The alarm goes at 5:20. You train at six, you are at a desk by half past eight, and everything you eat between those two points was decided the Sunday before or it was not decided at all. That is the whole case for prep. Not enthusiasm for cooking, just the fact that a 5:20 start leaves no room for a decision.
Most prep advice stops at what to cook. The harder part is the order you cook it in. Two people can prepare the same seven items, and one is finished in ninety minutes with everything cooled and stacked while the other is still standing over a tray of chicken at nine at night with the rice going cold. Nothing separates them except which appliance went on first.
Quick answer: the Sunday prep order for athletes who train before work
- Oven first, before you chop anything. It has the longest lead time and it runs unattended, so it should be working while you are.
- Stovetop second, while the oven is busy. Grains, eggs and one sauce, none of which hold you for long.
- Cold assembly last. Chopping, breakfasts, snacks and portioning, done on a clear counter while the hot food cools.
- Set out the pre-training food and the post-training breakfast deliberately. Those are the two meals a 5:20 alarm drops first when they are not ready.
- A harder week changes the quantities, not the order. More carbohydrate through the tray and the pot, same three blocks.
Why the order matters more than the hours
Sunday prep gets described as a time cost: two hours, three hours, an afternoon gone. Most of that time is not work, it is waiting. Chicken thighs take about 35 minutes in the oven, brown rice takes 25 on the stovetop, boiled eggs take 10, and none of those need you standing there. The kitchen has three stations that can run at once and one bottleneck.
The bottleneck is the oven. It is the slowest thing you own, it spends ten minutes heating before it does anything useful, and it usually holds the protein the rest of the week is built on. Start it last and everything queues behind it. Start it first and the other two blocks fit inside its running time. That single choice is the difference between a ninety-minute session and a three-hour one, which is most of what prep built around a training week comes down to in practice.
Cooling is the second reason. Hot food should not go into a sealed box in the fridge, so anything that comes off the heat late is still sitting on the counter when you want to be finished. Cooking the long items first gives them the whole session to come down while you work on everything else.
Block one: the oven goes on before you chop anything
Walk in, turn the oven on, load it the moment it is hot. Two trays, one decision each: one tray of protein, one tray of roasted carbohydrate.
The protein tray is whatever the week runs on. Chicken thighs, salmon fillets, a tray of meatballs, seasoned in the tray rather than in a separate bowl so there is nothing extra to wash. The carbohydrate tray is potatoes, sweet potatoes or squash, cut to a size that finishes in roughly the same time as the protein so both trays come out together.
Cook more protein than the plan strictly needs. It is the item most likely to run short by Thursday, it reheats better than anything else on the list, and it is the part of the day people quietly drop when nothing is ready. If a third shelf is free, a tray of roasted vegetables goes on beside them and costs you only the chopping.
Once the trays are in you have 30 to 45 minutes of oven time. That is not a break. That is block two.
Block two: the stovetop runs while the oven works
Three things belong on the stovetop, in this order: the grain, the eggs, the sauce.
The grain goes on first because it takes the longest and then looks after itself. Rice, a pot of oats if you cook them rather than soak them, or pasta if that is the plan. Cook the full week’s quantity in one pot. A second pot of the same thing on Wednesday night is the job you will not do.
Eggs go on next. Ten minutes of boiling gives you the snack and the breakfast component that needs no reheating and survives being eaten at a desk, which matters more than it sounds when you are back from training with twenty minutes before you have to leave.
The sauce goes last, in the smallest pan, and it earns more than any other ten minutes of the afternoon. Prepped food fails on flavour long before it fails on macros. The containers are fine on Monday and unappealing by Thursday, and one jar of something with heat, acid or salt in it carries the whole week. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is why so much good prep ends up in the bin.
Block three: cold assembly, on a counter that is finally clear
The oven is off, the trays are cooling, the stovetop is done. Everything left is cold work, and it goes faster than it looks.
Chop the raw vegetables and the salad components. Build the breakfasts, whether that is oats in jars or a container of egg and potato. Bag the snacks. Then portion: hot food into containers once it has stopped steaming, grains split across the week, sauce into a jar of its own rather than poured over the top, so Thursday’s container is not a wetter version of Monday’s.
Portioning last is deliberate. It is the step where you find out whether the week actually works, and doing it with everything in front of you means you can see the gap: two lunches short, or nothing set aside for the meal straight after Wednesday’s session. Closing that on Sunday costs one more tray. Finding it on Wednesday costs the meal.
The checklist to run this Sunday
Keep it on your phone. Times are elapsed from walking into the kitchen.
- 0:00 Oven on. Trays out, lined.
- 0:05 Protein tray seasoned and in. Carbohydrate tray cut and in.
- 0:15 Grain on the stovetop, full week’s quantity, lid on.
- 0:25 Eggs on to boil. Set a timer, not a guess.
- 0:35 Sauce in the small pan. Taste it before it comes off.
- 0:45 Trays out, oven off, everything onto a rack to cool.
- 0:50 Chop raw vegetables. Build breakfasts. Bag snacks.
- 1:10 Portion. Grains split, sauce jarred separately.
- 1:25 Tomorrow’s pre-training food onto the front shelf, at eye level.
- 1:30 Wash up while the last containers cool. Finished.
Ninety minutes, and only about forty of them are hands on. If your Sunday routinely runs past three hours, the loss is nearly always in step one: the oven went on after the chopping instead of before it.
When the week has more hard days, the quantities move and the order stays
A week with four hard sessions is not a different prep session. It is the same three blocks with more carbohydrate running through them, and the change lands in exactly two places: the roasted carbohydrate tray and the grain pot.
Say your easier weeks sit near 250g of carbohydrate a day, and a heavier week pushes the hard days toward 320g while the rest day comes down near 180g. This is an example shape, not a personal nutrition prescription. Spread across four hard days instead of two, that is roughly one extra tray of potatoes and a bigger pot of rice. Protein barely moves. The number of containers does not change, only what goes into them.
One structural change is worth making. On a heavy week, portion the hard-day carbohydrate separately instead of splitting the grain evenly across seven containers. An even split hands every day the same food, which is the flat-target problem showing up in your fridge rather than in an app. Deciding the hard, easy and rest portions before you cook is the practical half of planning food around your training week, and it is the part a weekly plan exists to settle in advance.
If a day carries two sessions, or Saturday’s session tends to move, prep to the shape you know and leave one meal deliberately unplanned. A single flexible slot absorbs the change. Rebuilding the whole week on Wednesday does not happen, and the containers that were right on Sunday are still right on Thursday.
The two meals that decide whether any of this survives
Training before work compresses the morning into something with no slack in it. Two meals sit inside that compression, and both fail quietly.
The first is whatever you eat before the session. At 5:20 it has to be already in your hand: a banana, a small bowl of the oats, something light on fat, because high fat slows digestion and a heavy stomach at six in the morning helps nothing. Put it on the front shelf on Sunday, at eye level. Food you have to look for at 5:20 is food you skip, and coffee plus no food plus hard work before a full day is rough in a way that shows up around three in the afternoon.
The second is the meal after training, which is really breakfast, and it is the largest opportunity in the day. You have just finished hard work and you are about to sit still for hours. That meal wants to be portioned, stable cold, and edible at a desk if it has to be: eggs and potatoes off Sunday’s trays, or oats with the protein already stirred through. Build it in block three like a real meal, because it is the one carrying the session you just did.
Get those two ready and the rest of the day mostly holds itself. Miss them and the week becomes catching up after 6pm, which is where a lot of good training quietly goes.
Where Mero fits
Everything above is the manual version. You decide the week, work out the quantities, then translate them into trays and pots. It works, and it asks you to do the arithmetic before you do any cooking, every Sunday, usually while you are already tired.
Mero is built to take that first half. It turns your macro targets and the shape of your training week into a plan for each day, with more carbohydrate on hard days and less on rest days, then produces one grocery list and a prep order for Sunday: what goes in the oven, what runs alongside it, what gets assembled cold. The planner will hand you the sequence, so the afternoon is execution rather than a calculation, and the week that follows is a checklist. Mero is on the waitlist now, built for athletes who already know their numbers and want the Sunday to hold. Until then, the planner page shows where those numbers turn into meals.