Carb intake confusion

What would be the main training benefit of long, less than even endurance pace rides like that? Is it just better fat adaptation…or can it actually make you faster?

I like going on long distance rides…but have gotten the impression it actually doesnt help me at all.

As the ‘Aim of Training’ line states: Build basic endurance and functional threshold; metabolic ride."

Long fasted rides are past the point of diminishing returns IMHO, as stated by Coach Chad and as others have posted…

It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible, or even that I doubt that they do these kind of fasted rides. It’s just that the nutrition data they publish doesn’t stack up to me. I reckon if you added up the intake / expenditure over that three day block you’d get a very low or even negative energy availability*, which has been shown to be counterproductive in a lot of ways. (*unless their “large bowl of porridge” is in fact a swimming pool)

I thought this podcast with James Morton was really interesting: #286: James Morton, PhD - Fuelling Elite Sport: Team Sky, Liverpool FC & Carbohydrate Periodization – Sigma Nutrition

He was the Team Sky head of nutrition and also worked for Liverpool FC, and now works for SiS I think. Some of his research found very noticeable changes in muscle adaptation when riding fasted vs. non-fasted.

BUT to clarify, his main mantra is “Fuel for the work required” meaning that only the easy rides should be fasted, and intense training and races should always follow some sort of carb loading. He advocates for the idea of “carb cycling” where some days are low, some days are high, and it ensures that the body is always efficient at using both fat and carbs for fuel.

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Question on this - what exactly is the “protein drink” they consume in the first 60 minutes? As it’s Sky / Ineos I assumed it was an SIS product, but could only find recovery shakes. Unless that’s what they mean.

Chris Froome used to drink a bottle of (regular) SIS Rego on days with heavy mountain stages - I assume this is what hes talking about, it has 22g carbs and 20g protein per 100g

I actually use this as its easier on my stomach than a regular ‘carb’ drink

I think he gets misunderstood some. I believe in that podcast he talks about fueling the easy days at 6 grams of carbs per kilo for the day. That would be a low carb day. High carb day is 10+ or even 14 grams per kilo.

I think us regular folk think of “low carb days” as no carb days and “high carb days” at around 5-6 grams per kilo.

There’s a big disconnect there.

I’m super carb centric and eating 6 grams of carbs per kilo per day is tough.

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Yes, agreed. No days are truly “low”. But it seems to be more of a cycle like this:

Sunday evening: Low carb dinner, go to bed depleted
Monday morning: Easy fasted endurance ride (train low)
Monday afternoon/evening: Lots of carbs!
Tuesday morning: Hard efforts, deplete all glycogen stores throughout the day (train high)
Tuesday evening: Low carb dinner, go to bed pretty depleted

…and repeat this type of up/down cycle. Obviously it is not always so extreme where every workout has to be fully depleted or fully topped off, but this is an exaggerated example to make the point. No day is fully low because it is very stressful to stay low for an entire day and that will then end up affecting the next day’s workouts. But there may still be long low carb periods that span a couple of days.

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I can eat 10g/kg of carbs a day, I just don’t have enough training time available to burn it up!

Re the benefits I suspect the main benefit may be weight loss/maintenance as much as or more than improvements in fitness, fat burning or other physiological gains. Long easy fasted rides seem a pretty safe way of getting or staying very lean without sacrificing too much muscle mass or power. One thing Sky/Ineos have been very good at is getting strong riders very lean without losing too much power e.g. converting guys like Wiggins and Thomas from track pursuiters into GC riders (Froome was pretty chunky in his early days as well). In contrast to previous generations of riders (Jan Ullrich springs to mind!) who used to pile on the pounds in the winter then race themselves into shape in the early season, modern riders also seem to stay pretty lean all year round.

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Man I struggle to get over 4g/kg even though I complimented today with ice cream. Diets rock. :smiley:

10g per kg seems…a LOT.

Of course…on the other hand…it is unusual for me to do more training in a day than a 90 min hard ride, or 3 hrs of easy riding. If I was routinely on my bike 3hrs plus, it might be easier to get close to 10g.

But yeesh still…i hit 5g/kg on my training days, shooting for 3000-3500 calories overall. If i burned an extra 1000 calories from a longer days training, and replaced all those lost calories with carbs…that would still only put me at roughly 7.5g/kg (650 carbs, 85kg bodyweight).

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Isn’t this more the fuelling for during a Grand Tour? Not fuelling easy / hard training days.

The chart I’ve seen is more like this, with the “low” breakfasts being your classic 3-egg omelette and half an avocado, etc.
image

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This is what I’ve been doing, with the important caveat that I only do it at most twice per week, not constantly low/high over and over.

I may, for instance, deliberately deplete glycogen between my hardest weekday workout and the endurance session the next morning, or between the hard club run on Saturday and the steady one on Sunday. But between that I’ll just try to eat a balanced diet with plenty of good carbs.

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If I remember correctly the 6 grams per kg were for 5 hour easy ride days.

I hear a lot of people on the forum talking about doing those on water only. So there’s a disconnect.

I think it’s confusing because what they say and what they show via pictures and meal plans is different.

You see Chris Froome eat an egg and salmon breakfast on a rest day and you think he’s going no carbs.

I also wonder if the conflicting information is on purpose. I wouldn’t put it past sky/Ineos to say they are doing one thing and then do another to get an advantage over their competitors.

So we really might have no idea what they do :smiley:.

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I’d say it depends on what your goals are for that 5hr ride. I do 5hr rides outside in winter at high Z2 power on just electrolytes (no or little carbs) during my base phase. But later in year once it warms up I’ll do 5hr where I’m slamming 90g carbs/h and trying to do the ride at the highest avg power that i can.

I think the pro’s don’t necessarily just eat to fuel that days workout, like we do, but they fuel thinking about the rest of the week. Think about if you did a stage race that contained one day that was going to be an easy ride. I wouldn’t fuel that day specific to the easy effort.

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A few screenshots from James Morton’s podcast transcript.

On Chris Froome, though also warning of the misconceptions people have when they see his low carb meals:

On g/kg intake during grand tours:

On long-term low carb high fat diets (he’s not a fan):

I think it’s pretty clear that if they’re going as low as 5g/kilo in stage races, they’ll be going lower on rest days and easy training days. But then they go big on carbs to fuel mountain stages and full-on high intensity training days, and yes, absolutely Froomey isn’t doing 4x15min threshold on an omelette and an avocado. Like everything else with diet, it all seems to be about balance.

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Have to be honest, this all seems rather complicated to me. Aside from going for it carbwise before a race, I generally just eat a lot of carbs, lots of fruit especially (am vegan, so, it’s a natural occurrence I guess). Despite that, eating what your body is asking for is really ll it’s about surely, and I think that is what Matt Fitzgerald is saying, and I would bet a lot on the fact froome is absolutely monstering carbs most of the time.

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I’m keeping a google sheet that I’ll publish in January that will have daily weight, bf, macro-nutrient absolute and relative values, kj burned, workout success, workout type, and power metrics.

Hopefully people will get some value from that.

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My body asks for beer, fried chicken wings with lots of blue cheese dressing, genoa salami sandwiches, rye whiskey old fashioneds, and pizza.

I think it is an exceedingly poor idea to trust what ones body says (aside from pain…and hell, even THAT is suspect advice sometimes).

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