 Motocross Racer: Ben Komar Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach In motocross, there are two types of coaches/trainers...
If you don't know me yet, you're about to find out which one I am... For one reason or another, a lot of people in motocross have gotten really "hard core" on nutrition information. There seems to be very little middle ground on this topic. You have the racers who eat really bad and live at fast food drive thru's running off of pop/soda and burgers to where you have the other end of the side who eat bird food and eat like they are entering a bikini competition. And not to mention, the waves of fad diets that come in and out of this sport... How have we gotten to this point? Shouldn't solid sport performance nutrition be normalized in this tough sport we call motocross? A common theme I see as a coach, is people of the sport pounding their chest on how gnarly it is (I 100% agree) but their actions don't reflect the intensity required to fuel the sport we all love. I'll be the first one in line to say how tough, gnarly, grueling, a sport this is. I have the ultimate respect for it. And when you respect something, you prepare for it with everything you got, or it will get you. By not being properly nutritionally fueled (or operating on some sort of a fad fat loss diet) is not something to play with when you're in a sport where the tracks and your competition is trying to eat you alive. Nutrition for sport performance is all based around the idea of eating to perform and eating to refuel. Very simple and straight forward. When it comes to training, it's more of a game of quality over quantity. When it comes to nutrition, it's a game of quantity over quality. When it comes to optimizing performance, you can be eating all of the right stuff and making great choices, however if you're eating too little or too much of it, then you will not get optimal results. It would be more advantageous for you to eat "unhealthy foods" in the correct amounts than to under-eat healthy options. Chew on that for a minute... Vibe Shift There's a little saying that goes like this... "Athletes eat and train, they don't diet and exercise." Racers all want unlimited energy. They do everything from taking supplements, to ice baths, to going keto, sucking on oxygen tubes, and to living on energy drinks. I've seen it all I swear, whatever is sell-able to a racer, they will try it. But, the fastest way to get more energy, is to give yourself more energy. And we need to be giving our bodies that energy in the form of calories. Like they say, you need to give to be able to get, right? Calories is literally a unit of energy that your body consumes and metabolizes to create energy for your body. This is what we call, allowing your body to work for yourself. Now read this 100 times before moving on. When you under eat, you place extra stress on the body, especially when you're asking a lot from it. If you're still unsure about what I'm saying right now, feel free to go study elite world class athletes in other sports. You'll find that the top distance athletes consume A LOT of calories and carbs (& sugars around workouts). The Norwegians marathon runners believe in being slightly overfed and that their abs shouldn't be super visual. Go see what Olympic Athletes have on their plates in the cafeteria, you'll see plates full of pasta and french fries (not telling you to eat fries), and should we discuss Michael Phelps diet plan when training? They understand that not only do they have to eat to recover and perform, they NEED to! I've had numerous racers in the past who under-ate or they were on a specific diet where I knew they didn't eat enough. They'd have days-weeks of high energy, but then they would follow up with weeks of really low energy. Things never get better until we peel them off of what they're doing, and finally give in to eating like an athlete. When it comes to a lot of pro racers, I see many factory level racers who are underfed and you can see it. It's written all over their faces and their results too. If they gained even 10lbs of lean mass by eating properly and stopped worrying about being skinny, they would perform a lot better on Saturdays. When You Don't Eat Enough 9 out of 10 A-Class/Pro Level Racers are under-eating. I know this because it's hard to race, ride, train, travel, and everything else to eat enough to keep up with your energy outputs. Even a lot of my riders, that's something we're always after, making sure they're keeping up with it. When you're underfed, it's not just about not getting enough energy, there's a lot more to it. When you're putting out large volumes of work and energy expenditure (energy out from racing/training) and you're not keep up with that demand, it adds another level of stress to your body. You're already stressing it with competition and training and now congratulations, you're stressing it even more by underfeeding it. Instead of providing enough food to keep up with energy demands, your body needs to tap into survival resources like adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones used when racing) to allow you to keep going. Nothing gets created when you're in a survival state. This leads to fatigue, illness, and eventually injuries that should've never happened. When you're stressed while you're riding and training, but allow for enough food to PERFORM & RECOVER, you drop and decrease those stress demands on the body and you operate as you should. Chronic Stress Environments = Things start breaking. Acute Stress with Recovery = Things improve. Calories Calories are the top priority when building out your nutrition plan when it comes to eating for your goals. Even if you're eating the right foods, if your calories are off, so will be your nutrition. To be able to race, practice, and train week in and week out, you are burning A LOT of calories. Way more than the average human being. Because of this, there is a responsibility to providing your body enough calories to do what you're asking of it. Think about it...
That's a lot more work than the average person. There's a very high likelihood that you're not eating enough. Especially if you're experiencing time periods where you're feeling mentally and physically flat, lacking motivation, retaining water weight, having trouble sleeping, feeling agitated, and experiencing frequent injuries, these are all signs that you're not keeping up with your caloric intake. To address this, a simple way to track what you eat every day on a calorie counter app like MyFitness Pal or any other reputable app that will track calories for you. I do this a lot with my clients, it's the best way to keep them accountable but also allows them to build awareness of what they're putting in their body, or what they're not putting enough in. These apps will likely give you some calorie suggestions based off of your profile and activity level, but you should be at least your body weight (in pounds) x 16 = daily calories to find you should be at least eating to get you inside that window. More is probably better, especially if you've been focused on eating "clean." When you're making good food choices, like eating lean protein, complex carbs, fruits and vegetables, these are foods that are lower in calories. So even though you've been "eating healthy" you may still be lacking 500-1,000 calories compared to what you're burning. This can be easy to achieve to make up the difference by just including, one more meal per day or increasing a couple extra caloric dense liquid shakes. This is a prime example of the time when you're eating healthy, but your main competitor is living off of McDonald's and Chipotle and it still seems like they have more energy than you during your races. Sure you're making better choices like you should, but since they are actually getting calories that are needed, they could simply have more energy to give, even if it's in the form of fast food. When it comes to eating for performance, you want 80-90% of those calories to come from those healthy sources like talked about above. But there are periods where you can get things like ice cream, pop/soda, sugary cereal, to get a good rush of calories in just simply to help reach your overall calorie needs at the right time and places. Macronutrients This is the second layer of nutrition for motocross and off-road racing. Macro's are what make up your calories and provide different pathways of energy. Protein provides the energy pathways to the cells to rebuild them, like your muscles in sport performance. When you ride and train, muscles get broken down, so consuming enough protein will properly rebuild them to allow you to repeat this process over and over again. Protein intake will also help strengthen your bones. In which if you race, you already know bones seem to snap pretty frequently in motocross...To get enough protein in to optimize performance and recovery, you'll want to aim for 0.8-1 gram per pound of body weight a day. Carbohydrates is what will provide energy for high intensity activity, like motocross and off-road racing. Carbs range from many forms like high fiber foods like brown rice and oatmeal to simple sugars like candy bars. I don't want to open up the can of worms on carb sources in this blog, but it's important to know that all carbs eventually get broken down and stored as sugar (glucose and glycogen) in the body. It's stored in the liver, the muscles, and in the bloodstream. For racing, carbs are the primary fuel source for your brain and your body. They are the high octane race gas for your performance. Without enough carbs, you're simply running on cortisol, adrenaline, and hopefully lots of caffeine too. Because carbs are essential for high performance activity, when they get replenished after motos and training, the filled storage helps send signals to the brain that the body is refueled and ready to go by cutting down on recovery times after these sessions. Because individuals respond differently to carb intake, I would suggest to start with 1.5 x BW in pounds for a minimal intake. From here I would push for 2 x BW or more depending on how you're feeling. Fats also provide energy. But not like how carbs do. It's more of a long term survival energy that's better burned at much lower intensities than out on the race track. If you relied on fat intake for energy production, it's like putting 87 pump gas in a factory motor and expecting it to pump out huge numbers on a dyno. So instead, you want to focus on consuming fats for other reasons of what makes them important. Hormone support, joint support, brain health, heart health, vitamin absorption, immune function, those are things that will benefit a racer instead of having a keto mindset that fats are going to provide you endless energy on the track. If you're telling me that I'm wrong right now and that you've raced in ketosis, then again, you're running off of stress hormones and not on fat intake. I recommend at least 20-30% of your calories come from healthy fat sources like olive oil, nut butters, fish oil, whole eggs, and fat intake from 90% or leaner red meat sources will be enough (you don't need fatty meats to fuel performance). Lastly, alcohol. This is the 4th macronutrient. I will probably do a blog in the future on this topic at some point. Maybe? All I can say now is that alcohol does nothing for athletic performance and that it's actually a toxin to your body. When you consume alcohol, your body starts to shut systems down to place its energy of ridding the body of it. This is why you get drunk. If you're of legal drinking age, do what you'd like with this information for now. I'm not saying that you should never consume an adult beverage, you just need to understand the rules of the game and how it impacts the body. Eat to Race There are endless layers and conversations we can discuss and cover when it comes to nutrition, especially with racing. We barely scratched the surface today, but from what I've learned in working with racers over the past 15 years, most can't get these basic fundamentals right in the first place. For some, this takes months to years to comprehend and actually put into action. We can get into things like race day nutrition, mass gaining, fat loss, meal timing, and we'll also for sure discuss hydration and supplementation too. And even more possibilities... But the main takeaway today, is to make sure that you're eating enough. Because most racers aren't. Some have terrible diets that need an absolute overhaul. Most racers that try to eat healthy just end up under eating because they can't get enough calories in from their low calorie food choices. A lot don't know what to eat, so they just don't take it seriously because they're a bit in the clouds, and many others just forget to eat because of race day nerves and a busy lifestyle leads to eating only twice a day or so. If you're a pro racer and you think that you have a handle on this because you're a pro, chances are you're still probably off of the mark and you don't even realize it. The racers at the absolute highest level still struggle in this area (for similar and different reasons) so there's a good chance that doing a self audit could be a game changer for you. Rule of thumb is to eat as much as you can handle and tolerate while performance on the bike is being driven up. If you're underfed, you may gain 2-5lbs because your body will now actually have some substance to store and utilize instead of Red Bull and Copenhagen. And for others, I've seen drastic 10-20lbs lost by increasing calories because the body was hanging on to too much water weight from the stress the body was under. So if you're training hard and racing hard, keep driving up your calories to use to fuel. Monitor your body weight on a scale, be honest with how you're feeling with performance and recovery, and pay close attention to how you feel on race day. When you eat enough for either motocross or off-road racing, expect these things to happen...
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