- Hey what's up triathlon trainiacs?
Triathlon Taren here with your daily
triathlon video helping you race like a pro,
And basically just be a better version of yourself
through the magic of triathlon.
Today we're going to do the first of a four part series,
and over the next four days,
what we're gonna be going through
is figuring out how to dial-in
your ideal
race nutrition.
Now over the course of these four videos
and an accompanying email guide
you're gonna be able to figure out what
nutrition you should be taking.
How many calories you need to be taking.
What the schedule is that you need
to be taking that nutrition in during a race,
and how you can customize a lot of those
kind of general guidelines to your specific
digestive requirements and your specific race.
And today we're gonna be talking about
the five most common nutrition mistakes
that new or even very experienced triathletes
make when they are approaching
and figuring out their ideal race nutrition.
And the first one is something that I was
extremely guilty of for probably the first three years
that I was doing triathlon,
and that's making the base of your nutrition
a really strong electrolyte drink, typically Gatorade.
Now this has been phased out over the last few years.
Even Gatorade itself is kinda taking the strength
and the amount of carbs and electrolytes in their drink.
The amount of sugar down quite a bit
making it a lot less syrupy,
but historically Gatorade has been the big player
in sports nutrition drinks.
But there've been a few problems
that have been figured out with Gatorade.
Number one is that because it's so syrupy and sweet
you have a lot of taste fatigue.
When you start getting in to longer races,
Olympic distance triathlons, half Iron Mans,
Full Iron Mans and you're taking something
that is that strong into your mouth constantly
it's gonna stop tasting very good
a few hours in and you're not gonna
be as incentivized to drink it,
and that's gonna be a problem
because you're not gonna wanna drink it
you're not going to drink it.
You're gonna be lacking a lot of calories,
a lot of electrolytes and it's gonna throw
your entire nutrition plan off.
But it's too much. It's too strong.
There's too much carbs, too much sugar,
too much electrolytes coming in all at one time
and our body has to figure out how to digest it,
and it ends up not digesting it too well
because it is too much and when we're in a race
we don't have a lot of blood in our stomach
to digest things.
It's in our extremities, our arms, our legs,
and having that really syrupy Gatorade to work through,
it doesn't end up working through
so it tends to slosh around a lot
and you get rot gut.
That's not a technical term, but get a rotted gut.
The second most common mistake is very similar to that,
and that's loading up on gels, chews, bars,
just taking too much in a race
and what ends up happening is like I said,
because you don't have a lot of blood in your stomach,
when you start overloading your entire digestive system
which isn't functioning at it's peak
with too much liquids, fluids, gels,
it ends up not being able to flush that through
and you'll often have people, a good friend of mine once,
actually throwing up during a race even though
he needed the calories and the electrolytes.
But just because his stomach couldn't work it through
he wasn't able to digest it and the stomach said,
you know what? Everyone out of here.
The third most common mistake that new triathletes make
is not
racing or training the same way.
They're not racing with the same nutrition strategy
that they used in training,
and they're not training with their ideal
race strategy for nutrition in mind.
And you should be training basically
the exact same way that you intend on racing.
In the couple of months leading into a race
your intensity should get very similar
to your race intensities and while you're
doing that you should be taking on the nutrition
that you're ideally going to take on during a race.
So that by the time you get to a race
you know exactly what's going to happen,
and what I see happening more often than not,
is people get to a race and they're like,
well I'm at a race now better pull out
the gels and they have a
absolutely explosive time from both ends.
The fourth very common nutrition mistake
that I see a lot of triathletes making
is the exact opposite of those first few.
And it relates to what they put
in their bottles for hydration.
And I see a lot of triathletes thinking
that water is enough.
Water is good and I would certainly recommend
it for certain instances where you're
somebody who has a really really sensitive stomach,
but for the vast majority of people,
water isn't what you need because you have to have
electrolytes coming into your system
when you're sweating so many out.
When you end up loading up on water without
a proper amount of electrolytes coming in the ratio
between electrolytes in your bloodstream
to fluid and hydration in your bloodstream
ends up going out of whack and it's called Hypernatremia,
so it's almost like water poisoning that you can do.
You can become over hydrated because that ratio is off.
So don't just take water on the course
because you might end up in even a worse situation
than if you had taken nothing at all.
And then the fifth most common problem,
and frankly even pro triathletes are very guilty of this,
it's not having a set schedule for when they're
going to take on their fluids and their calories.
And a lot of people will come into a triathlon
thinking that they're just gonna kinda feel it out.
They're gonna let their body tell them when they're thirsty,
when they're hungry, when they feel like they need
a little pick-me-up.
The down side to that is by the time
you feel like you need that pick-me-up, it's too late.
And it's almost impossible to catch up once
you're dehydrated, once you're bonking,
once you already feel hungry.
You would have to put in so many calories
all at once to stop those signals
that your brain is giving you.
That you're never gonna be able to catch up
and you're just gonna be on this downward slide.
Now I make it sound very complicated I'm sure,
but like I say through the course of that guide
which you can download
at triathlontaren.com/triathlonnutritionguide.
You just put in your email address
and over the course of four days, for free,
you are going to be walked through start to finish,
figuring out an exact nutrition plan
that will work for your specific race,
your specific weight, your specific time,
and we're gonna give you guidelines on how
you can change that depending on your
specific digestive issues and what types
of races you are going into.
I think it's smashing.
So there you go triathlon trainiacs.
If you aren't yet subscribed and you wanna make sure
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hit that subscribe button below,
and hit the notification belL.
If you wanna see part two, three, four,
once they're all out they will be linked right here
and if you wanna go on a bit of a binge watching spree
and see some good Triathlon Taren stuff,
specifically from Iron Man Kona,
check it out here.
It's one of our favorite videos.
I'll see you tomorrow in part two.