Endurance Nutrition vs. Functional Nutrition: Which is Best for Active Women?

You’re a runner. Or a cyclist. Maybe you like to lift weights, be active, or challenge yourself through other forms of endurance exercise. You know you need nutrition support to get you to your fitness goals.

Yet you also have an old nagging knee injury. Or you’ve been told you have iron deficiency. Maybe your struggling with chronic fatigue, keeping up with family and work responsibilities on top of your fitness goals. You feel you need support for your overall health before you can focus on endurance nutrition.

So where do you start? Is one better than the other? What’s the difference?

I offer both of these forms of nutrition coaching because when I was a struggling new mom trying to get back to my running goals, I realized I needed functional nutrition support as well and could not find someone who could help me with both. I had to piece together a timeline of support for myself and get help from multiple sources and try to get everyone to be on the same page with my health plan so that I was not doing harm in one area for the sake of healing in another.

But these two things are fundamentally different. How we approach nutrition for hormone health, injury prevention, and optimal metabolic function is different from how we fuel through a race training plan. The types of foods recommended are different, the macro breakdown of meals is different, the lifestyle strategies to support nutrition are different.

So which route is best for you, right now?

Functional Nutrition for Hormone Health:

1. I use a “test don’t guess approach”: We start with functional testing so that we can know what is going on in the body and not just guess
2. We build a functional foundation around nutrition and mindset.
3. We look at symptoms in relationship to stress, sleep, activity, nutrient intake, and hormones.
4. We go beyond the food: Functional nutrition also looks at lifestyle, habits, and overall health. Resources related to breathwork, environmental toxins, sleep hygiene, lymphatic drainage, and various therapy modalities are provided, as necessary.

Endurance Nutrition for Female Athletes:

1. First of all, if you’re training for something, you’re an athlete. Period.
2. HTMA testing: I provide HTMA testing to ALL 1:1 coaching clients, not just those wanting functional nutrition support. HTMA provides me insight into the nutrient status of your cells and can help me target any nutrients that are lacking or out of balance in order to best support athletic goals.
3. Custom macro calculations: In order to make sure you are fueling adequately, we start with a baseline and look at macros as a tool that we can use to maximize training and recovery. Macro calculations for endurance nutrition clients will change over the course of the training cycle as training changes up to race day.
4. Endurance nutrition is very nuanced and will vary week to week as training and recovery fluctuates. We look at fatigue, illness, injury, training recovery time, and amount of added stressors from week to week and adjust nutrition accordingly.

So what if you want nutrition support for a race AND you need functional nutrition help? Do you need to book both services? Can you work on both at the same time? What does a timeline look like?

When I talk with potential clients, we discuss what the overarching goal is. Is it symptom relief? Is it overall wellness? Or is it a training goal? That determines our end point. If you have a goal race, we can start there. But if you have a goal that you haven’t been able to reach over the course of numerous races because of chronic injury or illness, we probably have to take a step back from training and look at overall health first.

All 1:1 coaching plans allow time in the last month to prioritize training goals if that is desired. You do not need to go through functional nutrition coaching and then start over with endurance coaching. However, we really cannot do both at the same time. If your body is struggling, this is not a time to be training. It may be hard to hear or to put into practice, but in order for you to reach your endurance goals, you need to have your body primed to be able to handle the load that training puts on it. If not, you’re going to keep falling back into old injury patterns or continue to fail to reach your goal times.

Either way, you need to carve out a solid 6-12 months to focus on your goals. I prefer a minimum of 6 months because it allows us to get through the stage where things seem worse before they get better. It lets us go at the pace your body sets and not that our brains want to go by. We can adapt week to week, as needed. Even with my 8 week coaching plan, we talk through what to focus on for a 6-12 month timeline after we are done working together so there is a structure in place to continue to work from. This isn’t something to rush through. If your training plan is 4-5 months, don’t you also owe it to yourself to focus on your nutrition for just as long?

Are you interested in pursuing nutrition coaching or have more questions than were addressed here? Apply for coaching! Completing an application just shows your interest level and let’s us open up space for conversation. If we are a good fit to work together, we will find the best solution for your goals!