Fueling Properly for Double Workout Days

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Happy Friday fellow runners and welcome back to the Runners Connect podcast.

Today’s question comes from Laura. She has a question about double days.

Laura: I usually go for my run in the morning, and then depending on the day, either run again, or do hit or core in the afternoon.

For the second session, I tend to feel a bit weak and shaky afterwards. I don’t eat before these sessions so maybe that’s why, but how do you feel on days where you do two sessions?

I don’t want to gain weight but I also want to fuel properly any tips? Thanks so much.

Coach Jeff: This is a really great question because there are a lot of people that do double sessions, maybe not necessarily double runs, but are doing a run in the morning and then their strength training in the afternoon or evening.

So, I think it’s important to make sure that we’re fueling and recovering right from all of these sessions in order to get what we need to do.

What I’m first going to address is the latter part of your question, when you mentioned that you don’t want to gain weight but you want to fuel properly.

That is very common. Runners are usually either trying to lose weight or at least maintain proper weight.

What you actually want to do is you want to start understanding what your total caloric needs are for the day.

That starts by starting to understand what your TDE is which is basically, how much calories you burn throughout the day without any exercise, basically just what your thermal like metabolism burns through, and then you’re going to add on top how many runs you’re doing and the types of workouts you’re doing throughout the day and that’s going to be your total caloric needs.

Then from there, you’re going to subtract calories.

If you want to lose weight you’re going to keep those calories the same as if you want to maintain your weight. If you want to ensure recovery, you can add one or two hundred calories.

If you want to lose weight, you’re going to subtract about 300-500 calories for that particular day.

For example, it’s difficult to give here but let’s say you’re about 140 pounds as a female – and I don’t know if that’s what you are now but I’m just giving you a general example.

Your TDE’s probably going to be somewhere in the 1700-1800 calorie range depending on how active you are throughout the day, what your body fat percentage is, how tall you are, etcetera, but that’s going to give you your baseline.

Then you would add in the types of runs that you’re doing, so let’s maybe let’s just say the distance and duration and intensity of your runs for that day add up to about 300 calories.

Now we’re talking about 2000 calories for the day as what you need to maintain your current weight.

If you wanted to lose weight, I recommend targeting for that day, anywhere between 1600-1700 calories, and if you want to ensure recovery, not necessarily concerned with weight gain which I know you are but others might not be, you would look to do maybe 200 calories for that day.

That’s the important part because, if you’re really concerned about weight loss or optimal recovery, you need to know how many calories you’re burning.

This is a much bigger discussion than I could get into in this daily podcast, but caloric expenditure; how much cold calories you’re burning, versus how much calories you’re taking in, is the only thing that’s going to impact your weight loss or your weight fluctuation.

That is the essential number to get into. If you are interested in learning a little bit more, our master section has some awesome material on this.

First, we did a complete nutrition summit, probably three or four months ago that we went into in depth; all these things like diets, how to calculate your macronutrients, how to calculate your calories, why it’s important to know all of those things.

It was a three-day event and there’s probably about 25 hours of content just on nutrition.

But in that master section, we also have a calorie calculator for you and it’s specific to running.

What you do is you give us your weight, your height, how much you ran for that particular day, the distance you ran, the intensity that you ran, basically all those parameters.

We’ll then tell you exactly how many calories you need to burn for that, or what your caloric expenditure is that particular day.

Then we do the calculations for you. This is what you need to do if you want to lose weight and this is how much to target if you want to gain weight.

That calculator is available to you in the master section.

We also have a 30-day challenge which goes through the whole process of how to meal plan, how to meal prep, and what that looks like.

So, obviously I’ve hyped it up a little bit here but if you want to check it out, go to runnersconnect.net/pro and you can sign up for the master’s program and you can basically start getting access to that.

If you don’t want to do those calculations for you. So that is the essential step that you need to take in order to make sure that you’re not going to gain or lose weight.

Now, when it comes to fueling before and after your workouts, it’s basically a two-step process.

We’re looking at your first session and the important part for your second session is, we need to make sure that you’re recovering after that first workout.

And so, in order to do that, there’s just a couple of calculations you need to do. Basically, research and science has shown that you want a 4:1 ratio of carbohydrate to protein, for optimal recovery.

For every four grams of carbohydrate you consume, you want to consume one gram of protein and the reason for that is it actually helps stimulate muscle recovery.

It helps with insulin regulation, helps speed the carbohydrates, the glycogen and the proteins in the muscles to help you recover that 4:1 ratio.

For your really hard workouts, you’re intense sessions, what you’re looking for is about .5 grams of carbohydrate per pound of body weight.

So just to give you an example of what that would look like, for a 150-pound person, .5 grams of carbohydrate per pound would be about 75 grams of carbohydrate.

Because you want that 4:1 ratio, you’re going to want about 16-20 grams of protein along with that.

So that would be like a really tough session.

If you had a difficult speed work out and you want to make sure that you’re recovering, you would look to try to get 75 grams of carbohydrate and 20 grams of protein, sometime in the hour to two hours after that particular workout.

It doesn’t have to be within a half hour but the closer you can get to that workout, just go crazy with it.

You can do that in a bunch of different ways. My favorite thing to do is use sports nutrition products like Endurox that has that 4:1 ratio of carbohydrate to protein.

I think they taste great. You can add a scoop or two of Endurox, right after your workout.

That’s within a half hour and then over the next hour, maybe have a meal like some yogurt with granola, a banana with a protein shake, or peanut butter.

Play around with what foods work for you, based on the types of food you like, how quick it is to cook, what time you have available, where you are, that kind of thing.

But shoot for that 75 grams of carbohydrate and 20 grams of protein for your hardest work outs.

Then you adjust that number up and down mostly down, depending on how hard the session was.

If your morning session was pretty easy, you could probably get away with 0.25 grams of carbohydrate per pound of body weight.

If it’s just an easy run or a light workout, you could be looking at something like 25-50 grams of carbohydrate and 10-15 grams of protein, depending on how hard or easy your working.

That that’s an important step because in order have a good second session the next day, you need to make sure that you have covered from that first session.

That’s the first step in making sure that you have recovery and fueling right for your second session.

Now the second step is going to be fueling before the run. So that’s where you’re going to want to usually do more complex carbohydrates.

You don’t quite need as much protein before you go for your run. You can pretty much get away with mostly complex carbohydrates and those are going to be anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours away from your run.

So that includes something like brown rice, quinoa, oatmeal; there’s all kinds of complex carbs. If you just go to Google complex carbs, you can see all kinds of different options that you can see and use.

That’s going to be the primary fuel that you want to have throughout the day. Then as you get closer to the run, if it’s a harder run or really harder to work out, you could do a little bit more carbohydrate that might be a little bit more simple sugar or have a higher glycemic index, which is going to speed that glycogen to your system a little bit quicker.

That would be something like a banana, piece of fruit, bread, those types of things. So maybe if you’re really concerned, you could do something within a half an hour, an hour by eating some types of those carbohydrates.

Again, after recovery, you want to make sure that you get about 4:1 ratio of protein to carbohydrate.

It sounds like your second sessions are a little bit easier so you could probably get away with 0.25 grams of carbohydrate per pound of body weight.

Getting back to what I was talking about first with your caloric totals.

Basically what you’re going to do, to make sure that you don’t gain weight, is you’re going to take the total amount of calories you had after your run, or basically throughout the day, after your run, and then morning, before your run in the afternoon, after you run in the afternoon and you’re just going to add all those up.

The way I would approach it is, let’s say, in my example I said that 150-pound person wants 75 grams of carbohydrate and about 20 grams of protein.

Let’s assume that we didn’t have any fat in that meal, which is probably impossible but we’ll go ahead and pretend anyway.

That’s going to be about maybe 380, 400 calories. 75 grams of carbs, 20 grams of protein is 380 calories in that range.

And then if we look at maybe before I run, let’s say we had a cup of oatmeal or a serving of oatmeal.

Serving of oatmeal is about 150 calories so now we know that our post workout, pre-workout and second post workout added up to 700 calories in total.

I’m kind of making up the numbers but this is pretty easy to do when you get used to calorie tracking.

I don’t want to plug in too much but if you head to the master section, and go to the summit nutrition we did, I had a whole talk about how to calculate your macros and we give you calculators for it.

So, you would take your total caloric needs for the day, let’s say 1700 calories was the total number of calories you needed for the day, and we know that you’re fueling after and fueling before, and after all of your sessions equals 800 calories.

That would mean that you have 900 calories left throughout the day. That would be your breakfast, your lunch or dinner, your snacks and anything else.

So that would ensure that you’ve got everything that you need to recover because that’s the priority.

We want to make sure that you’re recovering before and after your sessions. That’s the most important time to eat before and after your session.

We want to make sure that we’re giving you enough calories during those windows, and then we take the calories that are left over, and you can spread them out throughout the day.

That’ll make sure that you don’t gain weight, if that’s what you’re concerned about.

I know that was kind of throwing a lot of numbers, and grams, and percentages at you but I really think that it’s important you understand those numbers.

There’s no way that you can accurately track if you’re going to gain or lose weight, if you’re not looking at your total caloric expenditure and making sure that you’re in those totals.

It’s just not possible.

If you love math, feel free to do it for yourself. If not, like I said, check out the master section. It’s $9 a month if you’re not a member already and those calculators, together with the 30-day challenge, and the summit will answer every question you’ve had about running nutrition.

I hope that helped answer your question. I appreciate everybody taking the time to listen to this episode.

I hope you have an awesome weekend.