What does a balanced diet include?

What does a balanced diet include?

On the 16th March, workshop 3 in our series of 4 was all about nutrition – fuelling the body and keeping it fuelled for sport. We started off by understanding what a calorie is, and how and where we extract calories from food and drink. We looked at how many calories 1 gram of a certain food type gave us – and how calories from certain foods are more efficient than others. We looked at the importance of a balanced diet.

As a practical exercise, we studied the labels of certain commercial sports products, determining if they were for pre, during or post exercise, and looked at how many grams of carbohydrate the body could turn into energy per hour.

The importance of staying hydrated was discussed, and what terms such as “isotonic” and “hypertonic” meant, as well as why it’s important to know. We also talked about making our own isotonic sports drinks to save money. If you’d like to download the session notes,  click here.

Following on from the classroom, we moved onto the Turbo session designed by group three.

Taking a break from "Killer"!

A short reprieve…

The brief for this session was to create a session for a Road Race rider. The workout contained a series of ramp intervals, followed by some high intensity short efforts.

The group gave this session a name: Killer!

And we agree, if done properly it’s a bit of a killer. Well done everyone!

The final workshop in this series is on Monday 23rd March, and will focus on race preparation. The classroom session will be delivered by Mark Doel, our British Cycling events co-ordinator for Central Region. The Turbo session will be delivered by Ralph, and is based on one of the sessions delivered by Prime Coaching. We’d love to hear your feedback on how the adults did after the session!