She Runs Eats Performs Runners Health Hub

Food Planning Tips for Busy Runners. How to adapt your every day food to a “runners food plan” to get performance and recovery results. We will be talking about:

1. What you need to think about when creating your runners food plan.

2. Planning your Food Plate to meet your energy requirements.

3. Practicalities of putting your food plan into action

4. Having some fall-back food plans …. In case food plan A doesn’t work out!

Spring is in the air and the new season’s fruits and vegetables are ready to pick and enjoy…but have you ever considered how these delicious and healthy foods may support your running training and performance? In this episode we delve into the nutritional properties of FOUR seasonal foods and outline how they may support YOUR running performance. The foods discussed are:

Cucumber
Mint
Spring onion
Purple sprouting broccoli

Finding optimal energy balance may feel elusive and that’s why we focus on this as part of Healthy Woman Healthy Runner Method. When nutrition, hydration and hormones are reset, if low energy is still an issue, we must zone in on the other things in life which may be energy drains. Often these energy drains may be aspects of lifestyle, like quality of sleep and rest or how they are managing their stress load or emotions.

Our solution is to identify the energy drains and use restorative rituals to plug the energy drains to restore and feel rejuvenated again.

The Ketogenic diet is well known as an approach for weight loss, at least in the short term, and has been used as an adjunct treatment for epilepsy and other neurological conditions. BUT, is it an appropriate diet for endurance athletes? In this episode we explore what the ketogenic diet is and our current understanding of its use as an approach to health before moving on to consider its influence on exercise performance. We then end by translating all this information into recommendations for you as runners. We look at the questions:

What are the potential detrimental side effects for health and running performance?
What are the benefits to performance from using fat as fuel?
Could the Ketgenic diet be manipulated to support running performance?
Could it be suitable for some runners but not others?
Could it be suitable at certain times during a runner’s annual training cycle?

Perimenopause and Performance

Perimenopause is a natural life phase, however it’s one where female hormones (especially oestrogen) are fluctuating and that can lead to wide ranging symptoms which may be erratic and even dramatic.

We talk about:

Perimenopausal challenges female runners experience and how it impacts on their running.

What is driving all of these changes in a women’s body and our recommended approach to managing peri menopause and running performance.

A focus on the impact of poor sleep and hot flushes on running performance.

Do you pay attention to your fluid intake? Do you find you sometimes forget to drink? Have you ever thought about what impact your hydration levels may have on your running performance?

In this episode we explore all these questions and more. We delve into the scientific research to gain an understanding of the current thinking around hydration and exercise performance as well as consider the impact of poor hydration on exercise performance.

We also endeavour to help you understand WHY appropriate hydration (euhydration) is important for YOUR running performance and give you lots of hints and tips on how to ensure you are getting adequate fluids into your daily routine