Dr Trent Stellingwerff, a lead author of the IOC's REDs clinical assessment tool, explains the signs to watch for and what to do about them.
Your easy runs feel hard, you're getting sick more often and your sessions are inconsistent. The usual advice: you're overtrained, back off. Trent thinks that advice is often wrong. In his team's review of the classic overtraining studies, 18 of the 21 that reported nutrition showed an energy or carbohydrate shortfall during the overload period.
We cover what energy availability is, why the diagnostic tool doesn't measure it, symptoms you can spot without a lab, how under-fuelling leads to stress fractures, and the one simple equation worth knowing.
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Timestamps
00:00 Cold open: a month of not eating
00:30 Intro
01:48 Trent's background
04:00 Why Trent studies under-fuelling
06:30 Pregnancy, breastfeeding and under-fuelling
10:17 Overtraining vs REDs
14:01 A quick word about Pace Buddies
15:42 18 out of 21: what old overtraining studies missed
19:48 What energy availability actually is
22:38 Spring classics: bad race days, fine weekly average
25:31 Why you shouldn't calculate it yourself
28:57 Fasted running: risk and reward
31:52 Race weight and the weight-loss trap
34:30 The symptom list
39:14 How under-fuelling causes stress fractures
42:20 What a runner can actually do
47:20 Why your watch is off by 30%
49:48 Why the diagnostic tool ignores energy intake
51:47 One calorie per kilo per kilometre
55:30 How long does recovery take?
57:28 REDs and eating disorders are not the same
59:19 The study he'd run with unlimited funding
The quick version
Energy availability = energy intake minus the energy cost of training, corrected for fat-free mass. It is not the same as a calorie deficit: one low day is fine, the pattern is the problem.
Rough cost of a run: 1 kcal per kg body weight per km. It dates from the 1960s, was built on a flat treadmill, and falls apart on hills and when walking.
Don't try to measure your way out: watch and app calories can be off by about 30%. Watch the symptoms instead.
First step: add roughly 300–400 kcal of carbohydrate around training, spread food across the day, and see how you feel after a week.
Find Trent Women's Health and Sport Performance Institute (Boston) · Canadian Sport Institute Pacific (Victoria)
Disclosure Trent previously spent six years in R&D at PowerBar (Nestlé Research Center) and has no current commercial interest in anything discussed.
This episode touches on eating disorders. REDs and eating disorders overlap but are not the same thing. Nothing here is medical advice or a diagnostic tool. If several of the symptoms sound familiar, see a physician.
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