Fuelling Whilst Training Why and How?

Preparing for a marathon is just as much about what you eat as it is about what you do with your training shoes. You can follow the perfect training plan, hit every session and still arrive at an event feeling flat and frustrated, simply because you didn’t give your body the right training nutrition
The main role of carbohydrate is to provide your working muscles and major organs with fuel to function. Carbohydrates are broken down to produce ATP, the energy currency of our cells, during exercise. As intensity increases the demand for carbohydrate also increases.

Carbohydrates are commonly categorised into two forms, simple and complex. Simple carbohydrates are short chain carbohydrate molecules which are sweet and found naturally in foods like fruit and honey. Regular sugar, also a simple carbohydrate, is added to processed foods for sweetness. These tend to have a bad reputation from a health perspective because they are often combined with fat to produce processed foods such as cakes and biscuits. Complex carbohydrates are formed from longer chains of molecules, are less sweet and are typically found in foods such as rice, pasta, potatoes, grains and bread. These are generally considered healthier, especially in their wholemeal or wholegrain forms, because they contain fibre and other micronutrients as well as some protein. That said, both simple and complex carbohydrates have their place.

During exercise it’s a different story. Carbohydrate provides 4 kcals per gram but can only be stored in limited quantities within the human body as liver and muscle glycogen, at a maximum of around 500g or 2,000 kcals. These stores can be rapidly depleted in as little as 1.5 hours of exercise. When stores empty, your ability to run will cease. This is known as hitting the wall.  Therefore, ingestion of carbohydrate before, during and after exercise should be considered highly important for anybody training for an endurance event. Simple carbohydrates are a great way of fuelling these extra requirements, while complex carbohydrates support satiety and form part of a healthy diet.

This is where the TORQ Fuelling System comes in. During long or intense sessions, the simple and structured TORQ Fuelling System provides measured doses of carbohydrate to match work rate:

1 TORQ Unit, 30g per hour, for light training

2 TORQ Units, 60g per hour, for longer runs

3 TORQ Units, 90g per hour, for high demand sessions

Fuelling with TORQ during training helps preserve stored carbohydrate, delay fatigue and build confidence that your gut can handle the demands of the event.