Whether you are practising for your very first triathlon, or intensively training for an Ironman, the combination of swimming, cycling and running demands both endurance and discipline. Because you have to train for three different sports, you will often train late in the evening or early in the morning – sometimes even twice a day and for more than ten hours per week!
Since you have to train for 10 hours per week, you probably don’t have any free time left. However, you cannot allow this to disrupt your eating habits. After all, your diet is just as important as your training in the months leading up to the race. Why is that?
Because your food ensures that you stay healthy, provides you with energy during training, helps you to recover after each training session and rebuilds your muscles after exercise. A healthy combination of carbohydrates, proteins and healthy fats is the triathletes best friend. Carbohydrates replenish your energy reserves and protein accelerates the recovery process in muscle tissue. Fats are essential for the effective absorption of vital micronutrients and are also an extra energy source thanks to their high calorific value.
Are you having trouble fitting healthy meals in between training sessions? Are you looking for a balanced diet which will allow you to improve your performance? Etixx Sports Nutrition products are made with the highest quality ingredients. Here, the focus is not on the effect that the products have on your figure, but rather how they affect the way you feel. All of our supplements are tested and approved by top athletes, so we can guarantee that our products will help you to perform better as a triathlete.
Every athlete has a set of personal needs depending on his or her objectives, condition, experience with sports nutrition and specific problems. Excluding these personal effects, we have found a lot of similarities between the members of our teams, including Endurance Team Moeskroen, Energy Team Zuidwest and all of the recreational runners who have been involved in the testing of our products.
In general, triathletes require more vitamins and minerals because of the exercise they do. Due to overworking and excess fertilisation, our agricultural land has been degraded, so that fruit and vegetables now contain less vitamins and minerals than roughly 50 years ago. This lower level of vitamins and minerals, combined with lower consumption of fruit and vegetables in general, means that triathletes have to pay extra attention to this. For this reason, extra supplements are highly recommended.
Our level of performance is directly proportional to our loss of moisture. It is important to start your training sessions properly hydrated. Pre-hydration starts the day before exercise, and mainly involves drinking water. The colour of your urine is a good indication of whether you are sufficiently hydrated. Dark yellow urine is a sign that you have not drunk enough. A light yellow colour indicates that you are well hydrated. During the meal before your session (3 hours before) or 10 minutes before the exercise, you can drink a sports drink to hydrate and get some extra carbohydrates.
The amount of moisture that you will lose during exercise depends on duration, intensity, genetics, body size and various environmental factors such as humidity and temperature. It is therefore not entirely clear how much you should drink while exercising. A very good way to determine how much moisture you need to consume is to use some scales on a day during which you will be training. Weigh yourself before and after training, and multiply the lost weight by 1.5. The outcome is the quantity of fluid that you need to consume in order to compensate for what you lost as sweat.
In order to perform during long periods of exercise, the muscles must have enough glycogen, and that is why it is important to consume carbohydrates while training and replenish these reserves. If no carbohydrates are consumed during long periods of intensive exercise, glycogen in the muscles will become depleted after 90 minutes. The table below shows how much carbohydrate must be consumed, because requirements depend on the duration of the exercise:
<1h | No additional carbohydrates required |
1-2h | 30g per hour |
2-3h | 60g per hour |
>2,5h | Up to 90 g per hour |
You can choose to consume carbohydrates during exercise in liquid, semi-liquid or solid form. The more liquid the food, the faster the carbohydrates will be absorbed during exercise. In stress situations, preference is always given to liquid sources of carbohydrate, because our digestive system does not work optimally when we are under stress.
Proper recovery after training is crucially important, because strangely enough, your body gets stronger and fitter after exercise, not during. In line with the motto “You’re only as good as your last recovery”, it is important to pay attention to what you eat and drink after exercise. This determines how much you will gain from your training. Often, you have to drive or catch a bus, or rush to your next appointment, so you do not immediately supply your body with the building materials it needs to ensure proper recovery. This can cause you to start your next training with fatigue, potentially causing you to enter a negative spiral. This can result in delayed progress, or even injury. What you should do, is provide your body with fuel and the right nutrition as fast as possible.
For those who are ready to take it a step further and are aiming for challenges that are just within their potential. The products below can help you with this depending on your goals.
Search