How to fuel your body for the Crossfit Open

It goes without saying that how you eat, sleep and drink on the days coming up to competition will impact your performance.

While a quick Crossfit Open qualifier that ends in 12 minutes is hardly the same thing as an all-day competition, it's often these short ones that drain your glycogen levels pretty quickly. Understanding how and when to fuel for your workout can make all the difference between crushing a workout and falling behind your peers.

In this blog we will look at the following schedules and phases:

• Microcycles, timing your peri workout nutrition and why that’s important

• schedules and routines, planning out how and when to eat through out the days and weeks coming up to an event

• circadian rhythms, organising your sleep-wake cycles to help you manage fatigue and ensure you get enough rest

Eat, drink, sleep, repeat.

When training or competing, blood sugar levels can determine how well you perform during that session. It is vital that the athletes stays on top of their blood glucose level, as a drop in blood sugar can leave an athlete feeling fatigued.

Athletes that perform the best, make sure that they have adequate amounts of glucose in the bloodstream so that they can feel both mentally sharp and physically tough.

Honing into these tiny details can be the thing that changes that score, and we all know how shaving off just a few seconds could mean you make it into a different percentile.

Both stress and adrenaline can deplete the body's blood sugar making it even more important that we stay on top of the right nutrients at the right time.

Adrenaline and epinephrine (hormones that are directly involved in stress response and during intense activity) can amplify the effects leaving an athlete feeling weak and shaky.

Yuck. Unless of course, you thrive off that kind of energy.

In these circumstances, caffeine as a pre-workout stimulant might be a great tool to counter these effects.

Because no two training days are the same, it’s important that you understand how to design your nutrition plan so that it gives you ample wiggle room.

Here are a couple things to consider:

• When it comes to building our training capacity for growth and stamina, we have to prioritise nutrition that helps us adapt

• When we need to exert maximal effort and display our capacity such as during a tournament, we may consider nutritional strategies that have an immediate effect on our performance

For example, research shows that antioxidant supplements can help decrease oxidative damage and even increase performance however decreasing oxidative damage may also slow your body down from learning how to make beneficial adaptations to a stressor.

In other words, if you reduce the stressor too much, the body won’t learn to adapt to the stressor in the future. This will be true for having a diet rich in fruit and vegetables will can help you recover, but taking a high dose of antioxidants supplements such as Vitamin C may actually hinder recovery.

This is why it’s important to understand how and when to supplement for performance and recovery.

In the weeks leading up to a competition or qualifier…

Manage your sleep schedule. Our circadian rhythms are powerful metabolic regulators meaning that they can affect just about anything from your appetite to your hormones.

If you’re a masters athlete over the age of 40, you may notice your sleep cycles changing which may affect:

• How early you rise, which in turn can affect your glucose levels and therefore impact your performance

• Your melatonin levels making it hard to fall asleep or stay asleep

• Your core temperature results in a need to spend more time warming up

• Your cortisol response, making it harder to recover after each workout

Making sure that you consider these changes in your body will be crucial to how you recover from each training day so that you can continue to increase performance without the risk of injury.

Practice some nutrient timing

For training days, making sure you fuel your body with the right amounts of nutrients and at the right times can impact how well you perform and recover.

Throughout the day make sure to add lean protein to your diet. Here are some great examples:

Chicken

Turkey

Tofu

Eggs (specifically egg whites)

Greek yoghurt

Increase your carb intake in the peri-workout windows:

1-2 hours prior to a training session

Eat light easily digestible carbs, here are some great examples:

Apples

Bananas

Rice cakes

Wholemeal grains

Potatoes (sweet or white)

Oatmeal

During training (intra-workout)

Make sure to hit a minimum of 15g of EAA 

Add 30g of carbs to your training fluid. This can be in juice or any carby drinks.

1-2 hrs after training

White rice

Granola bars

Potatoes

Oats

Tips for performing your best on the day

Its important that athletes do not attempt to try new foods, supplements or hydration techniques on the day of the event. You need ample time to learn how your body will react to each new practice, so stick with the basics.

• 2 Hours prior to your qualifier, eat normally. Stick with your normal food sources, now is not the time to be trying new foods.

• Hydrate adequately an hour before. You risk falling behind your peers when going into a competition even slightly dehydrated. Water is sufficient enough however if you prefer, you can add pre-workout glucose, but again make sure you aren't attempting anything new and risk upsetting your stomach.

• Caffeine can be a great tool as mentioned above but its important you know your tolerance levels as too much can leave you feeling like a tweaked out mess, and end up resulting in you feeling completely sapped.

• Time your carbs right. Slow releasing carbs are great a few hours prior to training, but won't be much help if you're consuming it right before training. Likewise, fast releasing carbs hours ahead won't do your performance much good either so plan ahead.

After completing the workout

There is a reason why post-workout meals are also called recovery meals, its arguably the most important one. This isn't necessarily the time to be celebrating with alcohol and donuts, although absolutely nothing wrong with that, but if you want the right nutrients to recover so that you can perform your best consistently, your best bet is your carb intake.



This is especially important if you plan on doing a retest in a few days' time.

Now go crush the Open!