2 questions for over 50's

2 questions for over 50’s (triathletes) - I am 20 yrs + triathlete - 7-10 hrs/week all three sports.

I have noticed two things in the last 18 months or so.

I need to pay very careful attention to nutrition during/after trainer road sessions and outside rides of >1 hour. Especially over/unders and threshold. Poor attention leaves me with a “washed out” feeling and what I have called a “sugar headache” for the rest of the day.

What’s your during/post session nutrition and how has it changed over time?

I am moving towards a three week cycle - 2 weeks build - 1 week recovery. This is on 1.5/2 ctl increase per week.

On the 4 week cycle - end of the 2nd build week - I feel wiped out and the quality of the session has been suffering.

Anyone else do this and how did you modify the TR sessions - (which are the same for 20 somethings as for us)

Thanks

I’m still on a 3 week build, 1 week recovery cycle but like you I’m very tired by the end of the 3rd week. I think it’s normal to feel like that whether it’s 2 or 3 weeks of build. In terms of nutrition the best thing I ever did was broadly track my intake and expenditure and try to balance it over each day. Your body has about 2000kcals of glycogen before you even consider the fat stores so I don’t fuel during workouts. I try to eat some form of carb (and possibly a bit of protein) about 3 hours before and I find that’s enough. I then eat within 20 minutes of completing - usually a proper meal. But I find nutrition is quite individual so worth trying different things to find what works best for you

tracking incoming kcals always sounds like a real hassle - something else to grapple with.
What;s the inside track?

I guess most of us follow the same diet week-week month-month -

My first thoughts are to work out how many kcals in say a bowl of breakfast cereal, a salad sandwich, a banana and build it from almost a template?

I use myfitnesspal. You can scan barcodes but I find that the existing database is so huge that somebody somewhere has already done it - so it’s fairly easy to find most things. Like you say, most people don’t have a huge diversity in what they eat week-in week-out and you only need to be broadly there or thereabouts in terms of the total (it’s impossible to be super accurate anyway). Trainingpeaks links to it (plus other apps if you use those) so you the effort involved isn’t too large

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ahhh so it will work out what a bowl of aldi breakfeast cereal is say - off to fiddle around with it. Thanks

Just searched in it - there are a lot of Aldi breakfast cereals! So yes, it will

Wait ‘till you get over 60. :wink:

I eat my breakfast fairly early so by the time I’m doing my workout, I need to fuel during the workout or I don’t have a good workout. I started following the advice of Amber and the boys on the podcast to take in a high carb recovery drink right after the workout. That’s been the biggest help for me.