If you train early in the morning, you might be wondering what to eat before your session to arrive fueled and perform well. The reality is, not every morning workout needs to be heavily fueled. How do you decide if and what to eat before your session? In this episode of the Fuel Your Strength Podcast, you’ll learn how to approach pre-workout nutrition for early morning workouts, especially when you’re short on time but still want enough fuel to make it through your session without gassing out. You’ll learn how to factor in training intensity, how much time you have before your session, hydration, and what you did the day before. This is a practical episode for athletic women over 40. Click play to listen right on this page, no app is needed: Or, listen on your favorite streaming platform: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | YouTube Want a free week of strength workouts? Click here to get started What You’ll Learn in This Episode How to fuel early morning workouts How training intensity factors in to pre-workout nutrition What to eat if you have 2-3 hours before training Smart pre-workout snack ideas when you only have 30-90 minutes How hydration, caffeine, and electrolytes can impact performance How the food you ate the day before affects your morning training energy Enjoyed This Episode and Want More? If this episode resonates and you’re ready to stop guessing in the gym, you can try a free 7 day sample of Strong with Steph, my progressive strength training program built specifically for athletic women over 40 who want structure and flexibility. Follow Steph on Instagram | YouTube | Facebook If you liked this episode, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts Related Posts Fueling for Better Performance Nutrition for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Carbohydrates for Athletic Women Within-Day Energy Deficit What to Eat for Early Morning Workouts – Episode Transcript 0:00It’s early in the morning, your alarm goes off, and even though you want to hit snooze, you turn it off and you get up because you need to get to your training session. You’re one of the early morning Dawn breaker crew. Who knows that getting your workout done early means that it gets done the day is less likely to get in your way. But one of the things my listeners and clients constantly tell me is, Steph, I don’t know what to eat, how to fuel my sessions properly, and what I should put in my body to get the most out of my training session. When I’m part of the early morning crew on this episode, we’re going to answer that question. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me this week. We’re going to be getting into a topic that we haven’t covered in a while on the show, and that is a specific nutrition question. What Should You Eat if You Work Out in the Morning? There was a time back when I first launched my Strength Nutrition Unlocked program in 2021 that I did a lot of nutrition content for performance, talking about fueling specifically for hobbyist athletes. And then we did a lot of that, and then shifted into talking more about the strength training that hobbyist athletes can use to support and supplement their main sport. And now I’m getting a lot more nutrition questions again. So we’re going to be talking about in this episode, a user submitted question, which is all about pre workout. So if you train early in the morning, this is a very specific question, but I train early in the morning. We’re going to talk about the sport that she does. How can I approach my fueling for my training sessions? So we’re going to be getting into that. And in case you don’t know, because I haven’t talked about it in about it in in a while, yes, I am a strength coach. So I coach people in lifting through Strong with Steph. But I’m also a certified sports nutritionist through the International Society for sports nutrition. Before we go any further, if you would like to hit Subscribe on your podcast app. Would very much appreciate it. Most people that listen aren’t subscribed. It’s free, but it really helps the show. If you’re watching on YouTube, hit the notification bell and subscribe there as well. Eating Before 6 AM Workouts Okay, today’s question comes from Tiffany. Tiffany is one of my very wonderful Strong with Steph lifters. She’s been lifting with me now for almost a year, and she’s also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu athlete. So she trains in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and she’s using strength training as a way to improve her durability on the mats. So her question is advice for fueling before a 6am BJJ class. And so I’m kind of holding this up if you’re watching on YouTube. This is a question that she submitted to me. So to give you a little bit of context, so you know, I’m not just talking out of my ass. I have been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu now for nine years, and I have a black belt, and I’ve been training consistently across those nine years with no significant breaks. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the mat. I have competed a little bit, although competing hasn’t been my main focus. And of course, prior to BJJ, I’ve spent a lot of time as a competitive athlete in various sports, everything from mountain biking to half marathons, triathlons, CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting. So I’ve got a lot of real life lived experience here as well, in addition to things like being a certified sports nutritionist and I work a lot with hobbyist athletes, women in midlife, generally 40s and 50s, who are out there training hard and want to know how to fuel your endeavors. And I do that in both my Strength Nutrition Unlocked program and also one on one nutrition coaching. Customized Fueling Advice is Best This question I’m going to use to kind of set up some broader topics about fueling, especially if you do train closer to the morning hours. But a lot of what we’re talking about here can be applied across a broad range of athletic pursuits. It must be said, though that everybody’s a little bit different, and nutrition is personal, because you might have a different training frequency, a different amount of training, that you’re doing a different intensity of training, maybe you are on the injured list currently, or you just had a surgery and you’re recovering from that. Maybe a really, really large human or a really, really tiny human, everybody is going to have some different considerations that make fueling for performance or fueling for training different, even down to the time of day that you tend to do your sessions? Do you do multiple sessions a day, that sort of thing. So this isn’t a substitute for really personalized advice, but rather some broad brush brushstrokes. And oftentimes, when I talk about fueling people get a little bit worried. They think, oh, well, I have to find, like, the right universal recommendations that are just going to magically apply to me? And the answer is probably not. We’re going to have to do some tweaking to make sure we’re hitting what we need, what our needs are. And also, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to overfeed myself. Somewhere along the way, the idea of fueling appropriately has gotten misconstrued as I need to overfeed myself and I’m going to have to eat more calories than I actually need, which is generally not the case. Performance Nutrition Framework for Athletic Women Over 40 That’s why, inside of Strength Nutrition Unlocked, I walk my clients through my framework for figuring all of this out. And so that framework is three parts. The first part is to fuel smart. The second part is to train tenaciously, and the third part is to recover right now. Those are the big, broad pillars inside of fueling smart we do things like estimating your energy needs, and those are going to be vastly different depending on the kind of training that you’re doing and other considerations. We’re going to figure out how to create your plate. How do we put together a food on the plate scenario where we’re able to actually approach this on a consistent basis? We have a system for how we either get food, prepare food, we meal prep, whatever it is. How do I figure that out? And then the third part is to power your workouts. So that section is what we’re going to be getting into here. All right, so let’s look at Tiffany’s question she’s asking about 6am Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, and what to eat beforehand. So I’m going to lay out some broad brushstrokes here and then dive into some details. The first thing we need to consider is, what kind of training is this so as you’re thinking about yourself, if you’re not a BJJ athlete, that’s fine, but think about, what is the intensity of my training? Going to be low, medium or high? Is how I would typically put that. The second thing I would think about is, what is my timing? What is my timeline? When am I waking up? When am I getting out of the house? What time does my training begin? So those are the two things I would have you consider right up front as guiding where this conversation goes. Do I Need to Eat More if I Exercise More? Because the intensity of the training could change your approach, and also how much time you have prior to your training session can also change the approach. And the third thing I would add in is it’s going to take some experimentation. So I can’t give everybody the perfect the perfect pre workout snack, because everybody’s got different tastes, different preferences, foods that sit more or less well with them, and, of course, some other sport specific considerations to make there too. So that’s going to take a little bit of experimentation on your part. So think about again. What is the intensity of my session? Number one. How Close to Workouts Should I Eat? Number two, how much time do I have prior to my session to actually put something in my pie hole? And third is like, what are my personal preferences, and how am I going to start to kind of experiment with that? Okay, so let’s go back to the first question, which is intensity. And I want to talk a little bit about BJJ here for a second. I’m not going to give you like all the details, but suffice to say, BJJ is a mostly cardiovascular type of sport. Yes, it does require strength. Don’t believe it when people say, Oh, it’s either strength or technique. No, you need both. You need strength to help with durability, and also it helps to be stronger. 9:47I don’t think you can be too strong. Of course, you can be strong with that technique and vice versa. You need both, okay, but strength is important. But when we’re doing the sport, we’re mostly using our gas tank, right? We’re doing takedowns. We’re trying to escape. I. We’re trying to move out of positions, move into positions, defend things, attack those sorts of things. And if you’re not familiar, it’s a ground based grappling system. Sometimes we’re trying to, you know, choke our partner, or get some kind of a joint lock to win, or we’re trying to win by points, that sort of thing, depending on the experience of the athlete. Are you really, really new? Are you really, really experienced? And the just the matchups, you know, if you’re sparring with somebody, what? What is the intent of the sparring that you’re doing? For example, you might have days where it’s a lot of really hard sessions. Maybe you’re in camp and it’s prior to some kind of competition, so your intensity could be a bit higher, right? You’re going to be paired up with people who are more your experience level or more appropriate for you to get a good competition simulation training. Maybe in your off time, when you’re not competing, you’re trying to shore up holes in your game, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s a bit more casual. I’m not somebody who competes a lot, so I tend to be a little bit more floating between different training partners. I’m not training with the world champions that are in our gym. Their level is even though we’re all black belts like their level is high above mine. I’m probably not going to give them a good training session, so they’re going to go with people their ability levels are matching, but sometimes I do go with people who are less experienced, and that means that I’m generally going to do stuff like defend frame, try to work on holes in my game, but my intensity tends to be fairly low, right? Maybe it’s a chill day. I’m going to do some flow roles. So I’ve talked about that in the episode on ride the wave, where I basically talked about training high, low. So you can go back and listen to that episode. Suffice to say, I would ask the person who asked this question, what is the intensity going to be like of a training session? Because that could determine how much of an effort you put into fueling right? Are you going to be taking on, you know, more carbohydrate, less carbohydrate? Do you need to fuel during the training session itself? If it’s a really long session, it’s a really, really hard effort, if you didn’t eat very well the day before, those sorts of things, you might need to take on some intra workout fuel those sorts of things. Are There Times You Don’t Have to Eat Before Working Out? Now, if you’re somebody who’s doing some strength training, you’re doing half marathon training, you’re going to go out and run intervals. You’re going to do a brick workout for your triathlon training, your needs could vary again, depending on the intensity of the training that you’re doing by and large on less intense days. We may not need to make as specific of an effort. And I see this is a place where people oftentimes go wrong in their performance nutrition approach. You have people who are a lot more casual, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can still be training in our sport, but we’re not pushing as hard. Maybe we’re not in competition, prep season or something like that, right? And so we don’t need as we’re not expending as many calories. We don’t need as much fuel, right? Or vice versa. We have increased our training intensity or our training frequency, and we are really not making the effort to close the gap, so we could maybe unintentionally fall into something like low energy availability. So the biggest thing that we need to think about here is like, what, where do we need to turn some of the knobs in terms of the intensity of the training and matching our fuel there? Okay, so that’s just again, broad brush strokes, and a lot is going to depend on the individual the season that you’re in, the goals that you have for your training, how hard you’re going at the current moment, and those sorts of things. So first thing I would ask Tiffany, who submitted this question, is like, are these really hard training sessions? Are these more casual? How hard are you pushing the pace? What else are you doing besides lifting? Are you doing other conditioning and training that could really affect the answer? Okay. Second question is, what is the timeline? Okay, so we’ve talked about the intensity and considering the sport at hand. Second question is, again, what is the timeline? And this is where having a plan can really be helpful, because if we’re kind of winging it, then we might not have anything prepared or on hand. It doesn’t mean you have to make all of this stuff from scratch. You can rely on packaged foods, especially if we’re talking about eating in and around our training session, those sorts of things, but having stuff on hand is really going to make a big difference. So we have to think about and inside of strength, nutrition, unlock, for example, I have it almost looks like a timeline, and I’ll see if I can put a picture of that on the screen for YouTube. But this timeline is sort of a way to conceptualize that the further out, the further out we are from my training session, the more sort of, I guess, leeway we have with the types of foods that we eat and the balance of the macronutrients compared to the closer that we get to that training session time. So I’m only talking about beforehand. The afterward will be for another discussion. So I want to think about if my training is at 6am we’re not saying you need to get up three hours early to eat. That just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, because likely we will be trading sleep, which is precious recovery, right? Sleep is but the most underrated recovery tool that we have. Everybody out there that’s like, oh, I need, you know, cold plunges and recovery compression
