then maybe it wasn’t absurd enough. How about 150 grams of carbs on a 30 minute recovery spin?
The point is that somewhere along the way, there comes a time when you can eat too much on the bike. We’re arguing where that point is… i’d love to hear what professional cyclists are instructed to do to stay lean.
Everyone benefits from making good choices with off bike nutrition. It stands to reason that they would also benefit from making good choices with ON bike nutrition. Not sure why everyone thinks that riding a bike is a license to eat as much sugar as possible.
Yes, but who is recommending that?!? You are building a very elaborate strawman here.
Professional cyclists have nothing to worry about. Neither have most amateurs.
Just do the math. I’m far from a professional cyclist and even with your inflated numbers, I physically cannot consume the calories I burn in low Z2. Even on the very chill workout (IF = 0.60) I’d have to take in 175 g/h. Oh, and FTP-wise I am at my low-point for the season. If I had done the same workout in September or October, I would need 190 g/h for the same workout.
Now scale up the numbers to a pro whose FTP is likely 15–30 % higher than mine (comparing peak numbers). While I have heard that pros can consume 150 g/h if need be, they’d still be deep in the red calorie-wise.
You are decorating your strawman. The advice is not and has never been “Eat as much an anything you can on the bike, independently of your goals, workout type and where you are in the season.”
I’m sure you can find someone, but that number is miniscule. Burning 400 kCal/h on the bike is something most athletes on TR can easily achieve. Ingesting 150 g carbs per hour for 3 hours is not.
That’s interesting. Are you simply saying upto 25% less of the sugar is absorbed and it sits in your stomach before passing through, or that your absorption rate is 25% lower than someone who’s had a high carb diet for years?
Oh, I fuel longer Z2 workouts. If I’m going longer than 3 hours, I’ll have things to eat during the ride. I always have snacks with me on the bike, regardless of the length. I’m not religious about not fuelling my Z2 rides, if I feel the need I’ll have a snack.
During the lockdowns in the UK I did some long Z2 rides without fuelling to see where my limits were. I carried snacks for when I was hitting those limits. I then experimented with what’s the minimum amount of carbs I need to consume an hour to maintain performance at Z2. I found out that answer on Z2 rides up to 10 hour duration.
I’m off on a 4-5 hour Z2 ride in about an hour. I have no intention of not snacking on this ride.
Because I ride ultra distance I’ll find my limits now and again. For ultras it’s useful to know where they are, and how far you can push it. For instance if the 24hr garage isn’t open at 3am, can you keep going till something is open in the morning, or do you need to stop and sleep as you don’t have enough food supplies for the next leg?
I also think it is genetic , and some of it is exercise induced. In other words at rest your absorption maybe the same as another person. But during prolonged or intense exercise your absorption may dramatically drop whilst theirs doesn’t.
Because ultra distance involves prolonged duration even if at a relatively easy effort, stomach issues are a common complaint later on. Reducing the amount you need to eat to fuel these events goes a long way to coping with the reduced gastric emptying.
“As exercise intensity and duration increases, there is considerable evidence for increases in indices of intestinal injury, permeability and endotoxaemia, together with impairment of gastric emptying, slowing of small intestinal transit and malabsorption. The addition of heat stress and running mode appears to exacerbate these markers of gastrointestinal disturbance. Exercise stress of ≥2 hours at 60% VO2max appears to be the threshold whereby significant gastrointestinal perturbations manifest, irrespective of fitness status.”
There are no absolutes of always doing this or that. I add sugar with salt and citric acid to bottles depending on a few things. For example:
If I skipped breakfast and doing a workout before lunch, will always add sugar. About 60g per hour for shorter Z2 seems to work. And if going a bit faster/multiple hours will bump it to 80g- 100g in each bottle regardless of having had breakfast or not and might then start adding solid carbs too.
Depending on the temperature, might add 1g to 3g of NaCl to each bottle.
If I did have breakfast then I might just drink plain water for shorter Z2 rides or just add in 20g to 40g of sugar per bottle.
I am able to ride multiple hours without eating on the bike if I needed to, but it is just not enjoyable as RPE starts going up. There is just no need and typically I am eating only 25%-50% of calories consumed during the ride, sometimes balancing on the edge of fueling just enough to keep the RPE from going up unnecessarily.
To be fair - I wasn’t suggesting I fueled all Z2 workouts at that level, nor that everyone should. I was merely giving an example of where fueling at that level was helpful for me.
If you have an FTP similar to mine and are doing Z2 workouts to start your day (straight out of bed) then I would recommend trying it, but I did not intend to suggest all of my Z2 rides were fueled like this, or that it would work for everyone
Woah, my bad! I made a bold assumption without reading all 286 replies. Lesson learned.
What I get from this whole thread, (at least, the bits of it I’ve had time to read, lol) aside from a bit of amusement and cringes is that there are many ways to go about fueling z2 workouts. Why there has to be so much mud-slinging and disrespect towards each other is what I don’t understand.
When I was a newb, I hadn’t the slightest idea about fuel, hydration, let alone electrolytes, etc. I just came home from each ride ravenous, with a massive headache, then I would head to the brewery for a couple beers and no food. For TR podcast to remind people to fuel, preferably with carbs, is probably the responsible, intelligent thing to do. If you are in the low carb, low fuel camp I guess this is cringeworthy to you, but it doesn’t matter - you do you!
As for me, I take a moderate approach, taking into account all kinds of variables from my daily life. From time to time, I will try both extremes just to check and see if they are better or not. (And what I’ve concluded thus far is that any more than 90 minutes with no fuel is sub-optimal for me - but that’s just me, a person none of you know).
It’s interesting to learn about all of the different substrate pathways and all of the different options you have for fueling. But I go with my intuition and what works for me based on experience. Mainly because the vast majority of the subjects for all of these studies are men, so women are basically flying partially blind in all of this.
That’s a super important point. I reckon the baseline should be 20 % lower for women, just on account of the weight difference. @Dr_Alex_Harrison has a fueling calculator app that takes gender and various other factors into account. I currently use it and it works very well for me. I override some of the recommendations (e. g. I drink way more than he recommends), but I just know that I need about 1.5–2 bottles per hour (currently on the lower end since we have winter and I don’t sweat as much).
@OreoCookie this is amazing user feedback! Tell me more! What sweat rating are you typically choosing? Have you been comfortable following the sodium recommendations? We can move the conversation to DM’s or the thread for the app specifically if you like.
Eventually we hope to have the biggest women’s data sample size in history. My wife will be helping design the research. Will be very neat to share the findings with everyone once we’ve got something useful to share. If you’d like to contribute to the end of flying blind, we have an app in beta testing you’re welcome to sign up for. We’d absolutely love to have you! Of course, there will be informed consent when it comes time to publish and very optional opting in to anonymous data disclosures just like we do in a research setting. That’s a bit down the road for now though.
I leave the sweat rate at the default. I just know from experience that I should prepare about 2 bottles per hour indoors. Outdoors, I take two full bottles and refill as necessary. The recommendation matches what I consume outdoors in temperate climate, i. e. about half of what I drink indoors.
I have a question regarding the sodium recommendation: my kitchen scale has a 1/10th g accuracy mode. But adding e. g. 350 mg is not possible, so I treat the recommendation as a minimum. Not that I try to go beyond it by much, but it might happen that I end up with, say, 500 mg = 0.5 g in my bottle rather than 0.35 g. My thinking (correct or not) is that I should take in a certain amount of sodium.
I don’t think too many people have a scale with a higher precision than 0.1 g, and I don’t plan on getting a precision scale for that either. Perhaps you should not use sub 1/10th g precision.
Lastly, I noticed that your carb recommendations went up. I assume this is to do with Podlogar’s study that you covered on your channel? For the record, that has been working very well for me.
PS Is there a way to contribute to your app/channel? I’d be willing to chip in a few ¥/€/$ per month e. g. via Patreon.
PPS I liked the video that dropped on your channel today.
Sure, but just think about the quickest way to do this, especially without wasting water: you’d weigh all the ingredients on a scale in the bottle. At least that’s what I do. I of course zero the scale after putting my bottle on it.
Just use the water that’s left to cook your rice in the evening, the salt will add flavor.
If you don’t want complexity just round it to the nearest 0.1 g yourself and realize that it falls well within all other uncertainties to compute the range of salt that is good for you.
