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Summary
On episode 226 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Matt Fitzgerald, a certified sports nutritionist and running and triathlon coach who has written more than 20 books on endurance training and nutrition, to discuss his book The Endurance Diet.
Matt explains that after researching elite endurance athletes across the world, from Kenya to Canada to Spain, he found five shared eating habits: eat everything, eat quality, eat carb centered, eat enough, and eat individually, none of which are built around weight loss.
The conversation then turns to training, covering the eight essentials Matt identified in elite programs, from the 80/20 intensity rule through periodization, downtime, and strength training, all built around the same idea: push hard, then genuinely recover.
Links
- https://mattfitzgerald.org
- Episode 655 – Optimize your running with Matt Fitzgerald
Key Takeaways
- Elite endurance athletes eat everything; they don’t eliminate whole food groups. Matt’s research across multiple countries and sports found none of them followed diets that ban entire categories of food, since humans are naturally omnivorous and cutting out food groups tends to cause problems for recreational athletes instead.
- “Eat quality” is the qualifier on “eat everything.” Their diets skew heavily toward unprocessed foods, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and unprocessed meat and seafood, with lower quality foods only making up a small part of the plate.
- Elite athletes eat carb centered, not simply high-carb. Carbohydrate intake tracks training load, low on rest days and high on heavy training or race days, but some quality carb source shows up in nearly every meal; Matt found no true elite competing successfully on a ketogenic approach, unlike some high-performing recreational athletes he cites.
- Eating enough matters as much as not overeating. The most reliable way elites regulate intake isn’t calorie counting, which Matt calls wildly inaccurate at the individual level, but reconnecting with the body’s own hunger and fullness signals.
- Eating individually means adapting the first four habits to your own culture and body. Athletes from different countries eat very different foods on the surface, yet share the same underlying habits; each also learns their own quirks, like the cyclist Matt describes who eats meat every other day based on how it affects his power and weight.
- The 80/20 rule governs training intensity. Roughly 80 percent of training should sit at low intensity, starting around 60 percent of max heart rate, and 20 percent at high intensity; most recreational athletes spend too much time in the moderate middle zone, which is more fatiguing without being more beneficial.
- Progressive overload only works in small increments. Fitness improves by challenging the body beyond what it’s used to, but jumping too fast, say from 10 to 40 miles a week, causes breakdown instead of progress.
- Training needs a toolbox of purpose-driven workouts paired with the hard/easy rule. Elites rotate through recovery runs, interval sessions, hill work, long endurance sessions, and tempo runs rather than relying on one format, and they space hard sessions apart instead of stacking them on consecutive days.
- Recovery weeks, periodization, and planned downtime prevent burnout. Recovery is relative to an athlete’s own normal load, periodization breaks training into base, build, peak, and taper phases, and downtime means intentionally losing some fitness two or three times a year so the body can fully regenerate; strength training rounds out the eight essentials because it benefits endurance performance even though many runners resist it.
“The go hard or go home mantra. Make your easy days easy and your hard days hard.”
Matt Fitzgerald