HDT Throwdown Review and Nutrition Tips

About the Event

The Throwdown is 14-16 hour overnight endurance event, with competitive and non-competitive options. It’s an absolute blast – if you have the opportunity to do one, do it! You will complete a series of workouts designed to test muscular, cardiovascular, and mental endurance. You will also be completing team-based challenges. A review of HDT Throwdown and nutrition tips to help you thrive:

The Throwdown competitive option has a ruck and sandbag weight standard, and you must perform all workouts as prescribed. For non-competitive, you select your sandbag and ruck weight, you can do the exercises within any workout in any order, and you can modify exercises to meet your needs. Bryan ensures you keep proper form for all exercises (which gets more challenging as you become exhausted).

The flow of the event is systematic and planned. As to be expected, the workouts are high volume. However, there is no sense of random exercise for exercise sake. The time between evolutions is intended for recovery – to position you to test the effectiveness of your training and push yourself to the limit. Therefore, the event is an excellent way to benchmark performance and identify areas for improvement. At times, your abilities as team leader will be tested and then evaluated through a peer review process.

Despite the competitive nature of the event, the is a positive team atmosphere. you will support and cheer each other on as you go. It was incredibly motivating to see people do things they didn’t think they could do (and I loved the thrill of chasing people ahead of me in workouts).

Nutrition Tips

The design of the Throwdown confers you a MASSIVE advantage when it comes to maintaining performance because: 1) there are rest periods 2) you are free to drink and eat whenever you want, and 3) you are not confined to the space available in your ruck.

If you’re a member of the HDT Nutrition, I’ve previously shared an understanding of energy systems with in the context of exercise and endurance events. Having now experienced a Throwdown firsthand, my descriptor of the event is undulating, high to moderate intensity aerobic exercise coupled with less frequent low intensity movement. Therefore, supplying your body steadily with readily digested and absorbed carbohydrate is the priority to maintain muscle force production.

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Fluids. Drink carbohydrate throughout the event. Sipping an electrolyte + carbohydrate beverage such as Tailwind, Skratch, or Gatorade (20-60g /hr. likely a good range for most folks) during or between workouts as well as water will help maintain hydration and restore glycogen. These products are convenient, but there’s nothing special about them. An less expensive option is to add dextrose (glucose) to water with table salt, which is what I did during the event. Plain dextrose is less sweet than sugar which helps it stay more palatable if consuming over a long period of time.

Foods. When you decide it’s time to eat solids, stick with easy to digest carbohydrates. A little bit of protein may help too if you find that that carbs are creating some gastrointestinal upset. Generally, it’s a good idea to minimize fiber intake, and avoid high fat and/or greasy foods. Here are a few ideas:

Pretzels, bagels, saltines
Crunchy rice rollers
Instant oat packs
Gummy candy, gels (be sure you’re drinking enough water if you select these). Albanese makes the best tasting gummy bears on earth.
PP & J sandwich – bread with your favorite jam + (mix protein power with a tiny bit of water to make a spreadable paste.
Sweet Potato Maple Bites

Consistency. Considering you have the luxury of drinking and eating whenever you want, do your best to be consistent with fluid and food intake, versus going long stretches of time. Sipping fluids every few minutes is preferable to chugging periodically to help your body absorb water and nutrients – no sense dumping a bunch of fluid quickly, most of it will likely come sailing out instead of helping you stay hydrated. Likewise, you are better off eating a little bit every break versus waiting several hours then consuming a large volume of food. When you body is prioritizing blood flow to digest food, that means blood flow is NOT being prioritized to your muscles.

While this is general best practice advice, nutrition is personal so it’s important to experiment and explore.