Eating Before a 5:30am Class

The alarm goes at 5am. You're in the car by 5:15 and on the floor by 5:30, and somewhere in those fifteen minutes is the question of whether you should have eaten something.

For a 60-minute session, you almost certainly don't need to.

Your liver holds enough glycogen to cover an overnight fast and an hour of training without you running out of anything. The argument for eating first tends to fall down on timing — solid food takes 60 to 90 minutes to clear the stomach, so anything you eat at 5:10 is still sitting there when you're upside down or on the rower at 5:45.

There are two exceptions worth knowing. If you feel light-headed or shaky in the first ten minutes — not tired, light-headed — you're better with something small. And if the session is long and heavily aerobic rather than a strength day, a bit of carbohydrate helps you hold the pace at the back end.

In both cases the dose is small. Twenty to thirty grams of carbohydrate, twenty minutes before. A banana. A slice of toast with honey. A handful of dried fruit. Nothing with fat or fibre in it — both slow gastric emptying. Coffee is fine and probably helps.

One thing that matters more than any of this: what you ate at 7pm the night before. Train at 5:30 on the back of a proper dinner and the morning fasted session question disappears. Skip dinner, drink two glasses of wine, and no banana at 5:10 is going to rescue it!

What matters more is the meal after. You've trained fasted, you've got a full day ahead, and the window between the session and the school run is the one people skip. Aim for 30 to 40 grams of protein within a couple of hours of finishing, with carbohydrate alongside it — eggs and toast, Greek yoghurt with oats and berries, leftovers from last night. Over the day, keep total protein between 1.6 and 2.2 grams per kilo of bodyweight. That total is what builds muscle. The timing is a distant second.

Try it both ways. Two weeks fasted, two weeks with the banana, same sessions, and notice which one you train better on.

Food is the part people get least support with. Our Nutrition and Lifestyle Programme, run by Dr Amy George — a CrossFit coach and an HSN nutrition and lifestyle coach — covers the eating, the habits and the long game, with no meal plans to fail at. Start with a free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com.