Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition

  I was really looking forward to today (Feb 13th/Tuesday). I love swimming and I love swimming outside and during my online hunt for an outdoor swimming pool around the area, I came across a 50-meter outdoor pool in Stellenbosch at Coetzenburg University.  I asked the open water swim group on whatsapp about allowing vistors and the group said that visitors were allowed.  I looked online at the lane availability schedule and noticed that after 8am was a good time to swim. We left our Airbnb around 7am for the 15 mile drive to Stellenbosch but there was a lot of traffic so it took us over an hour. Our route took us through Strand, which goes by the beach, so I made a mental note of this route for my run later in the day.  The Stellenbosch area has a different vibe to Gordon's Bay as the campus as there are several schools and students and the area is very pretty with lots of fields, trees, and paths for biking. As we got closer to the area, we saw a lot of people on m...

  Although water has no caloric value, it’s the most essential nutrient required in your diet on a daily basis. Your body is made of water. It’s part of your blood, brain, heart, lungs and bones. As it relates to exercise, water maintains blood volume, reduces the risk of heat stress, regulates body temperature and is involved in muscle contractions. To optimize your hydration status, you must be an active participant in your hydration regime by consuming adequate fluids and electrolytes on a daily basis - as well as before, during and after exercise. Leaving hydration to chance or ignoring dehydration symptoms can be hazardous to health and performance. Sadly, once you are dehydrated, you can't 'make-up' for fluids lost. Going into a workout dehydrated and/or not replenishing fluids and electrolytes lost during exercise can cause great strain on your cardiovascular system. As dehydration reduces plasma volume, blood becomes thicker and retains more sodium. This makes blood...

As an athlete, if your diet and hydration meets the training demands placed on your body, you will perform at your best, reduce risk for injury and illness and improve longevity in your sport. If you suffer from flat training sessions, subpar race performances, inconsistent training efforts, fatigue, injuries, chronic niggles, digestive issues, sleep disturbances and a reasonable amount of cold symptoms, you probably lack the essentials of a training diet that will boost your immune system and encourage optimal training enhancements. In my book, Essential Sports Nutrition ,  I start the first chapter discussing the topic of hydration. Why hydration? Despite not providing the body with energy (in the form of calories), water is the most essential nutrient in a healthy, performance-focused diet. Every tissue, organ, cell and body system requires it. Whereas you can survive for over a month without food, you can only survive but a few days without drinking water. Because yo...

RUN I feel many triathletes need a constant reminder that they are not runners. Certainly, runners do not need to be reminded that they are not triathletes. Runners absorb a completely training stress than the multisport athlete. Furthermore, the race day effort of a triathlete is based on the race distance, which determines what time of the day a triathlete runs and what type of mechanical fatigue the triathlete brings to the run. Thus, the pacing and fueling strategy for run training and running are very different than the single sport athlete. (Note - even for runners, I still find it valuable to set up aid stations or bring nutrition and hydration with you during long runs) For the triathletes, you can not think like a runner when you train for triathlons. For example, if you are doing a brick run, you can not think of your run off the bike as "only" a 20-minute run. I see it all the time - a triathlete is out on his/her bike for 3, 4, 5+ hours and then ...

BIKE It's unfortunate but many athletes underfuel in training and overfuel on race day. Why do triathletes do this? Underfueling can be from many reasons - fear of gaining weight, wanting to lose weight, trying to be more "metabolically efficient," not knowing how to fuel, not feeling that (more) calories are needed, thinking sport nutrition is bad/unhealthy, not bringing enough energy/fluids, not planning stops accordingly, poor planning/feeling rushed to get in a workout or not knowing how much energy/fluids are needed. Certainly, underfueling does not enhance performance and consequently, not meeting energy and hydration needs can sabotage health.  Overfueling on race day is often out of fear of not having enough energy . Sadly, no amount of calories on race day can make the body perform at an intensity that was not established in training.  And if you are an athlete who underfuels in training, not only are you missing an opportunity to boost fitness in trai...

Hopefully by now in the season, you have dialed in your fueling and hydration regime to help you adapt well to training and to keep your body healthy.  While there can be several pronounced and noticeable symptoms to let you know that you are not meeting your energy, electrolyte and fluid needs during your longer or more intense workouts, like headache, not feeling the urge to urinate during a long workout or for hours after the workout, nausea, bloating, fatigue, muscle aches/throbbing and dizziness, you may notice that even without a health or performance-related issue, with the intense summer heat, something is still off with your fueling and hydrating strategy. Important note: the symptoms I mentioned  are not "normal" just because you are an athlete, training hard, wanting to get faster or leaner or training for a long distance event. Over the next few blogs, you will learn a few simple tweaks that you can make to your current fueling and hydration regime. As a Board...

This weekend concluded a big volume week of training. What a great feeling to have this past week behind me and what a better feeling to know that my body was able to execute during every workout.  Saturday:  5 hour/85 miles with over 8000 feet of climbing - all at Ironman effort Followed by a 6 mile run Nutrition consumed during bike: 4.5 bottles (slightly short of what I wanted) each with 280 calories Additional calories consumed from wafer (170 calories)  and shot blocks (100 calories) Total consumed: 1530 calories and 108 ounce fluid (~2400 mg sodium) Nutrition consumed during run: 2 x 10 ounce flasks each with 80 calories Clif Hydration Total consumed: 20 ounce fluid + 160 calories Sunday:  1:50, 13.2 mile run (2000 feet of climbing) 2 x 10 ounce flasks each with 80 calories of Clif Hydration Refill 1 x 10 ounce flask with 80 calories + 1 flask water Total consumed: 40 ounce fluid + 240 calories More important to me than using these...

Many factors contribute to the total volume of fluid lost from the body on a daily basis - environmental conditions, size/surface area of an individual, metabolic rate, physical activity load (ex. frequency, duration, intensity), sweat loss, diet composition and volume of excreted fluids.  The daily fluid loss in cool weather (less than 70 degrees F) can be around 2300 mL (with much of that as fluid lost in urine) whereas in warm/hot weather (above 85 degree F weather) it can total 6600+ mL (with most of that lost as sweat).  Once again, as mentioned in my previous post,  relying on thirst to initiate daily water (or sport drink consumption during workouts) is a false recommendation to ensure adequate fluid consumption. I hear it over and over again that athletes feel that they don't need to drink because they aren't thirsty but then when they do feel thirsty, they do not provide themselves with opportunities for frequent drinking and it becomes uncomfortabl...

It surprises me how many athletes assume they are just fine just "getting by" in workouts by not fueling or hydrating during the workout. Could you be underfueling and more importantly, underhydrating during your workout? Maintaining adequate hydration during workouts and especially in races is one of the most important nutrition strategies for optimizing performance and for keeping the body in good health.  Every athlete knows that even losing a small percentage of body weight can affect health and can impair performance so why even think twice about going for a swim, bike or run without adequate fluids? I find myself spending a lot of my time educating athletes on what they are not doing well (or consistently) which could be sabotaging workouts and one area is speaking to triathletes and runners to try to get them to consume adequate fluids during workouts. With so many athletes coming to me looking to boost performance, improve health or to reach body comp...

Can you feel that?  The warm weather is finally here!! For the past few months, it's likely that you have been just fine with your fueling/hydration strategy while training/exercising. Perhaps you feel like you have been just fine getting by with little to no fluids or electrolytes when you train.  Well, when summer arrives, it's extremely important to make sure that you are focused on preventing dehydration and heat-related illnesses by making a huge effort to fuel and hydrate during every workout.  As an athlete, you should never ever feel like you are just getting by. If you do not make an effort or do not know how to fuel/hydrate properly for your workouts you will limit your ability to progress with your fitness as you work your butt off to get stronger, faster, fitter and more powerful.  You want to tweak, perfect and nail your sport nutrition and hydration regime all the time to ensure that you are getting the most out of your training and keepi...

Triathletes and endurance athletes are very susceptible to dehydration and even more so, a heat-related injury.  What must be understood is that the body is compromised when we place intentional training stress on the body through training and racing. However, what is even more serious is that many athletes are not taking the daily precautions to be "healthy" on a day to day basis. So as you can imagine, when an athlete throws in 8,10 or more hours of training per week, there is even more confusion on how to meet daily and sport needs but very little time to even make time/energy to ensure that the body is healthy going into workouts and well fueled/hydrated during workouts.  Because endurance racing is far from normal or easy for the human body to handle, health professionals acknowledge that metabolic demands during training/racing in long distance events are not easy to meet. That is, it is very hard for the body to take in the appropriate amount of calories, ...