Cycling Nutrition For Long Bike Rides - Improve Your Cycling!

Improve your cycling by improving your nutrition for your long cycle rides. It makes a world of difference.

If you’d prefer a video format of this article you can watch it above

In today’s post we’re to run through some nutrition mistakes cyclists commonly make on their long cycles.

Consider the type of ride that you’re doing

Where you cycle do you have all sorts of different rides? Do you have some flat, steady rides, do you have some punchy hilly rides?

Well, your nutrition should be influenced by the type of ride that you do but most athletes I work with don’t think about this. A ride is just a ride and it’s 2 or 3 hours long. But if you do a ride where you have periods where you have to go hard and for example keep working above your FTP you’re going to use more energy.

So you need to keep that in mind and plan that into your nutrition.

More hills, more hard efforts, more cycling generally - more nutrition

The cyclist who doesn’t eat, fails.

We’ve all got a friend who makes out like they just don’t need to eat.

You offer them a sweet and they shrug it off nonchalantly and just drink water for the rest of the ride.

But then towards the end of the ride you notice them becoming a bit grumpier, not being able to hold the same sort of pace that they were.

Well don’t be that friend and decide you’re not going to not eat anything for the whole ride. You don’t win any medals by not eating and it’s not a great idea.

You run the risk of bonking, feeling awful afterwards and not recovering properly, and that’s not great, but it’s also not great from a calorie point of view either.

As healthy triathletes you want to be fuelling your training and recovering well, and if you don’t eat on a long bike ride all you do is put yourself in a bigger calorie deficit and either have to play catch up or remain in a deficit.

Fat, fibre, full

I love a café stop but they can actually be the reason behind a big nutrition mistake for long rides. When you have a café stop, what’s your go to snack or drink? It’s pretty common for people to go for large milky coffees or toasties with lots of cheese.

While these options are delicious and can sometimes be just what you need, higher fat and fibre foods are more likely to give you a stitch or tummy upset when you start riding again.

Have you ever stopped at a café, wolfed down some food and then spent the next 30 minutes shifting uncomfortably until things ease off? Well that’s probably because you made this mistake.

This will also be worse if you’re working at a harder pace, so opting for lower fat or fibre options should help with this.

This cheesy deliciousness isn’t always helpful cyclists

High intensity calls for high glycaemic carbohydrates

Remember that the type of ride might impact how much nutrition you need during your rides? Well that also links to the type of carbohydrates you need to consider on your long rides.

You might have heard of fast or slow carbohydrates, low and high GI carbs, and understandably feel a bit confused.

Slower, easier endurance rides means you can eat these low GI or slow release carbs, because you don’t need the energy as quickly. These slower release carbs do what the name suggests, and release energy at a slower rate. But if you’re hitting hills and hard intervals, you need to fuel the fire as you’re going.

Think of it like this: If you’re out on a slow, jolly chatty ride with your mates then you’re just cruising along in your motorway car. It’s probably a diesel.

But when you’re laying the watts down, giving it some beans, you’re in your supercar. That’s running on petrol and it’s supercharged too.

Imagine that like your slow and fast release carbs. The harder you go the more energy you need available in a quicker time period.

Failure to prepare will prepare you to fail

That old cliché.

So, perhaps you’ve read some of these articles before, or watched some of my videos before and heard me say about how you need to make sure you fuel you training well and you think, OK James fine I’ll take nutrition with me.

But you know that you use your body’s store for the first part and it’s only later that you need the stuff that you take with you.

Well that’s a reasonable point, but it doesn’t quite work like that. It takes a while for what you eat or drink to get absorbed and then be used by your body, so if you only leave it until the end unfortunately it’s not going to do anything

Eat earlier into the ride to give your body time to use what you’ve eaten and you’ll feel heaps better by the end of the ride.

Don’t leave it too late to start eating or drinking!

Don’t let the weather ruin your nutrition strategies

Now I’m not sure where you’re reading this post from and what your climate is like, but in England when it’s cold it is cold. Although to be fair some of you are probably in Canada or somewhere where it’s far colder than here, but bear with me.

You’ve got your nutrition sorted, feeling pretty smug about it because you’re thinking you’ve nailed it all. You head out and release that all of the jelly babies or gummy sweets that you’ve got in your packet are actually extremely difficult to eat with gloves on.

You can’t just reach into your pocket and get them out like you would normally and you don’t want to stop to get them out, so you end up eating far less than you meant to.

So consider the weather for your rides and how practical it is for your nutrition. If it is cold and you aren’t going to be stopping, liquid nutrition might be a lot easier so you don’t have to unwrap things with gloves on.

Remember the overall aim

And that’s to fuel your training well. You don’t improve your cycling by underfuelling. Quite the opposite in fact. In order to improve your cycling you need to train consistently, over the long term.

By fuelling your long cycles well not only will you perform better during the cycling itself and most likely enjoy it far more, you’ll recover better and reduce your risk of injury and illness over the long term.