What to Eat Before Your Workout

Whether it’s from my yoga students, personal training clients or runners I’m coaching, a common question is about what to eat before they work out.

So let’s take a closer look at pre-workout fuel ideas.

It’s an important question because many of you exercise early in the morning.

You want to eat something that will digest well and is not too much food, yet you don’t want to feel lightheaded during your workout.

Eating before exercise can boost your performance, improve your endurance and help prevent low blood sugar, thereby preventing lightheadedness.

It also fuels your muscle and liver carbohydrate usage, providing you with energy throughout your workout.

The type of pre-workout fuel you’ll need depends on a few things.

One is your metabolism and digestive system.

The other is the type of exercise.

Your digestive system and metabolism are unique, so as I always suggest you must listen to your body to find out what works best. If finding a good pre-workout meal or snack has been a challenge for you, keep a journal of what you eat, the workouts, and how you feel.

Use these general guidelines when making your choices:

1. Blood flows to your belly during digestion. This means less blood flow for fueling your muscles. If you feel bloated when you exercise, this might be the reason. Have a meal or snack 45-90 minutes before your workout. You also need to allow for more digestion time before intense exercise as opposed to lower-intensity exercise.

2. Having difficulty with digestion? Then a liquid snack might be a better idea than a solid meal. Liquids take less time to digest (30 minutes or so).

3. Sugar will give you a quick boost. However, you’ll experience a drop in energy when your blood sugar levels stabilize. So if you’ve been feeling like your energy is on a roller coaster when you work out, stay away from sugar based snacks beforehand.

4. Eating carb-heavy foods before a workout can interfere with performance and cause stomach discomfort. If this happens to you, it’s because your body is still digesting. Make note of this and adjust the amount or type of carbs until you find yourself feeling fueled and energetic during your workout.

5. A study published in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Nutrition found that women who ate low-glycemic carbs before a workout burned 50 percent more fat during the workout. If that’s one of your goals, then opt for slow-burning low-glycemic carbs.

Finding optimal pre-workout fuel comes down to following these general guidelines and then tweaking them to your individual needs.

Hope this answers some of your questions about pre-workout fueling!

shelli