Why Meal Timing Is Critical For Tomorrow's Ride Performance?

When you’ve got less than 24 hours between demanding rides (i.e. rides at a moderate to high intensity over 90 minutes in duration that are likely to deplete your glycogen stores), as is often the case with riders training multiple times a week or at least trying to squeeze in two big rides over the weekend. Your recovery nutrition is vital to maintaining training quality into the second session.

What you eat immediately after the ride, in terms of the nutrients you consume (i.e., carbohydrates, protein, fats, and water) and the total amount, timing, and type of those nutrients, will have a direct impact on the rate at which you recover and potentially how you perform the next day.

Alongside recovery for performance, there has been some interest in sports nutrition research around strategies to enhance the adaptations that an individual gets from a training session, in particular, how nutrition can be used to increase the stress that a session creates to try and further drive training adaptations and give the athlete more benefit from the session without the athlete having to do any additional work. 

Often, the goal with training is not necessarily to put in our best performances every session but to try and gain as much improvement as possible from that session; as such, our nutrition approach to training may be somewhat different from that around competition. 

One strategy that has received some attention to help maximise molecular signalling post-exercise is around delaying the intake of carbohydrates post-exercise. Effectively, these are the signals the muscle sends out after a session, influencing how it responds to the session. Of particular interest are the signals from the muscle which initiate the growth of new mitochondria, which is effectively the engine of the muscle cell and is a critical adaptation that we want to achieve from any endurance training.

A recently published study by Dìaz-Lara et al. (2024) has evaluated the impact of post-exercise carbohydrate timing on both muscle glycogen response, next-day performance and molecular responses (i.e. how the muscle responds to the session). 

They took a group of nine recreationally active males and, on two occasions, performed some demanding high-intensity interval training. Over the next 24 hours, they consumed the same diet, but in one trial, they consumed carbohydrates immediately post-exercise and in the other, they delayed feeding by 3 hours (in a bid to maximise the molecular responses. 

The key findings of the study were threefold.

1. The two trials saw similar molecular signalling responses, suggesting in these participants, under these conditions, there isn’t additional benefit to restricting carbohydrate post-exercise from an adaptation perspective. 
2. Whilst you may expect greater glycogen storage, when maximising intake of carbohydrates post-exercise due to the utilisation of the short window of higher rates of glycogen storage, after 24 hours on a diet with the same total amount of carbohydrate, glycogen stores were the same.
3. Despite glycogen stores being the same after 24 hours (although the location of that glycogen might be different within the muscle), performance wasn’t. The group that delayed carbohydrate intake by 3 hours post-exercise saw a 30% reduction in their time to task failure on an exercise capacity test the next day, along with an increase in their perception of effort.

So, what does this mean for the athlete?

In effect, if you are looking to maximise training adaptations from the session, delaying your feeding post-exercise may not provide any additional benefit and may, in fact, negatively impact your performance the subsequent day. As such, when you want to perform well the next day, the intake of carbohydrates immediately post-exercise is going to be key to help support performance the next day. 

To learn more about how best to approach your fuelling during training, we cover this extensively within Fuel The Ride Academy, giving you both the knowledge, practical tools and support to help you develop your own personalised nutrition strategy around training to accelerate your performance. For more information, head to ‘Join FTR’ page above.