27/01/2026
Tell me you know nothing about sports nutrition without telling me you know nothing about sports nutrition.
There’s a lot of yelling about whether we need to be consuming huge quantities of carbs for training and racing in order to perform at your best.
A new review from Noakes, Prins and colleagues make the case that the mechanisms with which we fuel performance have been misunderstood and that perhaps we don’t need heroic amounts of carbohydrates to offset performance decrements that occur during training and racing. For what it’s worth, most age groupers I work with don’t need to hit these huge numbers and do well with less. Elite athletes? I do think there is something about an elite that makes them as good as they are beyond just nutrition. And they’d probably be successful anyway.
At any rate, the options provided here might be fine for walking leisurely, but if you’re doing anything with intensity, dates and grapes are high fructose and there’s a bit of fibre too - both of these can cause gastrointestinal distress (fructose is individual). The banana might be fine on a bike, I know a few athletes love that. But if moving via foot at pace, fruit is not a good option.
The review here https://academic.oup.com/edrv/advance-article/doi/10.1210/endrev/bnaf038/8432248
Everyone is different as to what they tolerate, and I have a lot of athletes who come to me wanting to ‘just eat real food’ while training. However it’s just difficult with the jostling of the gut if pushing it hard. So using sports nutrition products is a good option. I like gels and cubes, and honey 🍯 , the latter which is pretty close to real food. Cliff bars, sandwiches (white bread), low fat crackers (if not too dry), rice balls are lower fibre which can be good when intensity is low and better than fruit IMO. Especially dried fruit in high quantities.