I am excited to help you supercharge your training, avoid bonking, and find new levels of performance by learning how to create your own fueling plan that changes based on the workout you’re doing!

This plan will help you make smart nutrition decisions, take the guesswork out of how you should be eating, and get the most out of your training. I am sharing this with you so you can see and feel how powerful nutrition can be, when planned around your training sessions.

This is a valuable tool, and I hope you see it that way. Instead of paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get a plan like this, we can create it together here for free.

But before we get to how to use it, it’s important to understand a bit about WHY we need to adjust our intake based on our training.

Among the most interesting, exciting, and perhaps groundbreaking areas of sports nutrition over the past ten years or so has been the research looking at the strategic manipulation of carbohydrate intakes in order to maximize both training adaptations and racing performance.

In short, when we have carbs in our body we can typically perform better, but when we deplete those carbs (either before or during exercise) we send our body a stronger exercise “stress” signal.

I have written more about this in a 2-part blog post (here and here), so if these concepts are new to you I would suggest reading those first.

The first thing you should do is download the template here. I think it’s easier to work on it in excel, but feel free to use it however it works best for you.

Here is a short video that walks you through the basic sections of the planner.

Now that we understand how the planner works, we can create individualized plans. You can copy and paste the boxes in the bottom left corner (no-carb, low-carb, moderate-carb, high-carb), and paste them into the spaces for each meal throughout the week.

Step 1. Enter your typical weekly workouts into the fueling plan

Step 2. Fill in the carb amounts throughout the week.

A good place to start would be with whatever your typical diet is, and then adjust from there.

This video should give you a better idea of how to think about things.

Imagine a continually moving fuel tank inside your muscles. The gas gets depleted when you exercise, and re-filled when you eat carbohydrates.

Remember, we want to consider our carb intake in relation to a) the workout you just had, and b) the next workout you have coming up.

With that in mind, it would seem odd to eat tons of carbs if you weren’t doing much exercise. At the same time, it would be odd to avoid carbs if you are doing a lot of exercise.

Obviously there will be some nuance here, and it isn’t so simple as exercising a lot or a little. One of the factors that affects what your body is burning is exercise intensity.

This graph gives a general idea of where our energy comes from at varying exercise intensities by showing the relative contributions of both carbs (grey line) and fat (yellow line).

When we are sedentary we get a higher percentage of our energy from burning fat (the left side of the graph), and as we start increasing our exercise intensity by walking, jogging, running, sprinting, etc., carbohydrates

become responsible for an increasing proportion of our energy production. This is because carbs can be burned without oxygen (anaerobically), providing a faster (and more efficient) source of energy than fats, which require oxygen to be burned.

From here it may require some test driving to see how things work for you. Please do not get too wrapped up in the exact amounts of carbohydrate at each meal. That’s what is so nice about the color coding, think of it as small – medium- large. The numbers per meal are just a suggested starting point, and you can eventually dial them in closer and closer as you go.

Congratulations, you now have a nutritionally-periodized fueling plan to match your training!

If you’ve found this helpful, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to send me an email (RD@trifitla.com) to say hello, let me know how it’s working for you, or ask any questions! You can also click here to schedule a free 15-minute call to see if you’re getting the most out of your nutritional plan!