Eat and Drinking During Training

If you train to improve fitness for competitive or recreational endurance sports such as cycling, running, in-line skating, or triathlons, your success depends on developing solid nutrition and hydration habits to accompany your training plans. Quality training means maintaining a high speed relative to your effort. With dehydration or glycogen depletion, you slow down despite maintaining effort. That means you’re training to work hard while going slowly. This is not a skill most athletes want to perfect.

To keep training quality high, you must consume carbohydrate and fluids during any training session that is long enough to deplete you. It is okay to train to fatigue—but delaying that fatigue by eating or drinking will yield greater fitness gains.

What to drink?

Many drink products promise to improve VO2 max, increase endurance, and so on. Many of them work. Drinks that contain carbohydrate and electrolytes, and are diluted enough to allow you to properly absorb their components, all work about equally well. Powders you mix up or diluted apple juice with a tiny pinch of salt are equally good if they agree with your stomach. Research indicates that the most important quality of an exercise drink is having a taste that you like—so you will reach for the bottle and drink it. Water does not support endurance as well as exercise drinks when used alone, but when combined with carbohydrate-rich foods, water works great.

How much to drink?

Loss of any more than 1 percent of body weight (1 pound if you weigh 100 pounds, 1.5 pounds if you weigh 150) decreases aerobic power—which means decreased quality of training or decreased competitiveness in racing—so replacing the water that you lose through sweat or respiration is essential. Most athletes need between 16 and 50 ounces of fluid per hour of exercise. Water loss depends on individual body size, temperature, humidity, fitness, and other specific factors—so it’s impossible to subscribe precise values.

However, here are some guidelines to help you determine for yourself if you are drinking appropriately. If you guzzle water after a training session and don’t need to pee within the first 30 minutes after a session, pee dark, or lose more than 1 pound between pre-session and post-session weigh-ins, you’d get more from your training if you drank more.