Unlock the secrets to fueling your body for maximum running performance with our expert guest, Steven Winrow. As a multi-academically qualified nutritionist from Winrow Performance, Steven lays out the facts about how our bodies use energy and the importance of replenishing liver glycogen after a night's rest. Learn how carbs can effectively fuel your training and discover some practical advice on the best foods to consume before and after your morning run.
Ever wondered if fasted training was for you? We tackle that too, as Steven takes us through the potential benefits and risks of this controversial practice. Especially enlightening is our discussion on how elite athletes use fasted training differently from recreational runners. Plus, we dive into the impact of caffeine on endurance performance, offering a clear understanding of how it reduces perceived exertion, enhances carbohydrate absorption, and improves time trial performance.
We also address energy availability and its link to sleep, setting the stage for a future deep dive into this subject. So, join us for this insightful discussion and walk away with some actionable tips to optimize your nutrition for athletic performance.
Thanks for being part of our running community. Keep clocking those miles, keep pushing your limits, and above all, keep finding joy in the run. See you on the next episode of Maximum Mileage Running Podcast!
JOIN OUR FREE FACEBOOK GROUP! Your support here helps to keep making content and weekly podcast episodes... in return, you will have access to fantastic discounts through our numerous partners, plus we upload lots more content and chat to help you with your running!
Thanks to all our partners at Maximum Mileage who you can get huge discounts via the Maximum Mileage Facebook Group! :
You can find more resources including the blog or enquire about having one...
Unlock the secrets to fueling your body for maximum running performance with our expert guest, Steven Winrow. As a multi-academically qualified nutritionist from Winrow Performance, Steven lays out the facts about how our bodies use energy and the importance of replenishing liver glycogen after a night's rest. Learn how carbs can effectively fuel your training and discover some practical advice on the best foods to consume before and after your morning run.
Ever wondered if fasted training was for you? We tackle that too, as Steven takes us through the potential benefits and risks of this controversial practice. Especially enlightening is our discussion on how elite athletes use fasted training differently from recreational runners. Plus, we dive into the impact of caffeine on endurance performance, offering a clear understanding of how it reduces perceived exertion, enhances carbohydrate absorption, and improves time trial performance.
We also address energy availability and its link to sleep, setting the stage for a future deep dive into this subject. So, join us for this insightful discussion and walk away with some actionable tips to optimize your nutrition for athletic performance.
Thanks for being part of our running community. Keep clocking those miles, keep pushing your limits, and above all, keep finding joy in the run. See you on the next episode of Maximum Mileage Running Podcast!
JOIN OUR FREE FACEBOOK GROUP! Your support here helps to keep making content and weekly podcast episodes... in return, you will have access to fantastic discounts through our numerous partners, plus we upload lots more content and chat to help you with your running!
Thanks to all our partners at Maximum Mileage who you can get huge discounts via the Maximum Mileage Facebook Group! :
You can find more resources including the blog or enquire about having one...
Hi everybody, welcome back to the monthly hot seat, and it really is hot today. It is boiling as buggery in the UK at the moment. I struggle with this weather. Bring on the winter, I say I can't wait for it to start raining again. So anyway, welcome back to the hot seats, where me and Faye will be answering your questions, although today we have devoided ourselves of all responsibility yes, and I put all of the responsibility on a guest speaker and I am delighted to welcome on to the hot seat today A man who has been my nutritionist over the last couple of months, although I was a bit crap, to be honest, and now I'm injured, so he's not really doing much performance nutrition for me.
Speaker 1:So I'll pick things up with him again in a couple of months, once I've had my hernia operation fixed and everything. But he is working with another one of my athletes that I coached Steve and Steve Shaw and he's having great results. So, yes, on today's hot seat I've got Mr Steven Winrow from Winrow Performance. He is a multi-academically qualified nutritionist and all sorts of stuff. I'm going to let you tell us about you, steve, because you'll probably do a lot better job than I will.
Speaker 2:Thanks, nick. Yeah, so I guess a little bit of background about me, yes, please. Yes, my name is Steven Winrow, as Nick said. So I grew up playing tennis, actually as a youngster up to about 18. And I was lucky enough in that time to be exposed to youth elite level sport at least and have the chance to work with sub-top level coaches and things like that. And it was only when I finished that I decided to go into university and do an exercise physiologically at the time. So that was my undergrad studies and from that I had a break from studying and things like that. From there came back into academics. Basically, my tennis career ended when I was about 19,. Went into studying, finished from there, did some times across, got involved in that quite heavily, competed a little bit and that was never really that good. It was always too hard and it was always too easy.
Speaker 2:And then I ended up coming into triathlon, which I do now, so long distances, what I like to do. So I am half Ironman.
Speaker 1:You did one on the weekend right Half Ironman on the weekend.
Speaker 2:Yes, Funnily enough, I was played by a stitch and destroyed, so I'm racking my brains as to what goes.
Speaker 1:That one yeah yes, the old stitch. Do you know what the old stitch? I'm somebody on the call today who has stitches from time to time, Shangjou. So Shangjou, there's one for you to ask about.
Speaker 2:It's a difficult one to answer. So yeah, as I entered into Ironman, obviously there was for me a huge change from crossfit to endurance, which I didn't understand and are very much underappreciated. The magnitude of change involved and I did very similar things with food, what I was with crossfit to when I first started Ironman, and I ended up in a very, very dark place and concepts around low energy availability and relative energy deficiency syndrome. So that was my exposure and I got obsessed and wanting to understand a little bit more around that and that's what sparked me to then continue my study and into performance nutrition and get an understanding and use my physiology background to work alongside that. So that's kind of where I've been and where I am now, and now I've been working with the PIV for a couple of years, so it's been going really well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I have loads of questions for you. In fact, I'm a bit worried about time actually, because there are so many questions and we could go into a major rabbit hole with every single one of them, so I'll kick off with one and we'll see where we go. Yeah, so I'm going to kick off with probably the most asked question that I get asked when I'm talking to my athletes, particularly about when we're talking about time management, body eye coaches, super busy kids, jobs, all that sort of stuff, particularly when the weather is really warm.
Speaker 1:I've had people recently, the last week or so, saying I've got to get out. Either the kids are back at school, so I've got to get out nice and early in the morning, or it's too hot to run during the day. I've got to get out nice and early in the morning. What should I have before I go out? So yeah, there's a few angles to that question. Is what, particularly the grab and go bit? Because people are going out, and they're going out nice and early, so what are the kind of things that you would suggest for somebody who has got no time, needs to get out. They don't want to spend two hours making breakfast and then they've got to wait for a porridge to go down or something like that.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess it comes down to a little bit about the context of the run that they're about to do in the morning. So if we base that upon intensity, for example, if you are going to be going out and doing your interval sessions in the morning, then ideally we would like to get some sort of source of carbohydrates in. That's relatively easy to do. When we think about the foods that we're consuming in and around training, that is, the performance nutrition bubble, which doesn't necessarily quote on, quote need to be healthy, we are simply thinking about carbohydrate consumption, which might come from low fiber sources, potentially come from a carbohydrate drink if it needs to be, if it's to fuel that training.
Speaker 2:What we're actually trying to do with the foods of carbohydrates that we're consuming in the morning is we're trying to replenish the liver glycogen that has been used up overnight by the brain. Obviously, the liver is what controls blood glucose. So if you've got low liver glycogen upon starting, then it'll be more difficult to regulate blood sugar during the run and obviously everybody knows what it feels like to be low on blood sugar. It feels harder, it's harder to concentrate, blah, blah, blah. So if you are going to be doing a session that is particularly difficult, let's say an interval session. We really want to try and get something in that could be something real simple. It could be a bagel and jam, it could be a drink, it could be a couple of cereobars, it could be a bowl of Frosties, like that's simple.
Speaker 1:You're going to say Frosties, you love your Frosties, isn't it? Love the Frosties.
Speaker 2:Because that allows us to have a rapidly available, easily digestible source of carbohydrate to go into the session and just help that replenishment of liver glycogen going into it.
Speaker 1:And this is the important thing, right, when we talk about carbohydrate, you've got nutrition on the performance end and we're talking about getting something really simple in Frosties, jam, bagel, that kind of stuff. Carbohydrates are also wholesome foods, whole grains, but that's the stuff we don't want around a performance in a performance contest. So we don't want that because that's really high fiber sort of stuff and it's harder for the body to break down and for the gut to break down and it just ends up bouncing around in your stomach. Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 2:So we tend to recommend that we limit higher fiber sources and tend to try to substitute them for a lower fiber. So that could be quite simple. If you was having whole grain bread, let's have a white bread, Looking for those more refined sources of carbohydrates because they are much more easily absorbed and digested. When we talk about fiber, fiber has several health benefits that we really want right In the health and the day to day diet. The way fiber works is it can slow the rate at which food leaves the stomach. It can. It then gets fermented in the intestine so we get more positive bacteria there. It draws water to the steels. That helps with constipation, so it helps with diabetes, lower cholesterol all of these things which are massively important for health.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but when we relate that to performance, if you've got food that's sitting and lying in the stomach we don't want that it's going to feel like when we're running. If food is being fermented in the intestine, it's going to cause gas, potentially bloating. If it draws water to the stool, we could end up in the bushes. So these are all things to consider with fiber. It's not that we're looking for zero fiber, it's just we're trying to limit it and there will be people out there who have ults for breakfast and are absolutely fine. And that's where the context comes in in the individual. If you hear me or anybody else say or you shouldn't have ults, or you maybe you should swap ults, but you're someone who eats ults and gets on fine with them and still can go out and train no matter what the intensity, then ults are fine for you. It's everybody's individual preference.
Speaker 1:Because porridge is like. I mean, that's the go-to pre-marathon breakfast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Lots of people have it. Yeah, Like yeah, I would say. If you said to somebody.
Speaker 1:If you said you know, you put a poll on, you know one of the big tens of thousands of people, Facebook groups and said what does everybody have for breakfast before their marathon? I guarantee porridge would absolutely outstrip everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's, you know, it's going to be, because it's a little bit more complex than, say, a frosty. It's going to have that little bit slower and more gradual release of carbohydrates that you may potentially want. Depending on what nutritionists you speak to, they may say you should go for something like that as long as you can tolerate that fiber. Let's say that in the days prior you have completely limited fiber to a substantial amount. Just having that little bit of fiber in the morning that might be five to eight grams worth might not make that much difference. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So back to our early morning bit. So we've, I think we've established then. So if we are going out and doing something hard, where our heart rate is going to be, you know, significantly higher than if we were doing something easy, we are looking at low fiber, high carbohydrate. So you know, white breads, jams, honeys, frosties, crunchy nut I had a look at the label. Crunchy nutters are more sugary so I went with crunchy nutters as my go to Love them Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Whatever you like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's what we want around a session and then we can go to our fibrous, healthy whole grain stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sorry, sorry, we've got another guest. So, yeah, you like, in terms of recovery, if you're recovery time, you've got ample recovery time, so you're not training until the next day then your carbohydrates sources can then come from those more nutrient dense carbohydrates. So, yeah, if you and then, just for more context, if you were to be someone who's in heavy training and maybe you've got another run that day, then there is a potential there where, if your recovery time is, say, less than six hours, you may choose those more lower fiber, higher glycemic index time carbohydrates for that more rapid recovery, because they're more, more available to the system, quicker than what the high fiber stuffers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, so somebody's going out on an early run and it's an easy one. What we're saying?
Speaker 2:So this again is a contentious topic. Now there is arguments out there to say that if you are looking for specific metabolic adaptations ie you want to drive your body's ability to utilize fat as a fuel Then you want to be restricting carbohydrates prior to that session. This led a lot of people to overuse fasted training for this. What we have to understand is that when we are trying to up-regulate fat metabolism, all we are trying to do is limit insulin from being in the system. Now that doesn't require us to be fasted. That requires us to restrict carbohydrates. Consumption is what stimulates insulin, because insulin is the most anti-alipolitic hormone there is. When insulin is around, we don't mobilize fat. Generally. What I would suggest is, if you can, I would look to try and get some protein in Particularly.
Speaker 2:If you are going for a long run let's say that run is 19 minutes long you have to think about there is going to be a lot of muscle breakdown there from the running.
Speaker 2:If you can get some protein in prior, there is going to attenuate that muscle protein breakdown.
Speaker 2:If the run is, say, 60 minutes or less, then you may potentially just go out fasted and arguably there wouldn't be too much stress response from that, depending on who you speak to, it is all about the context of the individual. As me in New Sport, nick, if I was to, or Nick was to, tell the athlete that they could never train fasted, for a lot of people that would mean that they could never train, because it is just down to practicality that a lot of people do end up training fasted. If you have got a session that is relatively easy it is less than an hour I would say that the fasted training is fine. If it is maybe a little bit longer or you are looking for something really simple, it could be a way protein shape that you go into that session with. If you have got a little bit more time, potentially it is like an omelet based breakfast, where it is just mainly proteins and fats that go in prior to that easy run.
Speaker 1:We did have a little back and forth and we overtake yesterday about, was it you asked me are you anti fasted or pro fasted training? I have been quite staunchly anti fasted. As far as I am aware, particularly for women, there is probably less benefit versus the damage that it can do with regards to hormone regulation, menstrual cycles and bone density, things like that If it is overused. Particularly and I think that is where my stance has come in to be anti fasted because unless you are pretty black and white and very clear about when you can train fasted and when you cannot train fasted and how much dosage of fasted training you have, I think too many people without the right guidance can go too far with it.
Speaker 2:I think you are right and I think that you say there is arguably more downsides to fasted training that there would be any positive. I do not see a reason for fasted training other than practicality. If you are in heavy training and your run is now 90 minutes to 2 hours, going out fasted, you are just creating a really big calorie whole that you have got to get yourself out of somehow. And if you are not somebody who is used to consuming large amounts of calories for the rest of that day, then that is where the knock on effects come from, because food is our only energy really and that is fundamentally involved in bone turnover, muscle turnover, everything reproductive health and if you are not consuming those calories back all the time, you are going to end up in a state of low energy availability and the consequences of that.
Speaker 1:That is what I think I would prefer to focus on ensuring that people are feeling their runs, feeling their life feeling just making sure that they are eating properly generally and actually where we are getting those fat adaptations are actually from dialing back the speed that people are running at. I spend half my life talking about slow the fuck down. No one gives a fuck about your pace on Strava. It is my hashtag on Instagram. We don't need to be totally carb depleted to get those fat adaptations, particularly for people running at the level that I work with. I don't work with pro athletes that are looking for marginal gains here, here, there and everywhere, unless somebody is working full time with somebody like you, because that is the other things that I am not a nutritionist. I can advise to a point, but once it gets quite specific, that is where I always say stay in your lane and hand over to someone like yourself.
Speaker 2:I think it is important to understand that the higher up the food chain that you go, the less these targeted type of sessions occur, because you simply don't need to. When you are training 20 hours a week or 100 miles a week, you are in a constant state of glycogen depletion Every day. It is going to happen and that is where these adaptations go. One of the main adaptations to aerobic training is your ability to use fat as fuel. Because we are time strapped athletes, we are simply adding stimulus by restricting carbohydrates. A couple of times a week the top level athletes they go to altitude. They go to altitude to make things harder. It is harder stimulus and then they come back down. We are doing the same thing, but we are utilizing a restriction of carbohydrate to enhance an adaptation or a throughout attempt.
Speaker 1:I always like to come back to practicalities with this, because it is great getting into the science With your everyday runner who is just looking for those improvements. So I think we are in agreement to say that interval session, early morning, get your high fiber, high carb, low fiber. And then I am in the camp of if it is an easy one, as long as you eat something and don't go fast, then great.
Speaker 2:And if you simply practically cannot eat prior to the run, don't panic. I would just maximise your recovery. So make sure you get something in upon recovery, because the stress response will be heightened if you go out faster. So we need to attenuate that by recovering as best as we can. So getting your carbohydrates as soon as you finish, protein as soon as you finish, and rehydrate.
Speaker 1:Yeah cool. And that's a really good segue on to kind of one of the next questions really, which you know somebody's asked about an easy nutritional lunch. I think I sort of like to sort of put that in a bit more of a context of you know, we've been out, we've done our training, what is some you know a good thing for people to have after they've trained? Because one of the most common things I think I get is should I have a protein shake? It's just so associated with recovery, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is. But the most important thing about protein is that you get enough of it in the deck. So anywhere from 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo. As you get older, maybe up to 2.5. If you are trying to lose weight, maybe up to 2.5 as well. But when you're someone who's in training, quite often this anabolic window that it go on, go on. Anabolic window.
Speaker 1:That is there all the time, yeah, the bro science, yeah, if they're all the time you're constantly training and so that availability of that window is constant.
Speaker 2:There's no need to think I have to get my protein shake in at this first half an hour or it's useless. Yeah, it's not how it works.
Speaker 2:So I wouldn't worry too much. The most important thing is you get it in off in the day and maybe secondary to that, depending on who you speak to and where you look at the research that even distribution across the day is also important. So the body is always in a constant state of protein turnover. You either make new proteins or break one down. Every time that we train or we eat protein, we build new protein and then it starts to taper off when we drop down. So if you can get a hit of protein 20 to 30 grams every three to four hours across the day, you're on to a winner. But I guess back to the question if you were, if it was to finish, and we were thinking about something that we wanted to create, a nutrient dense type of recovery meal then we could look at something like a burrito, for example.
Speaker 2:I like to use burritos because you could go for a whole meal wrap. You got a high fiber carbohydrate source there. You could fill that wrap with whole grain rice. You've got more fiberous carbohydrate sources there. You've got protein sourcing, maybe a chicken. You could fill that out with spinach, peppers, mushroom, whatever it may be that you put in that burrito. You could even add some beans in there. See, all of a sudden you've got your carbohydrate hit, depending on how much you have. So you have a wrap 30 grams of carbohydrates. Add some rice, you might get another 20, 30 grams out of that 60 grams there, and then your protein source from the chicken. And then you've got your spinach magnesium and spinach calcium and spinach peppers these nutrient dense type of stuff that you can implement into a really simple burrito which you could make at the beginning of the week if you wanted to implement it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll take the chicken out altogether and stick more beans in, and then the vegans and vegetarians have got a great meal there too.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, and it's Matt's smiling and.
Speaker 1:I'm being serious like that. The burrito is an amazing example, because you literally take the chicken out and you've still got a really high protein, high carb, nutrient, dense, delicious. This burrito is a king.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think it's important as meat eaters that we acknowledge the fact that we're in a lucky position that we are able to access both meat sources and plant-based sources. We can't ignore the importance of plant-based protein. It's got a lot of nutrients in there. It's just a little bit more challenging for them to attain all the different amino acids. They just have to mix and match. So as a meat eater, you shouldn't ignore the plant-based stuff.
Speaker 1:No, not at all.
Speaker 4:I was only smiling Nick, because you were literally describing my dinner from last night. And so I was getting this warm fuzzy feeling that I got something right this week.
Speaker 1:No, I thought you were smiling because I was trying to keep Bex, who's on the call, who's a staunch vegan, and keep her happy. Very good, I'm going to keep cracking on because we do have loads of questions. This versus pasta for carb loading, I mean I don't just press on preference right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's the best way to think about it. Between them there's probably 50 calories worth of difference, because the pasta might carry a little bit more protein. It is genuinely preference. I would choose a rice. It'd be like it sits easier for me, but everyone's different. The only thing I would say is that just choose the least fiber option of both. So don't choose a whole wheat pasta. If you're going to carb low, go for a white refined.
Speaker 1:I think also because I talk about this on my Instagram channel quite a bit and with the people I coach every time they're coming out to a significant race, I put carb loading notes in there. And it's not just carb load. The night before pasta parties what a load of rubbish. It needs to be a three day process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's one of those where I think a lot of people's idea of carb loading is a really big dinner the night before. There's only so much capacity for the muscle to actually take on the carbohydrates that you've got at any, given that you're eating at any given time. So yeah, there's two, three day protocols, there's even a one day protocol to try and limit that weight gain. But again, it's with the carb load in the more aggressive you want to be with it, the definitely more practice that you need to do. You could go 10 gram per kilo the day before with my race at the weekend. I went nine gram per kilo the day before. But I've practiced that over week on week on week to be able to know what sources I can use. And funnily enough, anecdotally, if I was to say nine gram per kilo, I was starving all day. Funnily enough, because it's all low fiber. There must be about grams of fiber. It's just in and out. There's no fullness to it. It's strange.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess that's probably why I eat like an absolute horse for the three day before carb load. It's all sugary it's all just straight in and out. Yeah, I was going to say the next question, if we could have it from the floor, because I'm sick of my own voice now.
Speaker 4:Oh well, I was going to just jump in on that one. Actually Another point, steve, about feeling really hungry after having been like nine grams of carbs per kilo. One of the things I tend to find on the longer ultra distance races is I get really hungry but I feel like I'm eating constantly and eventually that hunger starts to feel like nausea. It feels really uncomfortable. So is it as simple as I just have to keep trying different options? Or long way into a long race? How do you balance the need for instant access sugar and trying to not have something heavy in your stomach with this fact that you're just starving?
Speaker 2:Well, I've heard some of the nutritionists who work in ultra endurance mentioned that they kind of work in stages where the first part of the event they would focus in on your traditional gels, traditional just get carbohydrates, focus on carbohydrates before moving towards more. How do I get some calories in here? So maybe flat jack based stuff. So we're trying to replenish a bit more calories. You know, I think the principle is to remain somewhere around 90 to 120, I mean, or probably say 90 grams somewhere around.
Speaker 1:On a previous episode of the podcast I spoke to Marcus Willday, the performance director at Talk, and he talks about currently it's. Their gels are a two to one ratio of multidextrometer fructose and the science supports 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour, but actually there's some really good evidence for 120, but then it's a one to one ratio because the gut can't handle more than 60 grams of glucose an hour.
Speaker 2:The 120 is a one to a 0.8. Yeah, I mean. So the hunger side of things potentially could be that, if you think about when you're getting deeper into a race you're, the amount of calories you've extended is substantial, you know, and taking on 90 grams an hour of carbohydrates is not going to keep up with that calorie extension expenditure at all, and that's just a limiting factor of performance we keep. The gut simply cannot take on as much calories as we require us to. We do whatever we can, okay.
Speaker 1:It's a common question in the ultra world. You know you have burnt 6000 calories on an ultra. How do I match that calorie for calorie? You don't get it, you don't. Yeah, I mean you're going to be all, all right.
Speaker 4:Well, I mean my proper question then. If I can get away with the proper question now, then because that was that was useful. Steve, that that's, yeah, sort of a bit of. I'm just going to have to find a way of not being hungry, but my question was particularly based on blood sugar. So, obviously, like the Zoe health nutrition study has really kind of raised the awareness of, like, gut health and particularly of blood sugar levels, because of course, they've been using blood sugar sensors with non-diabetics. And I was wondering, you know, from your perspective, would it be useful as a nutrition nutritionist, nutrition coach, to be able to have constant blood sugar monitoring of your clients, and can you see constant blood sugar monitoring becoming almost as mainstream? As you know, everyone wearing their GPS watch with heart rate monitor.
Speaker 2:Are you diabetic? No, are you pre-diabetic?
Speaker 4:Then not that I've been told. The answer is no.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think super sapiens are another one that came up with the glucose monitors. What we have to understand about glucose kinetics is it's vast, extremely vast, and affected by many, many, many things. If you're driving along in the car and somebody pulls out in front of you and nearly knocks off the road, you have that shock feeling and all of a sudden you've got no energy. It's the glucose crash. You run it along the road, you turn off the road, you go onto the trails, you go up a hill and all of a sudden you feel like that's glucose change. Glucose change is on intensity, it changes on stress response, it changes on heat, it changes on terrain, everything.
Speaker 2:There's so many things that affect blood glucose that you simply cannot put it down to. For example, during exercise, you can't just say my blood sugar is low, it's because I'm not eating enough carbohydrate. It's not how it works. And for a healthy individual, in the absence of any metabolic challenge or disease, a blood sugar spike is absolutely normal. You eat carbohydrates, blood sugar rises, intulin is released from the pancreas, blood sugar drops. That's how it works. It's a simple answer. The things like Zoe, they are a business. What they do is try to create research. Try to create a message that makes you feel that you need them. You don't need them. It's a very normal response to eating food and carbohydrate that your blood sugar was spiked. It comes to that happens on a day-to-day basis. It's a whole day Okay.
Speaker 1:There's like two, three years ago you saw, particularly in the ultra world and the marathon world. You saw the likes of Damien Hall, tom Evans, trying to think of some marathon runners. I saw with it Charlotte Pergio. People like that all had them on their arms for six months at a time. It was super sapiens, were absolutely hammering it. You don't see any of the top athletes wearing these things now. I didn't see any. I think it's passed now it's into the general public and it'll probably pass at some point.
Speaker 2:It's one of those things that comes about and, as with other things that have come out in the past, I think at the top end of sport, if something is potentially going to make a difference between losing, everybody will do it, because if Team X is doing it, team Y is going to do it. If Team GB found out that Australia are doing whatever they're doing, they're going to do it too. That's how it works, marketing wise you just get as many top athletes to wear as super sapiens and then that's it. I've heard from the NN running team over in Kenya how they just simply didn't know how to understand the data. If you don't know how to understand the data, how can you use it to inform?
Speaker 4:That's really interesting. It's a massive data collection exercise where it's going into a bit of a black hole at the moment because we can't do anything with it.
Speaker 2:Very cool, thank you.
Speaker 4:Very good.
Speaker 1:There you go, folks. Don't waste your money on Zoe. Don't spend your money on a coach instead. Next question this is actually from me how can caffeine affect performance?
Speaker 2:Very wide-ranging. I think the first thing to understand around caffeine is it's probably the most widely researched and studied supplement in the world.
Speaker 1:Performance-enhancing drugs.
Speaker 2:That's what it is. In the past, caffeine has been banned by WADA. That obviously changed because people consume coffee, so it's difficult to manage what level at which they can ban it. With that has come some very solid evidence and is one of very few supplements that you would recommend as a performance nutritionist. You've got the ability. You've got cognitive improvements, reducing your perceived exertion. It's going to increase your focus, probably better decision-making From a performance side of things. You've got increased capacity. So time to exhaustion in the research testing, so you can simply just go for longer. That's an output. It can improve your time trial performance so you can go faster over a distance. There's evidence for it to enhance your ability to absorb carbohydrates, which is obviously massively important. So there is lots of important benefits to caffeine, I think in terms of ultra-running, American running. The other thing to note is that probably its effects become more apparent as time progresses, so for the longer-distance guidance it could become even more important as time goes on in that.
Speaker 1:I've always gone, I think, in fact, I think it was Marcus from Talk that advised that if you are going to use the caffeine caffeinated gel because this is where my question was leading is, I knew you were going to give us a whole ream of benefits of caffeine because there are so many yeah, coffee. I think one of the misconceptions and misuses of caffeine, I think with the general public who are out there doing marathon and ultra-marathons, is where and when to use them. I mean, I see some people who go right, okay, I know I need to take 60, 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour, but they then also take caffeinated gels with every single one. Oh my God, some of those caffeinated gels have got 100 milligrams of caffeine in them. If you're whacking eight of them in, you, Christ, have a heart attack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. And the thing to think about what I find with some people when we go through the race nutrition plans that they have in places, they'll say that I have in this caffeine gel prior to going up this hill. I'm going to have it here, I'm going to get up this hill with the caffeine. You have to understand this. Caffeine is a half life and it takes a little bit of time for it to appear in the system. So whenever you take a caffeine gel, it's going to take anywhere up to an hour, 45 minutes to an hour for it to actually exert its effects.
Speaker 2:So if you are yelling, you have to think about that when you're planning. So you want to be thinking if I'm an hour away from this hill, then I'll have some caffeine because it's going to kick in then and from a dulce in perspective, you can really be getting performance benefits from one to two milligrams per kilo. The recommendations are three to six, but there is benefits that even lower. If you aim for that three to six milligrams per kilo over the course of your event, then I think you're in a good place. It used to be up to nine milligrams per kilo. In the recommendations there has been found that there isn't a performance benefit of going that high and you're actually just running the risk of the negative effects there. So if you're a 70 kilo athlete, it could be anywhere around 400 milligrams across the course of your event you would consume.
Speaker 1:Is it dehydrating?
Speaker 2:During exercise? No, so the scientific literature out there doesn't support this notion that caffeine dehydrates you. The studies that show a diuretic effect at rest can't be applied to exercise because physiology is not the same at rest as it is in exercise. The idea comes from the theory that caffeine stimulates the hormones to increase urine production. Obviously, if we're urinating, that's fluid leave in the body, so that dehydrating effect. But these don't tend to translate to impermence and up performance. So while it may have an effect, potentially at rest and you're probably looking at potentially having maybe five to ten coffees a day, from what I understand I mean people might tell me otherwise there's a lot of research out there around caffeine, so there'll be a lot of contradictory things, I'm sure, but I think it probably only is a mild to moderate effect on hydration. And when I think about things like coffee and caffeine, while caffeine may have a diuretic effect, you are having it with water and milk, so it's one of those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, let's keep going. So I had a question come in from Sean, who's a brand new athlete, just started with me this week. Actually, he's done a fantastic job of losing 40 pounds in weight and as part of his kind of continuation of his health journey is he's got the London marathon and he's looking at ultra marathons after that. So, yeah, he's done that through pretty much being keto, all right. And his question is should he gradually work his way back into having carbs in his diet? He's fully aware that he needs carbs to fuel his performances, and particularly as we start getting into the longer, harder stuff with marathon training in the spring. So would you sort of give some sort of guidelines, do you think, to somebody like Sean going from a fully extreme diet like keto? I hate keto for a lot of reasons. So, yeah, should he just go well, don't worry about it, I'm just going to go back to having 400 grams of carbs a day or is that going to cause massive negative effects?
Speaker 2:So I think, like you say, when you go to an extreme of a big diet, there's a process that has you have to go through in order to get to some sort of balance, if you like, and that's where we want to be, particularly with endurance sport. So losing weight with keto, particularly in that first part of the diet, is generally rapid, because carbohydrates are stored within the muscle and the liver as glycogen. That storage come. Every gram stored comes with about three grams of water stored with it. So naturally, if you go to keto and you remove carbohydrates from the diet, carbohydrates are removed from the muscle, they're removed from the liver, so we have less water with it. The liver then starts to create ketones. That's where we have keto diet. So the ketones then fuel the brain because they act in a similar way to what glucose does to fuel the brain. So the first thing that's going to happen when Sean comes back in brains carbohydrates back in is he's going to increase weight? Or what Sean has to understand is that it's not body fat, that's just carbohydrates. And you say the same thing to a keto as you would to someone who only eats carbohydrate, and that is and that is. There's a better way of doing this. Yeah, it's not high carb, it's not low carb, it's smart carb. You don't need to flood the system with carbohydrates to go and do a 60 minute easy run. You don't need to know, do you? But you may need. You're going to need those carbohydrates if you want to find your top end speed. If you're going to go on the track and do a track session, you're not going to get to your top end speed.
Speaker 2:On fats, but as a fuel is very difficult, in comparison to carbohydrates, for the body to oxidize. Yeah, right, there's a lot more reactions that have to take place in order for a fatty acid to be oxidized and used as a fuel. Okay, so that is why carbohydrates tend to trump fats. Fats tend to be able to fuel performance intensities up to around 60 to 65%. Now, for an ultra runner, you may only be running at 60%. However, if you're looking to get up hell, what do you do then? Because you may push that intensity, and the carbohydrates that we need in the diet stretch beyond just performance. Carbohydrates are massively important, not for gut health, you know the massively important for energy availability. You know if you are not eating enough and you are in a state of low carbohydrate availability. There is research out there that shows that that is even bigger of a contributor to low energy availability overall than calorie restriction. So low carbohydrate availability is worse than actual low energy availability if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in terms of him wanting to bring carbohydrates back in, I would certainly recommend that he gradually did that and started to focus on around his key sessions to bring those carbohydrates in so that they are available for the training session. Because it's important to understand that if we distinguish between the two, you can think of fat as gears one, two, three, calvarydates gears four, five and six.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you are only eating fat, then you impair your body's ability to utilize gears four, five and six. You can't access them. So although you have got this fuel source that you could probably run 40 marathons back to back to back with that, you simply can't rate at the intensity it requires to be competitive because you don't have your top gears.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, when you look at top level marathon runners elite level, like 205, 210 marathon runners they are oxidizing carbohydrates entirely at the end of the marathon Completely. There is no such thing as an oxidizer bike, because you don't run that fast, right? So it's almost entirely exclusive of fuel by carbohydrate, whereas for a me and Walter we may do a four-almer. At the end of that there may be a lot more fats being utilized, but to get to the end of that race you still need those carbohydrates available.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's sort of the conversation I'd had with him. I thought I was going to think what Steve is going to say. I think he probably will say concentrate around those key sessions and the long runs and maybe not worry too much around the other stuff, but gradually, Like I said, it's just smart carbohydrates and build them up gradually to the point where you're eating a well-balanced diet. Brilliant, I think you've got a question.
Speaker 3:I do indeed. This question is in fact from Duncan, one of our new athletes. He wants to know as a celiac, so as he moves towards longer runs, he wants to not consume too much fiber rich food. So he's aware from experience that gluten-free food tends to be higher in fiber. How can he, I mean, I guess, when it comes to fueling his races, what can he do to? What kind of fuel sources can he look at in regards to lower fiber options? I guess?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the celiac is an autoimmune disorder within the GI tract. So the body's immune system overreacts to gluten or cladding and containing foods which gluten is found in wheat, barley, oats, rye, that kind of stuff. So when we consume it the immune system damages the wall of the intestine and over time, if that's not managed, it can impact the ability to absorb nutrients. Now I guess he's asking about racing and fueling, but I think the first and most important thing from this question is to acknowledge that there's going to be an increase in training load here and to just to make sure that he is attaining a wide variety of nutrients that meets his energy demand.
Speaker 2:What we often find with athletes who are in a state of low energy availability is they've not acknowledged that jump in volume, for example, and they eat the same thing and they inadvertently end up in a state of low energy availability. So it's important that he is getting that wide variety of nutrients that's meeting his demand on a day-to-day basis and maybe considering supplements wherever necessary, because there are potential impermins due to the nature of celiac and his ability to absorb nutrients from the foods. So maybe pay particular attention maybe to iron and calcium, so dairy stuff, spinach, broccoli fish, as well as vitamin D, which I know those three are quite important for celiacs to pay attention to. So that would be the first thing that I would probably say for boy, and is just acknowledge that change in volume and make sure he's getting the nutrients and energy that he needs.
Speaker 1:For context, duncan's got a three year plan to get to UTMB so he is going to be doing some big miles over the coming years and obviously that will take a few ultras practice but also qualifying to be able to get to UTMB.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because no mean feat. But I guess, from a source point of view, you know the kind of things like beans and rice and cornweed, flour, quinoa, potatoes, nuts. Now I appreciate things like this aren't always practical right for fueling a race. Catch running around with some rice and beans and our top of work.
Speaker 1:No, with a quinoa salad no.
Speaker 2:But you know you could utilize nuts, potentially, banana, dried fruits, dried mango raisins, that kind of stuff, potentially even sort of cutting up, maybe gluten free bread with peanut butter and funnier that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I put a date into my fitness pal the other week. I can't believe how many carbs are in a date.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Like wow.
Speaker 3:They're great yeah.
Speaker 1:I knew they were good, but I actually looked and I was like Jesus Christ they are. I love dates, but also aren't they quite high in fiber though?
Speaker 2:It can be, but generally sometimes you drive sources of the fruits that are less fun. Okay, so this is the thing with individual athlete. There's always the recommendation. Then there's practicality, right, and the practicality is that there is a little bit more fiber that's to be carried in the certain foods that the individual has or the athlete has. Then we have to work with what we've got and our breathing always comes back to practice, always, always. It's like the earlier question around what we should have in the race that I can't remember what the question was now, but it was something's Around hunger, yeah, hunger. Anyway, it doesn't matter, but I would always think about the sources that work for the individual.
Speaker 2:The other side to the coin is that when you're using your energy gels, like your drinks, they're largely gluten free. So have a look for that note on the packaging. But just be sure that whatever supplements that you do have, whether that's vitamins or it's from the gels and the drinks that they are informed, sport tested, because we want to avoid contamination. Because if these, if you're getting the gel that says it's gluten free but is manufactured in a factory that contains wheat, for example, and it ends up in the gel, that could be a disaster. We want to make sure that whatever we get is what it says on the tin.
Speaker 1:I tell you you mentioned bananas. Actually, this has become one of my go-to foods amongst my carb loading stack. It's dried bananas, banana chips. Just sit there just munching on them throughout the whole day. Just a whole 500g bag and there's just some 300g of carbs in there. I like them.
Speaker 2:So utilising the sources that you work well with, and never do anything new on race day and always practice.
Speaker 1:Always practice. I would say the gut can be trained. That's one of the protocols I use with my athletes. As soon as we start getting into at least eight weeks out from race day, we start practicing fueling, whether that's ultras, marathons, whatever it is, and actually in some cases even earlier than that. Cool Contest of time and there are a couple more questions. So before we start to wrap up, sharon asked in a 50-mile race, is it possible to eat too much? Races offer and all you can eat buffet? Actually, there are. I mean, some of the Centurion Ultra events. Uts was pretty good actually. If you were in the 100k or 100 mile race, the buffet at each age station was pretty impressive actually. So there are some people I'm one of those people that have a bit of an iron gut and I feel like I could eat anything I want when I run. So, but is it possible to eat too much?
Speaker 2:I guess it's numerically possible to eat too much. Yeah, so it's not impossible, but good luck. Just practically. I would stick my neck out and probably say it's impossible, because you just simply wouldn't be able to digest or absorb the amount of calories that you're expending by consuming the same amount. You just wouldn't be able to continue. Even with an iron gut, you could be running and burning 700, 800 calories an hour. It's even more. It's going to take a lot to eat back and comfortably do so. So I would say it's going to be tough, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that you're not going to be able to.
Speaker 1:She also asks the question. She says day to day I try to eat as naturally as possible, but at race day I eat everything offered. It's flat coke, jaffa cakes, crisps, malt loaf, courses of oranges. Is that all a good idea?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, this comes back to what I was saying earlier about you've got two sides to this. You've got health nutrition, performance nutrition Eating as good and good naturally as possible, is great for the health side of nutrition, but performance nutrition is not necessarily. We're not focusing on health per se. We're focusing on trying to get food in that is going to be pertinent. Performance, that is getting the nutrients from your mouth to your muscles for the least cost and that's going to come from flat coke, jaffa cakes, crisps, malt loaf, like you say.
Speaker 2:So that is a good idea to consume them. That's the one thing that I would say is, if you are practicing with bananas and gels and then you go to the race and you turn up to the office, you can eat buffet and you have flat coke, jaffa cakes, crisps, malt loaf it's a bad idea because you have not trained with that. You are risking it. Even if you just tried a different gel, that different gel could go down the wrong way and not agree with it, because you have to practice with it. So make sure that, whatever it is that's going to be there, you have practiced.
Speaker 1:I've got to get better at the flat coke thing, because I don't practice with flat coke. But you get me an ultramarathon and I'm there at the aid station, neck and bottles of the stuff. I think that's the only thing I must say about the aid stations is they didn't flatten the coke, but I was still just guzzling it. Anyway. People were looking at me like how are you doing that, just necking litres of the stuff? Cool, okay, I think that is all the questions that I got sent. Has anybody else got anything? Faye? Did you have any others?
Speaker 3:Not specifically. That could potentially go down many wormholes, so for now I will hold fire.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. Well, steve, in summary, just to help everybody contextualise everything that we talked about and I always come back to how can somebody practically apply some of this stuff? So what would be your top few things that you'd be focusing on as part of training and racing that people can? Just a few takeaways they can take away with them now. What would be your top things.
Speaker 2:For me, nutrition boils down to this very simple phrase, that is, that you should eat a well-balanced diet containing a wide variety of nutrients that meets your energy need on a day-to-day basis. That's it. That's nutrition, and if you can do that. Obviously there's a lot of nuance to what I've just said, but that is the knots and crannies of nutrition. What a lot of people get wrong is they don't eat enough, or they don't eat enough carbohydrates to support performance. There is a lot of. Let's use the example of top-level athletes. A lot of them don't care about how, they just teach me how to win, so they just drink carbohydrates all the time.
Speaker 1:I remember you telling me you had a. We had a catch-up one day and you said you just got off the catch-up with somebody else and they were literally eating chicken ham in a wrap. That was it. Yeah, no salad, no sauce, no nothing, and that was it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's, as I mentioned, known about the keto stuff. It's about being smart. It's carbohydrates that are incredibly important for performance and health, but you don't need to have them all the time. Have them at the right time and think of nutrition as your baby that you work with and you create your strategy that works for you. Whether you work with a coach to be able to create that. Whatever you find works for you might be well against recommendations, yeah, but if it works for you, that's all that matters. Yeah, so it's not about looking around and seeing that this person has lost 10% of body fat through doing this diet, but when I do that diet, it doesn't work. So I must have something wrong with me, nothing wrong with you, it's just that work for them, it doesn't work for you. It's just that you have to find what works for you, be smart and just keep it simple.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Steve. If people want to work with you, like me and Steve sure do, and many other, your other athletes how do they find you? Where are you? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you find me on Instagram at just WinRoll Performance or WINROW Performance. You can get me there on Instagram. Otherwise, just drop me an email again. It's winrollperformance at outlookcom. And yeah, if I either just speak to Nick and he'll give you my number and you can reach out, no problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Whether it's one of my athletes on here now or listening back later, or anybody's listening to this back on the podcast, I'd highly recommend Steve. And did you change your name to have WIN in it? Or is that purely just by accident? Just by accident?
Speaker 2:I should have done rowing. That would have been cool yeah.
Speaker 1:That would have been hilarious. Very good, steve. Thank you so much for coming on. Not at all. Yeah, I will be getting you on a podcast, actually because there's something we've been talking about that you've been referring to lots and lots and lots and lots of energy availability, and it's a far too big a topic for us to cover today. I didn't want to go into energy availability today because it is complex. Today, I wanted to be more about practicality and good information, to set the scene, and then we're going to be in sleep. We're going to record a separate podcast. In fact, we're probably going to do a few podcasts, but energy availability will be one of them, because it's really interesting stuff. Cool.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Nick. Thanks very much, Nick, Cheers everyone.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Bye-bye. Thanks Nick, thanks Nick, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye.