What Should Your Youth Athlete Eat Before a Workout?

Written by Dr. Trevor Batson (Head Trainer at Core Blend Training)

Pre-training snacks for younger athletes should be focused on both keeping them feeling full and supporting their energy needs, to do this we’ll focus on two primary sources of energy- carbs and fats.

Carbs are things like fruits, rice, breads, and starches (i.e. potatoes)

digest fast. If you’re crunched for time and need to feed your athlete something within about 1.5 hours from their training session, these will be the focus. 20-40g of carbs right before training is a good starting point, with smaller and/or younger athletes being closer to 20g, and bigger athletes being closer to 40g. One caveat here is that some carbs do digest faster than others, so I’ll list some common ones here in order from fastest to slowest: Fruit, white rice/white bread, potatoes, whole-grain bread/brown rice. This means something like fruit would make more sense the closer to the training session you get, and something like whole-grain bread will make more sense if you have a bit more time to work with.

Fats come from things like animal products, dairy, nuts (and nut butters), and seeds. These are great sources of fuel but also digest much slower than carbs. Because of this you won’t want to add a lot of these right before training, but they can be a great addition (alongside carbs) to a snack 2-4 hours before training. 8-15g is a good range to be in here, with again smaller athletes being closer to 8g and bigger athletes being closer to 15g. Nuts, nut butters, and dairy generally digest a bit faster than fats from animal sources, so if you’re within 3 hours from the training session I’d rely on those more, whereas animal fats are great if you have a little bit more time!