Unless you’ve been hanging out with your head dug firmly into the sand for the last decade, you’re probably aware of the movement towards strength training – hallelujah! – and specifically its importance for cardio bunny endurance athletes. It’s now commonplace to be having the conversation about what strength training you’re doing to support your endurance endeavours and most people, whether they like the gym or not, are happily hanging out there regularly to reap the rewards of chucking a few weights about.
But how do you best support those efforts with your nutrition? Do you need to approach your eating strategy a little differently for strength training or can you just treat those sessions like any other training session? Are there different strategies for different types of training and should your nutrition vary throughout the season in line with your strength training? Read on…
The Importance of Strength Training for Endurance Athletes
In case you really are that ostrich I referred to in sentence one, let’s recap some of the benefits of strength training to really firm it in your mind that it isn’t really an optional extra…
- Improved Muscular Function and Endurance: Strength training enhances muscle efficiency, enabling you to maintain performance over longer distances.
- Injury Prevention: A stronger musculoskeletal system is less prone to injuries, which is crucial for athletes with high training volumes. Strength training will also teach you how to properly “practice” repeated movements of your body so you’re training yourself into correct movement patterns to help avoid injury.
- Enhanced Power Output: Strengthening specific muscle groups can boost your power output, crucial for sprints and hill climbs.
- Body Composition: Incorporating strength training can help maintain muscle mass while reducing body fat, contributing to a more efficient power-to-weight ratio and also, let’s face it, giving you a little reward in the mirror every now and then!
Types of Strength Training and Their Nutritional Needs
Just like your cardio training programme, your strength training should move through a few distinct cycles and phases depending on your goals. You may also have different phases and different approaches to your overall strength and conditioning strategy depending on your starting position and your end goal. And, just like your other training, this will require slight fluctuations and changes in various nutrients to really squeeze every last drop of benefit out of your programme.
Now let’s be clear. For most athletes, any kind of strength training is a bonus and if you’re getting that desirable progressive overload with adequate recovery and repair time, you’ll probably be improving both muscle size, quality and function all at once. But in the traditional strength training world, there are some different specifications according to your goals and if you’re a more advanced athletes, you might well be diving into the weeds a little more to really see things improve in your performance. So let’s dive into the different strategies you might employ and talk about how we can best fuel them.
1. Muscular Endurance and Functional Strength
Training Focus: For endurance athletes, the goal is often to improve muscular function and endurance rather than to build large muscles. This type of training typically involves high-repetition, lower-weight exercises that enhance the muscle’s ability to sustain prolonged activity.
Nutritional Strategy:
- Carbohydrates: Since endurance workouts rely heavily on glycogen stores, maintaining a diet rich in complex carbohydrates (e.g., whole grains, fruits, vegetables) is essential. Aim for 5-7 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight daily.
- Protein: While the emphasis isn’t on muscle growth, adequate protein intake supports recovery and repairs minor muscle damage. For athletes, particularly those over 50, maintaining adequate protein intake is fundamental to recovery, repair and thus training benefit over the long term. I therefore recommend 1.6g/kg daily.
- Timing: Focus on pre-training meals rich in carbohydrates to fuel your sessions and post-training meals combining protein and carbs to aid recovery so you’re ready to train again ASAP.
- Maintain Calorie Intake: An important point here is that you don’t need to be in a surplus here as your primary aim is not to gain mass but to improve and refine the function of the mass you already have. It is still absolutely essential to make sure you’re meeting your energy needs though so consult with a professional if you need help identifying what this might look like for you.
2. Muscle Hypertrophy (Building Muscle Mass)
Training Focus: Some phases of an athlete’s strength training program might focus on hypertrophy—building muscle size. This is particularly relevant during the off-season or preparatory phases, where the goal is to increase muscle cross-sectional area, which can later be converted into functional strength.
Nutritional Strategy:
- Increased Caloric Intake: Building muscle mass requires a caloric surplus. Ensure you’re consuming more calories than you’re burning (by about 10-20%, possibly less if you’re an extremely experienced athlete looking for only a minor increase in muscle mass), focusing on nutrient-dense foods to ensure as much benefit as possible from the foods you’re eating.
- Higher Protein Intake: To support muscle synthesis, increase protein intake to 1.6-2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. Sources like lean meats, dairy, eggs, and plant-based proteins are excellent choices.
- Carbohydrates and Fats: Maintain a balanced intake of carbohydrates to fuel training sessions and healthy fats to support overall health and hormone production. Fat intake should be around 20-30% of total daily calories.
3. Neuromuscular Adaptation and Specific Fiber Activation
Training Focus: This type of training is often sport-specific, aiming to enhance the activity of particular muscle fibers (e.g., Type I slow-twitch fibers for endurance or Type II fast-twitch fibers for explosive power). This is crucial for improving performance in specific areas like sprinting in triathlons or powering up steep inclines in cycling.
Nutritional Strategy:
- Targeted Carbohydrate Intake: Depending on whether you’re focusing on endurance or explosive power, your carbohydrate intake should be adjusted. For Type I fiber training, maintain moderate carbohydrate levels, while for Type II, consider carb-loading strategies before high-intensity sessions.
- Maintain Adequate Protein: Sticking to the figure of 1.6-2.2g/kg of body weight is essential to maintaining good quality muscle mass and ensuring everything is well repaired, recovered and refuelled ready to head into the next session or race and ensure you’re really benefitting from your S&C regime.
- Hydration and Electrolytes: Given the intensity of this training phase, ensure optimal hydration and electrolyte balance, especially during explosive and high-intensity sessions.
Phased Nutrition for Periodised Strength Training
Not everyone will have the same approach to periodisation in training. However, generally speaking, there’s a pretty effective way of structuring things which seems to work for 99% of athletes who have an “on” or “off” type seasonal cycle.
- Preparation/Off-Season: For triathletes, this is traditionally winter, but it will all depend on the types of races you are really targeting. For cyclists focusing on track racing or cyclocross, the winter might well be the “on” season! When you’re ages away from racing, it’s a great time to look at really maximising muscle mass and foundational form and strength. A higher calorie and protein intake is essential to support this type of training.
- Pre-Competition: In that “in-bewteeny” bit where you’re nit yet into the throes of racing but slowly ramping up the specificity of your training, you are likely to be aiming to maintain your muscle mass, perhaps slightly altering body composition (though not in a way that sacrifices training gains) and increasing endurance and specific muscular capacity and function. Making sure you’re meeting your energy needs during this phase is crucial, so focus on good quality nutrients, a well balanced macronutrient profile with carbs to fuel your efforts and ensuring your energy ins and outs are balanced too.
- Competition: Competition phase is all about prepping for your race. This means strength training is likely to be all about keeping you ticking over and nothing to do with making gains at this point. Your nutrition is all about keeping your gut happy (where it might be stressed by nerves and exertion during the race) and keeping you hydrated and primed for performance. Focus on ensuring EVERY strength session is well fuelled with carbs so you’re not in a deficit as a result of training. Same goes for refuelling; make sure you’re hitting your protein goals and most importantly, stay well hydrated through all your sessions.
Want help with fuelling your season or your strength training? Get in touch and book a free intro call here to find out how I can help.