Three Ways How Evaluating Your Nutrition Intake Helps You To Perform Better

Measuring is knowing, so goes the conventional wisdom. This also applies to nutrition intake during endurance exercise. While EatMyRide helps to plan your nutrition on beforehand, the app also enables you to get detailed insights afterwards. These insights can help you massively to improve your performance. Here’s how.

Learn to take sufficient carbohydrates and fluids

Replenishing carbohydrates and fluid is vital to keep up the performance. When your sports activity is synced to the EatMyRide app you can evaluate your nutrition and fluid intake and compare it to your needs. The needs are calculated by the app based on the characteristics of the activity, like the duration and intensity.

Knowing the energy and fluid needs and the products you took during the activity, you see to what extent your intake was sufficient. This is visualized in the Glycogen level graph. Did the glycogen level stay in the green zone? Good job, your intake was sufficient to aid your performance. Did it decrease into the orange or red zone? Be careful, you may have taken too little.

Know whether you took your nutrition and drinks at the right moment

In general it is hard to sustain a very high carbohydrate intake. Generally speaking, when the hourly carbohydrate intake exceeds 60 grams, one needs to be careful, because of potential gastrointestinal issues. Taking too many carbohydrates at once also poses a risk of gastrointestinal issues. Especially in case of high intensity exercise, the amount of blood flow to the stomach is limited, making it harder to digest the intake properly.

So, to avoid gastrointestinal issues it is advisable to evenly spread the carbohydrate intake over the exercise. EatMyRide shows you how well you spread your intake. This makes it easy to identify how you could improve the intake timing. Do you want to accurately and easily track your exact intake timings during exercise? Use the Carbohydrate Burn / Intake Balancer on your Garmin.

Understand the limits of your body and train your gut

As said, not every athlete can just easily digest 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour or more. So if you are aiming for an intake of 90 grams per hour or even more, you need to train your gastrointestinal system for this. Here we explain in more detail how you can train your gut.

How does evaluating your nutrition intake help in this process of training the gut? First, you get a view of your current intake, so know better how much intake you already can sustain. Besides that the app also gives you a handy overview of the maximum achieved carbohydrate intake. By evaluating your nutrition intake and step by step increasing the intake during exercise you can track your progress and steadily work towards your race.