Answer: We have been in the endurance game for dozens of years and have seen “fad” diets come and go. Whether athletes are asking us about 5:2, paleo, kombucha, beets, evil gluten, kale, trying to get their body to process more fat by eating pistachios, or expelling toxins with intrinsic hot pepper enemas our answer is always essentially the same – you are an athlete and your goal is performance.  If you want to get fast, focus on your training and the established rules of performance nutrition and leave the fad diets for the Hollywood types, runway models, and overweight people who can benefit from them.

In nearly all cases “fad diets” such, including the 5:2 diet were developed to help people lose weight, improve overall wellness, or change their body composition.  They were not developed to help SUP athletes paddle fast or long. Recently, it seems that the trend in popular diets,  such as the 5:2 diet and the pale diet,  are based on science ( some would say pseudoscience ) that says if we eat like a caveman we will live longer, look better, and be happier. The logic behind the 5:2 diet is that humans evolved to survive efficiently on a feast/famine schedule. Moreover, our bodies are not designed to negotiate the constant availability of food in modern life. Intermittent calorie restriction appears to trigger repair mechanisms that help prevent cancer, heart disease, improve blood sugar regulation, encourage weight loss, and help prevent other fatal illnesses. Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, and Kate Middleton are all proponents of intermittent fasting .  As an endurance athlete, however, you need to define “survive efficiently” as it pertains to your situation.

If your goal is to enter a few short paddle races and “survive” to the end  or go out for a mellow paddle with your friends from time to time, you can probably get away with the 5:2 diet, get whatever longevity gains the diet will offer you, and your paddling will not suffer.

Our bet, however, given that your purchased a book titled “ Competitive paddle board and SUP training ” and you asked how the 5:2 diet relates to competitive paddle training, you want more and efficient survival is not your primary goal. If you are like most of the athletes we work with, your goal is to either paddle faster or paddle longer or both.

The way we see it 5:2 will not work as a nutrition program for a competitive paddle endurance athlete. We know you need fuel to burn during your workouts. We know you need to progressively overload your system to make performance gains. We know that your body can only store so much glycogen. Therefore, if you want to workout and progressively overload your system but you are fasting while training you are going to hit the wall at about 1.5-2 hours when your glycogen stores run out. If your fast day is the day after a training day, you run the risk of not recovering properly because you will not be able to replace your glycogen stores. Eventually, you will suffer from overtraining syndrome.

If your goal is to become a better paddler, we encourage you to forget about your body image, focus on your paddling, and trust the program.  It may also be of interest to note that our experience over the last 20 years, is that your body composition will likely change as a consequence of your training.

• Step 1, as we describe in the nutrition chapter, is to get your calories dialed in. You will need to count calories for a few weeks to make sure you get this step correct.  In our experience, most athletes ignore this step and either eat too much or too little.
• Step 2 is to focus on your cross training. Paddling (SUP and prone paddling)  is a great exercise but when it comes to burning fat and changing your body composition, it is not the be all and end all.  In our experience, paddlers who are active cross trainers, have the “fit look” that most athletes who try fad diets want. Running and cycling use much bigger muscle groups so you get more bang for your buck while you are training. Strength workouts in the gym stimulate hormonal and metabolic changes that augment the changes to your body composition that you will get from endurance training.

The bottom line on all of this is that until Ben Affleck toes the line at Molokai, or Connor Baxter or Kai Lenny tell us that today is a “fast day” we will not be convinced that 5:2 has a place in endurance training. Stick with the basics if you want to get them most out of your paddling.

Roch