Why Good Nutrition and Falling in Love With Protein is Important as an Endurance Athlete
Protein is, without question, something that needs to become a non-negotiable staple to provide an endurance athlete good nutrition. Whether a plant-based athlete or a steak-loving athlete, protein is incredibly vital. So, why is good nutrition, specifically protein, important for endurance athletes? Are you getting enough protein as an endurance athlete? Do you fuel post-workout? Are you getting enough nutrient-dense foods? Let’s dive into why forming habits around protein-intake are so critical.
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Types of Nutrition For An Endurance Athlete
When considering endurance athletes, many associate carbohydrates as the key fuel for the sport, and it is clear to understand why. Carbohydrates provide good nutrition to fuel training and racing performance, acting like how gasoline is to a car. These building blocks fuel us towards training and racing events. However, we shouldn’t ignore protein. In fact, protein is absolutely central to the ability for endurance athletes to consistently execute training and racing events and to allow them to race well.
Before we dive into the merits and role of protein in your performance life, let’s frame a simple way to approach your eating habits as an athlete. The world of nutrition can be blinding in its complexity and confusion, but it doesn’t need to be this way. You have two main areas of focus in your daily eating habits:
Eating Habits Of Endurance Athletes
Meals focused on sports and life performance
Meals designed to amplify your global platform of health
Depending on what the role of your meal might be, can guide you into your priority and makeup of your dinner plate. When you are priming your body for training, recovering from a training session, or getting ready for a long day of work in the office, then the focus is on sports and life performance. You need a ‘performance meal’. Any other meal should likely be tilted towards a meal designed to deliver good nutrition to promote a platform of global health.
Without going into deep detail, here is what both look like in action.
Performance Meals
Your order of priority in a performance-focused meal is protein to begin, supported with plenty of starchy (slow absorbing) carbohydrates, and a sprinkle of vegetables, fruits, and oils. The predominant make-up of the meal plate is protein and carbohydrates. We will get into the why below.
Nutrition Meals
In a meal focused on global health retention or improvement, you use a different lens. You still build the meal around protein, but your demands for starchy carbohydrates are much lower. Instead, you want to support protein with a plethora of multi-colored vegetables as well as good fats and oils. Nutrient-dense foods, with any included starchy carbohydrates making up the smallest representation of the plate. These types of meals are often lunchtime and dinner meals when training isn’t immediately prior or coming up in the following few hours.
Notice how protein plays the primary role in both types of meals. And we are discussing endurance athletes, not NFL players! Yes, endurance sports are highly catabolic, meaning the stress of training load delivers a breakdown of muscle and tissue. We want to ensure that your body can adapt to the stress and repair, rebuild and adapt to this stress, and protein plays a key role. In fact, protein has a few important roles for endurance athletes and fitness enthusiasts.
Roles of Protein Nutrition for Endurance Athletes
Muscle repair
Developing adaptations from training stress
The building block of tissue health and integrity
Energy source
Natural suppressor of elevated stress hormones (such as cortisol) circulating during exercise
Other organ and cellular function
It may surprise you that protein is so important, and the importance of protein for endurance athletes has become more and more clear over recent years. When you train, you want to kick-off muscle repair and adaptations as soon as possible. You also want to provide the best opportunity for you to be ready for the following training sessions later in the day, or the day following. In addition, elevated stress hormones are anticipated and helpful in training to enable you to perform, but you don’t want to be sitting in the office trying to think clearly and make smart decisions with those same hormones circulating. Protein helps bring them down back toward baseline.
How Much Protein Do I Need
Unfortunately, getting enough protein to support your training load is often a challenge for athletes. Many are surprised with just how much protein is required to retain consistency, recovery, tissue health, and energy. Dial-in the habits of consistently refueling immediately following training, with a performance meal, or a protein shake followed by a performance meal within the following 90 minutes. Consider an appropriate amount of daily protein to sit somewhere around 1.4 to 1.8 grams of protein for each kilogram of body weight (convert pounds into kilograms by dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2), and support the ingestion with plenty of water and fluids.
Nutrition for endurance athletes is vitally important for a multitude of reasons. For endurance athletes, it’s apparent protein is a staple leading to good nutrition and improved performance. Our Purple Patch community is anchored around four pillars - one of which is nutrition and for good reason. Nutrition makes or breaks performance and we want our athletes - and you - to develop keen habits around it. If you want to make nutrition a focus during training, we invite you to join us, such as on Squad, or to dive into a nutrition consult with our nutrition partners.
Cheers,
Matt Dixon