Your gym bag might be packed with shoes, sleeves, tape, and everything you need to prepare for a CrossFit competition, but have you optimized the best CrossFit diet plan to fuel your muscles and mental clarity? Here we’ll outline the best diet for CrossFit to teach you how to power through training and arrive prepared to compete.
CrossFit is a strength conditioning workout performed at high intensity. Throughout CrossFit training, you push, pull, squat, and perform timed variations to build muscle. Emphasizing weight load, distance, and speed—you’ll develop real power using bells, bikes, balls, rowers, and rings. Your CrossFit performance can stretch even further with the right fuel through CrossFit diet plans, hydrating drinks, and ketone supplements.
It’s important to research what you should eat, drink, and use to fuel better performance from CrossFit training all the way to your actual competition. Here, we cover what makes for the best CrossFit diet plan, which drinks to consume, and how to use exogenous ketones as a powerful CrossFit supplement and recovery aid. Whatever your gender, these CrossFit pointers will help you craft a ketone-based diet plan to crush the gym!
What Do CrossFit Athletes Eat During Training?
Athletes who consume carbohydrates like rice, bread, and pasta will use glucose to give their body energy during exercise. While carbohydrates are a necessary fuel source, depending on them over other macronutrients has the potential to lead to fatigue and less sustained energy. That’s why typical CrossFit diets include plenty of meats, vegetables, nuts, and seeds—with some fruit, little starch, and no sugars.
Due to the high-intensity level of CrossFit training and competitions, some athletes may think they need to eat more carbs than the average person to adequately power their exercise, but that’s not the only diet that sustains the CrossFit lifestyle. When you compare a ketogenic diet to a carb-rich diet, you’ll see there are other ways to train and compete without losing momentum.
Keto vs. Carb Diet
When training for a CrossFit competition, there are significant differences between relying on and restricting carbohydrates. Because your body has two options for fuel sources to feed your muscles: carbs or fat. Here’s a simple pros vs. cons list of carb and keto CrossFit meal plans. See how a keto diet for CrossFit athletes builds attractive advantages and a competitive edge when compared to a carb-centric alternative.
Pros for Athletes on Keto Diets
As the ideal CrossFit meal plan, a ketogenic diet reduces inflammation of muscles and improves performance in exercise while sharpening cognitive function and focus. By running on ketones, you can secure countless benefits by restricting carbs and providing a more stable, powerful energy source than glucose:
- Fat loss
- Appetite control
- Better performance
- Weight management
- Boosted energy levels
- Cognitive improvement
Cons of Running on Carbs
As a lesser source of energy, carb-heavy CrossFit meal plans load the body with sugars as fuel. When relying on carbs and glucose, the body can struggle to maintain energy levels—creating mental fogs, physical lapses, and lost efficiency during training and competition:
- Spikes in blood sugar
- Inefficient energy source
- Slower conversion into fuel
By making your CrossFit meal plan keto-friendly instead of carb-saturated, you’ll avoid the downsides of carb-loading and sugar-crashing that are too common for so many CrossFit competitors who believe they need carbs to perform.
What Should a CrossFit Athlete Drink?
For low- or medium-intensity workouts, water suffices to maintain hydration, but electrolyte drinks benefit athletes training at high intensity (such as CrossFit). Unfortunately, traditional sports drinks have a high-calorie sugar content, leading to weight gain, tooth decay, and crashes.
A smart alternative to sports drinks and pre-workout mixes, exogenous ketone drinks contain powerful electrolytes like sodium, potassium, and magnesium to hydrate (and energize) more sustainably. As a CrossFit supplement and hydrating drink, exogenous ketones like Kenetik fill the substantial athletic needs of high-intensity workouts.
Beyond these essential elements of hydration—exogenous ketone drinks can supercharge mental and physical performance by supplementing the body’s natural stores of ketones. They make a great overall supplement to training, recovery, and competition.
How Do You Supplement CrossFit Workouts?
The best supplements for CrossFit aid your recovery from intense, draining workouts to keep you ready to perform better day after day. Many of the most popular supplements for CrossFit athletes include fats and amino acids for muscle growth and repair:
- BCAAs
- Fish oils
- Creatine
- Beta-alanine
Many athletes are even experimenting with dual-fueling, a process where athletes eat a non-ketogenic diet, but use supplemental ketones as an additional fuel source. To maximize results before, during, and after exercise, consider adding some of the best supplements for CrossFit workouts like exogenous ketones to bring your body into its most powerful energy state: ketosis. As CrossFit supplements, ketones are one of the most effective ways to train and compete. They also make a great addition to a CrossFit diet plan designed to give you an advantage in training.
That’s because, if you drink Kenetik, you'll enter ketosis faster (regardless of your CrossFit meal plan), making you ready to burn fats for fuel, tone your body, and train for hours on a stable source—without the usual blood-sugar crash.
How to Optimize CrossFit Training With Exogenous Ketones
Exogenous ketones supplement the body’s natural stores of ketones, helping CrossFit athletes enter ketosis faster and reap the benefits of training on a more efficient, stable energy source without the need for lengthy fasting or diet restriction.
Used as a pre-workout supplement, Kenetik fuels CrossFit athletes who want a competitive edge. Kenetik—the plant-based ketone drink approved by the American Brain Council—raises energy levels, hydrates the body with natural electrolytes, and improves performance, endurance, and recovery time.
Because Kenetik enhances alertness, boosts brain function, and sustains focus, its benefits extend far beyond giving the body what it wants. Kenetik keeps your body and mind aligned by aiding workouts with mental clarity as well as physical fuel.
A CrossFit diet plan rich in ketones keeps athletes primed for ketosis, the ultimate state of focused energy meant for high intensity. Learn how Kenetik can help you compete as a CrossFit athlete by exploring its pure-ketone formula and benefits for sports performance.
