Pre Workout Nutrition

A bootcamp student asked me what I would recommend for pre-workout energy and my first instinct was to say, "Nothing"!

If you are eating a well thought out nutrition plan you should have all the energy you need to get through a 1-hour workout without relying on food or drink just before training.  More important than what you eat just before working out is what you ate during the 12 hours previously.  If you ate moderate portions of carbs (about 1/3 your diet is what works for me) your muscles will store those carbs in the form of glycogen for later use.  You will have more than enough fuel in your body to endure 1-hour of training.

There are exceptions to this line of thinking.  If you have been going very carb-light during the 12 hours before training (which will happen if you train before your first meal of the day)  your body will be very receptive to some sort of nutrition 30 minutes before training.   That is a good time to drink something with simple sugars in it, typically juice (which I tend to water down 50%) or if you are a sucker for the taste and the marketing a small amount of Gatorade.  You would have to be careful with your quantities here because you could easily get stomach pains from drinking too much juice or Gatorade too close to class start time. 

Finally, if a person wants to get a JOLT! before training I do not have a problem with drinking 1/2 to 1 full cup of coffee before training.   It works for me. I just make sure to drink at least 2X the amount in water too! Avoid those 5-hour energy drinks which are clearly just crap marketed to the ill-informed.