On day one, we start with the nutrition fundamentals, so you have a high-level understanding of nutrition's different roles on the body. This module is a prerequisite learning day before progressing into the high-performance modules:

- Calories

- Carbohydrates

- Protein

- Dietary Fat

- Fibre

- Micronutrients

How To Plan Your Day & Week Of Eating

Learn how to plan your day and week of eating through carbohydrate periodisation. This provides structure and acts as your blueprint to guide your day of eating regardless of what time you train and how long or intense your session is. We’ve got you covered!

How To Calculate Your Calorie & Macronutrients

Discover our step-by-step strategy for calculating exactly how many calories and macronutrients you need daily to fuel your rides and meet your body's demands.

How To Track Your Food Accurately

You’ll also gain a high-level understanding of how to track your food accurately and what nutrition-tracking apps we recommend to ensure you hit your nutrition targets and can implement your plan with precision.

The Meal Plan Database

Gain access to plug-and-play 7-day baseline meal plan templates ranging from 50-120kg individuals in 10kg increments.

How To Review Progress

Making progress is never a straight road; there will be roadblocks and challenges. We teach you how to review your progress each week and what KPIs you need to measure to ensure you make progress week after week.

How To Adapt Your Nutrition Plan

Did the ride get cut short? Ride was longer or harder than usual? Had to skip your ride completely? We teach you how to adapt your nutrition plan when there are last-minute changes in your schedule or training loads.

How To Master Your Food Focus

Cyclists often struggle to manage their hunger and cravings after a hard ride, leaving them with a high food focus and increased temptation to go off-plan and overeat, which ultimately takes them further away from their desired result. This module provides a high-level overview of what drives us to eat and overeat and effective strategies to reduce the likelihood of it happening.

How To Plan For Social Events

Riders also love a social. Whether that’s food or alcohol related, we teach you how to structure your day and week of eating to accommodate and budget for social occasions so you can remain on plan and make incredible progress without giving up your social life.

How To Eat If You’re Plant-Based

If you’re a plant-based cyclist, hitting your nutrition targets can be challenging. We teach you how to overcome this and cover the specific nutrients of focus that you must include in your diet to perform at your best.

How To Eat If You’re a Youth Athlete

Although the FTR Academy isn’t designed for youth athletes, many parents or guardians wish to know precisely how much, when and what their child needs daily to meet their high energy demands. This module provides youth-specific recommendations to ensure your child develops optimally and builds strong eating habits.

How To Eat If You’re a Female Athlete

There’s much discussion about whether female athletes need to eat differently due to the differences in their physiology. In this module, you’ll learn the latest evidence and recommendations on how to eat if you’re a female athlete.

What’s The Optimal Body Composition?

Whether you’re a road, gravel, or cross-country rider looking to improve your watts per kilo or a gravity MTBer and track cyclist wanting to add muscle and increase robustness, this module will teach you how to define your optimal body composition to ensure you’re in peak shape to support both health and performance.

The Fat Loss Plan

Everyone can lose body fat and weight. However, many riders cannot achieve this without compromising performance and health. Additionally, many riders will struggle to maintain weight and, therefore, rebound and yo-yo dieting from year to year. This training educates cyclists on formulating their fat loss plan, including our tried-and-tested frameworks, principles, and calculations. After this training, you’ll be 100% clear on how much to eat daily to consistently drop body fat without it impacting training quality or life.

Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S)

Many riders aim to become as lean and light as possible to improve their watts per kilo. However, many riders take their weight loss efforts too far and experience the unwanted effects of undereating on health and performance. This training provides an overview of RED-S, including the causes, identifying its progression, and providing principles to avoid it.

Measuring Bodyweight & Progression

Do the scales drive you crazy? This training covers why the scales fluctuate daily and how to objectively use bodyweight measurements to track long-term progress.

Busting Through Fat Loss Plateaus

Fat loss is never linear. Although ‘The Fat Loss Plan’ teaches riders how to set up the perfect plan for fat loss success, progress will always plateau. This isn’t a result of poor standards or implementation; it's a result of your physiology adapting. Knowing this, we provide frameworks and strategies to overcome fat loss plateaus for weekly progress.

Refeeds & Diet Breaks

There may come a time when diet-induced fatigue accumulates, and progress stagnates or worsens due to being a fat-loss phase. As we say: For every issue, there’s an intervention. This training covers how to introduce diet breaks and refeeds to provide physiological and psychological relief from a calorie-restricted phase and prepare you for the next block. See this as a ‘nutrition deload’ like you may have a recovery week off the bike.

Transition From Fat Loss To Maintenance

Once a fat loss phase is completed and your power-weight ratio is optimised, it’s time to transition from being in a calorie deficit to calorie maintenance. Many riders will fear adding calories to their plan for the fear of gaining unwanted body fat. In this training, you’ll learn three approaches to transition to maintenance calories to ensure you maintain your results. It’s pointless dropping body fat and weight only to regain it within 3-6 months. After this training, you’ll know how to avoid this and maintain your improved body composition while eating more food!

Maximising Muscle Mass

Many riders wanting to improve their watts per kilo often forget about the muscle! You’ll learn to optimise your diet to build muscle and strength without gaining unwanted body fat. For road cyclists, you may be in a similar position to Jonas Abrahamsen, where adding 20kg of muscle was needed to improve his health and performance. Additionally, adding muscle will help reduce the risk of injury by offering more robustness and protection upon impact. Given the nature of all cycling disciplines, having a reasonable amount of muscle is a must. We aim to build strong and powerful riders, not weak and skinny.

Fuelling Strategies - The Day Before

Few riders appreciate the time it takes to properly fuel up for a ride. Glycogen, the name for carbohydrate stored within the muscle and liver, is the critical fuel source for performance. The more glycogen we have, the better our exercise capacity (i.e., how long we can go hard for). In this module, we look at how to approach fuelling in the days before a major event to limit stomach issues and give you the best legs possible. If you’re seconding guessing what, when and how much to be eating to avoid bonking, this training will give you the confidence and clarity going into every ride. No second guessing yourself, only strong legs!

Fuelling Strategies - The Pre-Ride Meal

The pre-race meal is a key time to top up your glycogen stores prior to race day, but it is also a time when choosing the wrong meal can have devastating effects on your performance. In this video we look at how much to eat, when to eat it and what to eat in the hours before a race. 

Fuelling Strategies - During The Ride

Fuelling is a critical strategy for enhancing performance for any event that lasts longer than an hour. Pound for pound, fuelling on the bike is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to enhance endurance performance. In this module, we look at why you should fuel, how much carbohydrate you should aim to consume, and specifically, what foods and drinks you should use to ensure that fuelling maximises your performance. If you want to wave good bye to fading, bonking, and not having strong legs, this module will show you exactly how!

Eating For Mental Performance

Many riders focus on fuelling the muscle, but what about the brain? Mental sharpness is a critical component of every cyclist's performance. Whether you’re a mountain biker finding the fastest lines and weaving between rocks, roots and trees, or a road cyclist staying tight in the peloton and being alert and engaged in sprinting for the finish line. This module teaches you how to eat to maximise mental performance so your brain works just as effectively as the muscle!

Managing Gastrointestinal Issues

There is a famous quote that says many endurance races are won and lost in the portaloos. Your gut plays a key role in supporting your performance by allowing the digesting and absorption of nutrients and fluids. Eat or drink the wrong things at the wrong time, and you can be left with debilitating gut symptoms, from cramps to bloating. In this module, we look at the key strategies for limiting the occurrence of gastrointestinal issues.

Training The Gut

The best-fuelling strategy in the world is pointless if you can’t tolerate it during a race. In this module, we look at strategies we can use to help develop our ability to tolerate bike fuelling and hydration. 

Hydration Strategies for Optimal Performance

Hydration is a key component of performance and an area that many athletes have the potential to improve. In this module, we look at why hydration is important and give you all the tools to develop a personalised hydration strategy. If you’ve ever wondered what fluids are best, and how much you need to consume in relation to your sweat rates, you’ll learn how to calculate your fluid requirements for any ride, and ensure your hydration strategies aren’t a limiting factor to your performance and success.

The Science of Electrolytes

Electrolyte supplementation is a huge area of confusion for many athletes. In this module, we look at the role that electrolytes play and why you don’t always need to supplement with them. You’ll be surprised with what the latest research recommends in this training!

The Cramping Cure

When an exercise-associated muscle cramp hits during a ride, it can be catastrophic to their performance, especially during race conditions when intensities are high. The origins of cramping are often misunderstood, and it goes far beyond the general folklore chat of fluid and sodium. This module teaches you all the possible causes of muscle cramps, the theoretical rationale for why riders may experience them, and, ultimately, what to do about it!

Enhanced Adaptations - Train Low

Training low has been a hot topic for several years. By training with low glycogen stores or performing sessions fasted, we can increase the metabolic stress of the session and potentially enhance the benefits from a training session. In this module, we look at how we can train low, why it might be useful, and when you might consider implementing this strategy. 

Ketogenic & Low Carbohydrate Diets For Performance

Should you follow a low-carb diet for performance? In this video, we take a no-nonsense approach to examining the science behind low-carb diets, focusing on when they are and aren’t effective for cyclists. 

Ketone Supplements & Performance

In recent years, there’s been a lot of hype around the use of exogenous ketone supplements. A nutrition strategy using supplemental ketones can potentially have several benefits for athletes. You’ve seen the Tour de France riders chugging a ketone supplement after every stage, but does this mean that you should to?

In this training, we give you a summary of everything you need to know about them based on the current scientific understanding. 

Athlete Supplement Toolbox

Supplements are always a hot topic; some are helpful, some don't work, and some are harmful or could get you banned (if you’re a pro). In this training, you’ll learn precisely what supplements have a strong scientific backing to ensure you’re taking the most effective supplements to support health, training performance and adaptations, and for racing. This will save you a tonne of money in the long run as you won't buy supplements that don't work!

Plus, you can take advantage of our generous FTR members-only discounts from supplement companies such as Science in Sport (SIS) and Health span Elite.

Moving forward, this module alone will save you hundreds if not thousands.

Part 1: Ultra-Fast Replenishment

If you’ve ever complained of having heavy legs the following morning after a hard ride, the rapid recovery strategies shared in part 1 aim to accelerate glycogen replenishment and rehydration so you return to baseline as quickly as possible. You’ll learn exactly how much, when, and what foods or fluids to consume to refill the tanks so you’re strong and fresh going into every ride.

Part 2: Strategies To Overcome Muscle Soreness

Muscle damage, or DOMS, is often experienced after demanding sessions and races. In this training, you’ll learn what causes muscle soreness and our highly effective nutrition strategies to reduce muscle stiffness and increase muscle function and performance ahead of the most challenging training weeks and races….and no, your post-race recovery shake isn't going to cut it, there’s far more that can be done to accelerate the recovery process.

The Supercharged Sleep Strategies

Sleep takes up approximately one-third of our lives. Sleep is often considered the most potent performance-enhancing and regenerative tool a cyclist has available. We all know its importance, yet many cyclists fall short of their sleep targets and frequently experience poor sleep quality and quantity. In this training, you’ll learn how to optimise your daily habits to create the optimal sleep environment for a restorative night's sleep.

Alcohol, Recovery & Well-Being

Cyclists love a post-ride drink and social outing. However, alcohol has the ability to impair timely recovery by reducing rates of glycogen replenishment, rehydration and muscle repair. This lesson covers the current recommendations around alcohol intake to mitigate poorer rates of recovery so you can make an informed decision surrounding your alcohol consumption.

We look at the theory and practice behind exactly what you need to do the day before a key race to maximise your performance on race day. Giving you the types and amounts of foods you need to eat to implement this highly effective strategy. 

Sometimes, carbohydrate loading can be an arduous task, considering the volume of food that needs to be consumed. This is why we’ve also provided several carbohydrate-load meal plans to help navigate this day of eating and ensure the tanks are fully topped up heading into race day!

This module kicks off with an in-depth overview of how to fuel for long races, which we’ve defined as more than two hours. Following the overview, there are several sub-modules with disciple-specific race day overview:

• Road Races: One Day & Stage Racing

• Time Trials - 50+ miles

• Gravel Racing

• MTB Marathon & Stage Racing

You’ll also gain access to race-day meal plans specific to your discipline and event to ensure you have complete confidence and clarity about what, when, and how much to eat on race day!

Similarly to the Long Races module, we kick things off with an in-depth overview of how to fuel for short races, which we’ve defined as 0.5-1.5 hours. Following the overview, there are several sub-modules with disciple-specific race day overview:

• Time Trials - 10-25 miles

• Road Criterium

• Cycle Cross Racing

• MTB Short Track & XC

And yes, you’ve guessed it, you’ll also gain access to race-day meal plans specific to your discipline and event to ensure you have complete confidence and clarity about what, when, and how much to eat on race day!

Gravity enduro events are long and demanding. They combine high-intensity work on the descents with long, steady climbs between stages, which ultimately means riders have a long day in the saddle! Riders must also stay mentally sharp throughout, meaning there’s a high importance on nutrition to ensure both physical and mental performance is maintained throughout the day.

In this module, you’ll learn exactly what, when and how much to eat to ensure your performance in the final stage is as strong as the first stage. Even better, you’ll gain access to meal plans to guide you through your fuelling strategy so you have complete confidence and clarity to perform at your best.

Long as the day where World Cup downhill racing was a week long party. DH racing is becoming more competitive each year, with the level of professionalism and standards increasing. Most riders are now following strength and conditioning programmes to maximise their performance, however many riders are failing to maximise their true performance due to poor nutrition strategies and habits on race weekends.

Coach Chris shares the exact principles, strategies and frameworks he’s used with Norco Race Division, working with the GOAT of DH mountain biking, Greg Minnaar. Therefore, regardless of what level you race at, you won’t be second guessing your race day strategy anymore.

Bonus: You’ll gain access to meal plans on how to fuel the race weekend: No guesswork, just fast race times!

Bulletproof Immunity

Picking up and illness or infection can be such a frustrating time for a cyclist. One day you’re hitting personal bests, the next you’re wiped out with a cold. From this, you’ll have to down tools for a week, then the following week is a gradual rebuild of volume and intensity, meaning that ~50% of your training block isn’t productive. If this happens multiple times per year, then you’re leaving many weeks of progression and development on the table. In this training, you’ll learn what foods and nutrients to consume as part two strategies: Immune tolerance and immune resistance. In other words, we teach you exactly what foods to eat to strengthen your immune system so you can better tolerate infection, decrease illness severity and duration, and ultimately get back in the saddle quicker than ever. You’ll always be exposed to pathogens (virus. Bacteria, fungi, etc), and your nutrition and lifestyle habits are highly effective in weathering this storm!

Nutrition For Connective Tissue Rehabilitation

In this training, you’ll learn how to build a highly effective rehabilitation plan to accelerate the healing process and minimise muscle mass loss following an injury. Nutrition plays a key role is determining how quickly you get back to training, but unfortunately, many riders get this very wrong, and end up delaying the rehabilitation process and the time between sustaining the injury and getting back in the saddle. After this training, you’ll know exactly what foods, nutrients and supplements to take to progress through your rehabilitation phase in record time!

Nutrition For Bone Health

Whether you ride on the road, gravel, track or trails, crashes happen which can often lead to bone fractures. Therefore, this training identifies what foods and nutrients you must consider to ensure bone strength and health is high, and therefore have greater robustness for that inevitable accident. As the saying goes, prevention is the best cure: The correct nutrition habits will create strong bones, which’ll accelerate recovery and ‘Bouncebackability’.

Nutrition For Concussion Protection & Recovery

mTBI of mild traumatic brain injuries for short is unfortunately a growing area of concern for riders of all disciplines. Sustaining a head knock can result in a cyclist not being able to do what they love to do, whether that’s short term (weeks) or a matter of months, or even needing to give up cycling all together.

Nutrition interventions around concussion is a fluid and fast-growing field with exciting data on what cyclists can eat before and after sustaining a head injury to offer protection before impact, and accelerate recovery following. In this training, we share the latest research on what, when and how much to eat to ensure they best protect themselves.

The Individual Development Plan (IDP)

By this point, you’ll have all the rationale, plans, principles and frameworks to maximise your cycling potential. On day 25, we introduce you to the Fuel The Ride Academy IDP so you can systemtatically plan and organise your goals to ensure you stay on track and make continued progression year upon year. Although you’ll learn everything needed in 25 days, athletic development is a career long mission. Growth minded individuals will always look to improve, the IDP provides the framework on how to accomplish this.

The Periodised Life

Cyclists periodise their training, and by this point, you’ve learnt how crucial periodising your nutrition is, however, many riders fail to periodised their life. Lifestyle control is one area that many indivioduals struggle with, especially if they lead busy lives, juggling training, work and family. This can often lead to heightened fatigue, burn out and staleness. That being said, having an awareness over the entirety of your life stressors will help you manage your daily allostatic load (the wear and tear on body and mind), and therefore better protect your energy and bandwidth so you can performance with excellence each day. From experience, this training is often the missing link that ties everything together, and facilitates thorough execution of your plan.

The Travel Nutrition Plan

Many cyclists, whether that be for work, racing, holidays or training camps will often travel. In this training, you’ll learn how to navigate travel days and stay on plan for both domestic and international travel days. Additionally, you’ll learn key strategies to manage gastrointestinal issues and have a greater awareness of the considerations surrounding international travel, food safety, and ultimately, your health.