Training for and competing in a race, whether it’s a 5k or a marathon, requires good nutrition. The right nutrients will fuel better workouts, which can translate to better performance.
When using Avatar Nutrition to fuel your performance goals, the first step is realizing that carbs will have a bigger impact than they would for the average Avatar member. Hard workouts pull from the carbohydrates stored in your muscles and liver, so refueling with at least a moderate level of carbs between workouts is key. The more intense and frequent the workouts, the more carbs you’ll need.
With that in mind, make sure the Carb/Fat Slider in your Diet Settings is set to High Carbs, or at the very least Medium Carbs. This will increase your carbs and lower your fat. Also, if you’d previously set the Protein Boost slider to increase your protein, bring it back down to Avatar’s protein recommendation. You’ll still have plenty of protein to recover, but you’ll get more carbs back that were exchanged for grams of protein.
While you’re in your settings, make sure your activity level is accurate. Getting this right will help the system give you the right amount of calories to bolster the energy you can put into your training.
Finally, choose a goal that helps you train hard and compete harder. That means staying away from the weight loss goal, which would decrease your calories (and carbs) and probably diminish your performance after a while. Muscle gain could be tempting, but unless part of your overall plan is to gain weight, it’s better to avoid this setting for endurance races. Instead, try a reverse diet setting or maintenance. A reverse diet will steadily increase your calories, which could follow the increase in training volume or intensity leading up to your competition. The reverse diet level would depend on how far out you are from the competition, but the conservative setting should work well for most athletes. If you start to gain unwanted weight as you reverse, switching to maintenance is your next-best option.
You may have heard that you’re “not supposed to do cardio during a reverse diet.” While this isn’t entirely true, it’s important not to use cardio as a fat loss tool. This can erase the calorie surplus that triggers your metabolism to adapt and burn more food, reducing the effectiveness of a reverse for increasing metabolic rate.
But when an endurance athlete uses the reverse diet setting, they’re doing it to add add more fuel to improve performance, rather than using it with the main goal of increasing their metabolism. That means you shouldn’t worry about doing “cardio” (training for your race) while on the reverse diet goal setting.
When you finally reach the week of your race, you’ll probably want to follow a protocol (such as carb loading) that wouldn’t be compliant with Avatar’s macros. That’s perfectly okay. Just mark out of range for that week, and give your all on race day. If the nutrition protocol you use for the competition is longer than a week, go ahead and switch to Vacation Mode until you’re back and ready to track your macros with Avatar again.
For more on Avatar for endurance athletes, check out this FAQ- Does Avatar Work for Endurance Athletes?