Professional cyclists diet - how to tackle
What do professional cyclists eat?
The aim is to include slow-release carbohydrate, a protein source and at least one fruit or vegetable to increase your day's nutrient profile. Even if you are in a rush there are plenty of quick breakfasts that can be eaten on the go, the simplest of which is a smoothie.
Big tours are phenomenal endurance and strength performances and place high demands on the riders who challenge them. On the one hand, the athletes need a lot of fuel to get 'around three and a half thousand kilometers' at an average speed of over three and a half thousand kilometers, 25 miles per hour. But on the flip side, they don't want to overeat to compromise their power to weight ratio, which is very important when cycling. (Dramatic Music) Came to the Giro d'Italiato to find out more, speaking to Nigel Mitchell, the EF Education First Pro Cycling Team's nutritionist, and has officially worked with Team Sky in UK cycling. who one day achieved enormous success in big tours, races, pretty much everything in top-class cycling.
So he is an ideal conversation partner. I just want to know if the drivers can have pudding. Let's find out. (relaxed music) Good afternoon, Nige. - Good to see you, Riley. - Yeah, so let's start the day. - Okay. - Breakfast.
What do the riders usually eat at the start, before the stage? - Yes, on a normal kind of stage a lot of people are surprised how normal the diet is, the food we make for the drivers. I We are so lucky because we have a fantastic cook with Olga and she is a really important one Is a member of the team. It is really very important.
She's one of the first people to get up and one of the last to go to bed, but it's super easy. We'll start you with porridge, we always have porridge - I love porridge. (Laughs) - You always have porridge and like we do, it's just a very simple recipe that Olga uses where it's made with just water So it's just very simple, very traditional - That's the Scottish way - Scottish way, yes, but we don't put whiskey in it.
We don't have whiskey and cream, which I think is more of a traditional Scottish guy, right? is when I'm in Scotland anyway. So we have porridge and we have omelets. Always have omelets.
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Olga will count how many eggs she can get through in a capital T Ours and it's hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of eggs. And then all we have is normal cereal, we have cheese, we have jam, it's just normal, simple stuff. - Yes.
We try not to go too massive for breakfast, especially because then you are only flooding the system with many, many, many carbohydrates and what you want to do is just replenish the system. - Right. - But you So too.
If you want something in there that will be, take some time to digest and this is why the eggs are great for breakfast because the eggs are digested pretty slowly, they also add some protein to the system, so that it helps drivers when they race to recover while they are going through.- Contributing to recovery all the time.- Yes, but it's just normal, simple food.- Yes.- People always go, 'No, that easy can be it can't be, it can't be that simple .'- Gi Is there some kind of protein, carbohydrate, that kind of macronutrient you're trying to hit? - Yeah, ah, so what we're looking for from a protein standpoint is targeting around 20 grams of protein, worth 20 to 30 grams the foods they have for breakfast, so you know, a couple of egg omelets, the porridge they eat, maybe a little bit of ham.
That easily gives them the 30 grams of protein worth, and from a carbohydrate standpoint, we're really looking for a gram per pound of body weight, and again, that's easy to achieve without going into detail. Just with the porridge, one bit of fruit, it's really easy for them to do it without them even thinking about it and that's really the idea. I will try to think about these servings.
Even if we shrink down a rod, things like the carbohydrates. We're trying to keep the amount pretty consistent. That's about 20 to 30 grams of it with these meals. (Upbeat music) - And you mentioned that it's different for a shorter stage, like a TT - Yes - So how does that work? - So TT One of the critical ones Things, one of the really important things, one of the most critical things is stomach comfort, and of course that's an extreme position when you're on skis backwards so depending on when the time trial is, but you know, usually the guys get up when your time trial is at 2am and they'll have their standard breakfast but slightly lighter portions doing a bit of riding, exploring and then, three, four hours before the TT, there's the pre-race meal and the pre-race -We always have the same food.
It's just rice and omelette - When we get out on the stage, what do the riders eat during a stage? - So during the stage we aim to achieve, depending on the intensity, and this is part of the training that the riders really have to think for themselves because you can't tell anyone you have to have that many grams of carbohydrates per hour because of the intensity they could be training so sometimes you can have people coming back and you look at the power files and they don't have to be really hard worked and you have other days where they just go full throttle all the time, so what are we? If you're riding relatively moderately, try to work towards aiming for around 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. If you work harder, it's closer to 60 to 80, even up to 100 grams per hour. and the way we deliver nutrition on bikes is like a modular system.
So we're working on some kind of 20 gram carbohydrate exchange, if you understand me. Like rice cake with around 20 grams of carbohydrates, a bar is like 40 grams of carbohydrates, so that's two exchanges. Depending on the drink we're using, we might be using an 80-gram carbohydrate drink, so that's four swaps so we're just working on that type of system.
I don't think the drivers always fully understand this.- Yes, but you're watching it.- But we know, so we go when you have a bottle of it - S o when you have an 80 gram bottle then this is enough for an hour, and we tend to use more of this liquid carbohydrate feeding when the stages are more technical, in the mountains when it is more difficult to eat, or later in the stages, So at the first start of the stage, depending on what the drivers are doing, we might only have a bottle of water and a bottle of racing drink in the bottles.
The racing drink is Scratch with 20 grams of carbohydrates. It may be that they'll be fathering their jobs early on, or they know they have to work, so we're going to be using 80 grams of carbohydrates in their bottles so we'll just titrate it by that little bit and we are very standard with the racing foods we use. So we use a combination of commercial bars and we also use the rice cakes.
It's the biggest, most popular, and most effective racing feed out there. (relaxed music) - Something I want to talk about is food residue. - Okay, yes - Because you mentioned something about driver avoidance of food that creates a lot of water retention in the intestines - Well it isn't so much water retention, there is more of the fecal matter poop, so basically in our colon, the bigger people are, the more there is, so you can have a few pounds of stool in the intestines.
I mean, you have to be pretty careful about the microbiome, the bacteria, it's important that we don't do it, that we don't play around with it too much, so sometimes we do it for certain stages and we don't do it all Time with all drivers, it really is when people are especially after something and we do, we support a low residue plan so we only remove food the body doesn't really digest, but what we do is still to be ensured That we're getting some of the soluble fiber to feed the bacteria, so we're not avoiding all of the fiber, but we're trying to avoid more of it - More o What we could think of the fiber that really makes up that mass Broccoli or something like that? - Yeah and, or oatmeal bread, so it's a really simple type of diet that is all about eating chicken and rice or fish and rice and then n there are vegetable juices to go with it.- Easier to digest.- Well, one of the other things about it is that, especially if you are on the last week of a big tour, the digestive system picks up.
To be tired, the drivers eat large amounts of lettuce, a lot more than what normal people would eat, and so with all the fiber you can get some ferment in the gut, so again with things like the vegetable juices, in fact, the nutrients concentrate and one Remove most of the mass. (Popular Music) - How has that changed since you got into professional cycling and nutrition? - Yeah, well I think there have been massive changes. I mean, I was pretty lucky when I was in World Tour Level cyc. came ling because i was joining a brand new team so i got into team sky where we had the opportunity to rewrite the rules and it was very little risk to the situation as we were not held back by some traditions, so we could try what we really tried and what we want to do which is currently working too.
Many of the practices we are doing with it now are what I introduced about 10 years ago. Things have moved on, but what we see now, most of the other teams have adopted a lot of those exercises as well, and so things in general just moved on, so one of the big ones used to be, things like pasta got really very strong in cycling used is used a lot more now. Again, all teams do this.
Things like juicing. You know you're racing in the restaurants and you see a lot of teams juicing now. Things like the rice cakes I can't take full credit for because it was actually Alan Lib who made a recipe from his grandmother about Doi.
He did something like that years ago and it was Brad Wiggins who said to me, 'Oh Alan does these kind of sticks' that are really good on a bike.' So we took some of those recipes and adjusted them and again all of the teams are doing this now and you know, Alan tells me that when he was professional cycling 15 years ago, people mocked him for walking around with his rice cooker. People took the Mickey and now each team has four or five rice cookers.
So there have been these changes and I think the focus on the quality of the food is much stronger than it was 10 years ago. All teams now have a cook. The teams now employ someone with a nutritional role who is responsible for both the strategic and operational activities of food and nutrition within the team.
The quality of the nutritional products has really increased in my opinion, but I think the intelligence in using the products has improved as So I don't think people are just racing, we have to use these bars, we have to use gels , have to use these drinks, we are now thinking what is actually the most reasonable solution to what we want to do, so we think about what the problem is and how to approach this problem, not what we have to do that we are just throw at it and try to get it to work. (Popular music) - Are there things that are blacklisted that you can't have? - My way of working is that I don't really like a didactic approach, good, bad. What I like to try and do is Too Okay, we believe this supports a performance environment, supports a performance diet, and thus the food we don't offer drivers, if that's something they really want then they can get it but we don't forbid it - yes. - If you know what I mean.
So if a driver sits there and eats or drinks, we won't judge him for it. That's our choice, so I think the only one of the things we really avoid as a team, apart from the mountain stages, so straight off the bike, we avoid things like soft drinks. You know colas.- They have been very popular in the past.- Yes, no, no, I mean they are super popular, but the reason we avoid them is because drinks are very low in pH and what we try to protect the digestive systems of the drivers during the race is a can of soda but the reason we don't give it to the drivers is because what we're trying to say is not supporting what we do want to reach hotel, you could say 'Oh god, I really need a can' so go and get one, but we don't offer it as a team, but we use the small one comes on mountain stages because that can be mental for some drivers almost life saving even if it doesn't overall support what we do but in this situation it supports the performance of the guys and there is only so much you can say that you can't - yeah right well, Thank you very much for that.
Great conversation with you as always and yes, we Really interesting. - Okay. - Thanks a lot for this.
Thanks to Nigel for his insight into what the pro riders eat. I think it's really interesting and I think the takeaway messages are that you will eat a lot of variety, a lot of real food that is easy to digest, but also practical when you have to remake things in strange places or on your bike. It's also really interesting to see that the trainers and nutritionists take into account the physical demands of each day because the days are often different and also the performance data and the tailor's food based on it is intact.
Well I hope you found this article interesting and informative, and if you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to GCN if you haven't already.
What is the best diet for cyclists?
- Breakfast - Porridge oats/eggs.
- Mid morning snack - Fruit/Yogurt.
- Lunch - Wholemeal bread sandwich/jacket potato/left over pasta from the night before.
- Mid afternoon snack - a piece of fruit/pack of unsalted nuts.
- Evening meal - A piece of chicken/ fish/other lean meat with Rice/Pasta/Vegetables.
What do cyclist eat during a long ride?
Recommended calorie sources: Start with solid foods, including sandwiches, homemade rice bars, and sports nutrition bars (we recommend ProBar Bite). Save the chewables and gels for the last third of the ride. After the ride: Sit down to a substantial meal within 60 minutes of finishing the ride.
Refueling is one of the easiest things you can do, but it has a massive impact on your performance. And the longer your journey, the more important refueling becomes. Mile ride, or the big huge sport you've been preparing for in a long time, or just a couple of long summer rides, we'll show you what to eat and when to eat it, but before we do, make sure that you subscribe to GCN if you haven't already, and also click the bell icons for notifications and support the channel. (Dramatic Music) - The first thing to know about refueling for a long ride is that your refueling doesn't start when you get it on your bike.
You need to think about your diet before driving, and that starts with your meal the night before. You want to have a solid meal that is high in carbohydrates. Maybe something with pasta, rice, or even quinoa Make the classic mistake of overeating.
While topping up carbs is a good thing, you'll want to replenish those carbohydrates served, but eating twice what you would normally eat will just leave you feeling bloated and sluggish the next day. Try to eat a little more carbs than you normally would; you really want a hearty, low-fat, low GI breakfast. So something like porridge, a Bircher muesli or overnight oats would be ideal as they are carbohydrates with low GI, which means that the energy is released slowly.
So you will feel the benefits longer. And you want to avoid fatty foods as they delay the absorption of much-needed carbohydrates into your system. Deep-frying may not be the best option before a big trip. (slow techno beat) - Simple things first.
If you are going on a long drive, bring two bottles with you. Now 750ml bottles are really useful when you can fit them into your frame. This is actually a 500, but the 750 won't fit every frame, especially y if you have a smaller bike.
But ultimately, the drinking strategy you choose will depend on the conditions in which you are driving. - When it's really hot, focus on having electrolytes in your beverages to replace the essential minerals you are losing by sweating, and if possible, schedule at least one point on your ride to pop your bottles A pro tip is also to take an electrolyte tablet and a bag of mixed drinks with you in your pocket or saddlebag, when you refill your bottles in the summer I like to have water and electrolytes in my bottles to make sure that I get through the sweat replenish lost minerals. But in winter I like to fill the bottles with carbohydrate mix and use some kind of special product, a bag of carbohydrate mix, you can actually get the maximum amount of carbohydrates your body can absorb in an hour.
The reason for this is that they have the right blend of sugars that will allow you to get the maximum amount of carbohydrates per hour, which can be massive to help you fuel up. (Techno music) - Take real food with you whenever you can on long bike rides. So these can be flapjacks, rice cakes, bananas, or maybe even small sandwiches.
If you're getting your fueling strategy right, and you're feeling tired, hungry and maybe blowing, then one of the best things to eat is an energy gel. Because energy gels only contain what you need: fuel, sugar. And that is what they are really easy to absorb into the body.
With this in mind, it's always good to take a few energy gels with you on long journeys. But you won't want to eat energy gels all the time. They have a lot of them and they can! starting to be pretty sickly.
But in terms of trying to make up for the dreaded bonk, speak to a seasoned cyclist who will tell you there is nothing like it. (Techno music) - It's a bit of a cliché, but when you start with that? If you're hungry on a long drive, it's really too late. It's not the end of the world on short trips, but if you run out of fuel you're probably not too far from home, but take it off my hands, you really, really don't want to run out of fuel halfway on an epic ride .
It's no fun. An intense drive consists of consuming carbohydrates every 20 minutes or so. That could be half an energy bar, a gel or a rice cake or something like that.
And what I tend to do is pretty geeky, I'll do and plan how much food I need and then pack my bags accordingly. But then always add an extra bar or a couple of extra gels in case I need it. For example, if the trip is a little more intense than your planning, or you start to have the feeling that you are not doing well, this is your insurance policy, these are your reserves, your emergency rations.
Hope you found this look at food useful on long journeys. And if yes? , then please give the article a big thumbs up. Now you have no excuse if you accept your next six-hour epic.
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How many calories does a pro cyclist eat?
Pro cyclists need to consume almost three times the number of calories when racing or training as the average personabout 6000-7000 calories per day. Pro cyclists can burn up to 10-15 calories per minute during a hard training session or race.
Why do cyclists eat bananas?
The Nutrition
The carbs will give you a mid-ride jolt. But their low calorie count means your jersey pocket might not fit as many as you need: For larger cyclists, a long ride could turn into a banana eating contest, Seebohar says. It'll add calories (that's a good thing: extra sustenance!) and control blood sugar.27.04.2018
Are eggs good for cyclists?
High-Fat Breakfast Meats and Eggs
Eggs are a great nutritional choice in general, but if you're pressed for time, give the fatty and protein-packed meals (i.e., anything made up of bacon and eggs) a pass.01.07.2021
What should I eat on a 100 mile bike ride?
Many century rides include aid or sag stops that provide riders with water refills and food choices that typically include trail mix, bananas, cookies and chips. Use these stops to replenish water bottles and grab an extra bite of food if needed, but do not rely on them for all your nutrition needs.23 2018 .
Is cycling better than running?
The number of calories you burn in either exercise depends on the intensity and length of time you do it. In general, running burns more calories than cycling because it uses more muscles. However, cycling is gentler on the body, and you may be able to do it longer or faster than you can run.21.01.2020
Can I eat a banana before cycling?
Bananas are good for long rides and eating before a ride as other than the very brown ones they reduce energy steadily over time. Don't just eat bananas on your bike, the fibre in bananas called pectin helps to moderate your blood sugar levels and can reduce your appetite, making them a good snack between meals.
Is peanut butter good for cycling?
Peanut butter is one of my favorite snacks for cyclists, she says. The combination of being high in fat with a hit of protein, carbs, and fiber makes peanut butter super satiating and helps stave off hunger for a whileperfect for a long ride.17 2021 .
What kind of food does a cyclist eat?
Some riders eat corn-based cereal, which is gluten-free. Depending on conditions, racers down 1-3 16 fluid-ounce (0.5 L) bottles every hour. Depending on preferences and stomach issues, a racer drinks water, sports drink and Coke. Most teams use a commercial sports drink.
Why is food so important to professional cyclists?
Food is so important that pro cycling teams employ their own chefs and nutritionists to make sure that riders are getting exactly what they need for every meal and while they ride. >>> How much weight do Tour de France riders lose?
How much food do cyclists eat in the Tour de France?
Flat stages generally require less energy than mountain stages,' Dr James Morton, Head of Nutrition for Team Sky, explains. 'On average, Grand Tour riders ingest between 5000 and 8000 kcal per day.' What are the nutritional challenges facing riders? Under-fuelling.