Where do your calories come from (sprinters)?
 

So what do all you sprinters eat to become and remain faster and stronger?


(1) Some version of Paleolithic diet based on lean meat, eggs and fish i.e. one that would resemble the game of our predecessors;


(2) More starchy foods including potatoes, rice, bread, pasta plus various seeds and grains;


(3) More fatty food like cheese, burgers, salami, sausages i.e. enough animal fat;


(4) Enough simple carbs including candies like muffins, cakes etc. plus some types of chocolate that are very high in sugar (roughly 50 per cent);


(5) I believe any major type of diet might be complemented with some fruits and vegetables, yogurt, milk, nuts, and fat chocolate (over 36 per cent fat) i.e. all that should not present a major calorie source.

Mostly ice cream. I need help.

I'm with BP, except I haven't been training. Maybe we should start a self help group.

I just forced myself to refuse some pancakes. The tears are ready to flow.

When I was training hard and at my fastest a few years ago now, I was trialling High Fat Low Carb. Kind of Keto but not really adhering to the hard core ketosis principles, just having lots of proteins and fats and keeping my carbs/sugars low. I guess you could say it worked as I got stronger and faster and a LOT lighter while doing it.

My biggest take away from it though was that I didn't need protein supps to perform/recover. For a long time I found that proteins shakes were a massive help to my recovery. Once I went to HFLC I was almost finished a batch of protein powder and it was off season so I didn't bother getting any more for a while. That was when I found that I had zero recovery issues when on HFLC. Once I came closer to the race season I was training harder and more often and I had zero residual soreness the next day

I rely for years upon large amounts of lean meat and decent amounts of eggs, yogurt, tomatoes, vegetable oil and sugar (coffee, sour yoghurt). However, it was often complemented with heavy amounts of cheese, fat chocolate and fruit juices.

300g of cheese and 100g of chocolate are easy to eat but it just mean extra 100-120g 80g of saturated fats.

1-2l of juice and 100g of chocolate mean at least 150-160g extra oligosaccharides ie heavy glicemic load. So fasting blood sugar level may jump well over the healthy limit of 6.1 mmol/l.

I cannot with a clear conscious say that I am a "sprinter "anymore. Just a fat guy who rides a bike a few times a week

my results in my 20s in very early 30s would clearly suggest that I was more sprinter than Enduro however

my nutrition was very roughly divided into thirds. Protein fat and carbs.

I got plenty of fat from my protein sources so I didn't go out of my way to add more fat which people do now who are following a keto type program

breakfast was usually combination of eggs and toast or grits and some type of meat but not always.
Lunch usually occurred after my morning bike ride and I used to stop at a restaurant called Fazoli's (lots of locations across the US, but basically a cheap pasta place) and there I would have a healthy serving of pasta with Bolognese and a slice of pizza or sometimes two to go along with it

dinner would often be largely meat. A piece of steak or a pork chop or two as I did not want to load myself down with carbs before going to bed.

in between I would drink meal replacement or protein shakes regularly

thats how a lot of business got done in the nineties


but the days schedule would be :

wake up and eat
wait an hour then go train, whether it was a couple of hours of bike work or the gym
lunch
thenGo to my job (was a second shift)
before dinner i might have a protein shake - back then , MLO and Met-RX were ruling this stuff
dinner (usually pre cooked and brought from home and heated up in the employee break area)
later another infusion of liquid protein
then after work 3-4x a week, id get in another gym workout


it was a very monastic existence for me and it was very effective at keeping me lean. No calories were counted but i exercised common sense. But i had no issues having an ice cream with my GF on the weekends


But with up to 4 hours or more of training most days, followed by working a full time job in a hot sweaty aircraft hanger, plus being relatively young, -- its no surprise i could stay lean, if not overtrained now that i look back on it

but-- years later, now im a regular in the Clydesdale/Athena area of the forum and am still looking for the elusive answer to drop a few pounds

I'm new at cycling but this is my experience in track & field sprint events:

We have to eat enough carbohydrates, fat, protein and fibre. But at the same time we have to help our digestive system.
How? By eating easy-to-digest foods such as Quinoa, red lentils, chicken..

For example, pork and beef cause a little putrefaction and a consequent extra effort for our digestive system(we need that effort during our sprints).
Something similar happens with gluten, it causes a little inflammation in our stomach.
We can eat them but not on competition or high intensity train days.

During the competition period I made a diet based on all kind of foods but avoiding red meat, gluten and some legume/vegetables and the results were great.

Legumes/vegetables that I avoided: Beans and chickpeas(hard digestions). Tomatoes and all kind of peppers(acid vegetables). Normal Rice and Pasta(too much carbs and gluten).

Solutions to keep eating carbs and proteins: (gluten free)

Quinoa: 45% carbs and 15% proteins
Red lentils pasta: 50% carbs, 25% proteins 9% fibre.
Red Rice: 77% carbs and 9% proteins.

Our problem in track & field was that we never took nothing as protein shakes and that kind of supplements.
Now in cycling I'm taking shakes and they are great for recoveries.

I wonder if there are many vegetarian sprinters?

Carl Lewis even switched to vegan diet since 1990. Next year he achieved 100m PB of 9.86; and 8.87 in Long Jump, all-time 3th best. Edit:However, I believe any vegan diet should be supplemented with some essential nutrients including methionine, vitamin B12, vitamin D3, and selenium.

On the other hand, I recently revised my knowledge in food contamination. EFSA (European Food Safety Agency) warned on pesticide misuse most often detected in the wheat, rice, peppers, bananas, table grapes, virgine olive oil etc. Also, a notable portion of eggs were plagued by fipronil. Source: the 2018 report, https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com...LRESIDUES-DATA (p. 45-46; 53-54).

A mixture of all of the above in moderation.

Josiah Ng was at one point, when he started out. He may heave been a pescatarian to start due to his religion (7th day Adventist i believe). I believe that he ended up adding chicken into his diet once he consistently made it onto the international stage. His results improved once he did.

Not saying you can't make it as a veg/vegan. I know some elite athletes who have been staunch vegetarians for a long time. There are a bunch of strength/speed/bodybuilder athletes that have gained some notoriety for being strict veg/vegan, although unfortunately that seems to be the only reason that they are known and not for any results. In other words, they're labeled as performing amongst elite athletes, but not known for doing well or even excelling amongst them.

As others have noted, it's entirely possible to be a sprint athlete and be vegetarian, even at the highest levels of sport.

I think the biggest challenge comes with how much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend to get the same nutrients and dense calories that you can with a traditional athlete's diet.

I ran into this when I tried keto diets a few times, and keto is pretty simple. It just became really frustrating to eat out or constantly prepare my own food while needing extra calories because I was training so much. It felt like work, even in Portland, OR where it wasn't unheard of to order a "burger in a bun of lettuce". Doing that in Atlanta was that much more difficult.

That being said, most top athletes have generally regimented diets. But, us weekend-warriors, not so much.

We're now truly living in a renaissance time for boutique and specialty diets ----

even in Oklahoma City, if you mention youre paleo , the server will likely suggest something her boyfriend orders because he is too (or something like that) -- and the hamburger without the bun has now become common enough that many times if you order a side of broccoli instead of fries, the server will automatically ask if you want to leave the bun off --- just 10 years ago , people thought you were goofy to do something that astonishing

Im not keto but I eat low carb -- my philosophy is id rather skip the breads and pastas in exchange for having a couple of beers every now and then. But this strategy is not working. I need to lose weight but my body is happy and has achieved some sort of homeostasis , so I believe its time to ditch the alcohol and try to induce true ketosis for a while

I have a sweet tooth and I'm OK with it. When I would diet I would simply "save my carbs for sweets" and retain some semblance of normalcy when it came to calorie counting. I was happy to trade beer, booze, rice, and bread for cookies.

I too have a bad sweet tooth. I have found that if I can avoid sweets for about a week, I can keep it under control. But sugar is kind of like a drug, and it's hard to avoid. I've also had success swapping in things like Oranges for cookies. And that usually works for a little while. Ultimately though, there is just too much sugar in too many things to avoid it and really break my addiction.

In my younger days, I believed I could eat anything and be healthy if I was riding enough. I have found that not to be true. One can ride a lot and still have high cholesterol, blood pressure and other issues. Over the course of a few years, I have lost about 30lbs. It wasn’t my intention, I was trying to improve my health issues. What I have found is that replacing a lot of what I was eating with vegetables and some fruit has improved my numbers and lost weight in the process.