Spring Training Camp: Fuel for Ramp-Up Weeks

Spring is when training volume increases across almost every sport at once — pre-season camps, race build-ups, the first outdoor weeks after a winter of maintenance. Bodies adapt to that reasonably well. Eating habits adapt more slowly, because they're habits.

The result is a specific and common failure: three weeks into a ramp-up, everything feels harder than the numbers say it should.

What under-fuelling a ramp-up looks like

It rarely presents as hunger. It presents as:

• Easy sessions feeling like moderate sessions
• Soreness that doesn't clear between days
• The last interval falling apart when it didn't in February
• Sleep getting worse rather than better despite more training
• Getting sick in week four
• Mood and motivation dropping without an obvious cause

These get attributed to overtraining, and sometimes that's right. Frequently the training load is fine and the energy intake hasn't moved to meet it.

A word on low energy availability

Worth naming directly, because spring ramp-ups are where it commonly starts.

Chronically consuming less energy than training demands — low energy availability, and in its clinical form Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport — is common in endurance and aesthetic sports and genuinely harmful. It affects bone density, hormonal function, immune response, mood and performance, in both men and women.

Warning signs include recurrent stress injuries, frequent illness, disrupted or absent menstrual cycles, unusual fatigue, and performance declining despite consistent training. If several of those are familiar, that's a conversation with a doctor or sports dietitian rather than a nutrition tweak. Individual assessment matters here.

Carbohydrate is usually the gap

Protein gets the attention. Carbohydrate is more often the thing that's short during a volume increase.

Endurance sports nutrition guidance commonly puts carbohydrate needs somewhere between 5 and 10 g per kilogram of bodyweight per day depending on training volume — with the upper end applying during heavy blocks. For a 70 kg athlete in a hard build, that's 350–700 g daily.

That is a lot of food, and it's why low-carbohydrate eating patterns sit awkwardly with high training volume. Glycogen is what fuels the work, and glycogen comes from carbohydrate.

Under-fuelling carbohydrate specifically shows up as heavy legs on easy days and sessions that collapse late.

Protein needs rise too

More training means more muscle protein turnover to repair, and a small fraction of amino acids get oxidised for fuel during prolonged work — more so when carbohydrate is low.

Common guidance for athletes in training lands around 1.6 g per kilogram daily, with endurance-specific figures often cited at 1.2–1.7 g/kg and strength-focused work sometimes higher. For a 70 kg athlete: roughly 85–120 g.

Distribution matters alongside the total — three or four feedings clearing the per-meal threshold rather than one large dinner. Detail in protein distribution.

Where snacks do the work

Here's the practical point. When volume increases, three meals often can't carry the additional energy comfortably — and appetite is frequently suppressed immediately after hard sessions, exactly when you most need to eat.

Snacks are how the total gets there. Two or three a day at 200–400 calories each covers a substantial increase without adding a fourth meal.

A 38 g bag of Protein Popped Chips is 150 calories with 12 g of protein and 16 g of carbohydrate. Honest limits: 16 g of carbohydrate is modest for an athlete's needs, so if your gap is primarily carbohydrate, fruit, rice cakes, bread and dried fruit deliver far more per calorie. A protein snack solves the protein half.

Structuring a ramp-up week

A rough framework rather than a prescription:

Day type	Emphasis
Hard session day	Carbohydrate up, before and after. Protein at every feeding.
Double day	Highest intake of the week. Snack between sessions.
Easy day	Normal intake. Don't under-eat easy days — that's where adaptation happens.
Rest day	Keep protein up. Carbohydrate can come down modestly.

The most common error is under-eating on easy and rest days because "I didn't train hard." Recovery from yesterday is happening today. Our post on rest days covers this.

Three practical habits

Front-load rather than back-load. Eating most of your food after 6pm means training the following morning on limited glycogen. Move calories earlier.

Have something in the bag every session. Not for the session — for the ninety minutes after it, when appetite is suppressed and you're on your way somewhere. Something you'll actually eat beats something optimal you won't. See gym bag snacks.

Increase food in week one, not week three. Intake should rise with the plan, not in response to feeling wrecked. By the time you notice, you're already behind.

For the running-specific version, see snacking for runners.