depends on how much time you've got. That's really important. And then if we look at afternoon sessions where you've got a lot of time, you maybe need to be a bit more careful around your choices that you make here for say lunch to make sure that you don't end up with gut upset in that evening session. So you might want to think about what your lunch choice is here if you know that you don't have iron guts. And it might want to be something that's not too complicated like not a massive salad or something that's going to be quite difficult to break down and digest and then maybe have a little bit of a pre training top up an hour or 30 minutes before a session as well. That's very easy to digest. Fast acting sort of carbohydrates to give you a little bit of a fuel top up before that session.

That's great. And I really, when I'm thinking about an afternoon session that is kind of foreign because all of my training's in the morning and then all of a sudden I'll do an afternoon session and I'm feeling lost as to when I should eat this and what I should be putting into my, to my digestive system so that I'm going to get the best bang for my buck. For example, we do a Thursday afternoon race about 6:30pm and I'm really grappling with how the timing gets right and it's taken a couple of years now before I really understand. And you said nutrition evolves and I think that is so accurate. You've got to keep practicing how it suits you and there's no right or wrong rule. It's everybody's different and therefore you need to keep practicing and then take notes after you've done your high intensity race on a Thursday night to see. Well that didn't work because I actually you know, felt really average in the stomach beforehand or I actually got cramped or I felt like I ran out of fuel at the end of the race. You've got to keep on top of what you're doing and you know, make, make a sort of diary as you're going. So, so would that be a good summary of, of what you're trying to get across to the listeners?

There was a good summary, yes. It's a hard one. Nutrition is very individual. What I would like the listeners to understand is that if you have doubt or you have no idea what you're doing, then one of my biggest passions and biggest goals is to try and put sports dietitians at the forefront of people's minds. We are who people come to see last, or something really bad happens. They have a terrible race and they've done everything else. They've spent 20 grand on a bike, they've got the sperm helmet, they've got carbon sole shoes, they've done all of that, still have a bad race. And it's only then that they seek help with nutrition. I would love people to start to think about doing it early, not first. You know, you need to learn how to ride a bike first. You need to learn how to swim, you need to learn how to put one foot in front of the other. But before going down weird supplement holes and trying to tick all of those other boxes, do some work with nutrition first, because it's amazing the difference when you've actually got that dialed into training, how good you can feel like you'll have so much more energy by the time you hit Friday, instead of falling into a heap then and not sure how you're going to get through your long weekend sessions, as well as understanding how to fuel those long sessions better. You can get so much more out of your body than you're capable of. And fueling is often that missing link for people. They've ticked everything else off, but they have no idea how to fuel properly. And so worst case scenario, you're sort of bonking or hitting the wall or you're stuck on the couch for the rest of the day after a long training session. Like, hands up. Who's that? Oh, yeah, running the risk of getting divorced because you're useless for the rest of the day. So I really encourage people to actually start to think about what they're doing and do some experimentation on themselves. But I guess my biggest passion is to get people to look to the professionals for nutrition advice, not read random crap on the Internet.

There's this almost mantra or it's just this weird thing among triathlon endurance community where people wear these things like a badge of honor, super fatigue and bonking. And even on a podcast recently, we had a shoe specialist on. He said people wear blisters as a badge of honor. And he's saying it's just a sign of poor shoe fit, you know, like it's not. And I used to think the same thing. I would be on the couch all day after a long endurance ride on a Saturday thinking that's Just what it was, you know, you've done a really hard session in the morning and you. You're useless for the rest of the day. I just thought that was normal. But then when you learn that, oh, no, if you fuel properly before, during and after, you're actually pretty good Saturday afternoon and it's not a normal thing to bonk and then be useless for the rest of the day. I absolutely couldn't agree with that more. Taking it back to the timing of things, we've gone through a bit of some examples of what you could be eating. We've gone through a little bit about the timing. The next part was how much and I guess the makeup and specifically the difference between the macronutrients. So you talked about a lot about carbs, but how limited do we go.

With proteins and fats in the pre training scenario?

Yes. Yeah. Still pre training. Yep.

Yeah. So pre training, the focus really is on carbohydrate foods. Like, we don't want to slow down our digestion with too much protein and too much fat. That's going to just sit heavy in our tummy and slow down our digestion when we're about to exercise or, you know, run away from a line where our sympathetic nervous system is heightened, that switches off all of our digestion pathways. So we don't want things in there that are going to slow down that process. So very much the focus on pre training foods is carbohydrate. If there's a little bit of protein in there, like say you're having a glass of milk, there's about 10 grams of protein in the glass of milk. That's not going to break the bank, but you're not looking at having really high fat, high protein foods before you exercise. Like, you wouldn't have eggs on toast as an example. The number of triathletes that I see that have their pre race nutrition as eggs on toast, I'm like, what are you doing? Makes no sense. But it's just because they don't know. A little bit of education. What'd you say?

I heard that's common among AFL players as well, to have eggs before a game, which wouldn't make sense either.

Yeah, afl. Well, you run a marathon in afl, right? So I probably wouldn't recommend that either.

Half.

Yeah, but a little bit of education in that space. It's a really easy fix. You just tweak that a little bit. You also wouldn't have like a giant steak before you raced or try and did a quality session either, because that's just going to sit really heavy in your tummy. And we don't use protein as a fuel source. We do a tiny bit, but it's definitely a huge focus on carbohydrates and fats. Now we don't need to fuel or pre fuel with fat because we have plenty of fat stored in our body. Even the leanest of athletes still have a lot of body fat. Even if you can't see it, there's plenty of fat there stored right in the muscle that we can use as a fuel source without having to need it, need eating it before exercise. So definitely the focus is on carbohydrate pre training and the easier to digest sources, particularly if the timing is tight. So we're looking at having that in the hour before exercise.

Would you recommend. We talked earlier about trying to get our body to adapt and if you're someone who's absolutely not happy with the weight that you're carrying into a triathlon event and you really want to be leaner and you've got this really good advice to say that this is the fuel source you need, majority of it carbohydrate, but you want to teach your body to burn more fat so that you actually arrive on race day the weight that you're really happy with. So just take the listeners through how you would do that and teaching your body to kind of incrementally reduce the carbs so that your body's learning how to burn some fats which is going to end up giving you a lighter body.

Yeah, great question. The low carb, high fat rabbit hole is a deep one. I don't think we have time to dive into that today. But if we're looking at leaning up for a race, the number one mistake I see triathletes make is they try and do that too hard and then run out of energy and fall into a hole. So I would encourage people to, if they want to shift some body fat, try and do the big chunk of it in the off season. You know, that elusive off season that people have do a lot of the body fat loss in the off season if you can. So you're not turning up to your pre race training block in the worst possible state that you could be. I've worked with a number of ironman athletes. In particular, I'm going to throw you under the bus. Sorry. That turn up to do an Ironman 10 to 20 kilos heavier than they want to be and then they use their ironman training to drop fat, drop 10 kilos and then Put it all back on in the off season. So if you want to drop some body fat, I think off season is a great time to do it. But I'm also a bit big. But I'm also a big advocate of not having huge shifts to make. And, you know, losing a couple of kilos in a, in a race build is, is totally fine and ideal. It's when there's huge shifts that becomes problematic and there's probably some underlying food habits that need to be changed so that there's not such huge fluctuations. And you're not using triathlon training to drop weight in a way. But when you're in a, in a race season and you want to lose a couple of kilos, then it's that eating strategically and eating in a more of a periodized way that I talked about earlier that I think is key in getting that to happen. So there's sessions that you might want to focus on train faster to help those fat burning pathways work more effectively. There's sessions that maybe you want to under fuel as well and go into a bit of a low glycogen hole where we can teach our body to use fat as a fuel source. And we do get some adaptations by under fueling and under recovering. Not something that I want to teach you how to do though, because it's much more of an advanced strategy to do that. A lot of triathletes don't have those foundational things of pre training, post training periodization sorted in the first place. So I probably wouldn't look at dabbling at that more advanced strategy of under fueling, under recovering. Unless you have got all of the I's dotted and all of the T's crowded, crossed and you're in probably more of an elite space.

Is there a particular range or target you could, you could say an athlete can aim for pre training. So you spoke about the fact that everyone's individual and everyone's body weight is slightly different. So you can't say this athlete needs 30 grams of carbs. But is there a gram per kilogram, for example, range that you could look for pre training?

Yeah, great question. So if we're fueling, then what's really important is that we are fueling with enough so we either train fasted and we don't have anything to eat, water's fine, black tea or coffee, because that helps to release fat from our cells to then use that as a fuel source. But if we have turned on that switch to burn carbohydrate as a fuel source, then we need to give ourselves enough carbohydrate. And what I see triathletes make a big mistake around is just having like half a banana and being like, yep, I'm fueled, I'm good. But we know that when we're fasting overnight, we use a lot of our liver glycogen. So I talked about glycogen before. It's our storage form of fuel. We store it in our muscles for energy during exercise, and we also store it in our liver. And our liver stores are what stops us from going hypoglycemic or low blood sugar levels overnight. Now we use through most of that overnight, we probably run through about 80%. There's not a lot left. So when we have some carbohydrate to fuel and we turn on that switch to burn carbohydrate as a fuel source, we need at least 50 grams of carbohydrates. So that looks like, for people, like a big banana is 20 to 30 grams of carbohydrate. So if you're only having a half a banana, you've probably got 10 to 15 grams of carbohydrate. You eat that carbohydrate, your insulin levels go up to try and deal with it. And that kind of accelerates this whole carbohydrate oxidation pathway and down regulates our fat oxidation pathways. But then you haven't giving yourself enough carbohydrate to deal with that. So then you go on exercise and you have that, you know, rapid reduction blood glucose levels in the first 20 minutes as well. So it's really important that if you are fueling, you have at least 50 grams of carbohydrate.

That's unbelievable advice because really, if you. I know a lot of people would be making that mistake. And what you're saying is it ends up making it worse. Right. You end up eating half of it. And I think you're doing yourself a good job. And then you're actually. Yeah. Putting your body through a worse state and you perform worse because of it. Is that right?

Yeah. Yep. So if you're a half a banana type person, a lot of females do that, then try and slowly increase that a little bit. You don't have to go from nothing to 50 grams of carbohydrate. You can slowly do that over time. Like what? You've got nothing to lose, Right. You're already in a bit of a hole, so let's sort of slowly climb your way out of that. But you'd need a piece of toast which is 15 grams of carbs. And then say a tablespoon of honey or jam, which is 30. No, two tablespoons is 30. How's my brain? So you'd need a slice of toast, a tablespoon of honey or jam and maybe half a banana sliced on top of that. That would give you enough carbohydrate pre training and still really small. I know a lot of people are limited with how much they can get in or tolerate before exercise. So thinking about those really carbohydrate rich foods that are easy to digest to give you enough bang for your buck.

Cool. And you think 50 grams is about a good target range. You don't need to go much higher than that. You don't need to aim for 60.

70, 100 grams, 50 grams, your minimum target. So it depends if we're talking about pre training before just a training session or if we're talking about our pre race nutrition. And that's a totally different kettle of fish. You definitely need more than 50 grams of carbohydrate in a racing situation.

Leave it on.

But you also have the time to digest and break that down as well. So 50 grams is your minimum. Definitely go more. If you can tolerate it, you need it. You're not trying to keep your calories intake in a more of a controlled amount. Again, it's individual. I don't want to give you like you have to do this because there will be, you know, triathletes love training pigs to go green. Right. If I tell you you have to do this, then I don't want people to go and go, Taryn told me to do this and then fall into a hole. You do really need to understand what you need for you. But that's some good guidelines to start with. That's your minimum.

And also when we look at the type of sport you're actually doing as a triathlete, you're going to go swimming, you're going to go riding, you're going to go running. So for me, I know that I couldn't eat the same food for a run as compared to a swim or a ride. Totally talk us through that.

Yeah, that's personal preference. A lot of people struggle with particular types of foods before certain types of sessions. Running is probably the biggest one. Right. And that's because your tummy is jiggling up and down while you're exercising. You generally have better tolerance for nutrition and food before you ride because your tummy's quite still. But running is the hardest one. And then people do really struggle with swimming because your stomach is in a different plane to standing. A lot of people like to avoid dairy before training because they find that's a challenge for them. Whether it is or not or it's just how they feel, it doesn't really matter. There's plenty of options that you can explore if that's a problem. But I would play around with the types of foods that you're having if you're struggling, and then also the timing. So running in particular, like a really hard quality run, I'd try and extend your pre training fueling out a little bit and make it way easier to digest.

There's some really good guidelines for pre training. Is there anything else before we move on to post training recovery that you'd like to say for people to potentially avoid with pre training or any other common mistakes you see?

Oh, we've covered a lot of mistakes. I love to talk about mistakes that triathletes make because fueling for three sports, sports is so different to fueling for one. And unless you've had nutrition advice, then it's a huge, big thing to get your head around. But I think out of all the things when it comes to nutrition, getting your pre training right and getting your recovery right are probably the first two things. They're always what I go through first with clients, with athletes is that they have to do that part right first because you get the best bang for your buck out of what you do around your training sessions.

That's awesome. So let's move into post training then. And I guess just start with the importance thing again. Why is it so important and what's happening post training, which is the reason you really need to get nutrition in.

Yeah, Recovery Nutrition 101, like, it's so important. It is the building blocks for all of your recovery pathways. So a lot of triathletes are pretty good at smashing themselves in training and then significantly under fueling. So there's a few key things that you need to do here in the recovery window. You need to what I. What I call tick the four hours of recovery off. So you need to refuel your muscle glycogen. Now, how much you have depends on what type of session you've done and how much you've used, and then also what you've got coming up next. So we're refueling our fuel tank with carbohydrate, and that's very individual. I like to teach my athletes inside the triathlon nutrition academy how to actually calculate their specific recovery meals for them because it's different from your training buddy, and it's different on certain types of days as well. So refuel is a big one we also need to repair, and that's putting protein in the system. Now, protein is our building blocks for all of our muscle fibers that we've probably just torn in our training session. But it's also the precursors for a lot of our recovery pathways. And we need protein to make hormones and enzymes. So it's one of the key things that you need to make sure you're getting in that recovery window as well. The third R is revitalize. And that is what most people forget. People are pretty good at throwing some eggs on their toast and then that's it, maybe having a coffee, but we miss putting all of that beautiful color on our plate. So throwing some things, spinach on your plate, some tomatoes, some mushrooms, whatever it is you like, or some berries on your muesli or porridge or something like that. Because we need all of those vitamins and minerals if we're going to exercise and train for three sports, our needs are actually a little bit higher than somebody that sits on their butt all day. So that's a third R. And the fourth one, which most people are generally pretty good at, is rehydrate. And you don't need anything more magical than water. Water is the best fluid for rehydration, particularly if you're eating it with a meal, because there's more electrolytes in that meal than there is in a bottle of sports drink. So when we talk about recovery nutrition, those are the four boxes that you need to tick. And then understanding how much of each is individual to you and your needs.

The timing, I suppose, would be the next thing. Is there a window that you need to, to be in to get the, to get the, the recovery process starting? And is there a point where it's too late?

Yes, great question. So there are some adaptations that happen if we under recover, but I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. Today we talk about a window of opportunity of around 30 to 45 minutes. Now, that is because at 60 minutes post exercise, that's where all of our recovery hormones and enzymes peak. So they need those building blocks of our carbohydrates and our proteins and all of our vitamins and minerals. They need them there in single unit building blocks ready to meet that peak. So we want whatever food we're eating or digesting to be broken down in time to meet that peak. So the easier to digest it is, we can probably delay that a little bit, like maybe 45 minutes is okay because within 15 minutes things will be digested and broken down in time to meet that peak. But the more complicated the food is, the more protein there is, the more fat there is, the more fiber there is. It's going to take much longer for our stomach to digest and pull those molecules apart to absorb it. So earlier the better. I always try and get my athletes to work on around half an hour when you suck at your nutrition, no offense, but when you suck, you're better off being more aggressive and having your recovery meals within half an hour to help that whole process work better. And then you're going to feel so much more energy in the afternoons by the end of the week if you're starting to get your recovery nutrition right for you.

I guess you've spoken about the importance of getting some protein in there in that four hours of recovery. You know that that process is really important to make sure you're getting the. What was the second hour because you had refuel and then re.

Repair.

Repair. That's right. So how much protein does someone need? What is the adequate amount?

Our protein needs vary depending on how big we are and how small we are. But a good sort of guideline is around 20 to 30 grams of protein in that recovery window because we need enough. A lot of people under eat our protein and we're not kind of ticking the right boxes and getting enough of those building blocks in that window. More is fine if you're a bigger person or you're a master's athlete. You know, you've been in the sport for quite a while and you're sort of 40, 50 plus. Then we know that we get protein resistance as age. We just don't digest it and absorb it as well as when we're younger. So you need more protein, more like 40 grams. But our protein needs a kind of like a cup. We need to fill that cup at regular intervals across the day. And if we under fill it, we only half fill it. We're not getting the building blocks that we need at the right times. And then if we overfill it and it spills out, it's almost a waste in a way. It's excess to what we need. We'll still burn it for calories, we'll still oxidize it for calories, but we otherwise we would just break it down and pee it out. So somewhere between 20 to 30 grams of protein for most people. And if you are a master's athlete, then it's more like 40 grams of protein in that window.

Something I've always wondered myself is if I've for some reason ended up sore and tired from a big session and the next day, even though the session I did wasn't hard, but it had some endurance factor in it and maybe I'm not in the same fitness state that I'd like to be and I end up a little bit sore the next day. Yet that night of the next day I have another hard training session. Is it okay to refuel way after the 60 minutes with protein? So if the training session the next day is at 6 o' clock and and you're feeling sore straight away the next morning, is it okay to really push the protein? Because we know protein aids in recovery. So is it okay to have lots of small incremental meals of protein during the day, even though carbohydrate is going to be our main source for our high intensity session?

Yeah. So you want to do both. So you want to have, you want to drip feed your protein intake after for recovery if you're backing up and going again that next evening or the next morning. Because we don't have rest days as triathletes, we might have an active recovery day, but we don't have full days off. Generally you need to constantly be topping up that protein cup all the time, every day, you know, five, six meals a day, depending on what type of eater you are. So that never kind of goes away. We're always recovering and repairing when we train for three sports in terms of carbohydrate to refuel again. That depends on how much you've burned and what you need to do, what you've got coming up. So I'd be focusing on both rather than just focusing on one of those macronutrients. You need to focus on both but then still be getting all of your vitamins and minerals as well.

So ideally you're getting enough protein to rebuild in that first 60 minutes. But even if you don't, the princess principle's the same. It should be a constant top up. So if you miss that first 60 minute window, it's not like, oh, I missed my protein window. It should be a constant principle anyway.

Yeah, you kind of have missed that peak of enzymes, but you still need to be putting protein in, filling that cup for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and for some people it's a little protein top up before bed to help with their recovery overnight. Because we know that whatever you throw into your stomach at night, the ph changes and it stomach clots and that slowly drips feeds protein throughout the evening while you're asleep. So that can be a useful strategy for some people as well. So there's no need to have those nighttime protein blends that are casein because your PH of your stomach changes anyway. So it doesn't matter what type of protein it is. That's just marketing bs.

That's really good to know. So can you just quickly tell us what the role of the enzymes are and why? Because they've come up a few times here. So what are these bloody enzymes and what are they doing?

Oh, that's a deep, deep hole.

Is there a summary version you can give us?

No, we don't need to go down that hole, honestly.

Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah. It's not relevant. It's just, I was just curious because it's come up a few times.

Yeah, it's just putting those muscle fibers back together. Right. Putting some glycogen back in your muscles so that you can use them for fuel. There's lots of things that happen in the recovery to help you back up, up and go again. But definitely not a rabbit hole we need to go down.

Nice. Well, we might finish off with kind of the, the what it looks like again. So you mentioned potentially eggs on toast as a post meal because eggs have some protein in there, but mixing it up with not just eggs on toast but different colors on the plate as well. Like you did with the pre training. What are some other go to foods that would be higher in carbohydrates and protein?

Yeah, so recovery is for typically for triathletes is breakfast or could also be dinner. If you have like an amazing lifestyle where you can go for a swim at lunchtime, your recovery from that could be lunch as well. So it's generally a main meal really just depends on what you like eating. But it's making sure that whatever you choose, you are ticking off those four boxes. A lot of people will just do two of them and not not capture the others. So for breakfast, some ideas could be the eggs on toast, but make sure you've got those beautiful colors on your plate. With other things and it doesn't need to be complicated. Like you don't have a lot of time to whip up like a ratatouille or some amazing cafe style breakfast. You can throw some cold cherry tomatoes on your plate and a few cold spinach leaves. Done. It could be something like muesli or porridge that's got the carbohydrates as the base with your oats and then you've got lots of anti inflammatory and antioxidants, fat coming from nuts and seeds. You might want to throw some fresh or frozen berries on the top for lots of vitamins. And we need to make sure there's enough protein there. So milk could be your base, it could be a high protein yogurt like Chobani or Yopro here in Australia. Those are some other good sort of mixed meals. It could be a smoothie that ticks all the right boxes on my website there's a whole recipe database. It's got over 130 recipes in there that tick all the right boxes for triathletes. And one of the things that's one of the things that's on there is a smoothie and it shows you how to pick your protein source, pick your carb source, here's all your other vitamins and minerals so that you can kind of build your own based on what you need. But smoothies is another good one. And then if we're talking about dinner, we're not eating just a piece of meat and pasta or a pasta dish that doesn't have any meat in it or protein in it or we're not having like a fried rice for instance with no vegetables in it. So it's just trying to balance those things out on our plate all the time and understanding how many serves of things that you'd need, which is quite individual to you.

That's a great way to finish. And I have seen that recipe book myself and it is really valuable. So if you want to go check it out, you can see it on Taryn's website, which we'll talk about in a second. But any last questions, dad, before we finish off?

No, it's great, Taryn, that you've actually gone into some real depth in the pre training phase and the post training phase and we could actually keep talking a lot longer about these and there's many more questions. We want to talk about what you should be doing in your racing. So we would love to have you back on to go through that and get your ideas about what you actually should be doing in the middle of a race. So thank you so much for being available and getting such a simple way across of understanding how much you can help yourself improve your performance by really being specific about what, what you're doing when you put food into your mouth.

Oh, you're welcome. I can talk about nutrition all day and I guess it's really my passion to translate that to practical things that people can walk away with. One of the things I would like to offer listeners if they do want to go and grab it is a checklist that I have that is 50 steps to triathlon Nutrition Mastery. There is a lot to do when it comes to nutrition and pre and post training nutrition is definitely just one of the things things but there's a whole lot of other things that you can do. So if you want to go and grab that head to dietitianapproved.com checklist and you can start to have a look at the some of the things that you can tackle or things that might be missing when it comes to nutrition to see if there's areas that you can make improvement. Because I've noticed huge changes in people when they dial in their nutrition. I'm sure you you're the same. It's tiny little things that make the biggest performance gains and don't cost that much either.

We'll put a link to that in the show. Notes. Is that the best place you'd like people to go and access your content is dietitianapproved.com yeah, you can find me.

On the website dietitianapproved.com you just need to spell dietitian correctly. It's got two T's in it because I'm Australian in the US it's got a C in it. So definitely need to do it with two T's. And if you want to see behind the scenes or have a chat on Instagram, it's dietitian approved. That's where you'll find me.

Awesome. Taryn, thank you very much for joining us and being so generous with your info. It is just such an unknown topic for a lot of triathletes. So we really like your mission of getting it to the forefront of triathletes minds and making them a lot more aware of the things they could be doing to improve their performance because that's what we're all about here. So thank you again for joining us.

Oh thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

That's it from us. Thank you very much for listening to this episode and we'll see you all next time. Sam.