Nutrition Periodization: Eating To Train

Since our refrigerator stopped working on us, I have stocked up on all sorts of healthy food, including spinach wraps.  These have become an every day occurrence in my food journal.  Not only at home am I on a wrap kick, but when we go out I've been getting wraps.  Nom, nom, nom!

Veggie-hummus wrap 

Recently I have started using My Fitness Pal to track my daily food intake, instead of the old fashioned pen and paper style, so I could see the true caloric extent of what I eat.  Let me tell you it has been a rude awakening for me!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I by no means need to lose weight, however, I know that my trashy eating habits will eventually catch up to me so I am always trying to instill the good eating habit (such a terrible cycle!).  I am not so much doing this to count calories as I am to see how my energy in and out matches up.  Which leads me to the topic of my post today... Eating to Train.  

This topic comes to you as part of my CSCS Series.  In case you missed the other posts, you can check them out here and here. 

EATING TO TRAIN

Nutrition and dieting is all a mental thing, it's all about discipline and control, qualities that many of us (myself included) struggle to consistently demonstrate.  Nutrition periodization is all about changing out old school focus of "how many calories should I eat" to the new school way of thinking, "eat to train, don't train to eat".  I will be the first to admit that I workout so I can enjoy an extra scoop of ice cream on some days.  But this is where I continually hop back on the train, each time I find myself straying from the tracks, I hop back on an refocus on food as fuel rather than a reward or treat.  Food should not be thought of as a reward or an enemy, rather an ally to achieve health, fitness and performance goals.  More and more I realize how my diet affects my marathon training, both in fueling and recovery.

Put more straight forward, our nutrition plans should support the body's energy needs associated with the different exercise volume and intensity variables throughout our training year to encourage positive physiological responses.  Sounds scientific huh?  For me when I think about it in these terms it makes complete sense to me, it's when I start thinking of food as just an object that I lose discipline and focus on what food is really for.  Although most of us don't, we should be spending as much time and energy in planning and preparing our nutrition plan as we do our exercise plan.

Nutrition plans can and should be used for any individual that is active.  The type of nutrition plan you should use may depend more on what type of athlete and how serious you are about your training.  In an upcoming post in this series I will share with you the quantitative and qualitative approaches to nutrition periodization.

It is my goal to focus a little more on nutrition planning and basing my day-to-day meals on the type of activity I will be doing that day.  

Who else is in?!

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Here's my fitness plan for this week and here's what I actually did...

Tuesday: 5 mile bike
1 mile run
5 mile bike
1 mile run
5 mile bike
1 mile run

Total time: 1:06:21

Wednesday: 12 miles w/RB

Thursday: 

+ 

2 Basketball Games (40:00 each)

Friday: 60:00 bike + Wedding Day Arms 

(I'm not sure the original source, but this is one of the sites I saw it on)

Saturday: 4 mile run + .75 mile walk 

Have a super Saturday everyone!