Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast to show that help swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford.

Welcome to the Effortless Swimming podcast. My guest today is Taryn Richardson. She is a triathlon nutrition specialist and she’s worked with the elite triathletes and the paratriathlon with triathlon Australia for six years. And I’ve got Taryn on the podcast today to talk about triathlon nutrition but also swimming nutrition and what we can do to make better choices, get fitter, keep leaner and basically just be healthier overall. So Taryn, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. You’re a fellow podcast host. So you’ve got a good mic. You’ve got good headphones. You know what you’re doing when you come on to a podcast. I expect you to basically just run it from here. No worries. No pressure. So Taryn, you’ve reached out a couple of weeks ago and I feel like I’ve seen you around just through the swimming world and triathlon world and you’ve worked closely with a past guest, Dan Atkins as well with a lot of his

athletes there to kick off the conversation. I want to start with some common mistakes that you come across when you’re working with age group triathletes or awesomeers. What are some of the things that you see and you go, oh, you would be so much better off if you just stop this or you started doing this. Oh, there are so many things. How long have you got? Let’s dive into them. That’s yeah. When it comes to nutrition for triathlon, it is so much more complicated. It doesn’t need to be hard but there are so many things that you need to do when you’re training for three sports in a week. Like it’s not just like you’re a swimmer and you just do pool, maybe some dry land stuff, or you’re just a runner or you just go to the gym. You have to understand how to eat to support swimming and cycling and running and then putting all three of those together. So what I find with triathletes, one of their biggest downfalls is that they are so into tech and so

into all the gadgets and they love all of the shiny little one percent of things and they go down those paths first, but they haven’t got the foundations of what they need to do on a day to day basis. Right. Like they have no idea how to recover properly after sessions to back up and go again. They have no idea how to periodize their carbohydrate intake to training. They have no idea how to fuel sessions properly either, but yet they’re taking like the weirdest supplement and they’ve got their spreadsheet with all of their stats and they’re doing this one thing that they might implement on a race day, but then on a day to day basis, they just suck. So yeah, there’s so many things that I see them making and what I try and do, my whole passion is to try and get athletes to understand how to fuel themselves properly on a day to day basis, because that’s where you’re going to get the best bang for your buck out of training is what

you consistently do daily. It’s not this one thing that you might do occasionally. It’s getting those foundations right. So as part of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy, I step triathletes through exactly what they need to do on a day to day basis to be fueling and recovering properly to get the most out of their body. It’s interesting to hear you say that because it is about what you do day in, day out. And it’s the same with think about with like kids relationships, your what you eat, what you do for training. It’s not the one session that’s going to make you a champion and get huge results. It’s what you do day in, day out when your significant other gets home from work or how do you say hi to them? What’s that relationship like it’s all those day to day things that really make up your life. It’s not the one thing. And we’re talking before the podcast. I made burgers last night without the bun, a healthy burger. I was looking

at the pickles. I emptied the pickle jar, got the last one out and I was looking at the pickle juice going, Oh, I know, like I’ve heard this is good for you. Maybe I’ll just drink and I went, No, that’s okay. I don’t need the benefit if there is one, but it just goes to show like your mind tends to go for those shiny things or what you may have read in an article or in a headline. And so reading through your bio, that’s one of the things that really starts to annoy is information that maybe doesn’t have the backing or doesn’t have the proof or it is the shiny object. So what what are some standout things that you think the majority of swimmers or triathletes are probably doing that they may be able to replace with a better option? Yeah, there’s so many things that make my blood boil to be honest. I’ve actually tried to calm myself down as I get older, but I’m very much an evidence based practitioner. I look to the literature and the research

to help guide interventions that we make with nutrition and I don’t watch like Netflix documentaries or random punters on YouTube to get my nutrition advice. So I guess it’s coming back to those fundamental things again, right? We don’t want to be taking a supplement which is what I call like the sprinkles on the icing on our cake. We want to lay that cake base first, that’s our sponge, that’s the biggest layer and then once you’ve done that’s your foundations of day-to-day healthy eating. It’s not particularly sexy messages like eating enough fruits and vegetables, but it’s that sort of daily habitual stuff that makes the biggest impact over the long term. It’s kind of like compound interest. Little tiny bits incrementally expand as we go on. Once you’ve got those foundations right then we want to ice that cake foundation. When you’ve iced it with some more advanced sports nutrition principles, so things like carbohydrate

loading, maybe some acute sodium loading to help with hydration, starting to sprinkle in some of our performance boosting supplements here, something like caffeine that’s got many years of well-backed research to support its benefit in endurance exercise and then only then once you’ve done those things you can put the sprinkles on your cake so that they actually stick to something. There’s a lot of literature around multiple supplement use and we see that the more stuff you take the less impact they have. So they wash each other out in a way. So we want to just focus on one key thing at a time and use that strategically to get the most benefit out of it and then maybe look at implementing something else separate to that. So it’s about getting those foundations right and not taking, I’m not going to mention any names. I can think of five off the top of my head. Supplements that are being very marketed to triathletes at the moment that are

probably not doing a whole lot because you haven’t got some of those foundations. One of the questions I had was eating before swimming so for me I get up at 4.30, 4.40 in the morning. We’ll be in the pool at 5.30 and I normally won’t eat. I’ll have fair bit of water. I’ll often have like not sponsored but like athletic greens. I’m a big fan of that. I’ll have that in the morning beforehand. No, what are you doing?

How much is that stuff? It’s like 80 bucks a month. Yeah, so for me I found it’s that’s replaced my coffee beforehand and I feel better throughout the day but what would your suggestion be pre-training first because I don’t like to eat before training because I feel a little bit, I feel too heavy getting into the water that early. So what would you suggest? There’s so many things to unpack there. Can we just stop on that athletic greens for a second? You’re not going to shoot it down are you? Not my athletic greens. What is it? Tell me, you tell me what’s in it. Do you understand what you’re taking? Green stuff that has lots of nutrients in it. Oh god, okay, so it is a sprinkle on the icing on the cake. It’s not a very sexy message but you will get more benefit from eating fresh fruits and vegetables than taking a greens powder and it’s way more cost effective as well. So you might feel better because you’ve stopped

caffeine in the morning. It’s not necessarily the greens powder that’s making you feel better. Yeah, I don’t agree with it. It has helped replace the habit of it as a sort of a substitute for that habit. So if I was to make a smoothie of some sort with fruits and veggies, you think that’d be a better option in the morning. Okay, so then we go back to the question around pre-training nutrition. You’re a pretty efficient swimmer right? You would be much more efficient in the water than potentially a triathlete listening who’s not as proficient in the water. So I like to set people up strategically with a bit of a plan for what they do pre-training based on what that session is. Like what are the goals of that session? Are we trying to perform in that session to the best of our ability and in turn having some metabolic adaptations that happen that are going to make us fit it and faster? If it’s that sort of performance session then we want to set

that up a little bit differently to a session that is maybe just for you maybe a 3k aerobic very easy throw the arms over type session. We want to think differently based on what the goals are. So something that is performance session so for you it might be like intervals and sprints in the pool or it might be a super long endurance swim that is targeting sort of race distance. Then my suggestion is you do a bit of fueling before a session like that and we want to focus on carbohydrate rich foods. So if you feel heavy in the mornings when you wake up or heavy before you swim then that might be something that you’ve just done for a long period of time and so you’ve trained your gut to feel like that but our gut is really trainable so it’s about putting in small little impactful change and shaking that up over time until you get used to it. So thinking about carb rich foods that are quick and easy to digest something that you can do and tolerate

at 4 30 in the morning it could be some of those big juicy medjool dates it could be some banana it could be a slice of toast with some spread on it it could be an up and go or something like that it doesn’t need to be complicated it doesn’t have to be an entire sit-down breakfast but thinking about our carbohydrate foods to fuel that session because if you fuel that session you’re more likely to push harder and train better and then get fitter and faster as a result rather than drag your ass through a session like that and not do what it’s meant to be doing. And so for the say they eat like an easy 3k session where you’re not really pushing it’s more aerobic based those ones you may be looking for the metabolic adaptation by not eating before training. Yeah yeah yeah exactly and so we want to fast then and so having an athletics greens powder is no longer fasting so even this weird middle ground of doing a little bit of fueling but

not really fueling enough. So having a strategic plan for your week so that you eat differently on different types of training days. So fasted means nothing you could have some water if you’re a caffeine user you could have some black tea or coffee but no milk no sugar no sweetener nothing like that that’s going to flip that switch of carbohydrate oxidation by having carbohydrate in our mouth. So fully fasted to do those easy aerobic not trying to no intensity in that type of session will help those fat oxidation pathways or fat burning pathways become more effective and efficient and then fueling on those really hard performance sessions so that you can push harder and train harder when we’re trying to actually do that type of session for a reason. And the sessions where we’re going over an hour let’s say it’s an hour and a quarter hour and a half and they’re some of the harder sessions should most people be fueling within that session or if they

have something just prior it can get them through it. Yeah it depends so depends what you’ve done before and then depending on what you’re doing after as well I think I always come back to triathlon where that swim is not their only session for the day typically. So what is going on before that and after that. For swimming you can typically survive on whatever you’ve had pre if we’re talking about elite level athletes though so working with Dan Atkins guys and the development squads for triathlon Australia they always had some sort of fuel on deck if it’s a performance session because their needs are so much higher than somebody that is just an age group triathlete so they might have a bit of sports drink in their bottle. Some of the girls sometimes had some coconut water which has got the same amount of carbohydrate in it as sports drink and it’s got those electrolytes as well you don’t necessarily need anything solid on the side of the

pool unless you get really hungry but just thinking about what you’re doing before and then whether you need something during or not would depend on your overall training load and what types of sessions you’ve got coming into that and coming out of that as well. And why does swimming make people hungry? I know my wife has been swimming she hadn’t swam like a lap since she was probably 16 years of age and then she injured her hip a few months ago and has had to start swimming and so he’s come back from the pool she’s like my god I’m so hungry and get this when I not as much when I run when I do pilates it’s just like a different sort of thing and I certainly find the same so what’s the go there? Yeah it’s an interesting one it’s because you’re swimming in a temperature controlled body of water so pools typically what 27 degrees Celsius that’s different to our body temperature so we’re trying to date what’s going on with our core body temperature and so

typically when it’s a really hot pool or it’s a really high lactic acid developing session those types of things blanch your appetite and so you may not be as hungry after a hot pool or a really high lactate session but compared to running or cycling doing that sort of distance or volume of training in a cooler pool you just feel so much more hungry because we cool ourselves so much more effectively into that pool water whereas if we did that same session on land we’re not as good as at cooling ourselves down so it’s hard to equate appetite to training intensity when we’ve got a pool involved because it’s going to make us so much more hungry increases all our appetite compared to if we did that session on the land. Does that mean we’re using more carbohydrates to burning more fuel than usual and we need to account for that? Not necessarily we use smaller muscle groups swimming typically so you might glycogen deplete some of those smaller

muscles like a deltoid in your arm but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are burning more calories overall particularly if you’re a efficient swimmer you can pull through the water and glide for a bit some people are like what is that Tyrone I have no idea how to do that but yet we don’t tend to burn as much compared to doing that same sort of work on land. And you mentioned carbohydrate periodization, dietary periodization before what are you referring to when you talk about that? So it just means we’re not eating the same things every day is the summary of that particularly for triathlon we have different types of training days we have lighter training days or those elusive rest days where we don’t do a lot or a light day might mean just an active recovery session but it’s an easy training day your carbohydrate needs on that type of day are so different to if you went did a three four six hour endurance ride you’re burning so much more carbohydrate

on a long session day so you need to eat differently to support that that is one of the key mistakes I see triathletes make is that they just eat the same thing all the time like particularly if you’ve got a job that is maybe a Monday to Friday you just plug into your usual rhythm Monday to Friday and eat the same breakfast maybe the same lunch dinner might have a bit of variety but it’s generally like whatever your normal rhythm is and then we hit the weekends where if you have a job a full-time job that’s typically where your long endurance sessions fall your energy burn carbohydrate burn on those days is going to be so much greater and I see people fall into two camps here they either just eat everything they can see they might go out to dinner more or grab takeaway they’ve got plenty of access to their cupboard to their pantry so there’s lots more snacking that occurs compared to when you’re stuck at work and in a rhythm or other people the

other people go the other direction where they just don’t eat much at all because they’ve lost their rhythm and routine with eating so they might skip a meal or you’re skipping a meal because you’re out on the bike all morning and then you just plug back into the usual rhythm so puritization in a nutshell is not eating the same thing each day and eating to support the work that you’ve done this episode of the podcast is proudly bought you by form goggles they’re currently running a holiday sale between December 8th to the 20th where you can receive 20% off your purchase if you purchase through our link formswim.com forward slash effortless so this is the best time to get the goggles for yourself or to give the gift of smart swimming then more than a pair of goggles meet the world’s most powerful swim platform see yourself improve with form smart swim goggles including a free one year membership when you purchase your goggles for

only 228 US dollars now they’ve currently changed up the offer where you can now get the goggles and you have that one year membership included for free and then if you’d like to continue with the membership going forwards it’s only 15 US dollars a month where you get access to their workouts training plans and their custom workout builder but you’ll always have access to the real-time data of the goggles so you’ll never lose access to that so if you’d like to swim without stopping to look at a pace clock or your watch and get live metrics right inside your goggles including your time distance pace they are right there in your goggles with form goggles I’ve used these for over 12 months now and I’m a huge fan of these goggles and use them for majority of my sessions and find them very helpful especially for gauging my time my effort and my pace and I think it’s a very helpful tool for the majority of swimmers that I would normally work with

so to get your pair of form goggles go to formswim.com forward slash effortless that’s formswim.com forward slash effortless yes it sounds like you’re really focused on making sure that it’s there’s no obviously one size fits all and that’s never the case even with swim technique and drills and all that sort of stuff it’s very individual and so with the coaching that you’re doing how much does it differentiate between the different athletes that you’re working with is there like the fundamentals that you’ve got you’ve talked about the cake and then is it just adjusting those fundamentals for the different people that you’re working with like how individualized are these nutrition plans that you provide for people they’re fully customizable and individualized because you’re right there is no one size fits all with nutrition we definitely have our evidence-based guidelines but every athlete is different I’ve got athletes inside the academy

program one guy Lewis has never been able to put weight on his entire life like the last 10 years he’s really struggled and then in the last 12 months I’ve been able to get two kilos on him versus another athlete who I’m not going to name who wants to lose 10 to 15 kilos and so my advice to both of them is always going to be different so the academy is set up that I give you the information and we go through the training and then all of the athletes inside get me live every week on pow hour where we fully customize and individualize everything so we’ve just finished our 70.3 and full distance Ironman race nutrition plans and every athlete inside has their own custom race plan because everyone’s really different we’ve got somebody like Jason who is going through brain cancer treatment and has just had radiation and he doesn’t have balance on the bike so his plan is designed for him to never take his hands off the handlebars

even in an Ironman distance event we should be able to get through that versus else wants to eat on the bike and has the ability to maybe grab a bottle behind their saddle or down between their legs on the tube so every plan is different I don’t believe in generic and it’s my job as an advanced sports dietitian to help you fast track that research into something that’s practical and easy to implement and in terms of being individualized there’s a lot of athletes would be probably leaning more towards leaning up but still having the energy to perform well on race day and to train what are some of those things that you would steer towards or where does your mind go when you’re thinking about this is how someone might be able to lose a couple of kilos over several months I went on a we had our Maldives swim camp a couple of months ago and after that I had a it was awesome and I think I put on weight there because it was a buffet

breakfast, lunch and dinner and the food was amazing and I’m like no this I’m going to skip this meal I don’t need it but I didn’t have the willpower to do that once while I was there and that’s okay because you’re in the Maldives live at large and the thing was I had a surf trip for seven days after that where we surfed three times a day I was in the water for seven hours each day and I would have lost I would have lost three kilos on that camp because I left at 87 came back at 85 and I reckon I would have put on a kilo pre-surf trip so aside from exercising for seven hours a day and eating healthy can someone do to lean up if this is a personal question for me yeah what can someone do get to lean up oh goodness am I talking to you am I talking to the listeners because my advice changes depending on who it is I was asking for a friend of mine just asking for a friend I did do a podcast episode on my podcast on this topic how to lean up

and maintain energy for triathlon training if listeners do want to dive into that in more detail it is really periodization and getting that right is one of the fundamentals of leaning up and still fueling training because what triathletes do and what any athlete does really if they want to lean up is they go on a calorie deficit they cut typically carbohydrate out first and sometimes when you are a high performing athlete whether it’s mental or not or physical you want to do everything right and so we go a bit too hard in cutting out our overall energy intake for the day and if that happens then you don’t have the fuel and the energy to support your training one of the things I’d get you to consider or anyone is to think about when is a good time to do that you don’t want to be chasing your tail and trying to drop a whole heap of body fat in your key race season you want to be looking at doing that potentially more so in the off season

or your pre season so that by the time you get to racing where you want to be training and performing and fueling to the best of your ability you can do that you can stoke the fire with fuel so that you can get all those beautiful adaptations that we want to get out of training rather than putting yourself into a hole and not performing at the best of your ability through training as well if you’re in season and you can’t go on a bit of a health kick I hate that term you want to think about cutting out I guess just crap in your diet I don’t need to tell you what crap is right chocolate alcohol or minimizing it junk food like anything that’s deep fried hot chips croissants all the tasty things keeping those things to a minimum not saying cut it out all together because that’s not the type of dietitian I am I’m like all about eating delicious food but thinking about where you’re putting those maybe they’re a little bit more strategic

on those heavier training days and not eating the whole buffet on a light or a rest day so a bit strategic around where you’re putting your calories it’s that periodization concept again and then thinking about where you are in your season is now a good time to look at some fat loss or should you be doing a in a bit more of an off season where your training performance doesn’t matter so much a lot of this comes down to willpower and changing habits and totally replace replacing habits so there’s some things that you’ve seen work for people along your journey as a dietitian that’s helped them stick to these things yeah you’re right it’s changing habits that you’ve had possibly for your whole life when you if you ever have little people or anybody listening that’s a parent you’re setting your kids up now for what their food habits and behaviors are like in adulthood do you have anything Brenton that you stick with now that you did when you were a kid

when I was in high school my mom would occasionally get like a packet donuts for us to have when we got home from school and we would I don’t know how many would have but I don’t know let’s say it was like two after school and that I’d say for now I’ve kicked it but certainly in my early 20s I would okay I was coaching I was coaching a squad and beforehand so at four o’clock I’d train for an hour and a half it’d be a hard session normally 5k working hard wouldn’t really eat much before then going to coaching and coaching for an hour and a half and then I would it’d be about 8 30 at night and I’d be driving home having not fueled after training and coaching and I’d be driving past coals and there was a time where I was devouring an entire cabri block or an entire packet of donuts every time after coaching because I hadn’t I think part of it was the maybe a childhood habit and a part of it was just I just wasn’t fueling right I wasn’t getting no recovery

no recovery at all and yeah in your 20s you can get away with it but it’s obviously not good for you but and I knew at the time but I just I couldn’t stop myself from doing it but I certainly see some of those habits that I may have got as a kid they certainly do that you have played out later on in life yeah I think the first step is being aware of it you don’t really understand that you have these habits and behaviors until somebody maybe points it out or you’re trying to fix something or go down a different trajectory and you’re starting to think about all those things that you have yeah being aware would be the first step and then understanding what you actually want to achieve or what you want to do about it a lot of us have food reward as a behavior that’s been set up from childhood if you’re ever upset or you played a game of netball or soccer and then you went and got ice cream after all of those things those little linking behaviors

are things that you really need to be careful of not setting up in your kids now because that stuff that happened in our day sound like an old person eat everything that’s on your plate type stuff or you can’t have dessert until you’ve eaten your broccoli all of those things have been set up from childhood so I spend a lot of my job untraining habits that people have created and again it’s I guess coming back to those foundations getting your fueling and recovery right is key and then thinking about what else it is that is a habit or behavior that you have and then taking small little incremental actions to change it so you’ve got as an example I don’t want to keep coming back to this athletic greens I feel like they’re getting too much air time for a product it’s too personal to me anyway so I don’t

I don’t love it but you so you change your coffee by putting something else in that you think is better for you so it’s doing things like that doing a swap for somebody that might eat sweet after a meal again that’s something that’s probably habitual and you’ve been doing since childhood you have dinner and then dessert have something else there instead that’s still sweet to help you get away from having row or tour of chocolate every night at dinnertime so maybe it’s something like a herbal tea something like licorice is quite sweet like licorice tea if you feel like you have sweet cravings maybe it’s having a piece of fruit maybe it’s having some yogurt so that you’re having something sweet still giving those brain receptors kind of what they want and then slowly stepping away it does take there’s lots of research around how long it takes to change a habit I’ve heard 30 days I’ve heard 38 days I’ve heard 45 I guess the summary of that is it takes time

and it’s putting in place what you want to do differently just and being consistent on a day to day basis if you’re used to having sweet after dinner try subbing it out or if you’re a cold turkey type person go cold turkey and it’s probably going to take a week or two for that craving of sweet to subside if you are a habit tracker type person there’s lots of apps that you can get on your phone or if you’re a physical list person the active actually like physically ticking something or crossing out has got so much more power physiologically psychologically than just thinking about it so I guess it’s yeah being aware thinking about what you actually want to change and then putting some steps in place to do it and then keeping yourself accountable so if there’s something that you want to cut back like eating chocolate every day then set yourself a little reward for a month’s time of not doing that and make it a non-food reward

and something that you actually really want so whether it’s some new running shoes or a new cycling kit or something that really excites you to do it then you’re more likely to implement that long term and if you fall off the wagon it’s all good just get back on the next day don’t wait until the whole next Monday comes around to get yourself back on track because that’s going to help that momentum too if you can just get yourself back on track the next it’s the first couple of days are always the hardest I find first one, two, three days whether it’s cutting out something sweet at night one thing I went through recently was two weeks ago, three weeks ago I cut out coffee for a week and I hadn’t gone probably a decade without having one coffee in a day and the first day I was having headaches I had to sleep for an hour and a half I was probably coming down from it I’m like if I had ever had drugs before and was addicted

this is the closest I’ll ever get to it it is a drug yeah and it wasn’t pleasant but then the second day was all right and then after that I felt great for those seven days after that that I was off it but a similar thing happens if you’ve been on sweets at night and then the first day or two you get those cravings but then after that they subside and you don’t think twice about it so knowing that that’s coming can be very helpful similar with when I’m working with people on their technique it’s like knowing that you’re probably going to be a bit frustrated and awkward and clunky when you’re changing things if you expect it and you know that you’ve got to push through that period to then get to the other side can help them mentally because if you don’t know that then you’re just going to hit that awkward period with your swimming or get that urge or that craving without knowing okay here it comes here’s that craving but if you can identify it

and just separate yourself from it you can then make the better decision yeah amen and the thing I want to finish on here Taran is every nutrition so going back 10 years ago when I was training at four o’clock in the afternoon doing a hard session and then not eating anything or not eating much at all before then coaching for an hour and a half so that’d be a period of four to five hours where I hadn’t eaten but I’d trained hard what’s happening there when I drive past coals and I go and get the block of chocolate like why is that so hard to resist and what would be a better choice to make there what should I have done looking back at that so what you should have done is had some sort of recovery snack or something convenient for you that you could have after your session before coaching thinking about the four hours of recovery we want to be ticking off those boxes in a way that is perfectly designed for you so your recovery meal

is different to mine because you’re a different human being to me but it’s understanding what you need for you and then building something that works for your lifestyle to tick those right boxes too so the first R is refuel you want to put some carbohydrate back in your fuel tank for whatever you’ve just burnt for that session and thinking about your overall training load as well so how much carbohydrate depends on a number of factors it depends it’s like my favorite saying with nutrition it depends I’m going to get a printed on a t-shirt but how much carbohydrate you need is different to me so it’s understanding your specific needs and meeting those then we want to make sure we repair with some protein as well and we want to make sure we’ve got enough to maximally stimulate all of our muscle protein and recovery pathways we want to make sure that we are rehydrating and water is fine it’s the best fluid for rehydration

you don’t need chocolate milk you don’t need sports drink or anything like that as long as you’re eating that food has more electrolytes in it than a bottle of sports drink anyway and then the last R which most people forget is what I call revitalize and that’s putting lots of vitamins and minerals back in the tank because they are the precursors for our recovery plus we have higher needs for a lot of things when we are more active than the general population so they’re the four Rs that you need to tick making sure you’ve got a perfectly formulated meal for you it’s going to look different to your training buddy and then we talk about this window of opportunity we want to try and get that in within sort of 30 to 45 minutes after your training session if you are backing up and going again in less than 24 hours so for triathletes that’s pretty much every single session for swimmers depending on what level of swimmer you are

that’s probably every single session as well but you are going through coals and looking for those really high carbohydrate fast digesting simple sugars because that’s what your body is needing it’s what it’s craving and your resolve is weak there because all of your hunger hormones are probably at their highest because you’ve just put yourself into a massive hole now there are some adaptations that happen by not recovering but that is very much an elite principle and not something that I would dabble with unless you’re someone like Ash Gentile and Matt Hauser those sort of elite level athletes it’s not an age group or everyday athlete type strategy one of the things you mentioned there was if you are backing up again in 24 hours that you should have that recovery window 30 to 40 minutes why not? if let’s say you’re not training the next day you won’t be back again for two days why is it less important? because you’ve got time

you’ve got time to fill up your glycogen fuel tank again so glycogen is our storage form of carbohydrate in our muscles and it takes it a 24 to 48 hours for that to fill back up again when it’s emptied now you may not have done a glycogen depleting session where you’ve emptied your fuel tank just like a car if you don’t have any fuel you can’t go anywhere so it takes a bit of time to fill that up if you’ve got the time you probably don’t have to be as aggressive with your recovery practices but if you have a short space of time like less than 24 hours then you really want to get a jump on it because you don’t have much time to do all of that process is there any advantage to delaying it? yeah there are some adaptations that occur by not carbohydrate refeeding but again it’s an elite strategy it is more likely to put an age group athlete into low energy availability doing that so please don’t do that don’t listen to this and go

I’m going to try that I’m doing good I encourage all age group triathletes unless you are winning Kona you need to be much more aggressive with your recovery after every single session we had Gustav Eden on the podcast who won the Bruce and Iron Man World Champs and they’re obviously very structured and scientific about their nutrition and all of that they’re very calculated with it and it seems like there’s a big more of a shift going in that direction rather than trying to get as a lean as possible there’s a big shift more in that direction when people see the results that the Norwegians are having and I’m sure you’re probably looking at that going this is a good thing are you talking about the body composition? yes that’s what I’m talking about in terms of like those if you look at Gustav Eden Christian Blumenfeld they look like Blumenfeld for example he’s a bigger I say bigger guy like they appear to be less concerned

about being lean to be able to go fast that they’re more focused on making sure that they’ve got the right fueling and they’ve got the right strategy for them to be able to sustain their speed and their energy throughout a race yeah they’re the best in the world so don’t question what they’re doing they are amazing athletes I’m very disappointed in the limelight that Blumenfeld’s body composition gets like he looks mean he looks fast he looks strong triathlon back in sort of Sydney Olympics 2000s that sort of timeframe back then athletes were just striving to be the lightest and leanest that they possibly could and since then the sport has very much evolved now we’re looking at much stronger athletes who have more muscle mass on and we’re seeing less stress fractures and less incidents of low energy availability and faster times is the result so I think that’s a really good message for triathletes and in any endurance athlete to hear

is that lighter is not necessarily better you want to have good strength to power to weight ratio and strength through particularly the bike but when we see things like draft legal racing you have to have a really strong swim too otherwise you’re left at the back on the bike as well so Lena is not always necessarily better one of my guys Jason inside the academy he is probably in the worst physical shape he has ever been in I hope he doesn’t mind me saying that but he is he came to me very carb phobic from like F-40 to 5 challenge type mentality where they cut all carbohydrate out and he’s understood over the last 12 months how to eat properly for triathlon and feel better and yes he’s put on some body fat because he was probably his metabolism was probably pretty short but he is performing the best he’s ever performed ever with more carbohydrate on board so it’s a delicate balance for sure for triathletes you’ve got to be lean

but strong and that’s not necessarily skinny I appreciate you coming on the podcast to share all of these things so Tyrone where should someone get in touch with you if they’re interested in the academy or contacting you what’s the best way to do that best place to do that is probably the website dietitianapproved.com but you’ve got to spell dietitian with two T’s not a C and the page there is the academy page I also have the triathlon nutrition academy podcast if people want to hear all things triathlon nutrition and if you send me a DM on Instagram at dietitian.approved you’ll get me in the DMs there as well fantastic well Tyrone thank you very much for being on the podcast and I’ve really enjoyed this chat and there’s a I think a lot that a lot that people can take out of it and just to let you know I don’t stop at coals and get a block of chocolate or a pack of donuts anymore I’m a changed man no judgment

and I’m sure I’ll all improve after this as well and only continue to get better so thanks again Tyrone yeah awesome thank you so much thanks for listening to the effortless swimming podcast if you’d like us to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to www.effortlesswimming.com