Two-a-day football workouts are intense and use up a lot of energy. Short rest periods between sessions brings upon a challenge to eat enough food to fully recover for the next workout session. Typical doubles-sessions run about two to two and a half hours long. In this amount of time, you can expect to burn about 1,500 calories or more per session!

Your pre-workout goal is to top off your muscle fuel stores, known as glycogen. The glycogen will be a primary source of energy for the practices. A carb-rich snack, such as the POWERBAR® Performance bar or the POWERBAR® Energize fruit smoothie bar should be consumed before both the early afternoon and the evening practices. A bagel or toast with jelly, dry or cooked cereal, and yogurt with fruit are also considered great carb-rich snacks. Consume your pre-workout snack about 45 to 60 minutes before the start of exercise to assure the food is properly digested.

While it would be very beneficial to replace carbs during the workout, this may not be feasible on the field during practice. Typical breaks in the action include water as the beverage to rehydrate. If possible, try to bring, or request a sports drink at the practices. A sports drink, like POWERBAR® Endurance provides carbs, sodium and fluid to replace that which is lost during exercise.

With fluid replacement in mind, double sessions in the hot August months will cause a large amount of sweat and sodium to be lost. The best ways to monitor your hydration level are changes in your body weight and the color of your urine. Weigh yourself before a session, and then weigh yourself again afterwards. Your post-workout weight should be no more than 2% of your pre-workout weight – In your case, you should aim not to lose more than 4 pounds. Also, your urine should be light in color, like the color of lemonade. If you lose more than 2% of your bodyweight and/or your urine is dark in color, you will need to drink more at the given breaks. Check out the Sweat Rate Calculator for personalized hydration recommendations and instructions on performing the Sweat Rate test.

Ideally, about 24 hours is recommended to allow muscles to fully recover with proper sports nutrition. However, an early afternoon session is usually followed by a four to six hour break, and then an evening session. In order to maximize the muscle recovery for the next session, concentrate on carbs. Within the first 30 minutes after a session, consume about half of your bodyweight in grams of carbs along with some protein. Then about two hours later, consume another half of your weight in grams of carbs. For example, you said you weigh about 206 pounds, so at each feeding, you should plan on consuming about 100 grams of carbs.

Football players should plan on following a well-balanced diet, including whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats and fish, and low-fat dairy choices. A typical diet should be made up of about 55% carbs, 15% protein and 30% fat. To give you a personalized nutrition plan for your weight and sport, please check out a new tool on the PowerBar website, called PowerCoach™. With PowerCoach, you will receive recommendations on before, during, and after activity meals and snacks. Also included are meal plans with healthy food choices to meet your daily calorie level.

The data generated from PowerCoach™ is based on the regular season but will give you a great idea on some healthy food choices to meet carb, protein and fat needs. As mentioned above, you will be burning through a higher amount of calories in the double-session practices. So use PowerCoach™ recommendations as a guide for food choices and modify them to meet your nutritional needs before, during and after the sessions.

Good luck with the 2-a-day football practices and the upcoming season! Go Aces!

Carbohydrates are the most important nutrient when talking about long duration endurance activities, like marathons. The muscles use carbohydrates as the primary source of energy. Muscles can also store carbohydrates in the form of glycogen. During endurance exercise when carbohydrates are not in sufficient supply, the body will turn to utilizing the glycogen as fuel. However, we have a limited supply of glycogen, and it is important to hold onto this as much as possible during exercise because if you ever become glycogen-depleted, you will basically have to stop what you are doing and replenish your stores.

What it sounds like you are planning on doing in the week before the marathon is to completely deplete your stores, and then carbohydrate load to maximize the glycogen stores. This is an old practice for carb loading and has not been proven to be the most beneficial.

Perhaps a better strategy is to continue your normal carbohydrate consumption and follow an alternate method of carb loading, where you increase the amount of carbs you consume daily in the week before the event.

You may want to consider the following carb loading regimen:
Day 1: 5 g of carbs/kg
Day 2: 5 g of carbs/kg
Day 3: 5 g of carbs/kg
Day 4: 10 g of carbs/kg
Day 5: 10 g of carbs/kg
Day 6: 10 g of carbs/kg
Day 7: Competition (follow normal diet prior to carb loading phase)

Please also check out the “Carbo-Loading – Men Vs. Women” article in our Nutrition and Training section on PowerBar.com

For events or training sessions lasting longer than an hour, carbohydrate consumption during the activity is mandatory. If you don’t consume carbs, you run the risk of depleting your muscle and liver glycogen stores. When this happens, your blood glucose level drops and you end up “hitting the wall.” This is probably what happened to you at mile 10. When you deplete your glycogen stores and can no longer maintain your blood glucose level, your body is forced to slow down or even stop.

The solution is to consume carbs regularly throughout exercise. For endurance activities, like a marathon or marathon training, liquid or semi-solid forms of carbs, such as POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink and POWERBAR® Gels, are usually tolerated better than solid carbs.

Typically, during sessions lasting longer than 2 hours, the need for carbs is about 45 to 90 grams per hour of activity. This would equate to about 2 to 3 POWERBAR® Gels per hour, or about 21 to 42 fluid ounces of POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink per hour. Both the POWERBAR® Gels and POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink are formulated with PowerBar C2 MAX optimized carb blend – based on the research tested 2:1 blend of glucose to fructose that maximizes fuel delivery to working muscles and improves endurance performance.

Try the gels with a few mouthfuls of water or the sports drink during your training sessions. In fact, they can be used interchangeably during exercise if you prefer. Both will provide the necessary carbs and sodium to help you perform at your best.

The other factor to consider is hydration. Dehydration and over-hydration can also decrease your endurance and have serious adverse effects if allowed to progress unchecked. The latest hydration guidelines call for athletes to hydrate based on sweat rate. If you’ve not yet performed a sweat rate test, the PowerBar Sweat Rate Calculator can guide you through the simple process. You will perform at your best if you remain in your hydration zone during exercise. That means avoiding weight gain due to excess fluid intake, and losing no more than 2% of your body weight due to fluid loss.

In summary, POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink and POWERBAR® Gels taken with water can provide the fluids, carbs, and sodium you need to keep you well-fueled and hydrated during endurance training and events.

Congratulations, this is an excellent regimen to build your cardiovascular fitness, maintain a healthy weight, and to build and maintain lean tissue.

Before exercise suggestions:
It’s always a good idea to ensure that you are fully hydrated going into a workout. Consuming 16-20 ounces of water a few hours before working out and another 6-10 ounces in the hour before exercise should be sufficient.

Forty-five minutes of cardiovascular training won’t put you at serious risk for running out of glycogen fuel stores. So, you don’t need to be too concerned about the pre-exercise meal. Instead, eat for comfort and to ward off hunger about an hour or two before exercise. Products like the new POWERBAR® Energize bar that's made with real fruit, POWERBAR® Performance bars and POWERBAR® Gels are convenient and portable high-carb snacks that may be helpful when your access to other foods is limited. Avoid high-fiber and high-fat foods just before exercise as they are slow to digest and can cause gastrointestinal distress during exercise.

For your weight training workouts consume some protein just prior to and after your workout. It doesn’t need to be a large amount – 10 to 20 grams of protein will suffice. This will help your body repair muscle tissue damaged during exercise and help with the building of new lean tissue as an adaptation to your training.

During exercise suggestions:
The biggest priority during your workouts is to hydrate. You can do that with plain water or a sports drink. If you’re training in hot or hot/humid conditions, a sports drink like POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink is the preferred option because of the sodium present. Consuming sodium along with fluids during exercise helps your body better gauge how much fluid you need. Also, adjust your fluid intake to your sweat rate and be sure that you don’t lose anymore than 2% of your body weight during exercise due to fluid loss. To determine how to calculate your sweat rate, use the PowerBar Sweat Rate Calculator.

After exercise suggestions:
If you don’t plan on exercising again for 24 hours or more, you can fully recover simply by eating your normal foods and beverages. If you want to speed recovery, consume some carbs within 30 minutes of finishing your workout - about 0.5 grams for every pound of body weight is sufficient. And if you didn’t consume 10-20 grams of protein prior to your workout, consume that amount as soon as possible after working out. If you want the convenience of PowerBar products to help promote recovery, POWERBAR® Recovery beverage and POWERBAR® Recovery bar are options to consider. Finally, be sure to gradually drink a sufficient volume of fluids after exercise to get your body weight back up to your usual pre-exercise weight.

There are different kinds of muscle cramps. Localized muscle cramping that is attributable to fatigue or doing too much for your level of conditioning can be relieved by stretching, ice, and massage.

“Heat cramps” seem to be different from the garden variety “fatigue cramps.” Heat cramps occur during prolonged exercise in hot conditions and may have more to do with large losses of fluid and the electrolyte sodium due to heavy sweating. Heat cramps often start out as twitching in the calf or quadriceps. You might notice it during a break in training or play. However, within 20 to 30 minutes the symptoms increase to full-blown cramps where a few muscle fibers contract at a time and then it spreads or seems to wander to nearby areas.

Athletes who suffer these types of cramps tend to have extreme losses of fluid and sodium when exercising in the heat. Losses of other electrolytes like potassium, magnesium, and calcium through sweat do not seem to be the issue, as they are lost in much lower amounts than sodium and the losses are usually easily replaced through a normal well-balanced diet.

So, your muscle cramping could be hydration-related heat cramps if you have a heavy sweat rate when working out in the heat, or you notice that salt seems to collect on your skin. If that is the case, you might experiment with the following strategies: Monitor your weight during exercise sessions to ensure that you’re not losing too much fluid, and hydrate with a sport drink that provides sodium such as POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink. Or, if you want fluids and electrolytes, but with fewer carbs and calories, try the new POWERBAR® Electrolytes drink mix during your next workout. After exercise, drink 23 fl oz of fluid for every pound of weight you lose during exercise and make sure to consume sources of sodium at the same time. For instance, POWERBAR® Recovery beverage and POWERBAR® Endurance sport drink provide both fluids and sodium. Salty high-carb snacks like pretzels are good sodium sources as well. Finally, if heat cramps do recur, at the first sign try consuming a high-salt solution such as half a teaspoon of salt (3 grams) mixed into a 20 fl oz bottle of water.