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.
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