Complete nutrition plan for endurance athletes is the tag line for this Fuel Right Race Light eBook and it does deliver on that promise. This book, by Registered Dietitian Kelli Jennings, is full of detail and crammed with the answers to every question you could think of to ask a sports nutritionist.

The focus of this book is on helping athletes meet “goal weight” or “race weight” or improve “strength to weight ratio” without letting performance suffer. I find that this is often why athletes reach out to me specifically – Kelli Jennings, RD

While the book is jam-packed with details, the first thing Kelli does is break out the basics needed to get started in an early chapter called Just Tell Me What to Eat.

To get started, all you have to do is read these four pages and go! I like that quick start strategy! Once started, you can then gradually read the rest of the 207 page book and layer in the fine details over time.

Multi-media

This is an eBook and Kelli takes advantage of that with embedded videos, podcasts, blog posts and recipes. This feels like added values and keeps things interesting.

Daily Nutrition vs. Training Nutrition

Kelli’s approach is to separate daily nutrition needs for wellness and fat loss during everyday life, from training nutrition for athletic performance.

I believe you should meet your weight goals with everyday eating, and maintain proper training nutrition in order to continue to train your best and meet your performance goals while meeting weight goals. Once athletes begin to skimp on training nutrition in order to lose weight, performance, health, and weight goals all usually suffer – Kelli Jennings, RD

Daily nutrition

Daily nutrition is your everyday food choices for overall health and wellness. Kelli recommends a minimally processed, whole food, slow-food balanced diet for everyday nutrition with the goal of your best health, wellness, weight, and recovery.

The daily nutrition chapter starts with a Daily Nutrition Self-Assessment to test your current habits, set dietary targets and get dietary recommendations. You then take these recommendations and flip to Appendix A to find your personal Customizable Eating Plan. Each customizable eating plan has multiple options for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.

Training nutrition

Training nutrition is fueling for athletic performance and recovery with quick-acting foods, fluids and electrolytes, before, during and after training.

The training nutrition chapter starts with a Training Nutrition Self-Assessment to see where you are at, then follows with a Build & Execute Your Perfect Training Fuel Plan. This walks you through fueling changes you need to make and additions you will benefit from. Fueling guidelines are further broken down by intensity and duration of training sessions. A < 60 minute zone 1 spin has different fueling demands than a >3 hour tempo session.

One Week Out from Competition or “Big” Training

This is an especially useful chapter giving the rundown on optimal nutrition for the entire week prior to an important race. Day-by-day guidelines are provided to ensure you make it to your race start with muscle glycogen and electrolyte supplies topped up.

Recipes

Beetroot juice is one of my favorite whole-food supplements. Kelli’s Pre-Training Beetroot Smoothie is one of  many recipes found in the book.

The remainder of the book is crammed with nutrition gems; metabolism boosts, benefits of vitamins and supplements, protein demands, gluten-free or not, super-foods, what oils to cook with, inflammation, caffeine, organic foods etc. There are recipes for homemade recovery drinks, electrolyte loading drinks, energy bars and 13 pages of tasty sounding meal plan recipes.

I highly recommend using the Fuel Right Race Light eBook to improve your nutrition and performance. LW Coaching is proud to partner with Apex Nutrition and you can purchase this book directly here.