Intratraining Drink as a wrestler

BBM Forum/JF,

I know you guys aren’t a huge fan of intraworkout nutrition for most normal gym sessions, but as a wrestler, I often find myself pretty exhausted and “empty” towards the end of practices. While this probably is unavoidable to some extent, I would like to know if something like a self made sports drink might be able to mitigate that. I was often told I should be drinking something with some sugar in it and have heard some claims that adding some electrolytes to that would be of benefit. Do you think there would be any benefit to drinking something like that? I would also try to keep my total daily calories the same by subtracting calories from another meal.

If the practice is longer than ~ 90 minutes, I think some intraworkout nutrition could be helpful, particularly if not well fed prior to the session and/or a much longer session. I think consuming ~0.7 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram body weight per hour up to a maximal dose of 60-90 grams per hour. A 6-8% carbohydrate solution, e.g. 6-8 grams of carbohydrates per 100 ml of fluid may be beneficial. The majority of this is personal preference as far as taste, rate of consumption, etc. as the biggest thing is to not upset your stomach.

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Does this apply to all hours within that session or only to each additional hour after the 90 minutes? Also, since you didn’t mention electrolytes or anything else, I’m guessing they aren’t useful in this case.

One additional question I would like to ask and one that is probably more difficult to answer, what about competition? In comp I got 6 rounds of 6-8 minutes distributed over ~6-10 hours. Since time in-between rounds varies and can be short it’s often hard to get a lot of food down. In that situation, would it be beneficial to add something like protein or anything else to the mix?

Pretty much all hours of the practice. That’s a lot of carbohydrates to jump to though, so I would probably do something like 20g/hr first to see how you tolerate it. I would not add other electrolytes to the mix besides some salt.

With the competition, the reality is one meal and a snack are really all you need, though it might not be feasible to get something in 90 minutes or so prior to a match. Liquid nutrition, e.g. a bit of whey and highly branched dextrins or cyclic dextrins, may be useful. I’d probably treat it as a meet day though, where we lift, wait around for irregular amounts of time, then lift some more, repeat. Having some snacks you normally eat and/or can tolerate well would be ideal. I like rice cakes, bananas, greek yogurt, peanut butter, and CLIF protein bars, personally. It’s mostly just personal preference.

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