What’s Durability & How Can Cyclists Use Nutrition To Improve It?

Most cyclists will have at some point undergone some form of exercise testing, whether that be a Functional Threshold Power (FTP), Critical Power or Lactate Threshold test, to name but a few.

These tests are often used for an array of purposes, from setting a benchmark on which to monitor performance improvements ahead of a key block of training, predicting future performance, monitoring training load or setting accurate training zones to ensure that training sessions elicit the desired physiological adaptation.

One of the main issues with these tests is that they are nearly always completed in the rested state when a rider can produce their best performance. While this is a way to help ensure repeatable results, it fails to consider that these variables are often highly unlikely to stay stable over a competition or a training session, particularly if there is a lot of work associated with that session.   

Your first lactate threshold (where lactate first begins to rise) during a laboratory test may be tens of watts higher than after a few hours of hard riding, and this can have significant implications on your performance, how you respond to training and the training load that you can cope with.

Have you ever raced on Zwift and easily beaten someone with a higher FTP than you? There’s a good chance part of that performance/result may be explained by your greater durability than the rider you beat, owing to your ability to fend off fatigue and maintain the performance you could achieve at the start of the activity.

We also see this in pro cycling, where top-level road riders possess greater abilities to maintain their performance later in training/competition compared to lower-level riders.

With races often won and lost based on your performance in the late stages of a race, often after hours of hard efforts, it’s no wonder durability is hugely important component for a riders physiology.

‘Durability’, has been defined as the time of onset and magnitude of deterioration in physiological characteristics over time during prolonged exercise.

As yet, we don’t really have a reliable or standardised way in which to measure or quantify durability within an athlete, and our understanding of this area is ever-increasing. Increasing our understanding of it may, in the future, help to more accurately predict cycling performance and even better perscribe training programs for athletes in order to maximise training adaptations and benefits.

Nutrition can play a key role in supporting an athlete’s durability. Strategies like fuelling, hydration, and nutrition-related cooling strategies to help prevent rises in core temperature, are all methods in which we can potentially enhance a rider's durability by reducing the physiological disturbance caused by racing and training.  

In particular, fuelling has been shown to help support durability. In a study that put a group of 16 men through a series of repeated 3-minute critical power tests, with and without carbohydrates (fed at a rate of 60 grams an hour), after 40 minutes, 80 minutes and 120 minutes of heavy-intensity cycling. The results showed that whilst 40 minutes and 80 minutes of cycling had no impact on end test power, which was the power that riders sustained at the end of the 3-minute test, after 2 hours of hard riding, there was a significantly greater end test power in the carbohydrate group compared to the placebo group.

So, in effect, durability is a key component of your physiology, and your ability to produce power at the business end of a race may be influenced by your fuelling on the bike. Durability is potentially a reason why your power-to-weight ratio based on an FTP test may not explain performance as well as you may have been led to believe. With a rider that has a lower power-to-weight ratio, but more durable potentially being able to outperform a rider with a higher FTR. Particularly if achieving that higher FTP has taken a significant period of aggressive under-fuelling. 

If you want to learn more about how to accelerate your race day performance then check out Fuel The Ride Academy.

Coach Ben