Meal Prep for Busy Athletes: 90 Minutes to Cover 5 Training Days

Why meal prep is the highest-leverage nutrition habit for athletes

Most nutrition failures for athletes are not knowledge failures. Athletes generally know what to eat. The failure happens at 7pm on a Tuesday after training — tired, hungry, and staring at an empty refrigerator — when the path of least resistance is takeout or whatever requires the fewest decisions.

Meal prep removes that decision point. When the food is already prepared, the path of least resistance becomes the performance option. That shift — from knowing what to eat to consistently eating it — is where the nutrition gains actually live.

The 90-minute Sunday cook is not a discipline exercise. It's a system design choice: spend a concentrated block of time once per week so the rest of the week requires almost no nutrition decisions at all.

What to prep and what not to prep

Not everything benefits from batch cooking. Proteins, grains, and roasted vegetables hold well and form the backbone of prep. Fresh salads, herbs, and most sauces are better made fresh. The goal is not to cook every meal in advance — it's to eliminate the slow parts so that assembly is fast.

A practical prep list: one or two protein sources cooked in bulk (chicken thighs, salmon portions, hard-boiled eggs, or a batch of lentils), a large grain (brown rice, quinoa, or oats for breakfast), two or three roasted vegetables, and a batch sauce or dressing that can go on multiple meals. From these components, 5 days of lunches and dinners can be assembled in under 10 minutes each.

Breakfast often deserves its own prep: overnight oats or a batch of egg muffins can cover the week's pre-training meals without any morning decision-making. Post-training snacks — portioned Greek yogurt, mixed nuts, fruit — require zero cooking and should simply be bought and stored ready to access.

The 90-minute Sunday framework

The session runs most efficiently with parallel cooking: oven items go in first (typically 35–45 minutes), stovetop items run alongside, and cooling and portioning happens at the end. Spending 5 minutes sequencing tasks before starting saves 20 minutes of standing around waiting.

A practical 90-minute sequence: (1) Preheat oven, season and load protein and vegetables. (2) Start grain on stovetop. (3) Prep breakfast batch (overnight oats takes 5 minutes, egg muffins bake alongside the main protein). (4) While everything cooks, portion snacks and prep any cold components. (5) Once everything is done, divide into containers by meal type or by day. Label if helpful.

The prep produces: 5 lunches, 4–5 dinners (leaving 2 nights for fresh cooking or leftovers), 5 breakfasts, and portioned snacks for the week. Total active time: 60–75 minutes. Cleanup: 15–20 minutes. Total: under 90 minutes. Return on investment: roughly 1–2 hours saved across the week, plus far better nutritional consistency.

Matching prep to training load

An athlete's weekly prep should reflect the week's training — not a fixed template repeated every week. If Wednesday is a hard session day, Wednesday's pre-prepared meal should be a higher-carbohydrate option. If Sunday is a rest day, Sunday's prep can front-load the protein-heavy, lower-carbohydrate containers for that day.

In practice: knowing your training schedule before you prep means you can portion grains differently for hard-day containers versus easy-day containers. Hard day: large grain portion, medium protein, vegetables. Easy or rest day: small grain portion, larger protein portion, more vegetables. Same prep, different ratios in the containers. This is nutrition periodization executed automatically through prep rather than requiring daily decisions.

Avoiding the three most common prep failures

Failure 1: Prepping food you don't actually want to eat by day 4. Variety is more important than optimization. If you hate eating the same thing on day 5 as day 1, use two protein sources and two grain options so the combinations feel different even when the components overlap.

Failure 2: Making prep too ambitious. Athletes who try to prep 21 meals from scratch in one session burn out after two weekends and stop entirely. Start with just lunch prep, get that consistent for two weeks, then add breakfast prep, then dinner if needed. Build the habit before building complexity.

Failure 3: Not having containers. Prep without portioned containers means the food is bulk-stored in the refrigerator, which requires decisions during the week. Invest in a set of identical containers that stack neatly — it sounds minor, but athletes who do this report dramatically better consistency than those who improvise storage.