By Shaina Savoy
We climbers love to push our limits. Whether that’s pushing a new grade, waking up at 3 AM to sprint up an alpine route before afternoon thunderstorms, or spending hours training in the gym. We all do these things “just for fun.” This desire that we have to push our limits at every opportunity can leave us looking for new ways to level up and optimize our performance.
If you’re not taking into account your nutrition or fueling strategies, you’re overlooking a vital factor of your performance. It’s an area that is easy to make good or informed choices, but simultaneously, it’s also easy to make mistakes. Below, I’ve outlined a few common mistakes that can keep you from feeling your best or supporting your performance efforts.
Here are the top 4 basic fueling mistakes that I see climbers often make:
1. Undervaluing Recovery Nutrition on Rest Days
Your nutrition on rest days helps provide the building blocks to rebuild and repair tissue, refuel and replenish depleted glycogen stores, and reduce inflammation from the stress of training. If your training or climbing sessions are demanding, you are doing your training and performance goals a disservice when you significantly reduce your caloric intake on rest days. Those calories are critical to support your recovery.
Additionally, if you’re training or climbing the next day… you need energy!
If you want to continue to perform well and have quality sessions, you should prioritize your nutrition and think of it as though you are refilling the tank for your next session. Training and performance days are catabolic (i.e. wasting) events, and non exercise, or recovery periods, are when anabolic events such as tissue repair, remodeling, and growth occur. An inadequate energy intake during your recovery period can result in loss of, or failure to, gain skeletal muscle and bone mass and can increase your risk of injury, illness, and fatigue.
On your rest and recovery days, try to focus on adequate calories and macronutrients. Your main focus should be on nutrient-dense sources of carbohydrate and high-quality protein, and enough essential fatty acids and micronutrients to help your body function optimally. A good aim for your recovery meals is around >0.2g per lb of body weight of protein to stimulate muscle protein synthesis PLUS .4-.6g/lb carbohydrate.
Fat is also a necessary component of the diet, so don’t forget to add in moderate amounts throughout the day. Fat provides essential fatty acids, additional nutrients, and aids in the absorption and transport of these nutrients and other fat-soluble phytonutrients found in plant foods. The essential fatty acids are precursors for many regulatory compounds within the body and include the major regulators of the inflammatory process. In addition, dietary fat is a component of the cell’s protective membrane barrier and thereby helps the skin and other tissues remain soft and pliable.
Lastly, don’t forget to hydrate! Both electrolytes and fluids lost during training need to be replenished. In addition to adequate water, replacing lost sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium, and calcium is important to rehydrate the body and help optimize your recovery.
When you train or exercise, it puts minor wear and tear on your body, effecting your muscle tissue, hydration status, and depleting nutrients. This damage acts as acute inflammation – sort of like a short-term, minor injury. The harder and more often you train, the more important your recovery becomes. Well executed post-training nutrition can improve muscle soreness, help you rehydrate, speed up recovery, promote muscle growth, and support your immune system.
So, don’t underestimate nutrition on your rest days! It is so important in order to get the most out of your training. Dialing in your recovery nutrition will help you work TOGETHER with your body to help you feel and perform your best.
2. Restricting Carbohydrate Intake
Carbohydrate – in the right mix – is needed to properly fuel your muscles and brain and to optimize your training, performance and health. You know those poor training or climbing sessions where you feel fatigued, reduced precision, lack of power, and “dead” muscles? Yeah, nobody likes those days. These symptoms may occur if you don’t understand the importance of carbohydrate fuel or know how much is required during stages of your training or performance.
Research has shown time and time again that muscle and whole-body fatigue develop at about the same time that glycogen stores become low. When muscles have been exhausted of their carbohydrate stores, they are forced to rely primarily on fat for fuel. However, “fat” cannot be burned as rapidly or efficiently as carbs can, and this forces you to slow your pace until eventually, you stop exercising. This happens for a couple reasons. First, you produce less adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy for a given amount of oxygen consumed when fat instead of carbs are used as fuel. Secondly, when the liver becomes exhausted of its carbohydrate stores, it becomes unable to serve as a storage reservoir for blood sugar and struggles to maintain blood sugar levels by converting protein (amino acid) sources to blood sugar (a process called gluconeogenesis). Gluconeogenesis is slow and cannot keep pace with the rate at which the exercising muscle takes up sugar, often resulting in low blood sugar which is accompanied by lightheadedness, lethargy and fatigue.
Overall, diets rich in carbohydrate increase your capacity to exercise longer before exhaustion. Additionally, carbohydrate is the preferred fuel for the brain and nervous system and the only fuel these systems can use without many weeks of adaptation that allows the brain to use products of fat metabolism (aka ketones).
Because muscle glycogen stores can be completely depleted at the end of a hard training or performance session, carbohydrate consumption should always be prioritized on harder training days. Consuming carbohydrate 20 to 30 minutes after training is essential for replenishing muscle glycogen stores and enhancing muscle recovery and muscle protein synthesis. This is particularly important if you’re training the next day because low muscle glycogen stores can impair subsequent training and performance.
Optimal carbohydrate intake depends on several factors, such as body size, the changing fuel demands of your climbing or training, and your training adaptation and body composition goals. Finding what your carbohydrate needs are typically involves some trial and error. Counting your carbohydrate intake for a few days can help you discover your personal needs and also forces you to learn a little more about which foods are rich sources of carbs.
If you decide to track your carbohydrate intake, and notice your lower carbohydrate intake days are accompanied by poor performance, lightheadedness, fatigue, or moodiness, this may be a sign you need the extra glucose from carbs! Working closely with a nutrition professional will help you tailor your carbohydrate intake to your own specific needs.
3. Not Dialing in the Pre-Workout Nutrition
Everyone’s nutrition strategies are going to be different depending on the individual, their goals, and intensity/duration of training. We all have different bodies, and therefore we all have unique dietary needs! However, when you fuel yourself for the work you plan on doing, we should all have some common goals:
- Support muscle protein synthesis and prevent protein breakdown
- Have sustained energy for the session
- Create regularity and sustainable nutrition protocols to utilize in our performance phases
Typically, around the 60-90 minute mark prior to training, you want to focus on a few things:
- Protein: Try to get some amino acids being digested into your bloodstream to support muscle protein synthesis and prevent muscle protein breakdown. These proteins will take some time to digest and be absorbed completely, which means you’ll still have some of these amino acids being delivered into the blood during your training session. A great amount to aim for is around 15-30 G of protein.
- Carbs: Carbohydrate will maximize glycogen storage and optimize performance. The closer you are to your sessions, choose sources that are faster digesting (simple carbs) when it comes to performance nutrition. The faster carbs can be digested, the less gastrointestinal problems you will have and the quicker the delivery of energy to the working muscles. A good amount is around 0.5-1g/kg.
- Lowering fiber and fat intake: Both fiber and fat take longer to digest and therefore are not ideal before training. Some people can tolerate higher amounts than others can, so you’ll want to play around with this on training days so you can avoid impacting your performance on days that you’re projecting.
These are just some general guidelines and of course, need to be adapted according to individual goals. Try to experiment and dial these things in on your training days, rather than right before you hop on your project so you’re not accidentally setting yourself up for digestive distress mid-crux.
4. Giving Into a Restrictive Mindset Instead of an Abundance Mindset
First things first, let’s chat about restriction, because it can be easily confused for discipline…
Restriction and discipline are two very different things in practice. Restriction is working in opposition to yourself, and discipline is working in synchronicity with yourself. To restrict is to deprive yourself. It requires willpower to be exerted against your true desires. It puts you at odds with your body and distances you from yourself.
To be disciplined means to devote yourself to a practice that is meaningful to you. Rather than working AGAINST yourself, discipline means working WITH yourself. It’s rooted in what you value and want to prioritize in your life. You are supporting yourself so that you can move in the direction that means something to you. Discipline should bring you closer to yourself.
Discipline can be a healthy part of your life! Much like setting healthy boundaries, discipline can help you stay true to yourself, your goals and ambitions, help you make sure that you are meeting your needs, and foster a caretaking relationship with yourself.
Adopting discipline can help you pursue your goals. Restriction, however, is not serving you. When we are restricting, we are subtracting from our diet, and thus subtracting from our performance goals and our quality of life.
Now that you can understand what I mean by a “restrictive” mindset, what do I mean by “abundance” mindset?
When we practice an abundance mindset, we are health and performance focused, instead of food or weight focused. We view food as ways we can ADD to our diet, performance and quality of life. We fuel ourselves with the goal of achieving our maximum performance potential, instead of constantly seeking out the minimum we need to simply get by.
Meeting energy needs is the first — yet often neglected — nutritional priority for climbers and athletes. A restrictive mindset is often neglecting your body’s energy or dietary needs.
Photo by Colette McInerney
If you could have the energy for even just one additional red point burn on your project, or have a smoother time recovering after an intense training session, would that motivate you to think of ways you could add to your diet, rather than subtracting?
When you are adding to your diet, you are creating potential for strength and performance gains. When you are nourishing your body, your body will thank you for fueling it by giving you more output potential. Sufficient energy consumption is important for maximizing the effect of your hard work training, promoting adequate tissue repair, maintaining or promoting lean body mass, and meeting your overall nutrient needs.
If you feel like you’re riding the line between restriction and discipline, take a moment to reflect and ask yourself some questions. Answer honestly.
- Do I have a happy relationship with food, free from anxiety or guilt?
- Am I able to handle weight fluctuations and not be heavily affected by the shifts in the scales when things may or may not go my way?
- Am I able to go out for social gatherings and not have any guilt associated with the foods I’ve chosen to eat?
- Do I spend a healthy amount of time thinking — and not obsessing — about food?
- Am I currently healthy, in terms of not experiencing any symptoms of LEA (low energy availability), or irregular periods?
If you answered “no” to one or more of those questions, then perhaps it’s time to reflect on whether your mindset or “goals” are serving you, or harming you. Then, ask yourself: What role do I want food to play in my life?
Abundance-based food choices are the golden ticket you need to feel at peace with food, your body, your performance, and yourself. They pave the way for a lifetime of mental and physical health so that you can enjoy your food, get the MOST out of your training and climbing sessions, and have a higher quality of life.
Fuel Well, Climb Well
So there you have it! Consuming the right fuel and fluid before, during, and after training has great potential to improve -or at least optimize – your training and performance. In fact, prioritizing your nutrition strategies has the potential to affect your performance to a greater degree than any dietary supplement or ergogenic aid. Fuel well and climb well!
Author Bio
Shaina Savoy is a passionate rock climber and Nutrition Therapist Master candidate living in Las Vegas, Nevada. While she especially enjoys helping athletes thrive on a plant-based diet, she firmly believes diet is a personal matter – everyone’s dietary needs are different in the same way that everyone’s bodies are different. This is why she loves helping others tap into their relationship with food through mindful eating. She believes that everyone deserves to feel empowered when making decisions with eating and that they deserve to enjoy a balanced, sustainable relationship with food.
When she’s not working or studying, Shaina enjoys spending all of her time with her dog Juniper, eating pancakes, and finding different ways to reconnect with the Earth.
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