New Study on Glycogen Replenishment Rates | Why You Might Be Plateaued | Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast 581

Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast
21

The tool had me at a lot more calories. I’ll give it a shot. It’s time for me to do a caloric reset anyway.

I found some of the things discussed intuitive given my personal experience. For example, periodization is far more effective for cutting or dialing in body composition long term. Cutting too long can cause you to stick at a weight and no longer see the same or as rapid a change. And a lower fat intake (like 20 to 25% of calories) relative to carbs when endurance training seemed to have the most effective body comp impact.

I did find it surprising that the calorie totals came out a good bit higher than if you go by a CICO formula using RMR + EEE + TEF, etc.

Here is what I worked out:

The TrainerRoad Nutrition Calculator looks like it takes your profile (male, base activity, steps, etc.) plus your FTP + RPE to estimate your EEE. That works well, but if you do more than cycling it might not capture everything you need.

So I looked into the Energy Availability (EA) model, what it is doing, and built a spreadsheet that lets you lay out your calories for a week. It also has a tab that maps out a periodized 2/2 cycle: 2 weeks Maintenance / 2 weeks Deficit. And it has a male/female toggle to adjust the rates.

The key difference is that it uses straight EEE, the kind you can pull from your Garmin, a tracker app, or whatever you use. It has a toggle for treating that EEE value as either Gross or Net. If Gross, it subtracts the portion contributed by RMR. This matters because the value varies by source: Garmin reports the Gross value for an activity, while a tracker app like Cronometer shows the Net value for the same imported activity.

You can copy the sheet to use it.

EA Calculator

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Thanks for sharing that @jkyle . It’s really great. I like the way you’ve set it up to have the fixed protein and fat macros and vary the extra fueling on carbs changing. One question: have you every tried to experiment with using a longer term (ie 1 week) such that if someone put their planned workout durations and Kcal burn for the 7 days then they/you could calculate the carbs required for fueling (e.g. fueling the workout) ?

Chris

23

If you look at the second tab it has a 4 week periodized spread. 2 weeks @ 40 and 2 weeks @35kcal/kg.

In that one, you can add in your daily EEE and minutes of exercise to see what you’ll need.

24

I went back over the last week and then compared to CICO. . . they’re actually very close when I use actually daily activity using my garmin watch and the TEF adjustment.

Close enough to be, I’d wager, effectively the same.

I wonder if the consistent “more calories from AE model” folks aren’t using daily activity trackers or TEF adjustements, etc. that would leave a 300+ deficit for me.