Fight Science Made Simple | FSMS #2 - Pre-Training Nutrition: How Elite Fighters Fuel for Peak Performance

Fueling your body before training can be the difference between a sharp, energized session and one where you gas out halfway through. Eat too much or the wrong foods, and you’ll feel sluggish and heavy. Eat too little, and you’ll run out of gas before the warm-up ends.

At Fight Science Made Simple, we teach fighters a simple system to solve this: the 4-2-1 Rule. This pre-training nutrition framework shows you exactly what to eat four hours, two hours, and one hour before training so you have steady energy, avoid stomach issues, and perform at your best.

In this article, we’ll break down:

• Why pre-training nutrition is a game-changer for fighters and martial artists.
• The 4-2-1 Rule and how to apply it to your daily training.
• Actionable examples of meals and snacks you can start using today.

Whether you’re a hobbyist, a competitor, or a pro, mastering pre-training nutrition will immediately improve your performance and recovery.

What is Fight Science Made Simple ?

Fight Science Made Simple is for fighters and martial artists who want to train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life.

Each week, we break down strength & conditioning, nutrition, recovery, and mindset into straightforward strategies you can actually use in training. Simple, practical, and backed by real fight science—so you can keep chasing your potential, performing at your peak, and becoming the fighter you’ve always wanted to be.

 Welcome to episode two of the Fight Science Made Simple podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Snyder. If you're new here, I am a lifelong martial artist, active MMA fighter and performance and recovery specialist. I have dedicated my life to the martial arts and helping fighters like you train harder, recover faster, and stay on the mat for life.

In today's episode, we are talking about nutrition. More specifically pre-training nutrition, what you eat before training is one of the most important decisions that you can make to have an immediate impact on your on mat performance. If you eat too much or you eat the wrong things, then you're gonna feel sluggish and slow and have a lot of stomach discomfort.

On the other hand, if you don't eat anything or you don't eat enough, or again, you eat the wrong things, you're not gonna have any energy. You're gonna gas out. You're gonna feel lightheaded, and your performance is going to feel flat. So. In today's episode, we are going to cover everything that you need to know about pre-training nutrition at the Fight Science Collective.

We have a very specific protocol for this. It's called the 4 2 1 Rule. So I'm gonna break down the 4, 2, 1 rule for you. I'm gonna show you specific strategy, specific foods that you could eat, and then some action steps that you can take today if you're training or sparring or have a workout to see. Some immediate improvements to your game.

So without further ado, let's jump in. So pre-training nutrition, like we said, very important concept, very important thing to grasp as a fighter, whether you're competing or not, what you eat before your training is really important and what we use at the Fight Science Collective to help our clients perform better and recover faster.

What we call the four two one rule. The 4 2 1 rule is pretty simple. Four hours before training you want to have a full meal. This is gonna be a normal size, big meal. We like to reference what we call the performance plate when you are creating your four hour pre-training meal. So if you have a plate.

Half of that plate. You wanna be carbohydrates. A quarter of that plate, you wanna be protein, and another quarter of that plate, you want to be vegetables. Now, if you have specific macronutrient breakdowns for each meal throughout the day through for each day. You're going to want to work this performance plate concept around your macro nutrient numbers.

That's what we do for our clients, uh, especially our highest level guys. We give them very specific meal plans and we tell them how much protein, carbs, fats to eat at each meal, and we cycle their carbs for high, low and medium intensity days. If you have. A high level detailed plan like that, then you want to fit the performance plate framework around that.

If you don't, then A, you should probably get one if you're serious, and B, if you're not as serious, maybe you're a hobbyist or tracking doesn't really do it for you. Then this performance plate concept on its own can be helpful. Um, for your carbs. You can do sweet potatoes, you can do pasta. You could do quinoa, you could do rice, you could do brown rice, you can sprinkle some fruits in there.

Oats, we want to get good, healthy, clean carbohydrates in there for your proteins, we want fish, chicken, steak, eggs, tofu. We want to get some lean protein sources in there. Uh, if you. Can account or a lot for higher calories in a day, then you can have some fattier protein sources in there. But if you're cutting or need to lose some weight, then your linear proteins are gonna be a way to go.

Um. On the veggie side of things, we like to eat the rainbow of vegetables. So mix in all different colors of veggies. Uh, then your fats are gonna get worked in there, either in what you're cooking, your food in, or the fat in your meat. So that's the the first part of the 4, 2, 1 rule. Four hours before you train, you want to eat a full meal.

Two hours before you train, you want to eat a high carb snack. So now. We're getting a little bit closer to training. Four hours before training, we can have a big meal and there's enough time where the food's going to digest, so you're not gonna feel sluggish or you're not going to get any kind of stomach discomfort in training.

Two hours before training. We still have enough time to digest, but we can't eat. As much as in our meal. And so what I tell our clients to do is two hours before training, have a snack that's high in carbs and has some protein in it. So something like Greek yogurt with fruit and granola and honey can be an awesome option.

A peanut butter and jelly can be a great option. Making a smoothie with a lot of fruit and maybe some protein powder and some honey can also be an amazing option. You wanna make sure that. You're, you're giving your body the fuel that it needs. So carbs, if you're treating really intense carbs, is your body's number one preferred.

Preferred fuel source. Number one, preferred fuel source. That's a mouthful to say. So your body wants carbs and then the protein's gonna help with recovery, help with muscle protection and preservation, and it's also gonna curve hunger. Protein is the most satiating macronutrients, which means it's the most filling.

So if you eat a lot of protein, you're not gonna feel as hungry. So we want a lot of protein in there. We wanna avoid fats and vegetables and fiber at our two hour pre-training snack, uh, because you're not going to have enough time to digest those things. So if you eat foods that are high in fat, high in fiber, then.

You're just not going to have the time to digest. It's gonna sit in your stomach and you're gonna feel that stomach discomfort. So, high carb snack, lots of carbs, a little bit of protein. That's the two. So four, two. Now one, the one part of the 4, 2, 1 rule. You want to eat 30 to 60 grams of simple, fast digesting carbohydrates.

Um, so this is the closest time to training. Our digestion window is very small and so. Simple carbs, most of that digestion happens in your mouth. So you just wanna get sugar immediately available into your bloodstream to use in your training. So this could look like an applesauce packet, two applesauce packets.

You could have rice cakes with jelly. You could have a banana with honey. Uh, you could do. Sports drink like a Gatorade. You wanna make sure that there's sugar in the sports drink, whatever it is, 30 to 60 grams of fast acting carbohydrates. So the sugar is there and it's readily available and ready for you to train.

And that's the framework, right? 4, 2, 1 4 hours of before training. Have a full meal, two hours before training. Have a high carb snack, one hour before training. Have fast acting carbs that are readily available to fuel your tank up. This is a game changer. This is one of the very first things that I implement in our client's regimen, and they immediately see improvements to their performance.

A lot of the times we have guys that are struggling with cardio and all we do is implement the 4, 2 1 rule and their gas tank goes to another level before we even do any kind of heart rate based conditioning. So it's, it's really, really powerful. A couple scenarios and a couple questions that I get asked that you might ask.

So what if you train early in the morning? What if I have like a 9:00 AM or a 10:00 AM training session and I don't have enough time to follow the entire 4, 2, 1 rule? Do I have to wake up, like if I'm training at 8:00 AM if I'm training at 9:00 AM do I have to have a meal at 5:00 AM? And what I tell our clients is if you have an early training session.

Follow the 4, 2, 1 rule in the allotted time that you have. So if you're training at 10:00 AM and you wake up at 7:00 AM maybe just follow the two, one part of that four portion. If maybe you're doing a 6:00 AM lift, maybe you just wake up and get some fast acting carbs and you just follow the one part of the rule.

You have to look at when your training session is and then be smart about. Which part of the 4, 2, 1 rule you follow? Uh, another question that I get is, what if I have multiple training sessions throughout the day? So if I have a morning and an evening training session. And what I would do with that is I would just follow the 4, 2, 1 rule twice.

So if you have a morning session, do the part of the 4, 2, 1 rule that allots for time leading up to that morning session. Get some recovery food in maybe a protein shake, maybe a meal after training, and then depending on how much time you have leading up to your second session, follow the 4, 2 1 rule.

Following up to that, if you have the ability to do the full 4, 2, 1 rule, great. If you only have two, one, then do two, one leading up to your second session. And so that's a question that I get a lot. Another question that I get a lot is, what about back to back training sessions? What if I'm doing two, three sessions in a row?

A lot of hours? Still follow the 4 2, 1 rule leading up to it. But I highly recommend having carbs to sip on throughout your training session. This is. A sports drink, like a Gatorade can be an awesome option. This is where having like go-go squeeze applesauce packets on you and just throwing down one or two applesauce packets throughout training is really important.

I also like to supplement with electrolytes throughout longer training sessions, so we're putting fluids back in our body. We're putting sodium and potassium back in our body. Uh, we're putting carbohydrates and, and fuel and glucose back in our body, so we're burning and losing all of these really important substances throughout training.

We wanna make sure that we're putting them back in so we can continue to perform, uh, and then we can recover at a really high level. But I, I cannot stress enough how important it is that you prioritize your pre. Training nutrition. I'll leave you with a story and then we will wrap up this episode for today.

Um, one of our pros, David Macias, uh, before he was a fight science client, were teammates. And so when I was newer to the gym, uh, he was there for a little while and I remember he was very closed off to any kind of new information, which is normal. Like if someone new is coming to your gym, you're gonna be a little bit skeptical.

I remember there was somebody at the gym that threw up during a striking class because they ate and they ate the wrong things before training. And David talked to me, he was like, dude, that's what happens when you eat before training. David was very much in the mindset of, I'm not gonna eat before training.

And David was killing it. He was a dominant, undefeated, amateur, and so he had a lot of proof to, to back up that reasoning. The other side of that is he was burned out all the time. He was struggling with nagging injuries. He had to pull out of a title fight because of an injury that he sustained, where if he was just eating the right things before training, his body would've been healthier.

He would've been less injury prone, and he probably wouldn't have had to pull out of that title fight. And so then when we started working together, we. Introduced the 4, 2 1 rule. We tightened up his nutrition. We showed him what to eat. He followed this rule before training and it was incredible. He ended up having more energy than ever in his entire career.

He put on muscle and size. He went down a weight class, so he was fighting at 1 55, a smaller one 50 fiver, getting injured, still winning, but that's just how tough he was. And then we started implementing more food into his regimen. He had more energy, his walk around weight went up, but then we went down to the 1 45 weight class, massive, one 40 fiver, less injury, more energy, and even more dominant per performances.

He's four and oh as a professional, and three of those are are finishes. That's the power of something like the 4, 2 1 rule. So if you're a fighter, if you're a hobbyist, if you're a martial artist, you're struggling with energy or you're confused about nutrition, this 4, 2 1 rule is gonna be a game changer for you.

You can start using it right now. Look into your cabinet, look what you have, look at the foods that you have. If you're going to training today, you can start using this rule right now, and I promise you, you implement this into training right now. You are going to see massive improvements into your performance.

Uh, but that's it. That's everything I got for you. Fight Science Made Simple episode two, short and sweet. If you dug the episode, please make sure you show it some love. Give it a like, follow this podcast so you don't miss out on any episodes or dropping episodes every single week, and make sure that you send it to a training partner.

The more. Fighters and martial artists that we can get this podcast into the hands of the bigger impact we're going to be able to have on the fight space means you're gonna be able to go further, you're gonna be able to go faster, you're gonna be able to do it with more enjoyment, healthier, uh, and we're gonna have a great community on the process, so please send it to a lot of fighters.

If there's any episodes that you wanna see, you can drop it in the comments down below. Look at that just about. Under 15 minutes, what is this, like 14 minutes and some change. Beautiful. Keeping it short. Keeping it sweet. Until next time, catch you later.