Often referred to as the fourth discipline, it's no secret that nutrition is an important part of triathlon. On today's episode, expert sports nutritionist, Dr. Krista Austin explains the connection between your performance goals, body composition, and food consumption. Dr. Austin also weighs in on finding your race weight, metabolic factors based on race length, and periodization of macros for daily training. Learn how to achieve your optimal performance through a focused approach to your nutrition.
TriDot Podcast .085
Performance & Nutrition: Making the Connection
Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain.We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.
Andrew Harley: Happy New Podcast Day Folks! So I went back and counted, and this is our 15th podcast episode with Dr. Krista Austin talking all about nutrition. And today we will be taking much of what we have learned from her in the past and building upon it, as we talk about having a performance mindset with the nutrition choices that we are making.
Dr. Austin is an exercise physiologist and nutritionist who consulted with the U.S. Olympic Committee and the English Institute of Sport. She has a PhD in exercise physiology & sports nutrition, a master's degree in exercise physiology, and is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist. Krista how’s it going today!?
Dr. Krista Austin: It’s going well. It’s nice and sunny here in San Diego. So just starting to hopefully enjoy that consistently as we move into the summer months here.
Andrew: Ahh yes, the typical San Diego weather, right? The weather you’re famous for there.
Dr. Austin: Yeah, but it’s not always that way. So...sometimes you show up and you’re like, “Wait a minute.This doesn’t look like the pictures in the book.” So we’re glad the good weather is here.
Andrew: Also joining us for this conversation is Pro Triathlete and Coach Elizabeth James. Elizabeth is a USAT Level II and Ironman U Certified Coach who quickly rose through the triathlon ranks using TriDot--from a beginner to top age-grouper to a professional triathlete. She is a Kona & Boston Marathon Qualifier who has coached triathletes with TriDot since 2014. Now Elizabeth, normally when we do our interviews with Dr. Austin you and I are together here in North Dallas, but today you’re somewhere else. Tell us a little bit about where you are right now.
Elizabeth James: Right now I’m in St. George, Utah. So definitely a different take on the scenery. Seriously, I am looking out the window at the red rocks and it is absolutely gorgeous. Andrew, I’m sorry, but I think both Dr. Austin and I have you beat in terms of scenery today.
Andrew: You both certainly do and of course by the time our athletes listen to this podcast you will have raced St. George 70.3 in the Pro Field so congrats in advance on what we hope and what we pray will be a great race.
I’m Andrew the average triathlete, voice of the people, and captain of the middle of the pack. As always we’ll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our nutrition main set conversation, and then wrap up with our cool down. Lots of good stuff, let’s get to it!
Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.
Andrew: From vineyards and distilleries to coffee plantations and apple orchards; there are many places where food is grown, picked, produced, or processed where the public can tour, taste, and even walk away with some tasty souvenirs. For our warm up question today, if you were to partake in the top food creation tour or experience of your choice….Where would it be, and what food or beverage would you be partaking in? And I will say the inspiration for this question...just the other day I was on Instagram and saw my family living in central Florida was enjoying a day out in the strawberry fields of central Florida doing some strawberry picking and they were enjoying that with my nieces and nephews and made a nice family event out of it. And it just got me wondering what you guys might say would be your top pick for a food based experience. Coach Elizabeth James, let’s start with you.
Elizabeth: Well, probably no surprise that mine would absolutely have to do with chocolate.When I was in high school I had the opportunity to tour about seven different European countries kind of on a choir trip and I loved chocolate then just as much as I do now. And oh my gosh! It was delicious there. So I’ve always talked about how when we go back to Europe with Charles and me, let's spend some time not only enjoying the sites, but really enjoying the food. So I’m thinking some European dark chocolate tour. Learn how to make the chocolate and taste all of it. That would be my top pick.
Andrew: Yeah, I didn’t even consider that and I think that’s fantastic Elizabeth. I think you really nailed that one. Sounds super tasty, sounds super scenic, and just a super great choice there from you. Dr. Austin, what would be your food experience of choice?
Dr. Austin: Well, this is a really tough one for me because I just like to experience all kinds of foods no matter where I’m at. So I actually went online and just saw a variety of them; from ones in Sigond, to Lisbon, to Venice, to Mexico City. And I’ll just tell you Andrew, I would like to try all of them!
Elizabeth: There we go.I like this!
Dr. Austin: So that’s actually my answer. You know, one of the best things about traveling is just embracing the culture that you’re going to meet and the new foods and trying things out. Oftentimes if you're on a trip it’s not always about adhering to your standard nutrition plan or what have you. It’s about experiencing what another country has to offer.For me it’s really about that and I think any of the ones that are out there around the world I would love to enjoy.And even going to a city like New Orleans here in the US, which I haven’t really spent a lot of time in, but I hear it’s great to do food tours there too. So a lot of different ones out there. I’m open to all of them!
Andrew: Also a great answer! I won’t even get mad at you for not picking just one because I think you’re absolutely right. I think that wherever you are traveling, experiencing that local cuisine via a food tour...I mean, you can’t beat it. And I’ve certainly tried things in other countries and other parts of the world that I would never have tried back home in Dallas and really surprised myself with some things that I liked better than I thought I might.
My answer for this question was pretty simple. I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii and do a Hawaiian pineapple plantation tour. I love pineapple. It’s one of my favorite fruits. It’s great dipped in chocolate. It’s great salted. It’s great on the grill. It’s great in a lot of forms and obviously if you can get a pineapple straight, primely picked from the plantations in Hawaii they’re just so good and juicy and golden.My wife for Christmas one year ordered me a pineapple from Hawaii and it was so tasty, so delicious, and I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii. It’s been a bucket list place for us . At the time we are recording this, I am actually just a few months away from my wife and I traveling to Hawaii with some friends and so I, thankfully, am going to have the opportunity to do a Hawaiian pineapple tour here shortly in the coming months.
Elizabeth: Oh good!I was just going to ask about that.I was like, hey I know you’re going pretty soon. Is this going to be a part of the trip? So good deal!
Dr. Austin: For sure!And that’s a good one Andrew.You’ll enjoy that.
Andrew: Outstanding! I can’t wait to partake. Well, hey guys! We’re going to throw this out to all of our listeners on social media. Make sure you are part of the I Am TriDot Facebook Group where we pose our podcast warm up question every single Monday. So go find today’s question. What food based tour or experience do you just most want to try.Maybe it’s something you’ve done before with the family. Maybe it’s something that you’ve never done, but had your eye on. Go find the post and let us know in the comments.
Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…
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Andrew: Of all the episodes of the TriDot Podcast we have released thus far, our 4th most listened to show, currently, is Episode 14 called Performance Nutrition for Triathletes. It’s no secret that nutrition is essential to success in this sport. And so many, many, many, many nutrition focused episodes have come since we hit the foundations of performance nutrition back on episode 14. Today we will be putting a lot of the pieces of things that we have learned with Dr. Austin together, as we talk about the intersection where our performance goals, body composition, and food intake all come together.So Dr. Austin, as we get into the good stuff here today, what is performance nutrition. I mean, you’ve told me before that that’s something you find yourself just constantly having to define for new athletes as they start to work with you. What do athletes need to understand heading into a conversation about performance nutrition?
Dr. Austin: Yeah, the first thing they’ve got to understand is that we’re not going to go down your traditional road of are you getting enough calcium, fiber, the whole bit.I’m actually going to hope that you’ve already covered down on health at that point and that you know where health stands. I’m going to try to get you to move into the actual use of performance metrics to help drive the decisions that you’re going to make on metabolism and manipulation of your body weight and composition so that you’re the most competitive athlete you can possibly be. Really what we’re looking to do is be more intentional in our use of food to support performance goals and view the food based on that rather than body image or just health goals. And really we’re hoping to facilitate optimal performance through recovery and fueling strategies that produce the highest quality of training and competition possible.Therefore, maximizing your training adaptations in the best athlete you can be. The biggest difference in performance nutrition is we use performance analysis to do that rather than your standard dietary intake.
Andrew: Do you find when you’re working with an athlete, the approach to food-based on performance goals as opposed to body image, or having a certain look, or having a certain weight...does viewing it through the lens of performance typically really drastically change how an athlete needs to eat?
Dr. Austin: Yeah, I think it does if they’re prepared to accept it. It’s kind of a mature step to take Andrew and so what we oftentimes have to ensure is that the athlete is actually prepared to go down that road.Not everyone is ready to go take that step on that path and say, “Hey, I’m prepared just to go ahead and perform.”Because sometimes it means in the sport of triathlon, I want you to sit a little heavier because on the bike you’re more powerful and here’s it’s relationship to your overall performance.So that’s kind of a new concept for people to take on is that they go, “Oh, you want me to be heavier? Oh, umm, okay.” It really is one of those things whether you’re working with athletes or coaches or whoever it is that you have to make sure that they’re ready for that step because it's a big step forward with nutrition.
Elizabeth: I like how you kind of categorize that as a step in this nutrition process though too.Because the first thing you went and said, we need to have the foundation of health. Like, we need to make sure that first we’re healthy. You have kind of that basis down and then we can start looking at performance. And it still is a little bit of a shift in mindset of okay, once we have this foundation, we’re healthy, now what are the gains for their performance. I’m glad that we kind of put that out there right in the first question. As Andrew also alluded to a little bit ago, we do have some earlier podcast episodes where you’ve kind of taught us some of those foundations of performance nutrition.What is the difference between that original performance nutrition foundation and what we hope to teach athletes in this podcast that’s a little different from what they’ve learned so far?
Dr. Austin: What I want to do is give you some examples that I’ve worked in over the years. I’m going to use endurance sport, but I’m also going to touch on some of the other aspects like weight classified sports or team sports just to give you a good understanding of how we start to come from a performance approach once we know an athlete is healthy and we can step down that road. So if I know an athlete is healthy in an endurance sport, typically I then start to walk down the road and say, “Okay, what is your discipline? What are you best suited for?” Are you an ITU athlete or are you a long course athlete? Or maybe you do sprint triathlons and are super competitive at that. Or if you’re just an endurance runner the question is, do you specialize in the marathon or are you more of like a 1500, 5K runner? That’s going to determine how much we start to distribute a variety of things whether it’s the focus on body weight and composition and the factors that we’re going to look at. Regardless, if you take a look at a lot of those sports, we’re going to ask a couple questions. First and foremost, you’re going to ask how fast is the athlete? And then secondly you might ask how quickly do they fatigue and how does that play into their actual events? So it involves really working with the coach quite closely.That is a new mindset for a lot of people is that they turn around and go, “Oh, so you’re not going to weigh me?You’re not going to body comp me initially, but you want to do a performance analysis?” You want to understand my best event and how I’m going to get to my performance to then drive the decisions we make. So it’s a bit of a different mindset. It can even be evaluation of products, let's say, for training and based on the type of improvement they give us with regard to output and recovery. Most athletes say, “Well, isn’t this what a company is advertising to me with regard to health or with regard to how they maximize carbohydrates for me or what have you?The type of protein they’re providing me?” And I turn around and say, “Well, how did it impact your output in training? How did it impact your recovery?” If it’s not improving those factors, is that the one that we should be utilizing. So it’s a very different approach where we kind of shelf the old; you know here’s the characteristics of the carbohydrate and we turn around and look at the actual performance metrics. Or we turn around and shelf the characteristics of the protein and we take a look at how it’s impacting us with regard to performance. If you take a look at some of the other sports that I’ve worked with over the years...let’s take weight classified sports. It’s really based on people’s technical and tactical capabilities. We used to do a lot of this when I was in the sport of Taekwondo where they would look at an athlete’s given weight and the weight class they wanted to be in and they’d say, “Look Krista, we need you to manage their body weight without compromising performance as we put them into this weight class.” Sometimes people look at that and go, “Oh, how are you supposed to do that and maintain their health?” But oftentimes it’s what happens on the competitive level is that what you decide about body weight and composition is dependent on how competitive they are. Especially the more competitive they become on the international scene. You see more and more of that. So over the years we’ve made decisions based on height and weight rather than just body composition. Or what is the actual leg reach of an athlete in Taekwondo? Or what’s the tactics a certain athlete utilizes in combative sports, and is our athlete competitive against that based on what they have in their toolbox? So that’s really more of a performance approach and that’s the coaches turning around and saying, “Within reason, can you keep this athlete within this weight class?” So really a different mindset. Then if you’re looking at something like team sports, they might be going to other countries and they have to understand unique limiters to performance with regard to like food availability. So we would turn around with a team sport and I’d say, “Okay, look. You get 5 kilograms of weight on the plane for food.Here is the food that will be available in that country. You’ve got to maintain your performance. So what are we going to pack in order to sustain performance?” It wasn’t about health per se even though health is a component of that obviously, but it was really about how are we going to get through this because you can only take so much with you. That’s where you really just say, “Look, we’ve got to stay focused on performance.” I remember telling some of my female athletes, “Look, you’re going into a country where you don’t know what the protein sources will be available to you.”And it really was actually something they might have to avoid. So I said, “First and foremost if you’ve only got 5 kilos, what do you pack?” Protein powder, maybe some powdered milk. You’ve got to sustain performance on the field and there’s not sport nutrition products. Maybe you take some honey and then some electrolytes. So that’s really different to give that perspective on your nutrition. I said, “How are we going to sustain you because you’ve got to perform at the highest level and you might not have access to the food that you thought might help you do the best.” So that’s where we take a performance approach and look at the key performance metrics that we have to sustain and pack the bag based on that.
Elizabeth: I know right now I’m just like, “Wow!” There’s so much more to this even than I realized. That’s fantastic.
Dr. Austin: Yeah, that was fun to do with a group of girls and have to say, “Okay, you’ve got 5 kilos.” Right?You’ve only got 5 kilos you can take, what are we going to pack? That was for the food. They obviously had a bag they could take. But it’s definitely a different perspective on how you choose your food.
Elizabeth: Well, and as somebody that, you know, typically likes to drive to races because I can have all my things with me and I can have my cooler of food. Just personally, I’m thinking, “Man, that would be tough!” So new insights there for sure.
Dr. Austin: It definitely is! You have to stay focused on performance. You have to sit there and say, “I’m going to be put outside my comfort zone.” And I will tell you that’s one thing in elite sport, we consistently get put outside our comfort zone with food just because it oftentimes means traveling to foreign countries and figuring out how we are going to maximize performance with the resources that are available to us.
Andrew: So Krista, to take just that huge nugget of wisdom that you just shared and kind of that approach of bringing a performance mentality to our nutrition...For we, the everyday people of triathlon, who recognize that we want to bring a performance mindset to our tri nutrition,...we need to start taking these principles that you’re talking about for high performance athletes and applying them to ourselves for triathlon--where do we begin to even do that? What questions do we have to ask and what do we need to evaluate in our own diets?
Dr. Austin: So you heard my question about the distance that you participate in and that’s something that you’re always going to get from an athlete. Sometimes they participate in multiple, but they have a predominant one and so we always start with that...figuring that out and that’s usually pretty easy. Then you have to turn around and ask the athlete, “So what anchors your triathlon?Which sport discipline is the one that you never want to sacrifice?” Because it is your anchor and your like, this is the sport that I come from. Then you have to turn around and ask the coach, “Well, which discipline are you bringing up this year?” And this is going to impact how we start to manipulate probably body weight and composition or even work capacities in what the athlete has really going for them.Because at that point in time you have to work at your performance goals with a balance in mind that, you know what, this is the gift they came in with to the sport...so maybe they came from a swim background or a run background. And we look at each discipline and understand the limitations to performance and how we go about addressing and getting up and around them really. And how does the decisions we make about nutrition help us do that? That’s the fun part about triathlon. It’s a puzzle and the puzzle changes every year. So that’s how we have to look at the performance side of nutrition as well. If a coach is manipulating training that much because of the three disciplines we’ve got to flow with that and we’ve got to stay asking, “Okay, what’s your strength and which one are you going to manipulate this year and how do I need to get that to flow through swimming, biking, and running?”
Andrew: So just to kind of offer up myself almost as a guinea pig, tangible example. I came to the sport of triathlon with a stronger running background. I’m much stronger in the run than I am the bike or swim. With the bike being such a large portion of any race my coach, John Mayfield, is working with me on really improving my bike power; really improving my ability to hold my bike power for longer durations. So if you were working with myself being in those shoes, you’re corresponding with my coach, John Mayfield, on nutritionally how to support that...What Are just a few nuggets that you would say just to kind of give a tangible example of what that relationship looks like between an athlete’s goals and their nutrition?
Dr. Austin: So the first thing I would probably get is his perspective on your power-to-weight ratio and what does he think the potential is for the bike? And that oftentimes makes us turn around with the distance runners and say, “Oh, we might actually be better to go up in body weight and start to increase maybe some muscle mass in the lower body.” So I often take that question to coaches and say, “Alright. What do you want to do with this bike? What are the watts per kilo, and how’s that then going to impact the run?” So understanding that from your coach is important because as soon as you start to morph towards the bike you have potential to alter the run and the question is how much is it going to compromise it.So you’re going to ask him the same questions just even to start off--”How fast is Andrew? How quickly does he fatigue? And oh, by the way, what is your goal for watts per kilo?”And we would probably start the conversation there and make sure that we never compromise your run in the process.
Andrew: Very interesting. Let’s just kind of go through just the other disciplines in the sport and really talk through for an athlete, what are the implications for each discipline nutritionally.So if we start with the first discipline, we start with the swim...What do we need to look at and what experience can you share from having helped athletes optimize their performance in the swim leg of a triathlon.
Dr. Austin: Oftentimes with swimmers I like to...you know I talked about how fast are you, how quickly do you fatigue, but really it comes down to your biomechanical efficiency in the water. What is your body position in the water like? Over the years I’ll ask athletes, “Have you had a biomechanical analysis done in the water?” And they’ll say, “No.” But they turn around and think that if they get more muscle or they get leaner or they get lighter that they will swim faster and that is not always the case.I remember when I first started working in swimming, one of the things that I was asked to do at one point was to evaluate an athlete’s need to actually lose weight and improve their body composition. So I showed up, went to the site, and I brought a few things with me including a lactate analyzer, blood glucose monitor, and then dove into some of the biomechanical analysis they actually had on the athlete. And it was interesting because the athlete really was perfect body position in the water. When I looked at the ability to tolerate these maximal lactates I said, “You know what? Max lactate is the issue. They’ve got to go out and compete against someone who is prepared to kick very hard at the end of an open water race.” And that’s kind of where the rubber meets the road. So when you come out of that you say, “Look, I don’t want to hurt their efficiency at this point because they’re going to do phenomenally well just based on where they’re at. However, how do we improve that anaerobic capacity? How do we improve the ability to kick against the other top athletes?”So that’s really the position that I came from on it. You know, I got a call from a swimmer once saying, “Hey, I’d like to increase muscle mass because I think that’s going to make me faster. If I increase muscle mass that will also make me leaner.” And that’s not necessarily true. We had to go through the same questions I just talked about with that athlete and say, “What are your thoughts and beliefs and understanding about what’s limiting your performance? Is that the answer or do I just need to fuel your body better based on key sessions and find a good match between nutritional intake and optimizing the quality of work you can do in the pool?” So sometimes there’s just a few misnomers when people show up and they say let’s do performance nutrition. I know when I first started working in the sport of swimming I made the mistake of letting athletes get a little too light too soon and they swam really fast. And later on it was pointed out to me that I probably helped peak those athletes way too early on and needed to realize the benefits of kind of slowing down what they were doing, letting them maintain a little more body weight including probably a little more body fat and making sure that we didn’t peak them too soon. Now, granted they performed extremely well and everyone was happy with the performance. But when they looked back on it they said, “Where was the actual errors that kind of prevented the medal haul that they might have potentially been able to accomplish despite the massive improvement in performance. They said, “Well, Krista. We think you let them get a little too light too soon.” So a lot of lessons learned about the swim. And it does take good periodization of nutrition from body weight and composition to optimize the swim for an athlete.
Elizabeth: Okay, so kind of moving from the swim to our next discipline, the bike. What are some of the other aspects beyond kind of what we just went through that you would look out for at the bike discipline itself?
Dr. Austin: With the bike I also start to look at things like the metabolic factors just because oftentimes the bike can make or break you if you’re not able to master it no matter what background you come from. When you’re in the shorter distances it’s really about anaerobic tolerance, whether it’s the ability to metabolize carbohydrate or the ability to clear it really well or to even buffer lactic acid. So we’ll come at it from the standpoint view of what do you need to be able to tolerate on the bike metabolically to then get off of it and run well. We always focus on building this aspect out depending on the type of triathlon you’re racing in and really just sometimes it comes down to what is your potential there?What is your strengths? How are you going to get there? I know I’ve worked with some athletes over the years that they are so aerobic they don’t produce lactate and so we really just work on optimizing that anaerobic side because they don’t have it. So we will hold on to their ability to utilize fat well and then teach them to prime their body to actually use that anaerobic system because that’s actually going to help make their bike that much better if they learn to use that system. So it’s just very dependent on the athlete themselves. It’s usually the biggest component of any triathlon so it’s important that you get it right and that you know how to balance how lean you become with regard to the run to help manage the bike and therefore the swim. So a lot of things to consider and it’s really, when you come to do performance nutrition, a huge conversation that you have to have with the athlete and their coach.
Elizabeth: It’s so cool because I know that with RaceX we have our bike impact on run time and so your race time is planned out, optimized to make sure that the energy expenditure on the bike is going to be not too much, not too little, so that you still have your optimal run time.And it’s kind of like that with this nutritional component too that we need to optimize it so that your bike is strong, but you’re not also compromising what the athlete would be able to do on the run.
Dr. Austin: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it really does come down to creating that more anaerobic side on the bike.I find oftentimes I don’t work as much on the fat utilization side of the bike, but rather anaerobic tolerance, making sure they can clear lactate well, they know how to optimize carbohydrate metabolism as their going through all of that, and it really is where you can get the best integration I would say of just nutrition and training is on the bike itself.
Andrew: So after we complete the bike leg of a race, the next discipline is the run. We all know that how well we are going to run is somewhat dependent on what happens out there on the bike. What factors do we need to examine to perform our best on the run course?
Dr. Austin: So it’s interesting with the run. It is very dependent on body weight and composition and even then you’ve got to really take into account your factors like the environment for the racing that the person’s going to do that year. You know, do you need to accommodate it for a certain tolerance to the heat? And that is kind of your cause for improving body weight and/or composition. But even at the more advanced level I will tell you what we start to look at with the running is how do we morph towards the body type, or what we call somatotype of a runner? I remember in terms of training one of the athletes that I had is that the swim and the bike were so strong and really the athlete needed to become a good runner and the question was what does that mean? It came down to not only how you train, but also the fuel sources that you learn to provide them during running. Running is one of these where we can metabolize fat a whole lot better and as you become a good runner you actually start to kind of reshape the legs and that was something that he focused on after talking to another coach who had trained down in Kenya for years and he said, “No. You run long enough your somatotype, your body type in essence, begins to change.” So running is one of the ones where we look a lot at economy. We look a lot at body type to begin to understand how do we put you in the best position to perform optimally? It’s also the one that I will say once we get there we have to keep everything in perspective because people think lighter means faster and that’s not always the case to be honest. It’s a fun discipline to work with, but I will tell you it is the one where people have to be careful not to kind of cross that line and really get too focused on how much they weigh or how lean they are.
Andrew: And I’ve certainly heard some professional marathoners, particularly in the women’s field, talk about over the years they’ve learned that they actually perform better a couple pounds heavier than maybe what that college coach or what that high school coach told them they should be at. You know, they learn a little bit more, they add on a few pounds and actually find themselves performing better. I know for triathletes the balance is always you can add on some muscle, you can add on some weight and probably be stronger on the bike, but maybe just a little slower on the run or vice versa. I know for myself just anecdotally I always weigh somewhere in the ballpark of 140 pounds. I’m a short, little guy. And just anecdotally I’ve always felt like I run stronger when I’m more 137-138 pounds and I always feel like I can bike stronger at more 142-143. And that’s not a huge swing from one to the other, but even anecdotally I’ve found it just feels a little bit easier to hold a faster run pace when I’m 137 and not 143. What for just your average, at home, everyday triathlete...what is maybe the best way to kind of experiment and figure out maybe what that ideal weight should be to kind of balance those two sports if that makes sense?
Dr. Austin: Yeah, for everyday triathlete...I’m going to tell you, this means a commitment to the sport that is probably at a different level than some people want to take sometimes.But it really takes years of just working with your coach and doing things well and building to understand if there is really a relationship there for you. What I’ve learned about the sport of triathlon oftentimes is that until you get kind of the depths of your bandwidth with the sport we don’t really start to understand how much we can impact run versus bike with body weight and composition. So what I often tell most triathletes who are just getting into the sport or they’re doing it to really just enjoy it and have fun. I say go with what your coach is asking you to do and optimize training.Let’s do that first and over time, let’s find out what your body naturally leans towards as you become better and better. I think what they eventually learn is that I’m going to get a lot of gains my first three to four years in the sport at any distance and until they’re past that point we don’t necessarily know what that relationship is. So I always like to encourage triathletes to actually be very patient with regard to going down this road. It’s a tough road to go down. Things become far more refined and give it time because you may learn a lot about yourself with regard to cycling versus running that you never knew. And let your coach kind of guide you and help you take the time to do that one and just don’t rush it.
Elizabeth: I think kind of moving on from swim, bike, run...this begs the question where we see all of these claims about nutrients and omega 3, vitamin D being super important for performance nutrition. Is that so?Are there micro nutrients that can really enhance performance?
Dr. Austin: So this is a great question. I see a lot of claims or even statements in research articles where they talk about something like vitamin D actually having the potential to maybe enhance performance because people are maybe missing out on it. Today the evidence that we have with the research for vitamin D to do that is actually pretty low. I haven’t really seen studies that can support a micro nutrient like that or omega 3 to really say, “Hey, we’re going to go enhance performance.” In fact, I’ve seen athletes over the years with below normal vitamin D levels and they go out and they perform extremely well.That’s actually them. That is what their body looks like and we’ve had to accept it because their stores actually don’t ever get very high. Or you’ll have a top performer with high cholesterol, very little omega 3 intake, and they’re out there just crushing it.If we do work on their cholesterol and work on their omega 3 intake it doesn’t necessarily improve performance.So I think we have to be very careful about making those statements with regard to micro nutrients. Now that being said, if we have depletion of vitamin and minerals that are very important to help facilitate endurance sport, it’s not that they’re enhancing performance, but we have to ensure that we maintain enough of it to have functionality. Something such as iron is a good example of that. If your iron stores get too low, you’re going to lose your ability to carry oxygen. You’re going to lose your ability to buffer lactic acid. So we want to always make sure that our iron stores are adequate so we don’t kind of dig a hole for ourselves. On the flip side of that, you will see products out there such as tart cherry juice that will talk about its ability to improve sleep. That’s not necessarily a micro nutrient, but it is a food-like item out there--it’s juice that you can go buy off the store shelf--and they have shown that it has the potential to help improve sleep if you’re able to tolerate it. It’s got some sorbitol to it and if people drink it before bed, about 8 ounces, they’ve shown--you know 8 to 16 ounces I guess you could say throughout the day--can help improve sleep. So you might then indirectly improve performance. Tart cherry is filled with micro nutrients that are key antioxidants and that you would say, “Hey, we can minimize inflammation and maybe help reduce some muscle soreness and damage.” So do I have athletes that drink tart cherry? Absolutely! They enjoy it. They like it as their beverage of maybe recovery or before bed. It’s kind of their high glycemic carbohydrate that they have. So does it directly enhance performance? I would say no, but maybe indirectly it might serve a purpose. The same thing could be said for something with branch chain amino acids. People have used those for years to combat something known as central fatigue. That is something that begins to occur usually in our long course athletes as they go through a race. I know Elizabeth probably has experienced this over and over again in which during prolonged events the fatigue that begins to occur because of build up of serotonin, you’re going to build up a hormone called prolactin. Really if you have the branch chain amino acids there it’s thought to help mitigate that fatigue. So it’s something where we can use and really say, “Can we enhance performance with it?”So it’s an interesting concept that some people have success with and others don’t have success with. But we always have to sit back and say, “What is the role of what we’re putting in our bodies.” I don’t ever make the claim these micro nutrients are going to enhance your performance or if we enhance the profile of your protein content with branch chain amino acids you’re going to enhance performance, but it’s something that you can take into consideration underneath specific circumstances to see if it can help you.
Elizabeth: Well and I love that too because does tart cherry juice necessarily make you faster?No, but if it’s going to help you sleep better and help you recover better to do better in those training sessions to work on your functional threshold in the run, then yeah there’s a connection there down the line of how it can help with performance. Those were great examples.
Dr. Austin: So we’ve got to think from the performance perspective right, when we go to put something like that in. So it’s great examples.
Andrew: I’m thinking back to some of the earlier podcast episodes we’ve done with you and there were two episodes we did that were specifically about our general health supplementation for performance. What supplements out there on the market can actually help athletes and what is just kind of noise? Those were two really great, informative episodes. If I remember correctly, Dr. Austin, I remember you really conveying that you are a bigger fan of trying to get our micro nutrients from actual food sources as opposed to supplementing them if that’s possible with our diet.As we kind of start thinking with a very performance mindset, is that still the case or do you become a bigger fan of supplementing with supplements, aftermarket products, when you start thinking about the upper echelon of performance?
Dr. Austin: So what you typically see is that you will increase your level of supplementation the more you go down that performance road. But the question is how much of it do you actually need to do? Typically I use everything in moderation and if an athlete’s sitting there going, “Well, I’m going to improve my amino acid profile purely through my dietary supplement because I’m being performance focused.”I actually kind of halt the bus on that one and I say, “Well, no, no, no, no, no...these are in addition to what we look at for health and we’re using them purely for the performance perspective.” So it’s where you kind of have to draw that line with an athlete that if they’re doing a dietary analysis or maybe they keep track of their food on an app or something. I say, “Hey, don’t include your supplements in there.” I don’t necessarily want them there. I want the supplements just as like a note and when you took them and why you took them maybe just because I do want to try to keep that separated out from the health side and the performance side being we do this to enhance performance. So it’s a fine line. Sometimes we do end up committing to certain aspects like amino acids that might help us fulfill our daily needs, but at the same time the question is, why are we using them? If we’re using them to enhance performance, I’m good with that. But if we’re using it to help fulfill daily needs, I kind of halt the bus and go “Wait a minute, what’s happening here?”
Andrew: Very helpful!Something you mentioned towards the top of the episode is you talked about how when you’re entering training and you’re entering nutrition with a performance mindset, you don’t look right away with an athlete at their body weight. You don’t look at their body composition. You look at other factors first and we talked a little bit about the relationship between body weight and composition and your ability to bike and run.So just talk to us about where in the process of improving your performance and being performance minded...where in that process do you focus on body weight and composition?
Dr. Austin: You know, that’s a good question Andrew and I will tell you it is very different for every single person. For most people I usually recommend it as an aside and only see it if there’s a relationship there long term. I really don’t like for athletes to get super honed in on body weight and composition.Many improve over time regardless, even if they’re not sitting there measuring it. I watch athletes sometimes when we just get into the weight room and they start to lean up because they are fueling right and they’re using a good nutritional system that’s geared towards optimizing their food intake and their performance effects. They start to lean up anyway and you just watch it happen before their eyes and they look stronger. When I see that I say, “You know what, we’re enhancing performance.” We have to understand that over time that if they do that we maintain their health better usually and then when it gets to that real critical point we turn around and say, “Okay, we want to stay performance focused. We’re going to take performance analysis and we’re going to use it to then work on body weight and composition.” A lot of times you’ll see me just not even come near the topic which people find a little bit odd, but I’ve learned that performance analysis usually tells us when we need to shoot up a red flag and really go after looking at body weight and composition.
Elizabeth: So just to clarify a little bit and I know earlier we just briefly touched on race weight.Many athletes have read articles or blogs about getting to a specific race weight or that “ideal” race weight.Would you say that that is something that athletes should think about? Would you say that race weight is kind of a myth? How is that kind of related to performance nutrition and is that a viable concept or more just kind of this nuanced fixating on a particular number of the scale?
Dr. Austin: You know, I think for most people I think they should stay away from the scale.The concept of an ideal race weight is not always there for most people because we are the everyday person. The more elite you become, the more committed to sport you become in terms of working your way up through your capability level, to be honest, you start to accidentally find out if you do have a tendency to be better at something let’s say a couple pounds heavier or a couple kilos heavier than if you were not. I was working with an athlete last year that wanted to drop down from 140 pounds to 135 pounds; kept bugging me about it and yet performance was just going through the roof at 140. So finally I turned around and said, “Okay. Why don’t we try starting to bring the weight down. We’re starting to get into race season. You want to do this.” And I had intentionally kept caloric intake pretty high, really fueling their body to get high quality training. So we got down a couple pounds and the athlete was racing and all of a sudden turns around and goes, “I don’t know if I should go to 135.” I said, “Oh, why’s that? I thought you said you raced better at 135?” And they said, “I don’t know. I don’t think my bike is as strong at 138 as it was at 140.” And I said, “Oh, gosh! Really?” And what you find is that the athlete is then starting to self identify the relationship between performance and body weight. And I said, “Do you know how we found 140?” “Just training and really performing my best. Just doing my best in training.” And I said, “Exactly!” Based on where the athlete was at I said, “You know what? I think we found your race weight.” I said, “I don’t think it’s 135.” I said, “Your bike is that powerful. It’s that strong. So let me encourage you to be careful before you start to drop another couple of pounds. You might want to rethink this.” And that’s when the athlete actually stopped and said, “You know what? I am going to rethink it. Maybe I need to take it a couple more back up.” So it’s an interesting concept and I like to let athletes kind of just find it themselves. I know last year with another one I kind of noticed that the athlete was just starting to get thin. They don’t really weigh themselves and even the strength coach kind of said to the main coach, “You know, athlete is looking a little thinner.” Athlete doesn’t weigh themselves, but they are performing well, they feel good.” And that’s when sometimes I do throw up a little bit of a red flag and say, “Are we getting too light?” Then as you get into the more elite aspects of sport I will tell you that we have to pay attention to it in certain disciplines. We do have to know that sometimes for a few months we’re going to step out of maybe a safety zone that we don’t like to step out of for most people.And maybe it’s even just three to four weeks where they get a good bit lighter than their usual, and that might be 3 to 5 pounds for somebody, and they race there. But then they come back. They don’t stay there. The reason we are careful about that at that elite level is because we don’t want to ever compromise their health, something like bone density, and end up with a stress fracture. I’ve had that happen before where I would say to an athlete, “Look, you’re looking a little light. Let’s pull it back up. You know, if we stay too light for too long we’re going to get injured.” And you get blown off. You get told “I’m doing this. I’m racing well.” And the next thing you know, we have a stress fracture. So the more elite you become the more you find that you have to pay really good attention to the body weight and composition that athletes perform their best at. For the everyday triathlete I really encourage you; don’t worry about finding your ideal race weight. Don’t make that the goal. Stay focused on your performance goals and whatever happens with body weight and composition, just kind of let it play out and see if you can look to the long term.
Elizabeth: I think that’s a great approach.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s great.
Elizabeth: I think both Andrew and I were both jumping in to say the same thing there.
Andrew: Love that!
Elizabeth: I know that for me, that has kind of been my story and my journey with it too. I mean, I for a long time had a number in my head that I thought was race weight and I race probably 6-7 pounds heavier than what I used to think was that ideal race weight for me. But that’s where I’m performing better and that’s where I’ve had my best races. When I did get lighter, yeah, I mean I lost power. I lost energy. I wasn’t performing as well. So I think what you said there about just focus on performance and kind of see where your body naturally lands in that is really going to be helpful for athletes.
Andrew: So Dr. Austin, for our listeners today, they heard your wisdom on body composition.They’ve heard your wisdom on body weight. They’ve heard your wisdom on just how to approach your eating with your performance goals in mind as opposed to just genuinely trying to eat healthy. You know, you can be more targeted if you have your performance goals in mind with your nutrition. For someone that’s listened to this conversation today and heard all of that, maybe let’s just land the plane today with this...What are those first steps for an athlete that, maybe they don’t have a coach specifically they’re working with, maybe they don’t have a nutritionist that they’ve connected with yet. What are the first steps for them in terms of being more performance minded with their nutrition and their training?
Dr. Austin: I would say that choosing one discipline for the year and starting to go through some of the factors that we talked about. We talked about the ability to improve like carbohydrate metabolism.You know, compliment your anaerobic metabolism in the sessions that you’re doing. We could start there. We could also just say, “Hey, if you want to start looking at performance, maybe track your power-to-weight ratio for the year.” And don’t worry about it. Don’t get focused on it. Take notes and watch what happens. Learn a lesson from it and learn what it does to your swim and your run. Then you come back and say, “What did I learn this year?”That’s where I would actually tell most triathletes to start. I would say take a year just to learn. What is that lesson about the bike? Then learn how it impacted your swim and your run. So that’s where I would tell most to start and you don’t even have to seek out someone like myself to do that. You can just track it over time and then be reflective about it and then maybe start to seek that help because you think it has the potential to make a difference.
Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.
Andrew: So last week on the podcast episode 84 which was called “31 Race Day Time-Saving Tips” we opened the show with our warm up question like we always do which was, “What songs make up the 20 minutes of music that helps you get through your bike FTP tests?” As always, we threw that question out on the I Am TriDot Facebook Group and got some excellent responses, but even beyond the answers with everyone’s pump up music another really good idea emerged from the online conversation. On Spotify in particular you can share playlists with other listeners and search for playlists that are created by other people that have been made public. So a few athletes made the suggestion that all the TriDot athletes on Spotify should make their workout or FTP playlists public and then add the word TriDot somewhere in the name so that way other athletes can search for and find new playlists to listen to while working out. I thought it was a great idea and admittedly I don’t know how Apple Music or Pandora or other streaming apps work in terms of this working for athletes on those platforms, but just as a cool down public service announcement today...If you are an athlete that streams your music via Spotify, my personal FTP playlist and my workout playlists now include TriDot in the title. They are officially named “Andrew’s TriDot Workout Mix” and “Andrew’s TriDot FTP Playlist.” So if anyone wants to rock out to the same music that I do, go find those playlists and enjoy. And if you have some pretty awesome music playlists yourself that you would like to share with other TriDot athletes on Spotify, just make those playlists public, throw the word TriDot in there, and help the rest of us enjoy your taste of music for our next workout. I already cannot wait to hear what ya’ll are listening to in your workouts. It’s always really nice just to enjoy a change of pace from my own personal playlists from time to time. So I can’t wait to see what you guys throw out there on Spotify.
Well that’s it for today folks!I want to thank Dr. Krista Austin and Pro Triathlete Elizabeth James for talking with us about performance nutrition.Thanks to UCAN for partnering with us on today's episode. Enjoying the show? Have any questions or topics you’d like to hear us talk about? Head to TriDot.com/Podcast and click on “Leave us a Voicemail” to let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll do it all again soon, until then, Happy Training.
Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure to subscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew.For more great tri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Ready to optimize your training? Head to TriDot.com and start your free trial today!TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.