Food is Fuel - Fast Dad Friday's Tip of the Week!

Eat More Carbs- Get Faster- It’s that simple.

No video for this week, you will just have to check out my instagram page to see what carbs I’m eating because it’s always changing(aside from the bread but we’ll get to that)!

Right after my son Kaito was born I started making bread. He was born on March 9th, right before the Covid-19 lockdown happened, and like most of the rest of the world, I got into bread baking. I had always wanted to learn how to keep a sourdough culture and bake bread from just flour and water, but the symphony and recording schedule in Nashville was just too hard to predict and starting this thing from scratch and keeping it alive seemed properly daunting, so I never did it. Here was this golden opportunity to finally make it happen! None of us were getting any sleep and we were home anyway, trying to leave as little as possible because of Covid, so why not give it a go!

I’m happy to say that I have gotten quite a bit better at baking since then, and have kept up the habit because first of all I LOVE the taste of fresh warm bread. It doesn’t need anything at all when it’s this fresh. But I’m also still doing it because I truly feel it is having a massive impact on my training effectiveness. I’m able to push better day to day, when I’m really focusing on having all forms of carbohydrates as the main body of my diet.

Complex Carbohydrates

It doesn’t have to be bread, that’s just working for me right now. It does however have to be a complex carbohydrates. A quick google will remind you that a complex carbohydrate is a string of sugar molecules in a long chain called polysaccharides. Our bodies eventually process these long chains of sugars into simple to use energy, glucose(blood sugar!) These carbohydrates take much longer to break down than sugar(simple carbohydrate) and provide the body right fuel to get your glycogen stores topped off to keep you recovering from working out day to day.

What foods are “complex carbs”?

Here are a few examples if you don’t have a good internal idea of what these kinds of carbs are:

Whole Grains
Rice
Starchy Fruit
Beans
Any starchy vegetables

An oversimplification of a complex metabolic process: Aerobic Training requires glycogen to perform. There was a trend of a “low carb” athlete model going around, using ketosis and ketones to reduce carb dependency. I have to admit, I (sort of) tried it myself. This way of eating MIGHT(emphasis on might here) be potentially helpful for a grand tour stage racer, a super high performing ironman distance triathlon racer, or ultra racer, but not for an athlete looking for their maximal performance values aerobically for FTP or VO2 max performance.

Simply put: Attempting to eat this way will hinder the your ability to train day after day. TRAINING Aerobic output requires crazy consistency. You simply have to be willing to put in the steady work. I can’t stress this enough. If you love riding a bike and going fast, putting out big watts, and doing big KJ rides, you need to Carb up!

When I started riding, I thought that Nutella was a decent way to refuel after a mega ride. It’s got a lot of sugar right? Sugar is just a very basic version of a carbohydrate! Well, they are, but it’s not quite that simple. A big sugar bomb is totally fine and actually beneficial right after working out. While exercising your body has better ability to process gulcose and that ability stays around for a little bit right after. That “recovery window” is the perfect time to carb out. But it has to be carbs!!!! Nutella, and many other cheat foods people think about are loaded with Fat, and that doesn’t do you any benefit for performance, and really raises the caloric density of any food. Not good!

See Also: Cycling Weight Loss: Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Race Weight and Improving Watts Per Kilo

Back to the Carb-train!

We need to keep it simple as athletes. Whole foods, Lots of carbs, Occasional Protein from meat and fish. It’s not complicated. It doesn’t have to be hard to eat this way either! It is however CRITICAL to stay consistent! There’s actually not a whole lot of muscular damaging that happens for most kinds of cycling you will do, especially if you are ticking over a nice high cadence. There is however, a very very large energy demand, a GLYCOLITIC demand that you really can only replenish by shifting the ratios of what you are eating on a day to day basis.

We have brought eating like an athlete up before, over and over actually, and I’m surprised it’s not brought up more often in training forums and on other coaching information sites/blogs/vlogs. I suppose it’s because it’s easy to revert to old habits, and there has always(at least in my mind) been a bit of a guessing game with how I’m going to recover after a race, or hard interval session, or long ride. This guessing game can be mitigated with good refueling, and good understanding of what kind of impact the prescribed intervals will have. Compared to when I started training and coaching, the way we can know exactly what an athlete needs with WKO5 these days is so much more advanced now than it used to be. The other piece to the recovery puzzle is your fueling!

Apparently, I needed a reminder to this myself, and I got one when I started making bread. I started performing better for longer stretches of days within my training blocks. It’s antidotal on my part here, but the research does suggest that running low on fuel on repeated days would lead to a mega leg implosion after a few workouts or hard rides on under fueled legs, causing you to need to pause your training for a few days so your body can refuel and recharge.

When Should I be Eating This Way

I’ve been crushing rice, fruit, and lean protein for a long time, so what’s different now? In the past, I had always “eaten for the task” meaning I would periodize what I ate when I ate, within a week, and within the training calendar. I don’t track my calories, never have, but I make micro shifts in my diet seasonally that help me do this. I also would eat a higher fat diet on Monday and Friday, my typical rest days, and try to limit the carbs a bit -not cut them out by any means, just less than if I were doing a hard ride- . I now think this is an error. I’m only training around 9 hours a week, but whenever I get on the bike aside from 60-90’ of recovery once in a while I am “training”. Training to me simply means I have an objective when I set out to pedal. I used to think that I could get away with eating for the task, but that was a misstep. Even on a pretty nuts and bolts training schedule of 7.5-9 hours of work per week, you are going to be emptying your glycolytic fuel tank regularly. Staying ahead of that “empty tank” warning just makes sense doesn’t it?

Brendan and I talked a lot about this great article about the Kenyan Runner Diet. Basically, the Kenyan diet is very simple and focused on Carbs. This isn’t just how runners in Kenya eat, it’s how everyone grows up eating as well. Additionally, there is also research out there that has proven that absorbing/storing and utilizing carbohydrates for energy is trainable, another reason to be consistent with this way of eating, and not to periodize.

Won’t All of these Carbs Cause Weight Gain?

If you sit on the couch, watch 6 movies a day while thinking about training, yea you will probably not need very many calories in general, let alone carbs. If however, you are going out day after day, 6 days a week, and dedicated to a training schedule you need to have the right energy stores for it!

The other issue here is empty fat calories. It’s really easy to overlook exactly the contents of packaged foods. So many processed and pre-made foods are loaded up with oils and salt for taste and shelf life. You really have to keep it simple and find complex carbs that work for you that are basic and you are ok with eating over and over. It doesn’t seem hard to me because I’ve been doing it for a long time but I can see how this could be hard to get used to as a new athlete. Just keep telling yourself that “food is fuel” and the little changes will start becoming automatic and add up to a very different you!

It’s not very difficult for me to maintain a “healthy” diet. My wife is a fantastic cook, and we don’t really keep any empty calories around the house. We haven’t eaten out since our son was born really (other than Indian take out once? Seriously I think that’s it) and we prepare everything with real ingredients. We don’t typically eat food that comes out of packages. That being said, I can slam down a bag of chips, a loaf of fresh banana bread, or a dozen cookies if given the opportunity! I’m not stingy with “fun calories”, just selective about WHEN I eat those.

Don’t worry, I eat a lot of foods other than Bread!

I’m not over eating, but I’m also not stingy with my calories at all. I can put back 1,000 calories of bread without blinking after a hard workout. I work backwards, very loosely based on what I’m guessing I will be burning in a week. For example, If I’m going to do about 10,000 KJ of work per week on the bike, and my base metabolic rate is about 2600 cal per day, I’m working with around 4000 calories per day I need to get down to stay more or less the same. I’m serious when I say I don’t count calories. It would drive me nuts, but Just by knowing this I can use it as an outline for what I’m taking in.

How many carbs are enough

It depends on where you are reading but a google search will tell you that 55-70% of the diet should be carbs, or 5-12g per KG of body weight. That’s a pretty big range. If I went with the 12g per kg with a 4000 calorie a day diet, that’s as much as 91% of my total diet is carbs! Translate that into bread terms, and that’s 2.1 loaves PER DAY!!!! That’s a lotta bread!

Even I don’t eat that much bread, but the range gives you a better way of understanding that this really needs to be a priority if you are training back to back to back days all the time. I also pad my diet with a steady flow of fruits, oats, and rice to mix it up.

It’s also worth noting that the bread I’m eating contains no preservatives, and is long fermented sourdough made with simply flour, water, and salt. There are no preservatives, additives or enrichments. This helps quite a bit with sustainability of this kind of eating.

On The Bike Carbs

The last critical piece is another one Brendan and I have talked about a ton: Fueling on Rides! 60-90g of carbs per hour, even if it’s only a 1 hour ride will make a MEGA MEGA difference in your repeatability of training, even if it’s just a simple endurance ride. I didn’t use to think this was as important as it is!I thought I could get away with little or no carbs on endurance rides, and that would help me be more efficient at making power, and keep my weight down. I had this weird stigma against carbs and always connected carbohydrates with over eating, or eating the wrong things. This really isn’t the case.

Every hour of every ride other than recovery rides at extremely low intensity of 50% or less of ftp I eat at least 60g of carbs, and as many as 88g per hour if racing, climbing, or performing intervals at max effort.

For me that looks like 2 bottles of fluid per hour- 1 water and 1 Science in Sport Electrolyte mix, and 2 or 3 gels. I have to say that I definitely prefer to only eat gels and drink my calories when I’m training. I’ve eaten a lot of different things for the variety of events I’ve competed in, but I think this way of doing it would be best for anything other than a 6+ hour event where you really will need to eat some more solid foods.

Science in Sport can’t be beat here. I’ve used a lot of different on bike fueling sources, but I’ve never used a product better than SIS. The Isotonic Gels are easy to take down, even the ones with Caffeine in them. SIS does sponsor Brendan and I but we don’t get behind any performance product that doesn’t work for us, ever.

The Only Time NOT to “Carb Up”

At this point my feels are that if I’m riding, I’m training, and that means carbs will be between 70-90% of my daily intake. The only time this wouldn’t be true, is during the midseason break of a no riding week, or during the off season if I’m not riding. I really can’t wait to see how this carb lifestyle pays off after a full year of being this focused on a real performance diet!

Wrap it Up Dude

I have eaten more carbs in the past 4 months than EVER since I started riding and this has helped the consistency of my performance. It’s silly to admit, but it wasn’t until I started baking my own sourdough from scratch that I realized just how crucial it was for this level of carb intake to happen day after day, every day, no matter the intensity of the rides of the day. If you train 6 days a week, performance consistency will be better because of it. Eat your complex carbs: bread, fruits, pasta, rice, and make sure you do it over and over and you will get better at storing, processing and using this fuel and your performance will thank you! The diet only helps if the training is happening, but the training cant happen without the diet.

Try cutting out the useless calories, start eating more complex carbs, and your performance consistency will most definitely improve. If you want some help with your training structure, shoot me an email, I want to help you improve your training and maximize the effort you are putting in! Patrick@EVOQ.BIKE or contact us online to learn how we can be of assistance to you in building a cycling training plan.

Cycling NutritionGuest UserJuly 23, 20201 Comment