Fuelling a Training Week

This is not a diet, and that is the point

Nothing on this page is about losing weight, changing shape, or earning your food. There are no calorie numbers here, no macro splits, no grams per kilo, and no plan. That is deliberate, and it is not squeamishness — this section is read by teenagers, and a page that hands out targets is a page that gets acted on by someone it was not written for.

What this page is about is narrower and more useful: how to eat across a week so that Thursday's session is as good as Monday's. That is a performance question and a quality-of-life question. If you have ever had a brilliant first session of the week and then spent the next three dragging yourself around the mat wondering where it went, this is the article for that.

The common problem is not eating too much

Among recreational martial artists, the issue is almost always the other direction. People turn up under-fuelled, repeatedly, without realizing that is what is happening.

There are good reasons for it. Combat sessions are long — a two-hour class is normal, where a gym workout is forty-five minutes. They run late, often finishing at the hour you would otherwise be eating. And hard training blunts appetite for a while afterward, so the hungriest you are going to be is not immediately after the session but the next morning, by which point you have already slept through the window.

Stack that across a week and the pattern looks like this: you train Monday well, eat a bit less than you spent, train Tuesday slightly flatter, eat a bit less again, and by Thursday you are tired in a way that feels like a conditioning problem but is an eating problem. Nobody tells you, because nobody can see it.

The qualitative test is simpler than any number: if your energy reliably falls off across the week, if you are getting ill more than usual, if you are cold all the time, if your sleep has gone strange, or if you are losing weight you did not set out to lose — the most likely explanation is that there is not enough food going in for the amount of work going out.

Carbohydrate is what hard rounds run on

You can argue about diets forever, and people do. The one thing that is not seriously in dispute is that high-intensity work — the scramble, the last round, the two minutes where you are breathing through a straw — is powered primarily by carbohydrate, and that your body holds only a limited amount of it at a time.

This is why the session where lunch was a coffee goes the way it goes. You do not feel it in the warm-up. You feel it about forty minutes in, when technique starts getting replaced by effort, and in the last round, when there is nothing to call on. Coaches read that as fitness. It is often just an empty tank.

So on a training day, make sure the meals before the session contain something substantial and starchy. Bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, oats, fruit, tortillas, whatever you actually like and will actually eat. Low-carbohydrate approaches are a legitimate choice for some people in some contexts, and they are a poor fit for the day you have a hard sparring class at 7pm. That is not a moral claim about food, it is a claim about which fuel a hard round burns.

Protein, in plain terms

Protein is what you rebuild with, and the useful version of the advice has no arithmetic in it: get some at most meals, roughly a palm-sized portion of something that counts, spread through the day rather than loaded into one enormous dinner.

Things that count are the obvious ones — eggs, meat, fish, dairy, yogurt, tofu, beans and lentils, nuts. If you eat plants only, the spread matters a little more and the variety does the work for you; a mix of beans, grains, soy and nuts across the day covers it without anyone needing to calculate anything.

You do not need powder. Powder is convenient, not magic, and it competes with real food that would have fed you better. And the supplement aisle, broadly, is a place where confident claims outrun the evidence by a wide margin.

Water, without the mythology

Hydration has accumulated more folklore than almost anything else in sport. The fixed daily quota that everyone quotes does not have much behind it, and the idea that you should be drinking constantly all day is not better — in rare cases, drinking far too much far too fast is genuinely dangerous.

The practical version: drink with your meals, drink when you are thirsty, and have water with you in a long class rather than arriving already behind. If you sweat heavily, if the gym is hot, or if you train twice in a day, food is doing part of the replacing too — salt comes from meals, and this is one of the reasons an under-eating week feels worse than it should.

If you turn up to a session already dry, you will feel it in the second hour as a headache and a shortened temper rather than as thirst. Deliberately dehydrating yourself for any reason is a separate and much more serious subject, and it is covered — as a safety question, not a method — in what parents and young athletes need to know about weight cutting.

A 6pm class and a 5.30 finish

This is the real question most people have, so here is the real answer. You are not going to eat a meal in that window, and you should not try. What works is something small, mostly carbohydrate, light on fat and fiber, eaten on the way:

• A banana, or any fruit you can eat in the car.
• A slice of toast with honey or jam. Two if the session is long.
• A small pot of yogurt.
• A cereal bar, a handful of dried fruit, a few crackers.
• A sandwich at your desk at 4pm, which is the better version of all of the above because it stops the problem happening.

Fat and fiber slow things down, which is exactly what you want at dinner and exactly what you do not want thirty minutes before someone tries to pass your guard. Rich, heavy, very large meals close to training are the usual cause of the session where you feel sick in the warm-up.

The other half of this is the daytime. The person who ate properly at lunch can turn up at 6pm on almost nothing and be fine. The person who did not cannot fix it with a banana.

After training, when you are not hungry

Appetite lags behind effort, so the moment you most need food is often the moment you least want it. The anxious thirty-minute window you have read about is oversold — for someone training a few times a week, the day as a whole matters far more than the half hour. But the day as a whole includes this meal, and skipping it is how a week quietly goes into deficit.

So make it easy rather than optimal. Something cooked earlier and waiting. Milk, a smoothie, cereal, a sandwich, leftovers eaten standing up. Liquid is easier than solid when you are too hot and too tired to chew, and liquid counts. And then eat an actual meal when your appetite comes back, even if that is later than you would like.

Going to bed hungry after a hard night also makes for worse sleep, which costs you the overnight part of your training — a trade covered in sleep: the training you do lying down.

Back-to-back days

When there is a session tonight and another tomorrow, the gap between them is the whole game, and you do not get a second chance at it. Eat properly tonight, eat properly in the morning, and do not let the day in between be the one where you were too busy to have lunch. Two sessions in two days off one real meal is how people end up injured and calling it bad luck.

On a genuine rest day, eat like it was a training day. Rest days are when the repair work happens, and repair work needs materials. The instinct to eat less on days you did not train has it exactly backwards.

What actually changes a training week

Almost nobody needs a plan. Most people need three unremarkable things: a real lunch on training days, something starchy in the hours before a hard session, and a meal after the late ones even when the hunger has not arrived yet.

Hold those for a month and you will notice it where it counts — not on a scale, but on a Thursday.