The Noise in the Kitchen: A Practical Guide to Training Nutrition
01 | The Noise in the Kitchen
There is a pattern I see in almost every athlete who comes to me for the first time. They train hours a week, hold a respectable FTP, swim with the front pack in their age group, and their nutrition is a mess. Not because they do not care about it, but because they care about it in all the wrong directions. One of the first athletes I ever coached was intermittent fasting through his Tuesday morning swim sessions because a podcast told him it would improve his fat oxidation. He spent about forty euros a month on recovery shakes. He had not eaten a proper meal before a weeknight threshold session in longer than he could remember. When I asked him what he ate on a typical training day, he talked for ten minutes and described what was, by any reasonable measure, a rest-day diet being applied to a body doing the work of a competitive endurance athlete. Fixing that took about two weeks of boring, consistent changes and the results showed up in his sessions almost immediately.
He was not unusual. The age-group triathlon world is full of people who have read everything and applied almost none of it in the right order. They know the term glycogen. They know what macros are. They have an opinion on maltodextrin versus cluster dextrin, and they can tell you that elite Norwegians eat eight grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day. They also skip breakfast before a 06:00 pool session, eat a sad desk lunch six hours later, and then try to make up the deficit with a large pasta dinner and a protein shake before bed. The information is there. The behaviour is somewhere else entirely.
I have written before about the noise problem in triathlon. The same forces that convince an age-grouper to buy a ceramic pulley wheel before they can hold aero for forty minutes are at work in the kitchen. The supplement industry sells confidence in a sachet. Podcasts sell protocols. Instagram sells aesthetics dressed up as performance. And the athlete sits in the middle of it all, genuinely trying to do the right thing, rotating between strategies that contradict each other on a weekly basis. Intermittent fasting on Monday. Ninety grams of carbohydrate per hour on Sunday. A "clean eating" phase in January that quietly eliminates most of the foods that would actually support their training load. The dysfunction is rarely ignorance. It is noise, and the age-grouper is drowning in it.
This article is about training nutrition for the other six days of the week. I have already written about race-day fuelling. That is a separate problem with a separate set of logistics. What I want to address here is the far more common and far more damaging pattern: the daily eating habits that slowly, invisibly erode the quality of every session an athlete does, every adaptation they are trying to make, and every recovery window they waste. The fix is not complicated. It is, in fact, aggressively simple. The hard part is the same hard part it always is in this sport: ignoring everything that does not matter and doing the boring thing well.
02 | What Underfuelling Actually Looks Like
The word underfuelling sounds dramatic, like something that happens to elite marathon runners chasing race weight or gymnasts in their teens. It is not. In the age-group triathlon world, underfuelling is almost always quiet, accidental, and completely invisible to the person doing it. It does not look like restriction. It looks like a normal day.
A 2025 study tracked seventy-two female endurance athletes with an average age of forty-two. These were not beginners and they were not ignorant about nutrition. They understood that carbohydrate mattered for performance. They could explain why. And yet, when researchers weighed what they actually ate against what their training demanded, the gap was enormous. On rest days they more or less met the lower end of carbohydrate guidelines. On moderate training days they fell short by over a gram per kilogram of body weight. On high-volume days the deficit was closer to three and a half grams per kilogram, and on the biggest days it stretched beyond five. They knew the theory. The behaviour did not follow. The researchers pointed to time pressure, the influence of "health halo" marketing on food choices, and a tendency to prioritise protein at the expense of carbohydrate, driven largely by mainstream diet culture that has very little to do with endurance sport.
This is what it looks like in practice. An athlete wakes at five fifteen, eats nothing or grabs a coffee, swims for seventy-five minutes, comes home, showers, and sits at a desk by eight. Breakfast happens at nine if it happens at all, and it is usually something light because they are not that hungry after training (which is itself a symptom, not a preference). Lunch is a salad or a sandwich, chosen because it looks "healthy" and fits into a thirty-minute break. The real eating happens at dinner, which is often large and carb-heavy because the body is finally catching up. The calorie total for the day might look acceptable on paper, but the distribution is wrong. The athlete spent the first twelve hours of the day in a deficit that undermined the quality of their morning session, delayed recovery from it, and left them flat for whatever is scheduled the next day. Multiply that across a training week and the cumulative cost is significant: sessions that feel harder than they should, adaptation that does not stick, form that breaks down earlier than fitness alone would explain, and a general sense of fatigue that gets blamed on overtraining or poor sleep or age.
The sports science term for this is low energy availability. It means the gap between what you eat and what you burn during exercise leaves too little energy for the rest of your body to function properly. Chronic low energy availability is the driver behind Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, a condition that can affect bone density, immune function, hormonal health, mood, and performance. It is not just an elite problem. The profile of the person most at risk is a busy professional training eight to fourteen hours a week, juggling work and family, eating on the move, and genuinely believing they are eating well. That is most of the people reading this.
03 | Carbohydrate Is Still the Answer
There is a persistent undercurrent in the endurance world that carbohydrate is somehow optional, or at least something to be cautious about. It comes from the keto crowd, the fasted-training crowd, the "fat-adapted" crowd, and the general wellness culture that has spent the last decade telling people that bread is the enemy. I have written about the zone 2 obsession before and the way it flattens training into a single gear. The carbohydrate anxiety is a close cousin. Both stem from the same impulse: find one idea, apply it everywhere, ignore the cost.
Carbohydrate is the primary fuel source for moderate-to-high intensity endurance exercise. That is not an opinion. When you swim threshold intervals, when you ride at tempo, when you run at anything above an easy jog, your body is burning through glycogen, and glycogen comes from carbohydrate. The tank is limited. A well-fuelled athlete carries maybe four hundred to six hundred grams of stored glycogen across muscle and liver. Once it runs low, intensity drops, form breaks apart, and the session stops doing what it was designed to do. The idea that you can train your body to bypass this by burning fat instead has been tested extensively. It does not improve performance in events lasting less than about ninety minutes, and even in longer efforts the evidence is thin. For the age-group triathlete doing structured, purposeful sessions across a training week, carbohydrate is the foundation. Everything else is decoration.
What does enough actually look like? For a seventy-five kilogram athlete training around ten hours a week, most training days need somewhere in the range of five to seven grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. That translates to roughly 375 to 525 grams of carbohydrate per day, which sounds abstract until you see it on a plate. A large bowl of porridge made with milk and a banana at breakfast gets you about eighty grams. A couple of thick slices of bread with a sandwich filling at lunch is another fifty to sixty. A proper portion of pasta or rice at dinner, the kind where you actually fill the plate rather than adding a polite side, puts you at another hundred to a hundred and twenty. Add a few pieces of fruit across the day, a flapjack or some rice cakes around training, and a glass of juice or a bowl of cereal in the evening and you are in the range without having done anything exotic. On a big weekend day with a three-hour ride, the portions go up and you add fuelling during the session. On a genuine rest day, you scale back to normal meals without the training snacks and the plate looks like what most people would consider a standard healthy diet. The point is that on training days, the volume of food needs to reflect the volume of work. Most age-groupers eat the same thing every day regardless of whether they trained for ninety minutes or sat on the sofa, and that mismatch is where the deficit builds.
The practical problem for most age-groupers is not the total. It is the timing. A seventy-five-minute session at 06:00 means the alarm goes off at five fifteen, and nobody wants to cook at five fifteen. But the liver is glycogen-depleted after a night of sleep, and training on empty is training on a half-charged battery. The fix does not require a kitchen. A banana and a slice of toast with honey, eaten fifteen to twenty minutes before you leave the house, puts roughly forty to sixty grams of carbohydrate into the system and takes about ninety seconds to prepare. A glass of juice if you cannot face solids. A bowl of overnight oats prepared the night before if you want something more substantial. The barrier is not complexity. It is habit. Every athlete I have moved from fasted morning sessions to a simple pre-training snack has reported the same thing within a week or two: the sessions feel different. They can hold pace longer, maintain focus, and finish with less residual fatigue. The adaptation from that single change, applied consistently across a training block, is worth more than any supplement on the market.
04 | Recovery: Eat the Meal
After the session, eat. That sounds obvious but it is the step most age-groupers skip or delay, either because they rush to a desk or because they are not hungry after hard efforts, which again is a signal and not a preference. The body has just burned through glycogen and broken down muscle tissue. It needs carbohydrate to refill those stores and it needs protein to trigger muscle protein synthesis, the process that actually repairs and rebuilds what the session just damaged. Those two jobs happen best when they happen together. Carbohydrate on its own restores glycogen but does little for muscle repair. Protein on its own starts the repair process but does not refill the tank. A meal or snack that combines both, ideally with around twenty to twenty-five grams of protein and a solid portion of carbohydrate, gives the body what it needs to do both jobs at once.
Dairy is one of the most effective and most overlooked recovery foods available. Greek yoghurt or quark with fruit and honey ticks almost every box: it delivers both whey and casein protein, which means a fast initial spike in amino acid availability followed by a slower sustained release, it provides carbohydrate when paired with fruit or granola, and it is easy on the stomach when appetite is low after a hard session. A 250-gram bowl of quark with a sliced banana and a drizzle of honey gives you roughly twenty to twenty-five grams of protein and forty-plus grams of carbohydrate for about a euro. It takes thirty seconds to prepare. Beyond dairy, the options are exactly what you would expect: rice and eggs, porridge with milk, a sandwich with real filling, leftovers from dinner reheated before you shower.
If you are out of the house and real food is not an option, a protein shake with a piece of fruit or a juice is a reasonable fallback. It is not the gold standard. It is a way of making sure something gets in when the alternative is nothing for three hours. The mistake is treating the shake as the default and the real meal as the occasional upgrade, which is exactly what the supplement industry would prefer you to do. The stuff that actually works day after day is the stuff that has been in your kitchen the whole time.
How quickly this happens matters, but probably less than marketing has led you to believe. If your next session is more than twenty-four hours away, eating a proper recovery meal within a couple of hours is sufficient. The body is not on a stopwatch. If you are training again the same day or very early the next morning, tighten that up: eat within thirty to forty-five minutes, prioritise simple carbohydrates that digest quickly alongside your protein source, and do not wait until you feel hungry because the hunger signal is often suppressed after intense work.
05 | Protein: Important, Over-Sold
Protein matters. It repairs muscle tissue, supports immune function, and plays a role in almost every adaptive process that training is trying to stimulate. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The problem is that mainstream fitness culture has elevated protein to a status it does not deserve for endurance athletes, and in doing so has quietly displaced the nutrient that actually matters most.
The research on endurance athletes is clear. A daily intake of around 1.6 to 1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight covers the demands of training, recovery, and adaptation for most age-groupers. For a seventy-five kilogram athlete, that is 120 to 135 grams per day. In real food terms: two eggs at breakfast gives you around twelve to fourteen grams. A chicken breast or a tin of tuna at lunch is another thirty to thirty-five. A 250-gram bowl of quark as an afternoon snack adds another twenty-five. A normal portion of meat or fish at dinner with some lentils or beans on the side closes the gap. That is four meals, no supplements, no engineering, and you are comfortably in range. Athletes over forty may benefit from pushing slightly higher, toward two grams per kilogram, to offset the natural age-related decline in muscle protein synthesis. An extra serving of dairy or an additional egg at breakfast covers the difference. These are not bodybuilding numbers. The key is spreading intake across three or four meals rather than loading it into one or two. Twenty to twenty-five grams per meal is more effective for muscle protein synthesis than two large hits of forty or fifty grams, because the body can only use so much at once and the rest is oxidised for energy rather than directed toward repair.
The over-prioritisation trap works like this: an athlete reads that protein is important for recovery, absorbs the general fitness messaging that pushes high-protein diets for body composition, and starts choosing meals based on protein content first. The salad with grilled chicken. The protein bar between sessions. The shake before bed. Each choice looks sensible in isolation. But every meal optimised for protein is a meal that probably underdelivers on carbohydrate, and for an endurance athlete training ten hours a week, that trade-off is the wrong one. The 2025 study of female endurance athletes found exactly this pattern: athletes were meeting or exceeding protein targets while chronically falling short on carbohydrate. They were building the roof while ignoring the foundations.
06 | The Supplement Trap
The supplement industry survives on a simple transaction: it sells the feeling of doing something useful to people who have not yet done the basics. A recovery shake after every session, even the easy ones that do not need special recovery nutrition. A BCAA powder sipped during a forty-five minute ride, when water would have been fine. An electrolyte tab dropped into every bottle regardless of session length, temperature, or sweat rate. A greens powder stirred into a glass each morning as "nutritional insurance" against a diet that, if it actually needed insuring, should be fixed at the source rather than patched with a sachet. None of these products are dangerous in isolation. Most of them are simply irrelevant for an age-grouper who eats proper meals at the right times. The money adds up. Thirty euros a month on protein bars. Twenty on electrolyte tabs. Fifteen on BCAAs. Another twenty on a "daily wellness" product. That is eighty-five euros a month spent on marginal interventions while the fridge contains two euros worth of porridge oats, a bag of rice, a box of eggs, and a tub of quark that would do the job better.
The same pattern shows up in gear. An athlete who cannot hold race pace in the final third of a 70.3 run does not have a supplement deficiency. They have a training and fuelling problem. The research backs this up. The International Society of Sports Nutrition's position is that vitamin and mineral supplements are unnecessary for athletes eating a balanced diet with adequate calories. A 2025 meta-analysis of forty-six randomised controlled trials in competitive athletes found that no chronic supplement produced a meaningful improvement in endurance performance or VO2max, and that the priority should be training, rest, and a carbohydrate-rich diet. Supplements have a role, but it is a small one and it comes last, after everything else is in order. A caffeine gel before a race. An electrolyte drink in genuine heat. A protein shake as a fallback when real food is genuinely unavailable. These are logistics solutions, not foundations. The moment a supplement becomes a daily habit that replaces a meal or substitutes for planning, it has stopped being useful and started being expensive comfort.
The most visible example is AG1, the greens powder that sponsors seemingly every podcast in the endurance space. It costs around eighty euros a month on subscription. The company behind it has raised over a hundred and twenty-five million in venture capital funding at a valuation above one billion euros, and its own press materials describe its podcast sponsorship network as a "powerful engine for customer acquisition." That is not a nutrition company talking. That is an investor-funded marketing operation that has bought access to the voices you trust. The product contains seventy-five ingredients, including ashwagandha, a nightshade-family compound whose long-term safety beyond twelve weeks is not established and which can trigger reactions in people with autoimmune conditions, thyroid disorders, or nightshade sensitivities. The doses are hidden inside proprietary blends, so you cannot check what you are actually consuming. I took one sip and my mouth went numb, my tongue started tingling, I got a metallic taste, and within minutes I felt my throat tighten. I get the same response to raw hazelnuts and raw almonds, so something in that seventy-five-ingredient blend triggers the same pathway. I still do not know which ingredient it was, because the label does not tell me. Nobody mentioned any of this on the podcast ad read. AG1 is not uniquely bad. It is just the most expensive and most aggressively marketed example of a category of products that solves a problem most age-groupers do not have while ignoring the ones they do.
07 | Fasting: Solving the Wrong Problem
Intermittent fasting arrived in triathlon from the general fitness and weight-loss world, where it has legitimate, if modest, applications for people trying to manage calorie intake. The problem is that a protocol designed to help sedentary or lightly active people control their eating has been repackaged as a performance tool for endurance athletes, and the evidence does not support the leap.
A meta-analysis of forty-six studies found that for sessions under sixty minutes, training fasted versus fed makes no measurable difference to performance. For longer sessions, performance is likely worse in the fasted state. That is the best-case summary: neutral for short efforts, negative for long ones. No study has shown that intermittent fasting improves any type of endurance performance. The research either reports a negative effect or no effect at all. Meanwhile, the costs of habitual fasted training are real. Muscle protein breakdown roughly doubles in the fasted state compared to fed training. Repeated fasted sessions elevate cortisol, and chronic cortisol elevation drives fatigue, poor recovery, abdominal fat storage, and suppressed immune function. For an age-grouper already juggling life stress, poor sleep, and a demanding training week, adding a fasting protocol on top is pouring fuel on a fire that is already burning.
The "fat adaptation" argument is a close relative. The theory is that by restricting carbohydrate or training fasted, you can teach your body to burn more fat and spare glycogen for when it matters. The physiology is partially true: fasted and low-carb training can increase fat oxidation rates. The performance implication is not. Research on low-carb, high-fat diets in endurance athletes has consistently shown that while fat burning goes up, the ability to use carbohydrate efficiently goes down, and since carbohydrate is the fuel that sustains moderate-to-high intensity work, the net result is either no improvement or a decline in race performance.
If you came to triathlon from a background where intermittent fasting worked for weight management, that is fine. It probably did what you needed at the time. But the energy demands of the sport are different, and the eating pattern needs to change with them. Eat before your sessions. Eat after them. Stop treating the simple stuff as optional.
08 | What Simple Looks Like
The fix for most of what I have described above is not a new protocol. It is not a meal plan. It is a single principle applied consistently: match what you eat to what you are doing that day.
On a rest day, eat normally. Three meals, mostly whole foods, a reasonable balance of carbohydrate, protein, and fat, no engineered products, no overthinking. This is what a rest day has always looked like for people who eat well. On a day with an easy session of forty-five minutes to an hour, the same applies with the addition of a pre-session snack if the session is early and a proper meal afterwards. On a day with a quality session, a threshold set, intervals, a strength session, the carbohydrate goes up. A bigger breakfast or a pre-session snack that actually contains something. A recovery meal that prioritises both carbohydrate and protein. On a long day, a weekend ride or brick of two hours or more, the portions scale up again and fuelling during the session comes into play.
That is it. There is no spreadsheet. There is no app. There is no weekly meal prep service required. The practical version looks like this: keep porridge oats, bananas, bread, rice, pasta, eggs, or Greek yoghurt, tinned tuna, and some frozen vegetables permanently stocked. Batch cook rice or pasta on a Sunday evening. Hard-boil a few eggs for the week. Keep rice cakes and fruit in the kitchen for pre-session snacks. The best pre-training meal is the one that is ready when the alarm goes off at five fifteen, which means it was either prepared the night before or requires less than two minutes to assemble. A banana and a slice of toast with honey. A small bowl of overnight oats. A glass of juice if solids feel like too much that early. This is a kitchen with food in it and an adult who uses it.
The cost argument matters too. A banana costs twenty cents. A gel costs two fifty. For a sixty-minute easy ride, the banana does the same job. A bowl of porridge with milk after a morning session costs less than a euro and delivers more useful nutrition than a four-euro branded recovery shake. The supplement industry has convinced a generation of age-groupers that performance nutrition requires specialist products. It does not. It requires a fridge, a stove, and the habit of eating before and after you train. If you did nothing else after reading this article except eat a proper breakfast before your early sessions and a proper meal after them, you would feel the difference within a training block.
09 | When Something Is Wrong
Most of what I have described in this article is fixable with better habits and a bit of planning. But there are situations where the problem is deeper than a skipped breakfast, and it is worth knowing what those look like.
Persistent fatigue that does not respond to rest or reduced training. Recurrent illness, catching every cold that goes around. Declining performance despite consistent training. Loss of menstrual cycle in women. Low libido in men. Stress fractures or recurring bone injuries. Mood disturbance, irritability, poor concentration that outlasts a bad week. Hair loss, brittle nails. These are signs of chronic energy deficiency, and they need professional attention rather than another article on the internet.
The appropriate referral is a sports dietitian. Not a nutritionist with a weekend certificate. Not a coach with a macro calculator. A qualified, registered sports dietitian who understands the demands of endurance training and the specific risks of low energy availability. If your relationship with food feels controlling, anxious, or punitive, that is also worth talking to someone about. Training through and after illness is one thing. Training through a pattern of chronic underfuelling is another, and it will cost you more than a bad season.
10 | Start Here
If you want help building the kind of structure that makes all of this automatic rather than effortful, Sense Endurance coaching is built around exactly that. Training that fits your life, accounts for the reality of early mornings and desk jobs and family logistics, and treats nutrition as part of the programme rather than an afterthought. We work on it together until the habits stick and the thinking disappears.
If you are not looking for coaching but want a training plan that already has the session structure, progression, and weekly rhythm in place, my Sense Endurance training plans are designed for age-groupers who train between eight and twelve hours a week. They give you the framework. The fridge is your responsibility.
Eat before you train. Eat after you train. Keep it simple, keep it consistent, and stop spending money on solutions to problems you do not have.
