Fuel your rides. Every ride. Z2, threshold, sweet spot, it doesn’t matter.
I used to not fuel my Z2 rides, thinking I’d lose weight more quickly. But in the end, I would more than make up for that by feeling ravenous and have a big breakfast (I train in the morning before breakfast).
Fueling every ride, including endurance rides, has led to several improvements for me:
- My breakfasts stay consistent, no matter how much I train. That’s big. When your calorie deficit is just a few hundred kCal instead of 1.000 kCal, it is much easier to keep your meals consistent no matter whether and how much you train. My weight when ending a training season yo-yos much less than it used to before.
- I practice fueling, which is a valuable skill. I internalized how much I need on an intuitive level how much I need, and my fueling when riding outdoors is much, much better now. Even when I don’t keep track of how much I eat, I would fuel quite well. In the past I sometimes felt I would overeat outdoors, but from crunching the numbers I know it is virtually impossible to “overfuel”.
- Fat burning is not a useful skill for most cyclists. Yes, if you love ultra endurance stuff, then maybe, but for the vast majority of us, you don’t want to burn fat, you want to expend calories.