How to Recover- Nutrition and Sleep

If you have spent any time on a swim team, you will know that training in this sport is intense. The only way you can keep up with the demands of training is to make sure that you do your best to recover in between workouts. In fact, the second you get out of a pool the next workout has already begun. If you take the time to do a little planning and scheduling, you can make every workout effective and keep your body from breaking down too much which will lead to overtraining and burnout. The two ways we do that are with sleep and nutrition. Let's start with sleep.

Sleep

This is the simple part of this chapter so we will keep it short and sweet:

1. Target 8 hours of sleep a night. If practice is at 6am, lights out by 10pm.
2. The bed is for sleeping only. No studying or electronics.
3. Screens emit blue light which suppresses natural melatonin release from the pineal gland. Stop looking at screens 1-2 hours before bed. At the very least, get an app to turn your screen a red hue or buy orange/red sunglasses to wear 2 hours before bedtime.
4. Bedroom should be pitch black, quiet and cold. Some white noise is ok. No music or TV to "fall asleep to."
5. Keep the same sleep schedule on off days, weekends and vacation (yeah... ok that rule we will probably break 🤣)

Nutrition

You are what you eat. Never forget that. If you eat junk food, you will likely have junk workouts and meets. If you don’t eat enough or at the right time, you will likely not feel good and not swim well.

If you want to keep up the good work in the water, you have to plan ahead and get the most out of your recovery. Other than having good sleep hygiene, nutrition is the biggest factor that determines the quality of your workouts, and therefore, the amount your Swimming Machine can adapt and become better.

By the end of a tough workout, your muscles have torn themselves apart, you sweated out liters of fluid and ran your sugar fuel tank dry as you fed the muscle’s engines. ALL of this needs to be fixed, and the clock is ticking because the next workout is coming up fast, so if you neglect your nutrition, you are really just neglecting your training and can even lead to overtraining.

An elite swimmer training four hours a day will need about 4000-5000 calories a day. Swimmers who were constantly fatigued were found to be 1000 calories under their daily requirements, muscle glycogen (sugar) stores were much lower than usual and their distance per stroke was 10% less in workout.

The goal of good nutrition is to refuel the muscle’s sugar stores as much as possible while also limiting how much nutrition gets sent to fat cells. This has nothing to do with looking good and maintaining a socially acceptable body weight, it’s just that fat cells don’t have anything to do with creating motion and will just eat up valuable sugar, turn it into fat, and make it virtually unavailable for the muscles. With some understanding and planning, we can create the ideal environment throughout the day that will maximize muscle sugar stores and minimize fat creation. The first thing to do is understand our food.

What is Food?

All food is made up of the same four basic compounds: carbohydrates, fat, protein, and nucleic acids. According to a big fancy document called the Institute of Medicine’s Macronutrient Report, the average person should consume so and so much of this and that… all of which swimmers ignore. And they should. What the average person needs and what you need are different. We aren’t worried about controlling Diabetes or heart failure, we care about refueling. To get the maximum out of this refueling process, let’s go through each of the four compounds and break them down a little to understand how we can take advantage of them.

Nucleic Acids are the molecules that make up your DNA and RNA, that’s where the “NA” comes from. They do the job of transferring information in the cell and are sometimes part of enzymes. They are super simple for us. There are four of them A, G, T and C and they don’t matter at all for our talk. The body can make all four of these molecules from scratch if it has to and needs very little to get the job done, so you never really run out as long as you have a balanced complete diet. Done.

Proteins are the next easiest to understand and also have little to do with our plans for world domination… I mean nutrition domination. A protein is a big molecule made up of 20 smaller ones called amino acids.

Any amino acid can link up with any other amino acid, and the sequence gives the completed protein its function and structure. This is very similar to Legos, except there are only 20 blocks to play with and they all connect to each other. With those 20 blocks, you can make anything.

For the most part, proteins and amino acids are not used as fuel, and so they are not a big part of our nutrition talk because most everyone on the Western world diet gets plenty of protein. Even bulking weightlifters get plenty of protein in a regular diet. We do

need to have a good source in our diet for two main reasons. One, only 11 of the amino acids can be made from scratch in the body, the rest need to come from your diet. And secondly, all those structures we built with our Legos/amino acids wear out and need to be replaced. Some can be recycled, but a lot of amino acids need to be replaced completely. The leftovers of proteins and amino acids get metabolized into urea, otherwise known as pee.

In the past, it was recommended endurance athletes double their protein intake at the beginning of the season to help fuel the muscles during periods where the athlete was still out of shape. Now however, the recommendation is to double your protein intake compared to an average non-athlete. In terms of daily consumption, about 2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day is needed, or about 100 grams of protein a day.

There are no such thing as good or bad proteins (unlike fats, coming up next), so just get enough from anywhere: plants, animals or supplement with protein shakes.

But remember, even if you’re eating double your need of protein, it won’t be enough if other energy reserves are not refueled. So, let’s talk fats and carbs which are the main two fuel sources for muscles.

While proteins can be broken down into only 20 amino acid building blocks, fats come in about a million varieties and some are better than others for optimal performance of the Swimming Machine. Fats are a huge fuel source for the mitochondrial engine in endurance athletes like swimmers. But they never seem to be used up. Two reasons. Any leftover sugar or protein that is eaten and not used will be converted and stored as fat. Secondly, fat is a very high-density storage system so you can pack a lot of energy into a small location. At any given time, about 70,000 calories are stored in the form of fat in an average person. Even “shredded” swimmers have lots of fat on them… trust me, I’ve seen the insides of a 90-year-old frail lady who was melting on my cadaver table in anatomy… the fat is there.

It’s ok. Fat is a good thing. It helps you get through tough workouts and is essential to absorbing certain fat-soluble vitamins. But not all fats are made the same, and some should be avoided. We can group the millions of varieties into three big categories that are easy to keep track of: Trans fats, Saturated fats, and mono/poly-unsaturated fats.

Trans fats are by far the worst fats you can eat and should be avoided 100% of the time. These fats are rarely found in nature and are mostly a synthetic fat created to give natural fats (like vegetable oil) a desired physical property (margarine, which is processed vegetable oil and solid at room temperature). Because it is not found in nature, the Swimming Machine is not capable of metabolizing trans fats effectively and will cause a lot of damage to blood vessels over the long term.

Trans fats can be found in anything that is processed and lasts forever: cake, frozen meals, fried food… all the good stuff.

Saturated fats come from animal fats and are ok in moderation. These can be found in meat, dairy and eggs which are generally solid at room temperature. According to the who’s who of science (Wikipedia), only about 7-10% of total daily calories should be saturated fats.

Finally, mono/poly-unsaturated fats are actually very good for you and there is no limit to how much you can eat (other than needing to eat protein and carbs). These fats mostly resemble what is found in the body and are used to construct cell membranes properly. These fats are mainly plant and nut derived: olive oil, canola oil, avocados, fish and cashews for example. These are also where we get those healthy Omega-3 fatty acids which can help reduce inflammation in high doses.

Why all this talk on fat? At the end of the day, most swimmers can burn every calorie they eat so what’s the difference if it is a saturated, trans or an unsaturated calorie? Like putting bad gas in your car, putting bad fat in your Swimming Machine might allow it to just get by and function, but if you want to excel, you have to put good in to get good out. The goal is about 1 gram of fat per kilogram of body weight per day of mostly mono/polyunsaturated fats, with saturated fats only coming from meat and eggs.

The fourth, final and most important food compound to discuss are carbohydrates. Named after their molecular composition of carbon and water (H20), carbs are the most important fuel source to replace after a tough workout, which can burn up to a gram of sugar a minute! Because of this massive burn rate, athletes need to increase their carbohydrate consumption compared to non-athletes. The more you work out, the more carbs you need. Here are the guidelines:

The base unit of any carb is a simple sugar which is a single molecule that is a ring of carbon with attached H2Os. Depending on the specific direction of the H2Os and the number of carbon atoms, you can create a multitude of different simple sugars. The

most important to us is glucose which is the preferred fuel source for all cells in the body.

Like amino acids, simple sugars can be attached to each other to create very large storage molecules called complex carbs. Foods can either contain simple sugars, complex carbs or both. In order for the body to absorb eaten carbohydrates, they must be broken down into simple sugars first before they can cross the gut barrier into the blood.

This takes time (about four hours from mouth to muscle). On the other hand, drinking a bunch of dissolved simple sugar (like in sports drinks) can have very quick absorption and we are going to take advantage of both the quick and slow absorption of different carbohydrates in our meal planning. Once in the blood, sugar can be stored inside muscles and the liver as glycogen, another complex carb specific to animals. 

Carbohydrates hold on to three times their weight in water because the oxygen molecules yada yada electronegativity yada like dissolves like yada… they just do. That’s why you can only hold about 40 minutes worth of sugar in your muscles during hard

workouts, and why the body stores most of its energy as fat.

The body can modify sugars that are absorbed to a certain degree to convert them all to glucose, the main sugar the body likes to use. Galactose, lactose, glycerol… all fine, EXCEPT fructose. Biochemically fructose can’t be converted to glucose or used in any pathway that is any good, so 90% of it just gets stored as fat. So, no fructose… ever. That includes “table sugar” which is half glucose and half fructose. Fructose is the main sugar in fruit and it is ok. It’s a small amount and comes with a lot of good stuff to balance it out.

Insulin, Glycemic Index and the Workout Loophole

Before we dive into our meal plan, there was one detail we skipped over that is confusing

but important. After being eaten, carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars, absorbed in the intestines, enter the blood and are then distributed throughout the body as simple sugars.

BUT, the sugars in the blood are not allowed to be absorbed by muscles, fat cells and other organs just willy nilly. They need a hormone called insulin to give permission for the muscles to take sugar out of the blood and store it inside the cell as glycogen.

This confusion exists because

a very selfish organ called the brain demands first dibs on sugar in the blood because it is the only fuel source the brain likes to use. The brain is special and doesn’t need insulin’s permission to take sugar out of the blood. Once the brain gets its fill, then muscles can start absorbing sugar. This is actually a good thing because if the brain doesn’t get its sweet tooth fix, it can stop functioning normally really quick and cause you to feel tired, pass-out, have seizures, and die. This is bad.

The amount of insulin released in the blood is proportional to the amount of sugar that enters the blood. So, if you have a couple sports drinks full of simple sugars that absorb within minutes, then insulin has to dump into the blood all at once and the insulin levels spike in order to get

 the sugar inside muscles and fat cells quickly. If you have a complex carb meal of veggies and pasta, the absorption of sugar will slow down and insulin won’t have to rise very high to maintain sugar levels at a reasonable level.

The speed and amount that blood sugar rises from different foods is called the Glycemic Index (GI) and it is a good estimate of how much insulin will rise as well. The higher the glycemic index of a food, the faster sugar is absorbed and enters the body, and the higher insulin will go to bring the sugar levels back down by allowing muscles and fat to absorb the sugar. Instead of trying to memorize every food’s index, it is easier to group them as low, medium and high glycemic index foods. The glycemic index is affected by how simple or complex the carbohydrates are in any given food. Dietary fiber that is found in fruits, veggies and unprocessed foods also slows down the absorption of sugar in the intestines and further reduces how high insulin levels go, and therefore will lower the glycemic index.

So, why do we care about the glycemic index and insulin spikes? The problem is insulin will send sugar anywhere that will take it. Muscles are where we want the sugar to go, but insulin will open up fat cells and other organs to taking that sugar too. That is sugar that is not going to muscles, not refueling glycogen stores, and not feeding your next workout. On top of that, insulin is a “rest and store” hormone, meaning it signals fat cells to absorb what they can, convert it all to fat and store it. That’s wasted fuel!

Our goal should be to maximize muscle’s absorption of sugar without getting spikes in insulin. Luckily, there is a loophole in the system that we can exploit. During and immediately after workout, muscles DO NOT need insulin to absorb sugar from the blood. The theory is that a workout is kind of like being in a fight for your life (and if it’s a butterfly set, it really is). The body wants to win that fight no matter what, so it allows muscles to take the sugar they need without insulin’s permission so they can keep their engines running at maximum to help you win the fight… I mean workout. It is not 100% clear how this happens (Nobel Prize potential?)

That means if you drink a bunch of sports drinks during workout and within 30 minutes of finishing workout, your muscles will absorb all that sugar without a lot of insulin needing to be released. That means no sugar is sent to fat cells because they still require insulin’s permission to absorb the sugar. We are going to take advantage of this loophole to jump start our recovery the second we are out of the water and make sure our muscles are fueled up and ready to go for the next workout. As we get farther from workout, we will focus our nutrition on lower glycemic index foods to keep insulin at a reasonable level and supply muscles with a steady stream of sugar to refuel them over a longer time.

How much sugar should you be drinking during your workout? A study was done with cyclists where one group drank water while another group drank 60 grams worth of sugar (2-3 bottles of sports drinks) PER HOUR for a two hour “fast as possible” ride. During the first 90 minutes, there was no difference in power output, speed or perceived effort. But during the last 30 minutes of the ride, the water group started falling behind, slowing down and reached exhaustion earlier than the sugar group who was

able to maintain their effort and feel more comfortable doing so than the water group. I know that’s a lot of drinking for a swimmer to do, and we are disadvantaged because we workout laying down and anything we drink wants to come back up. But this study illustrates an important point, we are not controlling our diet for the moment, we are planning ahead so that we can get the most out of every minute of our workout instead of burning out at the end. If you want to end as good as you start, you have to be proactive, not reactive!

Training and Competition Meal Plan

Now that we have an understanding of how different foods behave when we eat them, we can construct a daily meal plan. We are going to assume the worst-case scenario and that the day consists of a morning and afternoon practice and will use a 3 meals 3 snacks approach. Here is the pattern we are going to follow:

1.     High glycemic index liquids during and immediately after workout

2.     High/medium glycemic foods right after practice

3.     Lower glycemic index (GI) foods the further away from practice’s end

4.     NO JUNK FOOD EVER! Garbage in = garbage out!

Intense exercise can suppress appetite so creating an eating schedule can help make sure you meet your consumption needs.

Three Meals Three Snacks:

1.     Snack 1: Refueling liver and feeding the brain after an overnight fast (sleeping).

a.     30-60 min before hitting water.

b.     Liquid snack of low to medium GI food focusing on complex carbs, some protein and caffeine. About 3:1 carb to protein ratio.

c.     Breakfast shake with some fruit: apple, orange, banana…etc.

2.     Morning Workout

a.     Sugar drinks (super high GI) starting after warmup and throughout workout. No limits!

b.     Between exiting the pool and hitting the shower, another big bottle of sugar drink.

c.     (Hard candy, chocolate, fruit rollups… they are ok here if you need your sweet tooth fix, but only before showering).

3.     Meal 1: Breakfast

a.     Balanced meal with medium GI carbs, protein and fats

b.     Eggs, oatmeal, granola, fruit, milk…

c.     No juices! We are gonna be done with those. NO doughnuts, pancakes or cakes or processed bread, too much trans fats, not enough fiber.

4.     Snack 2 (can be before or after meal 2, depending on when lunch is)

a.     Low GI foods, something salty to keep your hydration up.

b.     About 3:1 carb to protein ratio.

c.     Almonds, avocado, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, another shake, cheeeeeese.

5.     Meal 2: Lunch

a.     Balanced meal with low GI carbs, protein, fats.

b.     Meat and veggies, very paleo here.

c.     No corndogs, hamburgers, fried chicken… too much bad fat. If you have to bring pre-prepared food from home, do it!!

6.     Afternoon Workout

a.     Sugar drinks after warmup and throughout workout just like the morning.

b.     Between exiting the pool and hitting the shower, another big bottle of sugar drink.

c.     (Hard candy, chocolate, fruit rollups… they are ok here if you need your sweet tooth fix, but only before showering).

7.     Meal 3: Dinner

a.     Balanced meal with mostly medium GI carbs, protein and fats

b.     Spaghetti, beans, rice with associated meats and veggies. Fruit is your new dessert.

c.     No cake, no bread, no bagels, no cookies or muffins please. We are done with these too.

8.     Snack 3: Bedtime Recovery

a.     Protein based snack with some very low GI carbs.

b.     Protein shake, cheese, jerky, milk.

Is that the most incredible, most awesomeness meal plan ever made?! The best part? It’s easily modifiable to your needs. Only have one afternoon practice that day? Cut out Snacks 1 and 2. If you only have a morning practice, skip Snack 3. If you have a day off, are in the off-season or in taper, get rid of all snacks. To some degree, we have to account for calories-in balancing with calories-out. More important however is eating good quality food that is good for you.

How do you know what good food is? Two rules of thumb:

·       The faster something spoils, the better it is for you (milk and veggies vs. chips and jam).

·       The longer it takes to make, the better it is for you (pot roast vs. microwaving a frozen dinner). 

Something not mentioned in the plan is hydration. Working out hard, even in a pool, you can lose up to two liters (4 pounds) PER HOUR of water through sweat. As little as a 1-2% (or 1.5-2lbs for most of us) decrease in body weight due to dehydration is enough to cause a measurable decrease in performance. If your blood volume is low from dehydration, your heart has to pump harder and faster to maintain its output which increases how hard you think workout is. On a daily basis, you need to get about 4 liters (1 gallon) of fluid a day. That’s 4 x 32oz bottles. These are on top of the sugary drinks we use during practice. If needed, weigh yourself daily before and after practice to monitor your hydration status. After you pee, the toilet bowl should look like nothing happened!

Competition Eating

Now let’s talk about the big day, RACE DAY! The goal here is to race without feeling hungry or full. It’s a tough balance because you could be at the pool six, eight, ten hours a day with races at any time. Between warm up and cool down you can easily eat up 1000s of yards of swimming, even for a sprinter. So, you have to keep your nutrition up without overfilling yourself at any one time during the day. That’s why snacks will be essential. Here is the plan:

1.     Try to eat a meal 2-3 hours before getting on the blocks, which might be only an hour or so before prelim’s warmups.

a.     Mostly low to medium GI carbs with some protein. Limit fat since it takes a long time to digest. I like rice or ramen with an egg or two.

2.     Snack on salty low GI carbs to keep you thirsty and not hungry.

a.     Dried fruit, nuts, plain cooked pasta. Stay away from sugary sports drinks unless it is right after warmup or the mile. Everything else is too short a race to burn much sugar, so we don’t have to worry much about refueling at this point.

3.     Eat a big balanced meal as soon as possible after the session, this may be the only meal before finals.

4.     End the day with more emphasis on protein to rebuild muscle during the night.

You may notice that during taper and competition you are swimming about half the usual yardage and at a much lower average intensity. Adjust your diet to match. To some degree, it is a calories-in/calories-out equation, and you don’t want to spend the last two weeks of the season eating like you’re training 10,000 yards a day when you are really only swimming about 3,000. Cut out some of the snacks and high glycemic index foods that are heavy in carbs. You will still recover just fine, but you won’t blow up like a balloon either and you will be ready for those cameras at the meet.

Depending on parents and school to cook you good meals and snacks is not an excuse for eating crap. Go to the grocery store with your parents and cook for yourself if you have to. Bring food from home and eat your own lunch at school. I remember the garbage they serve and it’s cheaper if you do it yourself. Replace excuses with solutions!

This chapter is supposed to represent the “ideal” way to eat for the health of your body, but if your brain needs a greasy burger every once in a while, IT'S OK! Don’t fret the outliers, but aim to make your general habits as good as they can be, and enjoy the occasional cookie 😊

Swimmer's Starter Guide book here!