Fuel yourself correctly for better performance, post-ride feeling and weight loss
Nutrition is an important element of cycling that is easy to overlook and get into bad habits with. We’ve picked the brains of Red Kite’s Dan – a high intensity cyclist and self-taught nutrition expert – for some nuggets of wisdom about eating to best advantage.
Why is it a good idea to fuel correctly?
Taking on the right amount of food will improve your endurance and performance during a ride and importantly – how you feel afterwards. Instead of feeling drained, you’ll feel good and able to get on with your day.
If weight loss is your goal, you will lose weight more effectively if you eat during a ride. Avoiding a huge calorie deficit at the end of a ride will make you less likely to wolf down loads of cakes, biscuits and beer later in the day.
How hard do you need to be cycling to justify eating during a ride?
The amount you need to eat on a ride depends on three things. How hard you cycle, how long for and how often you do it.
If you cycle at a low to moderate intensity (not out of breath) for an hour to 1½ hours, once or twice a week, you don’t need to worry about nutrition during the ride. A normal diet that has adequate carbs will keep you properly fuelled.
If you’re commuting by bike for around 30 mins twice a day, 5 days a week, again you won’t need to fuel while riding but you are likely to lose some weight. Otherwise, you could add more carbohydrates to your diet, such as a bigger bowl of porridge or more bread with your meals.
When you start cycling at a higher intensity (breathing hard) or if you are riding at medium intensity for over 1 ½ hours, 3 to 5 times a week, then you need to consider eating before, during and potentially directly after your ride.
If you are an enthusiastic exerciser with an active job, you will need to fuel on every ride, even the ones at lower intensity. Otherwise you risk entering chronic carb deficit which eats away at your body making you feel mentally foggy and low in mood.
What foods are best to eat?
Casual riders going for a low intensity 3 to 4 hour ride can get by eating ‘real’ food, although everyone can benefit from cycling-specific products.
Choose simple carbs like white bread and sugary snacks like Jelly Babies. A jam sandwich is the perfect combination that make carbs quickly available to the muscles. It’s these sugars that the muscles and brain need to function while exercising.
Whilst flapjacks are seen as the ideal cycling snack, they actually take longer to have an impact and can make you feel too full as they have a low GI (glycaemic index). So eat these types of food at the start of the ride, when your stomach can do more work rather than later on when your digestive system is fatigued.
Alternatively, you can buy readymade nutrition that comes in convenient packs which are easy to carry in the back of your jersey or jacket. We recommend Torq, a UK fitness consultancy, whose products are research-proven, as well as vegan and organic and come in a range of genuinely tasty flavours.
Torq package their products in useful ‘Torq’ units to help people work out how much they need . 1 Torq flapjack or 1 Torq gel = 1 torq unit. If you are exercising hard, you will benefit from 1-3 Torq units (30 – 90g of carbs) per hour.
What if I want to lose weight when I’m cycling?
Strange as it sounds, you don’t lose weight by not eating whilst riding. So don’t be gung-ho and be tempted not to eat on a long, hard ride. If you get it wrong you risk the bonk short-term and longer term you risk chronic carb deficit when you feel low all the time. What’s more, bad fuelling can adversely affect your motivation to ride.
A common saying in cycling is – you can’t out-ride a bad diet. So cycling hard then bingeing on biscuits is not going to help you reach your goal.
If you’re riding very hard you can burn through all of your body’s carbohydrate stores in as little as a 90-minutes and risk the dreaded ‘bonk’ (slang for acute carb deficit which results in dramatically reduced performance).
Take a look at the graph on the left taken from www. cycling-inform.com
A gentle all day paced social ride, leisurely enough to chat whilst riding is typically 80 – 150 watts.
Working harder at so-called “tempo” and breathing more intensely is around 150 – 250 watts for recreational riders where intensity ramps up and most people struggle to hold a conversation.
What is the bonk and how do I prevent it?
The bonk (also known as ‘hitting the wall’) is when you run out of most of your stored carbohydrates while you’re exercising.
You experience a sudden drop in performance, your legs feel empty and your brain feels like it’s shutting down. You can get shivers and either tunnel or starry vision accompanied by light-headedness. All in all, it’s not very nice and definitely something to avoid.
There’s no instant fix for the bonk. You just have to stop, consume lots of simple, sugary foods and wait until you recover. And you will recover once you’ve got sugar back in your system.
What’s best to eat if you’re not sweet-toothed?
Sandwiches made with white bread, with a little butter and some marmite or tuna made with a small amont of mayonnaise, rice cakes and pasta. These are ideal snacks that are full of the simple carbohydrates that will get sugar to your muscles.
Generally it’s worth trying different flavours to see what you find most palatable whilst you are riding. If you’re using gels, you need to drink a lot of water with them. The way you digest certain foods while cycling is very person specific. In fact, consumption of carbs while exercising is something you have to get used to. You need to train your gut. So use a variety of foods when you’re training and find what works for your taste buds and your stomach.
The upper limit of carbohydrate intake is around 100-120g per hour but most recreational riders don’t need this much. The more tired you get the more sensitive you’ll become to sweetness, which is when the savoury stuff comes into its own. Eating your favourite food when you’re tired will also give you a psychological boost. Having a variety of different foods will also keep you motivated to eat.
Caffeinated gels and drinks are useful for later on in a ride to reduce your sense of fatigue. They will increase your pep and speed up your reactions, but be mindful of your overall caffeine intake during the day.
The most important lesson is to take nutrition seriously when you’re regularly putting in the hard miles. Plan your fuel before, during and after a ride and find the foods that work for you.
Check out www.cycling-inform for more blogs on the topic, or come and have a chat with us in store.
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