What You Need to Know about a Training Diet
| Why is Carbohydrate Important for Performance? | ||||||||||||||||||
| Eat a diet high in carbohydrate throughout the season for energy to train and to compete. Fatigue is common after hard physical training day-after-day. When you work out twice a day it can get worse. You might blame your exhaustion on a "bad day". But if you are always tired, your diet might be the problem. When you exercise, you use energy stored as carbohydrate in your muscles. During a two-hour workout, you can easily use up all your stored energy. It is important that you replenish the carbohydrate level in your muscles for the next day's training. You do this by eating enough foods high in carbohydrate. Suppose you eat a diet low in carbohydrate. After just three days of two-hour workouts, you use up nearly all of your muscle carbohydrate. You are a candidate for fatigue. However, on a high-carbohydrate diet after the same workouts, your muscle carbohydrate level can be almost as high as it was before you began training. In that way, you can have the energy to train and compete at your top performance. |
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| Planning the Training Diet | ||||||||||||||||||
| What's the difference between the training diet and your normal diet? The training diet is probably higher in carbohydrate. The training diet includes more foods from the Grain Group, Vegetable Group, and Fruit Group. Of course, you still need protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and water in your diet. You get these nutrients, as well as carbohydrate, by eating a variety of foods from each of the Five Food Groups (Milk, Meat, Vegetable, Fruit and Grain). When planning a high-carbohydrate diet, remember:
Each day eat at least the recommended number of servings from the Five Food Groups listed in the chart below: RECOMMENDED SERVINGS |
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Cereals, breads, pasta, muffins, pancakes, rolls, and other grain products are high in carbohydrate.
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