How to Fuel Your Workouts: Pre-, Intra-, and Post-Workout Nutrition for Both Strength and Endurance Athletes
As coaches, one of the main things we focus on with our athletes - regardless of sport or training modality of choice - is peri-workout nutrition. Clients often initially think there's a magic food combination or super specific timing that’s going to rock their world and sky rocket their performance and recovery. And while there ARE some key considerations based on your sport of choice, the reality is that pre-workout meals, intra-workout fueling, and post-workout recovery nutrition don’t need to be over-complicated; food amounts and ideal timing will vary depending on what you’re doing, but there’s probably more of a range on these things than you’ve been led to believe. The real key is matching your nutrition strategy to the demands of the workout you are doing.
Whether you’re Olympic Weightlifting, doing a CrossFit class, training for HYROX, training for a marathon, or spending five hours on your bike every Saturday, nutrition can have a major impact on how well you train and recover. Obviously, your nutrition strategy probably shouldn’t look the same for every one of these workouts. A 60-minute strength session with built in rest periods and a four-hour bike ride put very different demands on your body. The longer and more metabolically demanding the session, the more important carbohydrate availability, intra-workout fueling, hydration, and intentional post-workout recovery become.
Pre-Workout Nutrition: Start the Workout Fueled
The goal of your pre-workout meal is to enter training with enough energy and carbohydrate available to support the work you’re about to do without feeling overly full or dealing with GI distress. If food is still sitting heavy in your stomach as you start your workout, it’s smart to revisit your food types and the timing of that meal. If you’re burping up your pre-workout meal, it is not being used as energy, and it can make your circulation and fuel conversion less efficient, compromise your body’s ability to cool itself efficiently, and drastically increase your perception of effort - YIKES, not ideal!
Regardless of training modality, carbohydrate should be the primary focus because it’s your body’s preferred fuel source for moderate- to high-intensity exercise. Protein is also important for supporting muscle protein synthesis and helping with satiety. While fat and fiber should absolutely be part of your overall diet, we always suggest limiting these things the closer you get to exercise because they can cause digestive issues once movement is introduced.
As a general framework, a pre-workout meal should include about 2-3+g carbohydrate to 1g protein ratio, with the amount depending on how long you have to digest the meal and how long and/or demanding the workout will be. These aren’t numbers you need to hit perfectly every time no matter what, this ratio is just a useful starting point. A strength workout lasting less than an hour might be in that 1-1.5:1 ratio range; an endurance workout lasting 4+ hrs would likely be in the 3-5:1 range. As always, trial-and-error is the name of the game to dial into your best practices! Timing matters, too. If you’re eating three to four hours before training, you can generally have a normal, balanced meal containing a substantial amount of carbohydrate, moderate protein, and your usual amount of fat and fiber. One to two hours before training, think more along the lines of a smaller carbohydrate-focused meal or snack with moderate protein and minimal fat and fiber. If you’re eating within an hour of exercise, prioritize easily digested carbohydrates such as a banana, white rice with honey and sea salt, bagel or toast with jam, or a sports gel or drink.
For strength training, your pre-workout carbohydrate needs are generally more modest; what you eat in TOTAL through the day is more critical than the specifics in the one meal before training. Decisions on fuel type / timing will come down to workout duration, intensity, and what you’ve eaten throughout the rest of the day. A meal like chicken, rice, vegetables, and fruit a few hours before lifting can work extremely well. Another option might be Greek yogurt with oats, banana, berries, and honey if you are closer to training.
Endurance athletes have more reason to prioritize carbohydrate before training because longer sessions place greater demands on glycogen stores. For longer endurance sessions, using body weight to dial in carbohydrate amount can be useful since your glycogen availability and storage is related - approximately 1-4g/kg of carbohydrate in the one to four hours before exercise is a wide but sufficient target range! The longer you have to digest the meal, the more carbohydrate you can generally tolerate. The longer the workout, the more you want to get in during your pre-workout window. Including pre-hydration (carb + electrolyte beverage) is a good way to get more fuel in with minimal volume, and to start the workout adequately hydrated.
Intra-Workout Fueling: Fuel the Work
This is where strength and endurance athlete fueling starts to look very different! For a typical ~45-60 minute strength workout, you probably don’t need to consume carbohydrates during the session. If you’ve eaten adequately beforehand and you’re meeting your overall calorie and carbohydrate needs, your body has plenty of stored energy to get through a normal lifting session.
Intra-workout fueling becomes more useful when training sessions get longer, more intense, or higher volume. A long HYROX simulation, a competitor-focused CrossFit session, a double-training day, or a workout performed in high heat / humidity conditions may all benefit from some carbohydrate during training. In those situations, approximately 20-45 g of carbohydrate per hour is a reasonable starting point. That could come from sports drinks, gels, and chews, applesauce packs, a banana or other low fiber fruit, fruit snacks, pretzels, or another easily digested carbohydrate source that you know you tolerate well.
For endurance athletes, however, intra-workout fueling becomes much more important, and even 100% necessary. As exercise duration increases, muscle glycogen becomes increasingly limited as your body draws from storage for energy. Even with a decent pre-workout meal, after about +/-90-minutes of continuous work, if you do not take in exogenous carbs, you will have churned and burned through the majority of your muscle glycogen stores. Consuming carbohydrates during exercise helps maintain blood glucose and carbohydrate availability so you can keep going; it literally delays your time to fatigue, allows you to sustain your desired intensity, and even decreases perception of effort. A useful general framework is approximately 30-50g/hour for sessions lasting 60-90 minutes, 45-75g/hour for 90-150 minutes, and 75-90+g/hour for sessions lasting 2.5 hours or longer. Some highly trained endurance athletes may consume even more than this, but higher carbohydrate intake needs to be progressively practiced and trained. Your gut tolerance, exercise modality (i.e. running vs cycling), power output / intensity, and time duration will all dictate where you fall within these target ranges.
Your gut is trainable, too! Sports supplements are the best starting point for most athletes as they are specifically formulated to ensure maximum tolerance and fuel conversation. They are the biggest bang for your buck in terms of ease of use, technology, and mitigating GI risk. That doesn’t mean they are the ONLY option, and your fuel doesn’t have to come exclusively from gels and sports drinks. This is particularly important for cyclists / gravel racers, long distance multisport athletes, ultramarathoners, and other athletes who may be exercising for several consecutive hours. A long bike ride might include a combination of sports drink, gels, chews, bananas, rice cakes, fig bars, pretzels, Uncrustables, bread with honey, dried fruit, etc. The best fueling strategy is often the one that combines convenient sports nutrition products with real food in a way that allows you to consistently hit your carbohydrate target without developing GI distress or palate/flavor fatigue. Once again, trial-and-error is the best way to figure out what works best for you.
Hydration and Sodium
For shorter strength workouts and endurance workouts under an hour, drinking water according to thirst is generally sufficient for most athletes. If you eat a diverse diet, any amount of processed / packaged food, or if you season your food with salt, you’re probably more than good to go on sodium; an electrolyte beverage is very likely unnecessary, save your money!
During long cardiovascular sessions, however, hydration is another area where endurance athletes need a more deliberate and practiced strategy. A reasonable starting point for many endurance athletes might be approximately 400-800mL of fluid and 300-600+ mg of sodium per hour, but these numbers are highly individual. Sweat rate, sweat sodium concentration, body size, exercise intensity, temperature, humidity, and dew point can all change your needs. Relying on a single instance test for either sweat rate (fluid loss) or sweat test (includes sodium loss) can be a little unreliable because these things can change dramatically based on a ton of factors that are hard to control for. We recommend dialing into a personalized range that will likely vary based on time duration, intensity, environment, etc vs. being super specific on a set of exact numbers for fluids and sodium intake per hour.
Fluid and sodium losses become more substantial in hot and humid conditions. Keep in mind that when humidity is high, sweat evaporates less efficiently. That means you may continue sweating heavily without receiving the same cooling benefit from that sweat, increasing both thermal strain (which also increases glycogen demand) and fluid losses. The higher the dew point, the more intentional you will want to be about pre-, intra-, and post-hydration and nutrition, including both fluid and sodium loading/replacement.
Post-Workout Nutrition: Replenish What You Used
Post-workout nutrition is about providing the nutrients your body needs to repair, rebuild, adapt, and replenish glycogen stores to prepare for your next training session. Protein supports muscle protein synthesis and tissue repair, while carbohydrate helps replenish muscle glycogen.
A general post-workout protein target is approximately 0.25-0.5g/kg; most athletes will land somewhere around 20-40 grams. Carbohydrate needs depend much more heavily on the type and duration of exercise, and how quickly you need to be ready for your next session.
After a 60-minute lifting session, a strength athlete doesn’t necessarily need to rush home and consume a huge carbohydrate-heavy meal immediately afterward. The “post-workout window” that people are terrified of missing is much more of a big, open garage door. If you are eating enough carbohydrate and calories in total throughout the day, there is generally plenty of time to replenish glycogen before the next workout. The total amount of glycogen depleted during a typical strength workout is generally much lower than during prolonged endurance exercise. For strength athletes, a balanced meal containing protein and carbohydrate (some fat and fiber as desired) is usually more than sufficient. Something like a chicken burrito bowl with rice, black beans, vegetables, salsa, and avocado. The focus should be on meeting your overall daily calorie, protein, and carbohydrate needs rather than obsessing over an immediate post-workout window.
For an endurance athlete who just completed a three-hour ride, marathon training long run, or long brick workout, the situation is very different. They likely have significantly depleted muscle glycogen (even if adequate intra-workout nutrition was consumed), lost substantial amounts of fluid and sodium through sweat, expended a large amount of energy, and likely have another training session coming within the next ~8-24 hours. In this situation, post-workout carbohydrate, fluid, and sodium replacement become much more time-sensitive. When rapid glycogen replenishment is important, 1-1.2 g/kg of carbohydrate and ~20-30g of protein as quickly after training is ideal. Continuing to focus on high carbohydrate intake in the subsequent hours after prolonged exercise when another training session is coming soon is also necessary. This is not because of a magical 30-minute “anabolic window” as much as it’s because when your recovery timeline is short, the sooner you begin replacing what you’ve used, the easier it is to restore glycogen, rehydrate, and be ready for your next session. What you do TODAY matters for your session tomorrow, and the next session after that, and on and on!
For endurance athletes, the post-workout meal may need to be much more structured. A carb and protein focus immediately after - adding fiber and fat into later meals in the day - to ensure rapid glycogen replenishment and amino acid delivery to start the recovery process. A recovery snack immediately post-exercise might simply be a banana plus a bagel and a protein shake, and then another more complete meal ~2hr post-workout that could include oatmeal with berries and honey with Greek yogurt and a veggie and egg scramble [salted] on the side, plus hydration. Or a rice bowl with chicken, lower-fiber vegetables, soy sauce, and some fruit, plus an electrolyte beverage.
Fuel For the Work, Not Just the Sport
There isn’t one universal “best” pre-, intra-, or post-workout nutrition strategy, but the best approach for YOU is going to be to match your nutrition to the demands of the session.
A 45-minute easy lifting session, a 90-minute CrossFit workout, a two-hour tempo run, and a five-hour easy bike ride are all technically “workouts,” but they place very different metabolic demands on your body!
For strength and hypertrophy training or training that lasts less than an hour, overall daily nutrition, adequate protein, and having enough carbohydrate available to support training are generally the biggest priorities. Intra-workout fuel is usually unnecessary for shorter sessions but can become useful during longer or particularly demanding workouts, or for two-a-day training.
For endurance athletes, carbohydrate timing and availability become much more critical. Pre-workout carbohydrate helps you start with adequate glycogen availability. Intra-workout carbohydrate helps maintain energy and performance as the session continues. Post-workout carbohydrate helps restore glycogen, protein supplies amino acids for rebuild/repair, while fluid and sodium help replace what you’ve lost through sweat.
Dialing in “best practices" takes some time and a little trial-and-error, but once you know what works for you, stick to it! At the end of the day, as athletes the goal is to leverage nutrition strategically so you can train harder, perform better, recover faster, avoid injury, and continue doing the things you love for the long term!
Written By: Amanda May, Director of Performance Nutrition, Coach
