Pre-exercise nutrition habits of endurance athletes

We recently conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 endurance athletes to better understand how people are fueling before exercise, how many perform fasted training sessions, and what dictates people’s choices.

In short, a lot of athletes perform fasted training (~63%), males perform fasted training more than females, people following low-carb or periodized-carb diets perform more fasted training than those following other dietary patterns, and many people perform fasted training because they think it helps their training, while others avoid fasted training because they do not think it helps their training. Also, fewer than half of athletes vary their pre-exercise nutrition choices based on workout duration, workout intensity, or mode of workout and nearly all factors measured relating to pre-exercise nutrition intake vary by sex, competitive level, and/or habitual dietary pattern.

I made a short video talking about some of the key findings…