5 Nutrition Strategies For Cyclists To Build Strong Legs This Winter

The winter is a key time to build ready for next season and is a key time in which what you eat around the training sessions can go a long way to supporting you in your development as an athlete to get you into next year a better athlete.  

 It’s now October 11^th, 2024. Let’s say your season starts on 1^st March 2025. That’s a total of 140 days until the next season starts. Now, if we consider that as an athlete, you might eat five times a day, that is 700 meals and 700 opportunities that you have to use the food you eat to enhance your training adaptations, improve your performance, help fend off illness and infection, and optimise your body composition.

There are a number of key nutrition strategies that we can use to help us build strong legs this winter, and I’ve summarised the 5 key most important ones below...

1. Limit illness and infection – As an athlete, your availability to train is one of the most powerful tools to drive your development. A study in 2016 showed that in a group of elite track and field athletes, achieving their performance goals was seven times more likely to happen if they were able to complete >80% of their planned training weeks. Therefore, avoiding illness and infection this winter is a key priority and challenge. In this three-part series of blogs, FTR Founder Chris covers some of the key strategies for using nutrition to support immunity...
   
   Cycling Immunity - Part 1
   Cycling Immunity - Part 2
   Cycling Immunity - Part 3
   
   
2. Optimise protein intake  – All of the hardware within your muscles is largely made up of protein, from the mitochondria (the muscle engine) to the capillaries and blood, which supply oxygen and nutrients to the muscle fibres themselves. Optimising your protein intake around your training is a key priority to help maximise the adaptive responses to your sessions. As we’ve previously covered in the blog below, this can help maximise the benefits from training.
   
   How optimising protein can maximise the benefits from training 
   How much protein do cyclists actually need? 
3. Fuel for the work required – To complete quality training sessions,e sufficient fuel (predominately in the form of carbohydrates) available to the muscles, but this doesn’t mean we smash in loads of carbohydrates on a daily basis. One of the best ways in which we can manage body composition, adjust our daily energy intake to support the needs of each individual training session and maximise tha adaptive responses of each training session is to periodise our carbohydrate intake on a meal-by-meal, day-by-day basis often reffered to as 'fuelling for the work required' in the blog post below, we cover this in more detail... 
   
   Fuelling For The Work Required - how cyclists should fuel their training 
   
   

4. Supplementation – Winter can often be a good time to experiment with new nutrition strategies to establish if these are worthwhile to implement come the competitive season and to help implement them in a way that will limit any associated issues. In the blog below we look at some of the key supplement strategies which may be worth considering for enhancing cycling performance.
   
   Which supplements imprve cycling performance? 

5. Recovery – When you’re packing in the hours to build the foundation for the next season, your recovery between sessions can play a key role in supporting your training quality and ensuring you have the legs to be able to do the next session. The blogs below cover some of the key aspects of recovery to consider to help you bounce back quickly.
   Is Chocolate Milk the ultimate recovery drink? 
   Recovery drink or food? 
   The 4 R's of Recovery
   
   

To learn more about how to get the most out of your winter training block, in just 25 days, we cover the science and give you the practical tools and support you need to develop your own nutrition strategy to help this winter be the best one yet. All for a fraction of the price of working one-to-one with a professional. For more information on Fuel The Ride Academy, click the FTR logo at the top of the page.

Coach Ben