You’re a runner. You may be a member of a running room, maybe you read Runner’s World, in any case, you’re a runner through and through. You run long distances, but you understand that to stay injury-free, and to boost your endurance performance, you need to do some strength training. So how should you eat to support such seemingly opposite activities?
That’s what I’ll cover in this article, because for better or for worse, there’s no “best diet for joggers.”
See, what you should eat depends on a few factors, like:
- How much running and how much strength training are you doing?
- Whether you are trying to lose fat, gain muscle, or maintain
- Your personal responses to carbohydrates, fats and proteins
Original source: here.
Your Ratio of Running to Strength Training
This can also be divided into several groups, based on distance, as well as your season. In other words, if you’re a marathon runner in your “off” season, you may actually have a lower weekly mileage than a 10K runner in their season.
In every case, you should almost always be having more carbohydrates than anything else. As a percentage, it might be as low as 40% on the low end, to as high as 75% on the high end.
If you’re strength training twice per week, and running twice per week, you might have about 50-60% carbs, and 20-25% protein (the remainder would be fat).
If you’re strength training twice per week, and running 4-5 times per week, you might have about 60-75% carbs, and 20-25% protein (again, the remainder would be fat).
On your strength training days, you might choose to increase your protein content.
What are some carbohydrate-rich foods? That’s things like potatoes, rice, quinoa, beans, pumpkins, etc. What about protein-rich foods? Meat, fish and seafood. If you’re wondering “what about _______?” (fill in the blank with “eggs” or “cheese” or “beans”, etc.), read my article, What Are the Best Protein Source?
So far, we’ve been talking about ratios, but it goes without saying that the absolute amount of food that you should be eating should be higher for longer distances.
In other words, let’s say a 10K runner is eating a ratio of 50% carbs, and 20% protein, on a 2500-calorie-per-day diet, that’s 1250 calories from carbohydrates, and 500 calories from protein.
A marathon runner may be eating 50% carbs, and 20% protein, but eating 3500 calories per day, so now, that’s 1750 calories from carbs, and 700 from protein.
Ask your accountant for help with these calculations.
Whether you are Trying to Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, or Maintain
This one is fairly common sense, but if you are trying to lose fat, your activity levels should be higher, and your food intake should be lower. However, one big mistake that people make when trying to lose fat is to eat too little. That’s a great recipe for slowing down your metabolism.
The overall deficit (from a combination of nutrition and exercise) should be around the 500 calorie per day range.
So if you’re burning 700 calories per day through exercise, you should also raise your calories by about 200. Although the net loss in calories would be 500. A big mistake would be burning 700 calories per day through exercise, and actually lowering calories.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to increase your muscle mass, it would make sense to eat slightly more protein.
So in your “off” season, the goal should be to build some muscle, because during the season, you tend to lose it. Endurance exercise isn’t very conducive to muscle mass, but the demands of the sport necessitate some muscle loss for good performance. Unfortunately, with good performance, usually, health declines. Isn’t that ironic? So to stay healthy, you need to build up the muscle mass that you’ve lost during your high-mileage parts of the year.
Your Personal Responses to Carbohydrates, Fats and Proteins
This one is the “wild card.” There is pretty significant person-to-person variation in the number of calories required for good performance. You want to eat enough food for good performance, and good health, but not so much that it spills over into fat stores. And not so little that your performance and health suffers.
To understand exactly how much you need, you start with a predicted baseline. I’m not a calorie-counting fan for reasons that I outline in my article, How Many Calories Are you Really Burning? So I like to start with this baseline:
Half of your plate should be starches (potatoes, rice, pumpkins, etc.), one quarter of the plate is meat, fish or seafood, and the remaining quarter is non-starchy vegetables (broccoli, spinach, etc.).
But before we put our clients on this template, we take a few measurements:
- Body composition
- Energy levels (this is obviously subjective)
- Performance
Then, after following the basic meal template for 2 weeks, we take our measurements again. If everything is moving in the right direction, we stick with what we’re doing. If anything changes negatively, we change what we’re doing.
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take measurements, and I outline all the reasons, in my article The Importance of Measurements.
After all, as I say in all of my seminars, “if you’re not assessing, you are guessing.”
As you can see, based on all the variables there’s no single best diet for joggers, because joggers vary so much between each other, and even the same jogger varies based on his/her distance.
