Interestingly, most athletes will perform better when eating a small snack before an early morning workout - regardless of the intensity and duration of exercise. However, there are reasons why athletes will struggle when eating before an early morning workout - specifically digestive issues and reactive hypoglycemia.
As a Board Certified Sport Dietitian, my practice revolves around helping athletes eat in a way that fosters improved performance in training and on race/event day. At Trimarni, our focus is to help athletes experience athletic excellence without compromising health. Therefore, when prescribing strategies to optimize performance, I'm always looking at ways where nutrition can better help an athlete adapt to training stress, reduce risk for illness and injury and enhance recovery, without compromising mental and physical health.
If you spend time wandering around social media, ask for nutrition advice from a personal trainer, browse through fitness and nutrition websites or listen to/read triathlon/running-centric podcasts or forums, there's a good chance that you've heard a lot of discussion and praise for fasted training. In other words, not eating before an early morning workout is good and eating before an early morning workout is bad.
For the average fitness enthusiast who is exercising without purpose or structure, nutrient timing advice may or may not apply. In other words, eating before an early workout may or may not benefit the fitness enthusiast as it relates to performance because the exercise regime is not designed in a way to improve performance. Therefore, health should be the focus when the fitness enthusiast is determining whether or not to eat before an early morning workout.
However, for the athlete (my population), training is likely systematically designed with careful purpose so that each workout has a clear focus in the road map to an upcoming event. There's likely great consideration for the intensity, volume, reps, sets and frequency of workouts that occur within a week and the goal is to perform consistently well while maximizing recovery between sessions. Nutrient timing plays an important role in how the body adapts to training stress. If this sounds like your type of training, dialing in your pre-workout fueling will likely benefit you when you are asking your body to perform, adapt and recover day after day for performance gains.
As for what to eat around workouts for better results, you are in luck. In my book Essential Sports Nutrition, I wrote three chapters on this topic. Chapter 3 is on fueling before exercise. Chapter 4 is on fueling during and after exercise and Chapter 5 is on fueling on rest days. I include food examples and specific guidelines for each type of workout and when it occurs. All your questions about when and what to eat will be answered in my book.
Despite knowing what to eat or that you would probably benefit by eating something before your early morning workout, there are still reasons why athletes struggle with early morning pre-workout nutrition. In my next blog I'll discuss those reasons in more detail.