What is REDs and why do cyclists need to know about it?

As a cyclist, we can often expend a huge amount of energy on the bike; after all, many of us love getting out for long rides, and given the chance, we like to ride multiple times a week both for the sheer joy that riding bikes brings and to improve our abilities and move us closer towards our performance goals. 

 Fuelling our rides properly takes a level of understanding of sports nutrition that takes time and expertise to develop (This is a key aspect we want to help riders with through Fuel The Ride Academy). It also takes effort, a degree of discipline, and organisation to ensure that knowledge of fuelling is translated into a fuelling strategy that we can execute both on and off the bike. 

When we ride a lot, fuelling well is vital to our maintaining our health and performance. We can expend a large amount of energy in a single ride (often thousands of kcals), and factor in that we might complete multiple rides in a week, and quite quickly, we can have a very significant increase in our energy expenditure. If our energy intake doesn’t keep up with our expenditure, we can begin to dig ourselves into a metaphorical hole. 

Alongside our riding, we may also have busy work and family lives with the many other commitments we have off the bike, and this can often make implementing good nutrition practices a challenge. 

As a cyclist, underfuelling can be caused by several factors, from poor nutrition knowledge (i.e. just not knowing what to do), logistical challenges of eating around riding and general life, to an overzealous approach to weight loss to more sinister reasons such as eating disorders and a poor relationship with food. 

Underfuelling can lead to something called low energy availability. When we ride, the body has little control over the amount of energy we expend on the bike. On a given day, this can mean that a large proportion of the energy we eat in our diet can go towards fuelling our riding, and the implication of this is that if we don’t have enough energy available, we can end up having less than we need (after we’ve factored in the energy expended through training) to support our normal physiological function. 

We need energy to support processes within the body, such as growth and repair, reproduction, digestion and keeping warm. Without enough energy to support these processes, they can be negatively impacted as they are downregulated to compensate for the low energy available.  

Being in a state of low energy availability for as little as a few weeks can lead to low energy availability becoming problematic. This can cause an athlete to start to develop a condition called Relative Energy Deficiency In Sports, or REDs for short. 

REDs can have several negative impacts on an athlete's health and performance. These are illustrated on the diagrams below. Low energy availability is at the centre of each, as this is the key driver, and the degree of energy availability will impact on the degree of the symptoms. 

Performance Effects

Health Effects 

 As you can see from these diagrams, the effects of underfuelling are wide-ranging, and for any athletes looking to be healthy and able to perform well, we need to ensure that they consume enough energy to prevent low energy availability from becoming problematic.

As a cyclist, one of the key signs that you might be consistently in a state of low energy available in men is a loss of sex drive and morning erections, and in female athletes, not taking hormonal contraceptives is a loss of a menstrual cycle. 

As such, as cyclists, to help support our performance and, more importantly, our health, we have to develop good fuelling practices to support the training we do. 

- Coach Ben 

Graphics from - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37752011/