Article: Eating before competing
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You've done the hard work: hours of training; improving your skills; tuning yourself mentally. To capitalise, you need to ensure you eat and drink the right stuff as well
Dr Michael McCoy
You've done the hard work: hours of training; improving your skills; tuning yourself mentally. To capitalise, you need to ensure you eat and drink the right stuff as well.
What you eat and drink in the 48 hours prior to competition can make an enormous difference to how well you go on the big day. In fact, a little attention to nutritional detail might be the best investment in your performance you can make.
That said, if your general training diet isn't up to scratch, following these guidelines will be a help, but it's like licking the icing off but the rest of the cake untouched. We'll talk about what kind of cake later.
High performance nutrition
Before making our high performance recommendations, a quick word about ‘carbohydrate loading'. Many will have heard about this practice, with many regimes proposing a full week of training and dietary modification prior to competition.
Recent research and practice has demonstrated there is no additional benefit to be gained from going through the early ‘depletion' phases of carbohydrate loading methodology. This practice had athletes training hard and eating low carbohydrate diets to deplete their carbohydrate reserves, four to seven days before competing.
This was done in the belief that once the athlete returned to high carbohydrate eating patterns, their muscles ‘super-compensated' and stored extra amounts of carbohydrate. Research now shows carbohydrate stores can reach the same high levels without the depletion phase. A much better option!
Eat
In the last two days before you compete, your training volume should be reduced to help you ‘freshen up'. Muscles store energy as carbohydrate (in the form of glycogen) and use it during every exercise session you do. It takes up to 48 hours to fully restore the muscle carbohydrate used in the previous session.
The more quickly this nutritional preparation starts after your last hard training session the better. Our bodies make much better use of carbohydrate if it is eaten within two hours of finishing a training session, than if we wait longer before eating. Fruit and sports drinks are excellent readily available carbohydrate sources that are useful for this purpose.
Your food should be high in unrefined carbohydrates, moderately high in protein and low in fat. Try for plenty of rice and pasta meals but avoid creamy or fatty sauces such as carbonara or Bolognese.
Continue to eat a high carbohydrate/low fat diet right up until you compete. Within the last four hours of competing, most of your nutritional preparation has been done.
The dietary finishing touches should be low in fat, but avoid carbohydrate foods that are high in fibre; you don't want to still be digesting food while you're mid competition. Choose quickly digested foods with a high glycaemic index such as Corn Flakes, white bread or rice.
Drink
For the 48 hours prior to the event you should make sure you are well hydrated. Water is the ideal drink. Drink a glass with every meal, and one to two glasses between meals.
Your urine should be clear, or nearly so, prior to competing. The colour of dilute apple juice is as dark as it should be; almost as clear as water is ideal.
Perform
Apart from not wanting food in your stomach when you exercise, you get a natural insulin burst after a meal that can temporarily lower blood glucose (sugar) and impair your performance. You should not eat or drink anything much in the last 1.5 to two hours prior to performing.
Drink water if you are thirsty. If you've followed the above, being a little hungry shouldn't be an issue. What's left? Just do it. And eat the cake once you finish.
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