What to Eat for Early Morning Workouts

If you train early in the morning, you might be wondering what to eat before your session to arrive fueled and perform well. The reality is, not every morning workout needs to be heavily fueled. How do you decide if and what to eat before your session?

In this episode of the Fuel Your Strength Podcast, you’ll learn how to approach pre-workout nutrition for early morning workouts, especially when you’re short on time but still want enough fuel to make it through your session without gassing out.

You’ll learn how to factor in training intensity, how much time you have before your session, hydration, and what you did the day before. This is a practical episode for athletic women over 40.

Want SIMPLe, meal prep ideas to save you time & Fuel your training? Get the PERFORMANCE MEAL PREP GUIDe.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

How to fuel early morning workouts
How training intensity factors in to pre-workout nutrition
What to eat if you have 2-3 hours before training
Smart pre-workout snack ideas when you only have 30-90 minutes
How hydration, caffeine, and electrolytes can impact performance
How the food you ate the day before affects your morning training energy

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What to Eat for Early Morning Workouts – Episode Transcript

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It’s early in the morning, your alarm goes off, and even though you want to hit snooze, you turn it off and you get up because you need to get to your training session. You’re one of the early morning Dawn breaker crew. Who knows that getting your workout done early means that it gets done the day is less likely to get in your way.

But one of the things my listeners and clients constantly tell me is, Steph, I don’t know what to eat, how to fuel my sessions properly, and what I should put in my body to get the most out of my training session. When I’m part of the early morning crew on this episode, we’re going to answer that question. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me this week. We’re going to be getting into a topic that we haven’t covered in a while on the show, and that is a specific nutrition question.

What Should You Eat if You Work Out in the Morning?

There was a time back when I first launched my Strength Nutrition Unlocked program in 2021 that I did a lot of nutrition content for performance, talking about fueling specifically for hobbyist athletes. And then we did a lot of that, and then shifted into talking more about the strength training that hobbyist athletes can use to support and supplement their main sport. And now I’m getting a lot more nutrition questions again. So we’re going to be talking about in this episode, a user submitted question, which is all about pre workout. So if you train early in the morning, this is a very specific question, but I train early in the morning.

We’re going to talk about the sport that she does. How can I approach my fueling for my training sessions? So we’re going to be getting into that. And in case you don’t know, because I haven’t talked about it in about it in in a while, yes, I am a strength coach. So I coach people in lifting through Strong with Steph. But I’m also a certified sports nutritionist through the International Society for sports nutrition.

Before we go any further, if you would like to hit Subscribe on your podcast app. Would very much appreciate it. Most people that listen aren’t subscribed. It’s free, but it really helps the show. If you’re watching on YouTube, hit the notification bell and subscribe there as well.

Eating Before 6 AM Workouts

Okay, today’s question comes from Tiffany. Tiffany is one of my very wonderful Strong with Steph lifters. She’s been lifting with me now for almost a year, and she’s also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu athlete. So she trains in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and she’s using strength training as a way to improve her durability on the mats. So her question is advice for fueling before a 6am BJJ class. And so I’m kind of holding this up if you’re watching on YouTube. This is a question that she submitted to me. So to give you a little bit of context, so you know, I’m not just talking out of my ass. I have been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu now for nine years, and I have a black belt, and I’ve been training consistently across those nine years with no significant breaks. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the mat. I have competed a little bit, although competing hasn’t been my main focus.

And of course, prior to BJJ, I’ve spent a lot of time as a competitive athlete in various sports, everything from mountain biking to half marathons, triathlons, CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting. So I’ve got a lot of real life lived experience here as well, in addition to things like being a certified sports nutritionist and I work a lot with hobbyist athletes, women in midlife, generally 40s and 50s, who are out there training hard and want to know how to fuel your endeavors. And I do that in both my Strength Nutrition Unlocked program and also one on one nutrition coaching.

Customized Fueling Advice is Best

This question I’m going to use to kind of set up some broader topics about fueling, especially if you do train closer to the morning hours. But a lot of what we’re talking about here can be applied across a broad range of athletic pursuits. It must be said, though that everybody’s a little bit different, and nutrition is personal, because you might have a different training frequency, a different amount of training, that you’re doing a different intensity of training, maybe you are on the injured list currently, or you just had a surgery and you’re recovering from that. Maybe a really, really large human or a really, really tiny human, everybody is going to have some different considerations that make fueling for performance or fueling for training different, even down to the time of day that you tend to do your sessions?

Do you do multiple sessions a day, that sort of thing. So this isn’t a substitute for really personalized advice, but rather some broad brush brushstrokes. And oftentimes, when I talk about fueling people get a little bit worried. They think, oh, well, I have to find, like, the right universal recommendations that are just going to magically apply to me? And the answer is probably not. We’re going to have to do some tweaking to make sure we’re hitting what we need, what our needs are. And also, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to overfeed myself. Somewhere along the way, the idea of fueling appropriately has gotten misconstrued as I need to overfeed myself and I’m going to have to eat more calories than I actually need, which is generally not the case.

Performance Nutrition Framework for Athletic Women Over 40

That’s why, inside of Strength Nutrition Unlocked, I walk my clients through my framework for figuring all of this out. And so that framework is three parts. The first part is to fuel smart. The second part is to train tenaciously, and the third part is to recover right now. Those are the big, broad pillars inside of fueling smart we do things like estimating your energy needs, and those are going to be vastly different depending on the kind of training that you’re doing and other considerations. We’re going to figure out how to create your plate. How do we put together a food on the plate scenario where we’re able to actually approach this on a consistent basis? We have a system for how we either get food, prepare food, we meal prep, whatever it is. How do I figure that out? And then the third part is to power your workouts. So that section is what we’re going to be getting into here.

All right, so let’s look at Tiffany’s question she’s asking about 6am Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, and what to eat beforehand. So I’m going to lay out some broad brushstrokes here and then dive into some details. The first thing we need to consider is, what kind of training is this so as you’re thinking about yourself, if you’re not a BJJ athlete, that’s fine, but think about, what is the intensity of my training? Going to be low, medium or high? Is how I would typically put that. The second thing I would think about is, what is my timing? What is my timeline? When am I waking up? When am I getting out of the house? What time does my training begin? So those are the two things I would have you consider right up front as guiding where this conversation goes.

Do I Need to Eat More if I Exercise More?

Because the intensity of the training could change your approach, and also how much time you have prior to your training session can also change the approach. And the third thing I would add in is it’s going to take some experimentation. So I can’t give everybody the perfect the perfect pre workout snack, because everybody’s got different tastes, different preferences, foods that sit more or less well with them, and, of course, some other sport specific considerations to make there too. So that’s going to take a little bit of experimentation on your part. So think about again. What is the intensity of my session? Number one.

How Close to Workouts Should I Eat?

Number two, how much time do I have prior to my session to actually put something in my pie hole? And third is like, what are my personal preferences, and how am I going to start to kind of experiment with that? Okay, so let’s go back to the first question, which is intensity. And I want to talk a little bit about BJJ here for a second. I’m not going to give you like all the details, but suffice to say, BJJ is a mostly cardiovascular type of sport. Yes, it does require strength. Don’t believe it when people say, Oh, it’s either strength or technique. No, you need both. You need strength to help with durability, and also it helps to be stronger.

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I don’t think you can be too strong. Of course, you can be strong with that technique and vice versa. You need both, okay, but strength is important. But when we’re doing the sport, we’re mostly using our gas tank, right? We’re doing takedowns. We’re trying to escape. I. We’re trying to move out of positions, move into positions, defend things, attack those sorts of things. And if you’re not familiar, it’s a ground based grappling system. Sometimes we’re trying to, you know, choke our partner, or get some kind of a joint lock to win, or we’re trying to win by points, that sort of thing, depending on the experience of the athlete. Are you really, really new? Are you really, really experienced?

And the just the matchups, you know, if you’re sparring with somebody, what? What is the intent of the sparring that you’re doing? For example, you might have days where it’s a lot of really hard sessions. Maybe you’re in camp and it’s prior to some kind of competition, so your intensity could be a bit higher, right? You’re going to be paired up with people who are more your experience level or more appropriate for you to get a good competition simulation training. Maybe in your off time, when you’re not competing, you’re trying to shore up holes in your game, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s a bit more casual. I’m not somebody who competes a lot, so I tend to be a little bit more floating between different training partners. I’m not training with the world champions that are in our gym.

Their level is even though we’re all black belts like their level is high above mine. I’m probably not going to give them a good training session, so they’re going to go with people their ability levels are matching, but sometimes I do go with people who are less experienced, and that means that I’m generally going to do stuff like defend frame, try to work on holes in my game, but my intensity tends to be fairly low, right? Maybe it’s a chill day. I’m going to do some flow roles.

So I’ve talked about that in the episode on ride the wave, where I basically talked about training high, low. So you can go back and listen to that episode. Suffice to say, I would ask the person who asked this question, what is the intensity going to be like of a training session? Because that could determine how much of an effort you put into fueling right? Are you going to be taking on, you know, more carbohydrate, less carbohydrate? Do you need to fuel during the training session itself? If it’s a really long session, it’s a really, really hard effort, if you didn’t eat very well the day before, those sorts of things, you might need to take on some intra workout fuel those sorts of things.

Are There Times You Don’t Have to Eat Before Working Out?

Now, if you’re somebody who’s doing some strength training, you’re doing half marathon training, you’re going to go out and run intervals. You’re going to do a brick workout for your triathlon training, your needs could vary again, depending on the intensity of the training that you’re doing by and large on less intense days. We may not need to make as specific of an effort. And I see this is a place where people oftentimes go wrong in their performance nutrition approach. You have people who are a lot more casual, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can still be training in our sport, but we’re not pushing as hard. Maybe we’re not in competition, prep season or something like that, right? And so we don’t need as we’re not expending as many calories. We don’t need as much fuel, right? Or vice versa. We have increased our training intensity or our training frequency, and we are really not making the effort to close the gap, so we could maybe unintentionally fall into something like low energy availability. So the biggest thing that we need to think about here is like, what, where do we need to turn some of the knobs in terms of the intensity of the training and matching our fuel there?

Okay, so that’s just again, broad brush strokes, and a lot is going to depend on the individual the season that you’re in, the goals that you have for your training, how hard you’re going at the current moment, and those sorts of things. So first thing I would ask Tiffany, who submitted this question, is like, are these really hard training sessions? Are these more casual? How hard are you pushing the pace? What else are you doing besides lifting? Are you doing other conditioning and training that could really affect the answer? Okay.

Second question is, what is the timeline? Okay, so we’ve talked about the intensity and considering the sport at hand. Second question is, again, what is the timeline? And this is where having a plan can really be helpful, because if we’re kind of winging it, then we might not have anything prepared or on hand. It doesn’t mean you have to make all of this stuff from scratch. You can rely on packaged foods, especially if we’re talking about eating in and around our training session, those sorts of things, but having stuff on hand is really going to make a big difference. So we have to think about and inside of strength, nutrition, unlock, for example, I have it almost looks like a timeline, and I’ll see if I can put a picture of that on the screen for YouTube.

But this timeline is sort of a way to conceptualize that the further out, the further out we are from my training session, the more sort of, I guess, leeway we have with the types of foods that we eat and the balance of the macronutrients compared to the closer that we get to that training session time. So I’m only talking about beforehand. The afterward will be for another discussion. So I want to think about if my training is at 6am we’re not saying you need to get up three hours early to eat. That just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, because likely we will be trading sleep, which is precious recovery, right? Sleep is but the most underrated recovery tool that we have. Everybody out there that’s like, oh, I need, you know, cold plunges and recovery compression boots and all of this other stuff. I mean, sure, those things could be nice, but the biggest recovery tool we have is sleep. And in midlife, it’s already for some people, challenging enough as it is, so we’re not going to wake up at 3am to eat a full meal prior to a 6am training session.

Okay, that just doesn’t make sense. So if we’re waking up, let’s say we’ve got about an hour ish beforehand. We’ll talk about that. And if it’s kind of in that 30 minute range, like we’re really cutting it close, you know, we woke up, the alarm went off. We’re going to roll out of bed. We’re just going to get dressed and put our ghee in our bag, or, I guess, if you’re not wearing geese or doing no ghee, you’re going to put get your gym bag, go to your training session. How do we approach these things?

What Should I Eat 3 Hours Before a Workout?

Let’s just, for the sake of discussion, say that this training session is a little bit later in the morning. Let’s call it 9am let’s say you’re up at about 6am you want to eat something beforehand. You’ve got about two or three hours before your training session. This is a time where you could eat a balanced meal with protein, carbs and fat, and make sure that you’re getting like a decent portion so you feel full enough without being overly stuffed. And we will also want to make sure we get a decent chunk of carbohydrate here, because we’re about to go train later. And as I explained, BJJ does require our cardiovascular system to be highly active. We are going to be, in many cases, kind of like dipping into our carbohydrate stores, unless it’s extremely casual and more aerobic, which could be the case on a recovery day or easier day. But more than likely, we’re going to be tapping into some stored glycogen, some carbohydrate, you know, some blood sugar, for example, to fuel our workout.

So having a balanced meal, if it’s two to three hours ahead of time, with a decent amount of carbohydrate. Now how? How much exactly is? That depends on how much you’re going to be eating for the day. The ratio is going to depend on, are you a really, really big person? Are you a really, really small person? But suffice to say, we generally want a decent chunk of carbohydrate, especially pre workout. Okay, so we can use some of that to fuel our workout. So there’s that. Okay, what if now we’re in that second zone, so we’ve got a little bit of time, but not a ton. Let’s call it an hour to an hour and a half beforehand. So let’s say you wake up at 430 or five, and you’re just an early morning person, as it is, so you have a bit more time.

This is where we’re probably going to eat something that has a little bit of staying power, has some carbohydrate, maybe a little bit of protein, but our portions are going to tend to be on the smaller side. So here’s where eating a giant breakfast, especially as we’re getting toward that hour mark, 30 minutes to an hour, eating a really big meal, might not work, especially if you’re somebody who’s a bit more sensitive in your stomach, right? And add to that, the sport specific considerations, for example, if you’re a runner and you’re literally jostling up and down, and that tends to, you know, upset your stomach because everything is sloshing,

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maybe you need to think about that. For Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, we tend to run around warm up. Maybe we’re doing some kind of drills where we’re inverting, so we’re kind of half folded in half, going upside down, or where somebody is putting Knee on Belly on you, and you’re like, oh my god, I just ate this. There’s always some guy, by the way, at Jiu Jitsu, who’s like, in the evening class or something, and is like, Oh, dude, I ate the biggest Cali burrito before I got here. And you’re just like, oh, like, oh my god, a giant burrito is literally, you know, I’m like, got my knee. On your stomach, and you just ate a huge burrito, and it’s making you feel horrible. So, you know, we have to be clever about that stuff too, even if it’s not a morning session. But we don’t generally want to eat like a huge meal if we’re getting closer to our workout session, because it is just we’re going to try. Our body’s going to be trying to digest that as we’re then training, and some of that blood is going to be shunted away from digesting our food and into our peripheral muscles right to to start moving. So we have to be kind of clever about that.

What Should I Eat an Hour and a Half Before a Workout?

But generally speaking, if we’re in that hour to hour and a half prior to our workout, we’re going to be making our portions a bit smaller. So say, think of snacking snack size portions. And I’m not going to get into like, grams of this and grams of that here, because, you know, it’s more important for you to grab the concepts that we’re talking about, rather than relying on an exact number. Because, again, these things are going to vary for a bunch of reasons. But snack size portions mostly carbs and a little bit of protein.

I’ll give you a quick example. Could be something like a an apple sauce packet or two, or a banana and half a protein shake. And for some reason, every time I bring up protein shakes, people are like, Oh, gross. Or they’re thinking that they’re going to have to take a 20 ounce shaker bottle and drink the entire thing. Look, y’all, you can make it simple on yourself. Make a protein shake portion with water, which keeps it on the air quotes here on the lighter side, and drink half of it. Sip it on the way. You’re also getting some bonus hydration, and then drink the rest later.

You don’t have to, like, sit I’m just picturing people sitting in their car guzzling an entire 20 ounce protein shake right before they’re about to step into training. And of course, that’s just going to make your stomach very full, and again, you’re going to end up feeling maybe a little bit uncomfortable and just sloshy, so you don’t have to eat the whole thing. You could, say, drink half a protein shake, or get one of those that are pre mixed and in a smaller bottle. You could if you’re somebody who likes something like oatmeal, and that does really well for you, and the fiber doesn’t bother you, and you’re in that hour to hour and a half ahead of time, make a portion. Have a few bites before you leave the house and eat. Bring the rest to eat with you as your post workout, or save it at home if you’re going to go home right away and eat the rest for breakfast, right?

So there’s a lot of different ways you can do this, but suffice to say, again, smaller portions, more along the lines of carbs with a little bit of protein and generally keeping fat on the on the more minimal side, you don’t need to be very, very militant about this, but just know that higher fat meal options will slow down the emptying of your stomach, so they’re great for that balanced meal two or three hours ahead of time, you know, include your your fat in that meal for flavor and and enjoyment and mouthfeel and all of those things. And fat is an important part of how we fuel ourselves, right? Just for macronutrients sake, for health reasons. But if we’re in our period of time really close to our workout, we might want to minimize that a little bit more.

Okay, so again, we’re starting to think about shifting toward that time where we’re getting very close to our workout. Maybe we’re eating a two or three to one ratio of carbs to protein, somewhere in that range. Again, smaller you are, and the less intense you’re moving, you might tend to the lower side there, and vice versa. Okay, now let’s say you are that person who’s like, I just woke up. All right, I gotta literally roll out of bed, grab what I can and get the hell out of the house, because I’m gonna be late for class. So let’s say you’ve got about 30 minutes in that 30 minutes to one hour range, we

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want to think about minimizing fat, right? So the least amount of fat as possible, so we give our body the best chance to digest these quick carbs that we’re going to give it mostly carbohydrate. Now, if there’s incidental protein and what we’re eating, I wouldn’t sweat that, but I generally wouldn’t like gnaw on a giant chicken breast right as I’m about to walk in again.

Protein takes a while to digest. Takes a little bit more effort. So we want to think about if it’s right before and I mean, like a half hour ish, so we don’t crash our blood sugar, but about 30 minutes or so we want to keep it to quicker digesting carbohydrates. So think simpler carbs with less fiber and minimizing protein with very little fat, if we can help it all right, so those are going to be more sugary things. Think like. Cereals or things like that would be just a quick example where it’s generally going to be a lower fiber might not be the time to to eat a super high fiber cereal, but more simple, easy to digest carbohydrates here, right beforehand, again, the applesauce packets, I think are great because they’re they’re already liquefied for the most part.

That’s just one example, but generally speaking, we want to keep it easy and quick to digest, focusing more on simple sugars, and again, test What does well for you, that’s very, very, very important. Okay, so we’ve covered now the timeline. If we have a long time before our training session, then we can eat that mixed, balanced meal, mixed macronutrients. If it’s in that middle time range, hour to an hour and a half, we’re going to start to make our portions a bit smaller, right? We don’t want to fill ourselves up too, too much. We’re going to start to start to rely more on carbohydrates with a little bit of protein and less on fat.

What Should I Eat 30 Minutes Before a Workout?

And then, as we get right up against our workout, say, 30 minutes prior, very small portions, for the most part, mostly focused on quick digesting carbohydrates. Okay, so you can kind of envision the size and the the makeup of these pre workout snacks getting smaller and smaller as you get right up to again, some people have an uncanny knack for being able to handle a lot of different kinds of food without stomach upset or anything like that. You really have to test things out and see what do you favor? What works well for you, even things like yogurt with fruit in that sort of one to one and a half hour timeframe can work really well, because yogurt is very almost liquid, right? So it’s more, more pre digested, those sorts of things.

So you kind of have to see what do you like, what works for your body, what works for your preferences and your budget and preparation time. But that’s how I would approach the timeline aspect, okay, and of course, also mentioning some preferences.

How Much Water Should I Drink Before a Workout?

Now let’s talk about a couple of other things to consider. The first is hydration. So you’ve just spent a bunch of time asleep. We’re exhaling all night, inhaling and exhaling, so you’ve probably lost some fluids that way. You know, maybe woken up in the night to pee a couple times. The bottom line is, you wake up try to get some hydration in you ASAP. Of course, you can have caffeine. If you are a caffeine person, great. A lot of people will say, Oh, but I heard it dehydrates you. And people who are habituated to caffeine, that’s generally not an issue. And caffeine can be an ergogenic aid if you’re somebody who’s not as accustomed to using it.

So the more accustomed you are to taking caffeine, which, for most people, are going to be drinking their caffeine, but the more accustomed you are to it, the less of an effect it might have like and for performance sake, it is a very well studied supplement for that reason, but in a lot of these studies, people are sort of taken off of their use of caffeine and then given caffeine back to see what will happen to their performance. But just as a general practice, it’s helping you to feel more alert and awake. It’s generally not an issue to have some caffeine when you’re first, you know, getting up in the morning, I would also have some extra fluid as soon as you can, because it takes a little while for our body to actually absorb that. So if you’re like about to roll into class, you know, it’s 5:55am and you’re going to just chug a giant water bottle, it’s going to take a while for that, that fluid to actually absorb into your system. Okay, so try to get some fluid into you ahead of time.

Should I Drink Electrolytes Every Morning?

What about electrolytes? Okay, I feel like electrolytes are one of those things where it’s like, the people that could maybe benefit from them, oftentimes don’t take them, and the people who generally don’t need them are like, I put, you know, three electrolyte sticks in my water today.

We have to think about this. If you are a really heavy sweater, it’s really hot out, etc, etc, you’re training very hard. I mean, in the ghee, right? You’ve got underclothes, so you’ve at least got shorts or pants, you know, like spandex, and then you’ve got, in many cases, like in our academy, we all wear rash guards, so we’ve got at least a short sleeve rash guard, and then we’ve got another layer of clothes on top of that, right strangle pajamas. That’s why we make that joke. But we’re wearing generate some kind of cotton or cotton mix, long sleeve top, long sleeve bottom. In all weather, okay, so it does get very hot. A lot of academies don’t have AC. I mean, if you live in a very cold place, that might be great, but living here in Southern California, it can get very warm. So there are a. Lot of people who are very heavy sweaters, and then you add on top of it, gear. Now I’ve seen also in the NoGi scenario, where the mat looks like a slip and slide after training, and that kind of schemes me out. But hey, more power to your elbow if that’s your preferred method of training Jiu Jitsu.

But people do sweat a lot, right? So if you’re a heavy sweater, it’s very hot, you might benefit from an electrolyte. And if you’re somebody who needs a little bit of extra carb, you can have you find them that have a little bit of carbohydrate in them. Does everybody need to use an electrolyte? Who does a sport and does some kind of sport training, especially if it’s low intensity day, of course not, right? So there’s a lot of people who are sort of like, oh, electrolytes are scam. Oh, nobody needs them. In some cases, people who are training really hard could benefit from them.

So you kind of have to know, again, your body, what is your sweat rate like? I know on easier days now, I hardly sweat at all, right? So I’m generally not going to use an electrolyte on those days as the weather picks up, it gets hotter out, those sorts of things, then I know I’m going to have a hard day. I might put an electrolyte in my water. So I would consider your hydration and your hydration during class as well.

Should I Eat Less on Rest Days?

All right, the last piece, the last piece, since Tiffany’s question was about 6am we need to think about, what did you do the day before? Okay, so this is something that I think is oftentimes missed from the conversation, because recovery from training, think about what what is your your previous training session. Recovery doesn’t just take place in the 30 minutes after your previous training session. Your fueling doesn’t just matter in the hour ahead of your training session. It’s kind of this ongoing timeline. And so I would ask Tiffany, for example, if we’re training super early in the morning, we don’t have a lot of time, we’re going to have a small snack mostly focused on carbohydrate with a little bit of protein, if it’s in there, what is the quality and quantity of what you ate the day before? Insofar as

Did you eat adequately? Are you skipping meals? Did you eat a decent dinner or a decent amount of food in the second half of the day, the day before? Those sorts of things? Because you’re going to be digesting continuously, right? We’re going to be asleep. Yes, we have a little bit of, you know, liver glycogen depletion during sleep, of course. So it’s important to think of what we’re doing prior to our session in the morning, but what we did the day before is also going to have an impact. So this is where I work with a lot of my athletes, if they are people who have really chaotic schedules, or they tend to miss meals pretty consistently, that sort of thing.

Sometimes they’re only thinking about, well, what am I about to eat as I’m walking into my training session and I’m like, No, we got to back back up. Right back up. Think about what, what we’re doing the day before, a couple days before, if we’re somebody who does multiple training sessions a day, say two training sessions a day, maybe you train jiu jitsu in the morning and in the evening. That’s not unheard of, right? You’re doing two sessions a day, or you’re lifting and you’re doing jiu jitsu lift in the morning, do Jiu Jitsu in the afternoon or the evening.

That’s where we have to start thinking about those shortened windows of time. Like last night, I did evening class in Jiu Jitsu. I don’t normally do evening class because I like I like myself to go to bed. I like my sleeps. And evening class is really stimulating for me. And then I get home and I feel like I’m rushing. But for some people, it’s the only time they can go. So I was a class last night. I knew I didn’t have

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any training on today. Today, Wednesday is my off day, my recovery day. I do walking generally on on Wednesday, but that’s it. So it’s a low intensity day. So I didn’t have I didn’t have to stress about eating something when I got home and then, like, what was I going to eat in the morning? Right? But if you are somebody who’s about to wake up in the morning having had gone to a hard training session in the evening on the night before, then the gap between those is short, so you would have to think a little bit more strategically, maybe be a little bit more organized about what you had post workout and then what you’re going to eat pre workout, if that makes sense.

Episode Summary

So we’ve covered a lot of ground on this episode, and I know a lot of this is the like. It depends, but it truly does. We covered a few things. The first one is how I address nutrition with my lifters and my hobby as athletes. Right in terms of fueling, we need to think about your energy needs, which is based on a bunch of different factors. How we get you to introduce behavior change and like organization and systems and creating your plate on. A day to day basis. And the third is how we think about powering your workouts, pre workout, post workout, what is your schedule, like, those sorts of things. Then we talked about, what is the intensity of your session, because that could change.

For example, how many grams of carbohydrate you need to shoot for? Do you need to eat something during your training session? Endurance athletes, particularly if your sessions are very long, that is you you want to think about what are you going to eat during? Okay? But not everybody has to consider that, and not everybody has to eat during their workout or take on fuel. I should say the second thing we talked about this timeline, how close to your session are you? If you’ve got hours, you’ve got more leeway, right? If you get closer and closer to walking in the door to your training session, you’re going to have to think about smaller portions, mostly carbohydrate driven, and if it’s very close to your actual workout, making it so that those carbohydrates are easy to digest and get into your system, right?

And then the last piece, of course, preference wise, talked about, like experimenting with different things. And then the last piece is the other things to think about, hydration. What did you do the evening before, the day before? That sort of thing. So it sounds complicated, but the more we know, the more we can sit down and have a plan about what our training looks like, what is our week going to tend to look like, in terms of our high effort days, our lower effort days, what time of the day we like to train, what our food preferences are, what sits well with us, in our bodies, in our budget and our wallet, with the Time constraints that we have to prepare food or not, we can start to flesh out a better idea.

So I hope that was helpful. We covered a lot of ground here. If you would like help in customizing and getting answers specifically for you. This is what I do inside of Strength Nutrition Unlocked. You can find out more information about that on my website. You can also check out my free meal prep guide for performance. You get that at Steph Gaudreau, comm slash meal prep guide. The last part of that is all one word. Meal prep guide, one word. And then if you’d like to find out more about lifting and how I can support you with a plan for strength training, whether that’s your main thing or you want to use strength training to supplement the sport that you’re doing, much like Tiffany and myself as BJJ athletes, who also know that our longevity in this sport depends on how healthy we can stay and how resilient and durable our tissues are.

You can find a sample of Strong with Steph here. Last but not least, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app or platform if you’re currently not subscribed, it is free, and it does help the show. All right. Thanks for tuning in today. Thank you so much, and until next time, stay strong.