The Forgotten Window Of Opportunity For Cycling Nutrition?

When it comes to nutrition, cyclists often focus a lot of their effort and attention on their nutrition for race day. They often invest a lot in various products and supplements in a bid to maximise performance in the event they’ve been training for, often months in the build-up.

Whilst there is little doubt that getting things like a rider's fuelling, hydration and supplementation strategy correct on race day can offer big benefits to performance, for many riders, racing only really represents a relatively small proportion of the year, often accounting for only a handful of days. 

In comparison, cyclists often spend months, if not years, preparing and training for key events, often spending many hours per week on the bike in a bid to improve performance and maximise their athletic potential.   

As a nutritionist, one of the key areas that I often see riders forgetting about or at least under appreciating is the massive impact that nutrition can have on supporting training performance, maximising training adaptations, and helping ensure that you as an athlete can get as much benefit and gain as much performance benefit from their training as possible.

This is particularly important for the many cyclists who may have significant restrictions on their time availability to train, meaning that every session has to count, as they’ve reached a ceiling for the number of hours they spend on the bike. 

Every meal you eat can change the biochemistry within the body, and these changes can either be to the benefit or detriment of your session. Optimising the total amount, timing, and type of nutrients you consume around your training can have a huge impact on both your training performance and how the body responds and adapts to it. It can also help support your health, helping to maximise training availability by limiting the time lost to illness.

Every meal is, therefore, an opportunity to help move you closer to your performance goal. When you consider that you might eat x5 times a day, that’s x35 times per week. Over the course of the year, that’s close to 2000 opportunities to better support your training with the food you eat.

Even small changes to what you eat can have an impact and accumulate over the course of the year, these small changes can add up to significant performance gains.

Let's take fuelling, for example. Optimising your intake of carbohydrates around the sessions you do, can not only help you achieve more work within the session by preventing fatigue late into exercise, but this additional work can potentially improve your training quality and help drive more gains in performance over time. Carbohydrates can help support training through recovery, allowing an athlete to arrive at the next session able to perform more high quality work. 

 Similarly, dietary protein intake is vital in order to provide the body with the amino acid building blocks that it needs in order to rebuild and repair muscle tissue, to increase the hardware within the muscle to allow you to produce more power through the pedals.

These are just two examples where what you eat around a session can have an influence on training; there are hundreds more strategies that an athlete can look to utilise in order to help them improve. 

Within Fuel The Ride Academy, we give you all the knowledge, tools and applications you need in order to develop your own nutrition plan to help you get the absolute most out of yourself during training. For more info, check out the links at the top of the page. 

Coach Ben