How to Avoid Letting Your Nutrition Slip During Your Running Training
- Allison Felsenthal
- Sep 1, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 5, 2021
As a runner, one of the biggest worries is getting injured due to lack of recovery and poor nutrition. MyFitnessPal and MyPlate are user-friendly platforms to hold athletes and coaches accountable and facilitate collaboration between a coach and an athlete while using food to coincide with an athlete's training program! Whether you're looking to avoid injuries while running or have an aspiring goal to train for a run long-distance, this blog is for you, looking at the top-notch news in the industry weekly, bringing you information to help you optimize your runs and health!
Use an Accountability System
One of the biggest risk factors for running injuries is doing too much too soon. Build up your running distance and frequency slowly. This allows your tissues time to build themselves up to tolerate the new loads, stresses and strains you’re putting through your system.
Avoid being drawn into challenges like run every day for a month. If you aren’t used to it, it’s a really quick way to get injured and lose the enjoyment of running.
Initially, give your body a good 36-48 hours between running or other impact training sessions to allow your body time to adapt to the new loads you’re putting on it.
Consider using an equation like the acute:chronic workload ratio to guide how many miles you’re running each week. Your chronic fitness is the average running miles over the last four weeks. Your acute load is the miles you are doing this week. If that ratio is over 130%, you have a much higher chance of injury.
If you’re new to running, keep a steady pace on your runs over the first 6-8 weeks. Let your body get used to things before taking on interval, sprint, hill or Fartlek training runs.
Optimize Your Recovery
Running doesn’t get you fitter. It’s the rest periods between bouts of exercise where your body adapts and improves its function. Get your recovery strategy sorted and you might be surprised how much better you feel the day after running and see your performance improve.
Protein: although commonly used by body builders, it’s really useful for runners too. As we exercise for longer periods of time, our bodies move into a ‘catabolic’ state where we start to break it down. By having a source of protein immediately after exercise, we turn our body chemistry to an ‘anabolic’ state – for build up and recovery. So although the Western diet typically has more protein than we need, having a protein source (like 250ml of skimmed milk) helps our body biology recover quicker.
Rehydration: even in cold weather, as we exercise and get warm we sweat. I know it’s not all that pleasant, but it’s a useful tool our body uses to keep us from overheating. So after running/exercise, it’s really important to make sure we replenish the stores in the body. Little and often can be a great way to refill the body’s water supplies. Mark a bottle of water with timings on to aim for drinking during the day. If you can’t stand having plain water, maybe have a ratio of 1-part fruit juice (not from concentrate) to 5-parts water. It just takes the edge off the plain water taste.
Food/carbohydrates: getting some quality carbs back into the system quickly after exercise is really important to get the body bouncing back. It’s not called ‘the golden hour’ because that’s when athletes get presented with their medals! That’s the time the body turbocharges its recovery efforts, so the sooner you get it in you the better. Quality food is always better than junk food, even though that bar of chocolate looks so tempting after a hard run! Okay, maybe have a square or two of it after your bowl of pasta and chicken! Your food tracks using one of the nutrition tracking apps shared below!
Warm down: it’s so tempting just to collapse when we get back home after a run, but we can help optimise our recovery by helping the body return to its non-exercise state more gently. Maybe plan to finish your run 4-5 minutes away from your house and then have a brisk walk back to help the body settle back to resting levels. Or set the bike up on a turbo trainer in the garage and spend 5 minutes having a little leg spin after your run.
Stretching/foam roller/massage tools: although we said about getting strong earlier, it’s not a bad thing to loosen up tight and sore muscles after running or repeated bouts of exercise. Yes it can be painful – and that often puts us off using it – but the good old trusty foam roller is a fab way to loosen muscles and relieve pressure on the joints and other tissues. If you really can’t stand the foam roller, some classic static stretches can also be really useful. Just don’t work into pain – just till you feel a stretch. A more expensive option is the newer vibrating massage tools – for some they’re more comfortable than using the foam roller, but unfortunately more expensive as well.
Sleep: sleep is so important for the human body. Far too many of us are sleep deprived. It might seem a passive process, but it’s a time where the body can recover, adapt and recharge the batteries all over the system. Loads of brain areas are involved in sleep and it’s really important for recovery, health and building fitness. Give yourself a real big helping hand with recovery and give yourself the opportunity of 8 hours’ sleep per night.
Low stress: another excellent tool to help de-stress and promote better happier mental states and boost recovery efforts in the body is a period of time to unwind, in a location of low stress – where the phone doesn’t ring, the kids don’t annoy you and work can’t touch you. Find a protected location where each day you give yourself 10 minutes to do what YOU want to do. Whatever that is – reading, yoga, Sudoku puzzles, listening to music or mental wondering – it doesn’t matter what you do, just as long as it’s something that you want to do.
Nutrition Accountability Trackers
MyFitnessPal or MyPlate are two of my go-to apps that are incredibly user-friendly, as long as you know how to use them.
Here is my video explaining how to use MyFitnessPal, how to add certain foods to each meal daily, how to connect with friends on the app to help hold you accountable throughout your nutritional transformation journey!
Here is my video explaining how to use MyPlate, discussing adding certain foods to each meal daily, and connecting with friends on the app to help hold you accountable throughout your nutritional transformation journey! This is on a mobile device.
This video shows you how to engage with friends on MyPlate on your desktop!
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