10 Healthy Cookbooks Every Athlete Should Read

Anita Bean is a bodybuilder-turned-nutritionist, and the thesis of her second cookbook is simple: it’s really not difficult to gain and retain muscle with a vegetarian diet. The book features more than 100 recipes — covering breakfast, lunch and dinner — for the prospective or seasoned athlete.

A New York Times best-seller, Scott Jurek’s not-so-humbly-titled book is one-part cookbook, one-part long form motivational speech. Jurek, one of, if not the, most dominant ultramarathoner the world has ever seen spells out what made him great in a narrative that winds between storytelling and classic recipe format. Anyone serious about running long distance owes this book to themselves.

Pip Taylor is a nutritionist by trade and a triathlete by hobby. This book is for someone at the very start of their fitness journey, simplifying food science (within reason) to a three-step practice to determine the foods that your body reacts well and not so well to. The Athlete’s Fix touches on (and promptly does away with) many of-the-moment diets with rather refreshing earnesty and dives deep into fighting off stomach inflammation, the war on gluten, the benefits of vegetarianism and much more.

This cookbook answers one of the most difficult questions pertaining to fitness-friendly diets — what do you eat in-between meals? Written by a chef and a doctor, Skratch Labs’ Feed Zone Portables packs more than 100 simple and snackable recipes in its pages, including dozens of vegetarian and vegan options.

Four-time Olympian marathoner Shalane Flanagan and chef Elyse Kopecky worked together on a book with more than 100 recipes tailormade for the flavor-conscious eater. That is to say people who believe food can be both fuel and enjoyable to eat. Among a mountain of bite-sized nutritional information, the book explores the role of fat in the endurance sport athlete’s diet, a macro too useful to be avoided.

Skratch Labs’ flagship cookbook zeroes in on meals that can be made quickly and pack up neatly. This extremely well-reviewed cookbook conjures up more than 150 recipes designed by Biju Thomas and Allen Lim of Skratch Labs, and it provides breakdowns for how and why each will benefit you.

Is the fifth edition of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s monumental weighlifting bible a cookbook, strictly speaking? No. Does it, within its 800 pages, contain plenty of nutritional information, tips and recipes. It does. From the hand of the most-lauded bodybuilder of all time comes a book on building and sculpting muscle, sports psychology, lifting form and plenty of protein shakes.