Keep protein where it is, keep eating real meals, and let carbohydrate follow appetite and the next day's training rather than slashing it on principle. Rest days are when the adaptation from the week's training is actually built, so they are a strange day to under-eat.
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Should I eat differently on CrossFit rest days? Keep protein where it is, keep eating real meals, and let carbohydrate follow appetite and the next day's training rather than slashing it on principle. Rest days are when the adaptation from the week's training is actually built, so they are a strange day to under-eat.
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The intuition is simple and wrong: no training, so less food. In practice a rest day sits inside a training week — you trained yesterday, you will train tomorrow, and the repair and glycogen restoration from yesterday's session is happening today. Cutting food on the day your body is doing the rebuilding is the least useful timing available.
The second issue is protein. Many athletes eat protein-forward around sessions and then drift on rest days, which is exactly backwards from how daily protein targets work.
The ISSN position stand on protein and exercise frames intake as a daily figure — roughly 1.4–2.0 g per kg of body weight for most exercising people — which is the clearest argument against dropping protein on non-training days.
Morton and colleagues similarly report benefits of added protein levelling off near 1.6 g/kg/day in pooled resistance-training data: an adequacy argument, applied daily.
On carbohydrate, the contemporary endurance carbohydrate review supports scaling to demand, which means a rest day may legitimately carry less carbohydrate than a heavy day — but scaling is not the same as eliminating.
How strong is this evidence? The systematic review of high-intensity functional training is explicit that nutrition-intervention evidence in this population is limited and generally low-to-moderate quality. Treat anything specific to CrossFit as practice-informed rather than proven.
Protein-forward meals at moderate calories, useful when appetite is lower but protein should not be. Macros read from the menu data.
Examples from the SmashMeals menu and archive. The menu rotates weekly — check this week's menu.
An illustration of distribution, not portion sizes. Totals depend on body size, goals and weekly training load.
Our kitchen is 100% dedicated gluten-free because some people need it to be — coeliac disease, diagnosed gluten sensitivity, or a household that simply eats gluten-free. Removing gluten is not a performance strategy in itself, and there is no good evidence it improves output, recovery or inflammation in athletes without a medical reason. Rest days are also the day people most often eat out, which for coeliac athletes is where the dedicated-kitchen advantage of prepared meals is most obvious.
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Nutrition needs vary with body size, training volume, goals, health conditions and competition demands. For individualised performance or medical nutrition, work with a qualified sports dietitian or clinician.
Editorially reviewed by SmashMeals for source accuracy in September 2026. Written from published research and each organisation's own current format documentation. It is not medical or individualised sports-nutrition advice, and no clinician reviewed it.
SmashMeals is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by CrossFit, LLC or any affiliate gym. CrossFit's own nutrition material is labelled as the organisation's guidance, not independent consensus.
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