Exercise Nutrition

Here is a subject you could spend a lot of time on. Let’s shoot for the basics first. After that feel free to get into the details on your own. Here is a great article to start.

Before we begin remember we need body fat. Check your BMI here. If you are underweight you are 100% not performing at your best and you are setting yourself up for health problems now and down the road. I check these BMI numbers and I let my clients know. No matter what it takes I will be a part of the solution, even if it means you take a break from structured training and stop paying me.

If we are a healthy body weight it doesn’t take much more body fat to have as much energy as we would ever need to complete a bicycle ride. If we had two extra pounds of body fat we would have over 8,000 calories of energy for activity. Have you ever burned that many calories on a ride? So if we have so many stored calories then why do we “bonk?”

Our body can store more energy from fat than we would ever need. If we go slow enough we could exercise for a long time. The problem is as racing cyclists we don't want to go slow. We want to go fast. We want to hit our max heart rate. We want to sprint to glory! WOOO! Going faster requires carbohydrates. Fat gives us a lot of energy but it is very slow to burn. It will last us a long time but it won’t give us energy bursts for max efforts. Unfortunately, we have a limited ability to store carbohydrates. We can store about 400 grams of carbohydrates in our muscles and 100 grams in our liver. Maybe a little more or less depending on body size. So that is around 2,000 calories worth of carbohydrates. When was the last time you burned 2,000 calories on a ride? Probably pretty often. When we use up all of our carbohydrates we bonk. We tell our legs to go faster but they can’t, there aren’t any carbohydrates for it. We are probably still noticing an increased breathing rate. How can we be breathing so heavy but going so slow? We are still breathing so heavy because we are maxing out our fat burning capacity and we have a bunch of CO2 (byproduct of fat metabolism) to get rid of. So we want to work hard, we feel like we are working hard, but we are just not going fast. We are feeling out of it because our brain uses carbohydrates for fuel and we don’t have any stores left.

Just like hydration, refueling our carbohydrates is a losing battle in a long high intensity cycling race. We will burn more carbohydrates than we can consume. The goal with training and our race nutrition is to try to get to the end of the race with carbohydrates left in the tank or to not run out before our competitors! If we have carbohydrates in our muscles then we have the energy for our race winning efforts. So one goal of training is to increase our fat burning capacity with long sub threshold rides. We also want to try to increase the time we can spend in the sweet spot zone. The training part of that is a separate discussion but this post is key to that training. This type of training we need to be doing will require as much energy as we can get into our legs. We need to be taking our nutrition seriously. If we are trying to lose weight then we won’t be getting this quality training in. Weighing five pounds less on race day will be about 5% as beneficial as fueling and getting these fitness gains. Eat your calories!

The Basics

For our race nutrition we should try to consume 30-60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Anything more than that we can’t absorb. It will sit in your stomach and probably cause some upset and can actually decrease the amount of fluid we will absorb. Anything less than that and we are leaving some energy for later on the table.

For longer rides it is a good idea to consume a little protein because a small percentage of our total energy comes from it. It is not a lot and if we look at it from a single ride point of view it wouldn’t even have a detrimental affect on our performance. But if we zoom out over a larger period of time we could actually lose muscle mass because of it. So in order to maintain our muscles, which we need to produce power, we should be eating protein during our longer rides. Our article above suggests we get 5-15% of our calories from protein. So if we are consuming 240 calories an hour that means 12 to 36 calories should be from protein. That’s just 3 to 9 grams per hour.

Those are the basics. From there you can read about different types of carbohydrates. Do you drink them, eat them, or a combination of both? Remember that the more drink mix you put into your bottle the less fluid you will absorb. If your drink mix is too concentrated it will actually dehydrate you. The optimal drink concentration will be different based on the type of drink mix it is. Another thing that makes this so individualized is what your stomach can tolerate. It’s so individual and there are so many ways you can get the right amount of calories in that you just need to experiment and find what works for you!

For me I have the least amount of drink mix in my bottle that is recommended and then I have something like Powerbar Hydrogels to get me to the 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Then I’ll have a bite of a protein bar every once in a while. It’s the basics for me. I used to bonk all the time. Now with the right training and this basic eating strategy I don’t bonk anymore. Even on my three hour - 342 watt average rides!

If we are bonking on our rides we are doing something wrong. Not eating well enough or training too hard. This is a huge thing to figure out.