Am I Over fueling?

There’s a few things to consider

  1. Training your gut to tolerate higher carbohydrates intake and especially at high intensities when stomach blood flow is less.
  2. How do your workouts feel for the amount you are consuming? In other words are you able to execute all your intervals well till the end?
  3. How is your overall energy intake / expenditure over the course of the week / month. In other words is you weight stable, is it changing dramatically, is it dropping but at a slow steady rate?

If you want to improve your fat oxidation levels then you’ll need to be getting in the long Z2 rides. High intensity without fuelling on the turbo isn’t going to achieve that.

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What do you mean by optimizing? Are you looking to lose some body fat? Because then you’ll want to get to a slight calorie deficit. So if that is your goal, you’re not over fueling your workout, but you are over fueling in total.

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I’ve personally been experimenting fueling 60 and 90 minute Sweet Spot, Threshold, and VO2 workouts at 120g / hour, but those are also morning workouts where I haven’t eaten anything since the night before.

End result: I still burn more than I take in, and I’m not nearly as hungry later in the day and as likely to snack. So far, I’m a fan.

If I’m doing a short and easy Z2 / Endurance ride, that’s different for me. Will do those without anything and just eat normally throughout the day.

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I think fueling depends on the situation also. My example is I usually wake up at 5 am to train, so my body has to be ready to train from a fasted state. Even if it’s an endurance ride I’ll fuel at least 80g- 100g per hour for that scenario. Some say may say it’s excessive but I don’t think so. The other end if you train in the afternoon, you’re not in a fasted state and can probably get away with fueling a little less. That’s my own personal anecdote, I’m 6’3” at 184 pounds and my RMR is around 3k calories a day for context.

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As I said, as you wrote them, I agree with them for the most part. Trust that I am a big believer of not dieting on the bike and of fueling your workouts.

That said, I do believe the type of workout dictates the fueling. I don’t need to pound gels or get 100g an hour to go on a walk with my family, and I don’t need it for riding Z2.

We know that energy contribution from fats play a bigger role in the lower zones, and the opposite from higher zones where glycogen plays a bigger role. I personally don’t want to add calories to my body as sugar when there are healthier ways to add calories. If I don’t need the rocket fuel for the easy stuff, I don’t want to waste it.

Price: I train six days a week and take one rest day. It gets expensive eating this pure stuff, even if you make your own. I do have a carb drink on my Z2 days, but I am not trying to fuel as if I would for a race.

So, I purely look at it as energy demands dictate how I fuel. If I am doing above Z2 work I fuel it accordingly and would never advise against doing so. Like @Jonathan says, it feels like cheat mode almost when you fuel correctly for threshold efforts.

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There is also this table which has been posted before by our very own @Dr_Alex_Harrison (hope you don’t mind tag in!):

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100g/hr is almost matching the hourly calorie burn rate. If hourly burn was 750+, sure, but if you’re burning 450ish and eating / drinking 300ish an hour it is not a big deal from my perspective.

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Do you know if any of these intake recommendations are tied to hourly calorie burn rate?

I get these 90g+/hr recommendations if you are burning 750+kCal / hr, but as the poster mentioned the hourly burn rate is like 450-550kCal. Or conversely, if someone is burning 800kCal/hr, if it could be done without any negative side effects would people recommend aiming for 200g/hr and zero deficit?

It’s been said before but it’s worth repeating: Fuel the work. Don’t diet on the bike.

I’m 60 years old, 5’ 9" high and weigh 140 lbs. I take 90g of ordinary table sugar per hour for all my workouts. Not only does this successfully fuel my workouts but it also puts me in a good place for my subsequent recovery. After the workout, I may have an occasional recovery shake (whey, sugar and cocoa powder, depending on how long it is to my next meal), otherwise I eat and drink as normal for the rest of the day. I have no need or desire to binge eat.

I have a physically demanding full-time job (lots of walking and lifting and carrying heavy objects), so by fuelling my workouts at 90g per hour, which puts me in a good place for my recovery, I’m also laying the foundations for the next demanding day at work (which, incidentally, I also fuel appropriately for - I don’t diet at work!).

Table sugar contains 4 calories per gram. 90g = 360 cals. I’m typically burning between 450 to over 1,000 cals per workout (depending on duration and intensity). Even someting as low level and undemanding as Pettit -1 would have me burning 436 cals. It’s pretty hard to over-fuel on the bike.

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I would suggest that if you feel it necessary to take in 100g in a one hour ride you’re probably not eating enough off the bike. That’s just my opinion, YMMV.

Given the choice of eating a quality meal before and after a ride and drinking water or maybe Skratch for an hour or taking in 100g of table sugar to “fuel a one hour ride”, I know what I would do.

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@dlukes01 I’d read the dental health topic that was recently active.

Fueling a ride doesn’t always have to mean sugar in a bottle. A solid breakfast and a banana or two on the bike can also fuel a decent ride.

I like the sliding scale approach based on length and intensity posted above.

I recently listened to this podcast. The ideas on metabolic flexibility are interesting:

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Exactly.

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I believe something we are missing here is the quality of the workout. Are you making improvements? Or are you feeling fatigued? If you are raising your FTP on a consistent basis, not gaining weight, feeling decent throughout the day, I think its working for you.

One thing I have noticed with a lot of riding buddies is that they don’t eat enough on long rides and fade at the end.

It is amazing how long you can go at a decent pace if you fuell your body. On the flip side it is amazing how quickly you lose power and feel like absolute crap if you fall behind too far on your fueling.

But again, this is for longer rides. If you need this for an hour, I question your nutrition, unless you are actively dieting to cut fat.

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some other considerations are how much carbohydrate does your diet normally contain. For threshold and vo2 work, your body will absolutely torch carbs, so having enough is crucial. Carbs will also help lessen the effect of DOMs, so there’s a good case to keep the carbs flowing during the workout and not dimishing glycogen stores. There’s not “fresh glycogen”, so I really don’t think you need to tap the onboard reserves; if anything, you want them there for recovery after the ride!

Caloric deficit off the bike, IF you’re trying to lose weight, but unless I missed that, losing weight wasn’t a goal of yours.

Definitely would not recommend 40g/hr. If anything, more carbs on the hard days, and keep it at 80 on the easier days, for reasons mentioned above and more. Carbs are king.

Good luck!

Brendan

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You mention two important points I should have made, too: like you, I also get up at 5:00–5:30 am and train in the morning. So I haven’t eaten for about 10 hours. And I do vary the carb intake by feel depending on the workout type. Usually that amounts to 85–90 g/h for endurance workouts and 95–110 g/h for hard workouts. If the workouts are shorter, the average tends to skew on the higher side.

No, unless your FTP is <<200 W. 100 g of carbs correspond to about 400 kCal. At about 210 W you burn 780 kCal per hour. Even at 150 W average power, you’d burn more calories than you take in. More precisely, you’d still run a calorie deficit of 140 kCal per hour.

Yes, although that’s assuming you have enough time between your breakfast and your workout. Bananas are great workout food, although I don’t like to eat them during workouts because I don’t know what to do with the peels. (I am not a basketballer, so they’d just land on some random spot on the floor even if I had a trashcan nearby.)

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yeah, the OP said 425-550kCal/hr burn on these high calorie burn workouts (vo2max / sweetspot / etc.) and fueling at about 300kCal/hr. I think guess that means <200w FTP. I would imagine that the hourly burn for endurance rides is less than the stated 425kCal/hr. It could be considered ideal to fuel at the same rate as expenditure, but with people advising pushing to 90-110g/hr the OP might even be at a surplus on endurance rides.

I’m not saying don’t fuel or cut it dramatically, but this whole idea of not scaling fuel intake to FTP / calorie burn blows my mind. A person with a 400w FTP has different fueling needs from someone with a 200w FTP. I can understand trying to max out intake for the 400w FTP person as their gut probably isn’t going to let them take in 250g/hr and they will always be losing ground, but different situation for 200w FTP person.

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I commented above on fueling 120 g / hr for harder workouts. For reference, all of those workouts I’m burning 720-890 KCal / hr at my FTP and taking in 480 / hr. Even my Z2 workout today I burned 650 KCal and would have run a deficit, but elected not to fuel for that as I did it at lunchtime and had breakfast earlier.

I definitely agree don’t take in more than you burn.

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You make a valid point: if the burn rate is 425–550 kCal/h, you are likely talking about a rider with a low FTP. Also, it is more likely that the rider weighs less and thus, can consume less.

It is for that reason that I’d expect/aim for a slightly lower consumption (e. g. 80 g/h on hard rides and 70ish g/h on easier rides). Plus, GI distress is a thing and you need to train your gut and experiment with various fuel sources. For sure I would not recommend fasting on endurance rides or to cut your carb intake to 40 g/h.

But I wouldn’t worry about a calorie surplus. Even at the burn rates given here, the OP would not have a calorie surplus if he took in 100 g/h (about 400 kCal/h). It is pretty much impossible for a trained cyclist to have a calorie surplus for longer workouts when they work Z2 and up.

We are all different of course, but I think I WOULD personally worry. I am trying to keep my weight low. I’m actually trying to still lose 2% body fat.

If I get those calories from sugar when they aren’t needed, then I am sacrificing those calories for sugar when they could be from protein or healthy fats, or other mix of nutritious foods.

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You are not alone, I’m trying to cut 3 kg, too. But dieting on the bike is a bad idea, because (to quote Frank Overton from FasCat Coaching) 80 % of the dieting is off the bike. In my experience, it is much easier to have a steady, maintainable calorie deficit when I fuel all of my rides.

Believe me, I understand your logic perfectly. In the past, I was you! I did what you are proposing here in the past, thinking it’d make me a better cyclist, too. And it did not work as well as fueling properly. My FTP (absolute and specific) was about 12 % lower and I was often ravenous after hard workouts. I was so hungry, I ate half a loaf of bread. Especially during rest weeks and in the beginning of the off-season I’d gain weight, because it’d take my body 1–2 weeks to adjust to my changed calorie expenditure. Now my breakfast after training is more or less the same no matter what kind of workout I have. In fact, I have a full stomach already, so my appetite is moderate.

If you want more infor, have a look at the thread that I linked to earlier as it addressed weight loss and fueling specifically: the overwhelming consensus is that you should not cut calories while on the bike if you want to lose weight.

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