Ironman how many calories

How many calories do you burn during Ironman? The short answer, a lot. The longer answer, depends on your body weight, metabolism, and a few other factors.

What should I eat while training for an Ironman? What should I drink during an Ironman? What should I eat during an Ironman? A pound athlete burns about 2, calories in five hours while a pound athlete burns 1, Put all the sports together and you'll burn 7, calories or more during the course of the race.

An elite athlete racing at the most aggressive paces in all three sports and finishing in eight to nine hours could burn 8, to 10, calories. You will need to replace some of these calories with nutrition on the course. Ironman events offer sports drinks, gels, chews, bars, fruit and other food that is easy to digest. How much you need to eat during each event really depends on your body's ability to process the calories and your ability to use stored fat as fuel.

Practice refueling during long training sessions so you know what works for you on race day. Never try a new food or fueling routine on race day or risk gastric distress or bonking -- complete, fatigue from which you can't recover. Many performance nutrition and hydration products include sodium, so be sure to check the product labels to know how much you're putting in your body.

Race simulation sessions during training and lower priority races are the perfect time to test out your nutrition and hydration plans to ensure your body responds appropriately at race intensity. A good approach is to start by fueling on the lower end of carbohydrate intake ranges and if you are successful and do not experience any gut issues, increase the intake during the subsequent session until you reach an optimal balance.

Often times athletes focus their nutrition testing on bike-run "brick" workouts but neglect to test out nutrition plans during swim-bike workouts. After the completion of the swim leg in an IRONMAN, athletes must make refueling a priority, but it is also a time when the stomach is sensitive, especially if you just finished a saltwater swim and ingested any seawater. Be aware of how your stomach feels and how you respond to nutrition after a swim.

Being diligent in training about planning and testing your fueling strategy over multiple sessions will pay dividends come race day. Allow me to take the opportunity to spoil the plot of this article from the very beginning. Your nutrition plan for a full iron distance triathlon will be less than double what it would be for the half. There, you can leave now. However, for the inquisitive at heart let me digress as to why this is the case.

Disclaimer : I will only be focusing on calorie consumption and to a lesser degree carbohydrates in discussing this topic. Glucose, liquid intake, sodium intake, protein, and so on could all have articles devoted to each topic separately. So for the sake of simplicity we will only concentrate on pure caloric consumption for a half iron versus a full iron triathlon. Firstly, the primary difference between your experience in the half IRONMAN as opposed to the full is going to be your intensity level.

Obviously intensity drops significantly during the full, resulting in a decreased requirement of calories per hour. In other words, as your muscles push harder and your blood pumps faster you need more fuel. As a result, you should be consuming more calories carbs per hour especially on the bike during a half iron triathlon than you would during a full iron.

Remember that the goal of triathlon nutrition is to consume just enough calories to sustain your goal intensity for the entire duration of the race.