How Fruit Can Improve Cycling Performance?

I’m sure you’re all aware of the importance of fruit intake within a healthy dietary pattern, but as athletes, the role of fruits can extend to helping support heavy training and enhance performance. Let me explain.

Fruits have many dietary benefits for athletes, from providing sugars to support glycogen levels to fluid to support hydration and fibre to support gut health, to name but a few.

In particular, many fruits and vegetables are high in polyphenols. These strongly influence the taste and colour characteristics of fruits and vegetables, which is often the reason behind the nutrition advice to ‘eat the rainbow’. Owing to the polyphenol content of the foods makes them brightly coloured. By choosing colourful fruits and vegetables, we can potentially increase our intake of these valuable compounds.

Polyphenols are found in high quantities in fruits and vegetables like cherries, blueberries, blackcurrants, pomegranates, and blackberries, along with red grapes, apples, raspberries, and onions. Many manufacturers also produce supplements, utilising the high polyphenol content of these fruits into concentrated forms such as Montmorency tart jerry juice and New Zealand blackcurrant extract.

Polyphenols can help support a cyclist’s performance in several ways. Evidence suggests they may help in a whole host of beneficial aspects, from reducing cell damage, stress, and inflammation to improving blood flow, enhancing high-intensity exercise performance, reducing muscle soreness, reducing the occurrence of upper respiratory tract infections, and enhancing sleep quality through the provision of melatonin.

These are all aspects that many athletes would see as beneficial and, therefore, of significant benefit, particularly during intensified training/competition periods, where aspects such as muscle soreness and sleep quality can be a significant problem.

The intake of polyphenols comes with a number of challenges; much like the caffeine content of coffee can be highly variable, the polyphenol content of different fruits and vegetables can also be highly variable. This can be down to the condition in which the fruit was grown and how it’s been prepared. This can make it a challenge to ensure you have consumed sufficient quantities of the active ingredient (i.e., the polyphenols) within foods to gain a benefit. Hence, the use of polyphenol supplements with verified quantities of this compound can, at times, be beneficial.

However, for many of us, unless the intake of these compounds is critical for performance (i.e. around competition), then we can get away with a food-first approach whereby we rely on foods for our polyphenols. Much of the research to date has used doses achievable from intakes of around 125 grams of blueberries or 300 grams of mixed berries, which can be easily achievable over the course of the day and pretty tasty too.

We can gain benefits from polyphenols from both short-term (acute supplementation) doses, as little as a single dose pre-exercise, or through chronic supplementation, over a period of multiple days and weeks.

So, for any athletes looking to gain the benefits of polyphenols in their training, ensuring a good intake of polyphenol-rich foods during training and using food-based supplements around competition, where dosing is more critical, is likely to be an intelligent approach for supporting performance.

Coach Ben

Reference - Fruit‐Derived Polyphenol Supplementation for Athlete Recovery and Performance