Those “best endurance athletes” are clearly the Kenyan runners. One study found that athletes from just one collection of Kenyans, the Kalenjin tribe, had won approximately 40 percent of all major international middle- and long-distance running competitions in the 10-year period from 1987 to 1997. In addition, approximately half of all of the male athletes in the world who have ever run the 10K in less than 27 minutes hail from Kenya. Although is not Jiu-Jitsu just an endurance sport, it is interesting to see what these athletes eat that give them so much energy. We can as a result look into incorporating part of that into our own grappler’s diet:
Source: http://rbgsocialclub.wordpress.com
Breakfast at 8:00 a.m.
Mid-morning snack at 10:00 a.m.
Lunch at 1:00 p.m.
Afternoon snack at 4:00 p.m.
Supper at 7:00 p.m.
“Kenyan runners tend to eat a limited variety of foods, and that was certainly the case with these elite athletes. Most of their nutrients came from vegetable sources, and the “staple” edibles were bread, boiled rice, poached potatoes, boiled porridge, cabbage, kidney beans and ugali (a well-cooked, corn-meal paste that’s molded into balls and dipped into other foods for flavoring).
Meat (primarily beef) was eaten just four times a week in fairly small amounts (about 100 grams — 3.5 ounces a day). A fair amount of tea with milk and sugar was imbibed on a daily basis (more on this in a moment).
If you’re thinking about heading to a nutritional-supplement store to purchase some performance-enhancing supplements (or you already purchase on a regular basis), bear in mind that the Kenyan runners were not taking supplements of any kind. There were no vitamins, no minerals, no special formulations or miracle compounds, nada. The gold-medal-winning Kenyans adhered to the odd philosophy that regular foods could fuel their efforts quite nicely.”
About the source of their food:
“About 86 percent of daily calories came from vegetable sources, with 14 percent from animal foods. As you might expect, the Kenyan-runners’ diets were extremely rich in carbohydrate, with 76.5 percent of daily calories coming from carbs. The Kenyans ate about 10.4 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body mass each day, or approximately 4.7 grams per pound of body weight.”
