Originally Posted by
mr_pedro
Ya gotta eat trash to ride fast!
People are so confused about what a healthy diet means. Most important is to eat a variety of things without growing excessive body fat.
There is nothing wrong with refined sugar, except that you can easily eat too much of it, becoming fat and with negative health consequences.
So the regular advice is to watch out for refined sugars as it can take you down the wrong path. This is sound advice when doing anything but prolonged efforts at the limit of your powers.
The advice given in the video is scientific common knowledge these days. What people need to understand is that eating 90g of sugar per hour is only needed when averaging more than say 300W for hours and if that is close to the max you can do. A pro cyclist could probably do a fasted ride for hours at 300W as they would be using mostly fat for fuel.
You can also be close to your limit at say 180W, and if you do that for hours you also need to eat some carbs along the way, but not as many are needed. The big advantage of not needing as many carbs per hour is that you can now get them from regular tasty whole foods. But that is a luxury that the high power cyclist don’t have at the rate that they need to take in carbs. They are close to max the body can naturally absorb and that is why they go for as much fast refined sugars as possible,
Somewhat disagree. If you do 230W for an hour you burn about 850 calories. For a pro most of that will come from fat, but for many amateurs likely most of that will come from carbs. The closer you are to your VT2 the more carbs you burn. If say 75% of that comes from carbs, that means you are burning 160g of sugar in that hour. Either your glycogen stores are very full (and again, pros are likely to have larger glycogen stores than amateurs) and you don't ride too long, or you might want to ingest that 90g/hour. I have done rides where after hours my stomach starts to struggle to digest and I start to feel I can't hold power any more. Short break with water and carbs and I can suddenly go harder again.
But yes, if you just go 2-3 hours then likely you don't need 90g/hour. And fwiw I personally only ingest 60g/hour on shorter rides. Still a decent amount because you don't want to completely deplete glycogen stores and it's been shown ingesting more during and right after aides recovery.