Back to the Barre: Fuelling the Return to Training Without Falling Into Under-Fuelling

Every September, I have some version of the same conversation with the dance students I work with. Summer training was lighter. Now, in the space of a single week, it isn’t — full days back at the studio, early starts most mornings.

It’s not neglect, and it’s rarely a lack of care. It’s just an easy gap to miss, because everything else about the new term is loud and visible — timetables, uniforms, new choreography — while fuelling is quiet. Nobody hands you a form for it. And by the time it becomes obvious something’s off, three or four weeks have usually gone by.

What’s actually happening in week one

Training load doesn’t ramp up gradually in September — it jumps. A student who was doing a few classes a week in August can be back to five or six full days within days of term starting. Energy expenditure rises to match that almost immediately.

Food intake doesn’t rise on the same timeline. Routines take longer to reset than schedules do — new school lunch arrangements, less time to cook in the evening, the general disruption of a new term. So for a stretch of week one, and often longer, there’s a mismatch: more energy going out, without more coming in to match it.

That gap is what sports medicine calls low energy availability — not enough fuel left over, once training demands are accounted for, to properly support everything else the body needs to do: repair muscle, regulate hormones, support bone health, and in adolescents, continue growing. The body is very good at making short-term trade-offs to cope with this. It’s much less good at doing so safely over weeks.

Why “easing back in” with less food gets it backwards

There’s a common instinct — among dancers, and often among the adults around them — to treat the return to training as a moment to be a bit more careful, food-wise. Ease in gently. Don’t overdo it while getting back into shape.

It’s an understandable thought. It’s also the exact opposite of what the body needs at this point in the term.

More training always means more fuel required, not less — regardless of how long the break was, or how “unfit” someone feels after it. Under-fuelling into a training-load jump is one of the fastest routes to the pattern I see constantly in early autumn: a dancer who is training hard, doing everything right in the studio, and still feels heavy, flat, and slower to pick things up than they expect. That’s rarely a fitness problem in week one. Far more often, it’s a fuelling gap wearing a fitness costume.

Left unaddressed, that gap doesn’t stay quiet. The early signs are easy to miss individually — low mood, irritability, trouble concentrating in class, niggling injuries that don’t quite resolve, a period that goes missing and gets filed under “normal for dancers.” None of them are normal. Together, or persistent, they’re the pattern behind REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) — and September’s training-load jump is exactly the kind of moment that tends to trigger it.

What a realistic refuelling week actually looks like

This isn’t about eating “more to compensate” in some dramatic sense. It’s about matching intake to the training day that’s actually happening now, not the lighter one from August.

A few practical anchors that tend to make the biggest difference in week one:

Breakfast happens, even before an early start. Skipping it because class begins at 8am is a common pattern — and one of the simplest to fix with something that travels, even if it’s eaten on the way in.

Lunch is a full meal, in its own right — not a light bite squeezed in. It’s easy for lunch to quietly shrink to a sandwich eaten standing up, or get skipped altogether between school and rehearsal. But on a training day like this, lunch is doing as much work as dinner: it needs to be a proper, sit-down-worthy meal, not an afterthought treated as “just something to tide you over.”

Snacks morning and afternoon should be carb-based, and quick enough for a 10-minute break. Lunch covers the middle of the day, but between classes there’s often only a short break to eat in — not time for anything that needs sitting down to or preparing on the spot. A mid-morning and a mid-afternoon snack built around carbohydrate (an oatcake, a banana, a handful of dried fruit, a cereal bar, a slice of toast) tops up fuel stores in the time available, and does far more than a quick sugary fix that fades before class ends.

Dinner after evening training matters as much as anything eaten beforehand. This is when the body does its repair work. A meal that gets pushed too late, or skipped in favour of “I’ll just have a snack, I’m tired,” is one of the more overlooked pieces of the puzzle.

Hydration resets with the schedule too. Longer days at the studio, often with less thinking time than the summer allowed, make it easy to arrive under-hydrated without noticing.

None of this needs to be complicated or precisely measured. It needs to be consistent, and it needs to actually match the training that’s happening — which, right now, is more than it was a few weeks ago.

A simple system, so it doesn’t rely on willpower

None of the above holds up on a Tuesday if it depends on having the energy to think it through fresh every day — and by week one back, nobody has that spare energy. What actually makes it stick is a handful of small systems, set up once on a quieter day, that take the decision out of the busiest ones.

• Sketch a loose meal plan for the week. Not a rigid script — just knowing on Sunday roughly what dinner is on a heavy training day versus a lighter one means nobody’s standing at the fridge at 8pm trying to invent something.
• Cook double at dinner, and let it become tomorrow’s lunch. If dinner’s already being cooked after an evening class, doubling it costs almost no extra time or effort — and it means lunch the next day is already sorted rather than a rushed decision at midday.
• Prep breakfast the night before. For a 7am start, breakfast either gets made in a fog five minutes before leaving, or it gets skipped. Overnight oats, a batch of muffins, or simply setting out what’s needed the night before turns it from a decision into something that just happens.
• Buy snacks in bulk, not one at a time. If oatcakes, nut butter, yoghurt drinks or trail mix only get bought when someone remembers, the bag is empty on the days it matters most. Buying enough for the week (or fortnight) in one go means the snack is there without anyone having to think about it that morning.
• Pick one weekly reset point. Sunday evening works for a lot of students, but any quiet slot does — the point is doing this planning once, rather than making the same set of decisions fresh every single day of a full training week.

If this feels harder than it should

If you’re a dancer noticing you feel flatter or more tired than expected this week, a parent unsure whether what you’re seeing is normal adjustment or something more, or a teacher who’s spotted a pattern in a student — it’s worth an actual conversation rather than a guess. Support around fuelling for training doesn’t need to wait until something’s gone visibly wrong.