How important is nutrition to triathlon performance?

This is often a question I get asked, how important is nutrition?  Why should I bother doing this?  These are valid questions and it is good that they are asked.  So why is nutrition important to triathlon performance.  Lets try and answer this in a scientific way.

About 10 years ago a scientific review was published looking at all the ways in which 40 km time trial performance can be improved from training through various nutrition techniques to aerodynamic changes.  The results of this were quite fascinating.  They showed that aerodyanmic changes to your bike position could make between 1 and 7 min difference to 40 km time trial performance in a novice athlete.  Training could improve your 40 km time trial time by anything up to 10 minutes and nutrition interventions such as carbohydrate and caffeine intake can make between a 30 and 90 second difference to time trial performance.  So nutrition interventions improve performance but not by as much as aerodynamics or training.

But I think the authors missed a trick, they forgot to factor in the effect of nutrition on training.  Eating the right things at the right time and you can massively improve your recovery for the next training session.  For a triathlete this is likely to come quite soon. 

More and more research is also showing that eating the right things can maximise the adaptation to training.  Eating can indeed make you fitter.

Of course the reverse is also true, some foods will slow your recovery and some will blunt adaptation.

So ultimately get your nutrition right and performance is improved, get it wrong and boy will you know about it.
  

Introduction

So if you are reading this welcome to my blog and thankyou for having a look at what this blog is all about.  This blog is simply all about Sports Nutrition.  Having worked in the field for many years I have often looked on the internet and thought how confusing it must be for the general public.  There is so much mis-information about not only sports nutrition but general nutrition too.  It is a minefield. 

The general philosophy of this blog will be to provide sports nutrition information based on SCIENTIFIC evidence.  There will be no fads, no gimmicks, no porducts to sell, no quackery.  Just simple evidence based information with a practical spin and my opinion on some of this science.

So to start the scientific theme lets put this into a scientific abstract

Aim:  To porvide the reader with a practical spin on scientific evidence.  To take the reader from scientific journal to their kitchen.  The main interest will be around endurance sport and Triathlon in particular, but I might chuck some nutrition for strength athletes in now and again.

Methods:  Commentaries, reviews of areas, thoughts and murmerings, recipies, myth busting, the list could be endless

Results:  A greater understanding of how nutrition can impact on your performance.

Conclusion:  Improved performance with appropriate nutrition.