Is Chocolate Milk The Ultimate Recovery Drink For Cyclists?

How quickly you bounce back from a training session can influence how you perform in future training sessions or competitions, particularly when you don’t have a lot of time between sessions (I.e. < 24 hours).

What you eat and drink in the hours after a session can significantly influence how quickly you recover. It can also play a role in supporting training adaptation and maximising the benefit of that session, helping you see greater gains in performance over time.

When it comes to nutrition for recovery, there are three key focuses… 

1. Rehydration - We lose water predominantly through sweat during exercise, so we need to replenish this by drinking adequate fluids after the session.
2. Replenishment - We deplete our glycogen stores during exercise, and these have a big impact on performance (more glycogen when we start exercise means we can go hard for longer), so we want to eat adequate carbohydrates in order to replenish these stores.
3. Rebuild—The proteins in our diet provide the building blocks for growing and repairing damaged muscle tissue post-session.

As we’ve covered in a previous blog, consuming a recovery drink immediately after a session can be an easy and convenient way to get adequate nutrients in at a key time.

 Using a drink rather than food can help provide fluids, manage the lack of appetite that riders may have after a hard session, and help ensure these nutrients get into the system quickly to kickstart the recovery process.

A key nutrition strategy that we recommend at Fuel The Ride Academy and one that many athletes use is the use of flavoured milk (e.g., chocolate milkshakes). These types of beverages are well suited to supporting recovery for a number of reasons…

1. Milk—is a good source of protein and fluid. It is naturally high in electrolytes, and this, combined with the fat within milk, helps to slow the delivery of the fluid into the system; this helps ensure the fluid is retained and rapid rehydration occurs. The protein in milk is a combination of whey (fast protein) and casein (a slow-digesting protein), with milk typically considered a high-quality source of protein for recovery.
2. Chocolate—These beverages typically have added sugar to make them sweet and palatable. This not only makes them easier to consume, but the inclusion of sugar (e.g., sucrose) provides additional carbohydrates that help support glycogen recovery, better than just consuming milk on its own. The sugar is also typically a combination of glucose and fructose, with glucose preferentially being stored in muscle and fructose in the liver.
3. Flavonoids—Chocolate milk typically contains cocoa, which is rich in flavonoids that can help reduce the inflammation associated with exercise and support muscle recovery. The dose of these will vary depending on the different drinks.
4. Ubiquitous availability—In the modern world, these types of drinks are available pretty much everywhere, making it an easy strategy to implement. They are also typically significantly cheaper than many recovery drinks from supplement companies and are likely as effective. 

With its widespread use as a recovery beverage, there has been a good amount of attention to chocolate milk as a recovery strategy within scientific research. A meta-analysis of research, where all of the studies are taken together and analysed as a whole, giving us better insight than any single research study on it’s own. It showed that chocolate milk was either better or as effective on a number of different aspects of recovery in comparison to other recovery drinks.

So, in summary, chocolate milk is certainly a cheap, convenient and effective strategy for maximising recovery from cycling and a key strategy we’d recommend athletes implement after heavy sessions or when rapid recovery is a key focus.

Coach Ben