For some reason I get super hungry on recovery rides. Literally within the first 5 minutes of the ride I will start to get hungry. It’s nearly unbearable after 45 minutes and I’m ready to eat all the donuts when I’m done with the workout.
Any idea why this is? I don’t fuel for the recovery ride but it’s usually in the afternoon, a couple hours after lunch. On the other hand, my hard interval workouts are in the morning, usually after a light breakfast. I do fuel for the hard workouts.
Two things came to mind: first of all, why do you insist on making your life difficult? If your body is hungry during workouts, you should feed it. Even if you don’t need it, you will lower the RPE. And secondly, I think not fueling comes with the risk of overeating afterwards. It’s as if you are going shopping on an empty stomach.
So I’d just nibble on a few things during your workouts, even the lower-intensity ones.
Haha, very good point. Sounds like something my parents would say too .
My concern is how intense and quickly the hunger builds. I wonder if my body, out of habit, is expecting chews/gels when I get on the bike which drives the hunger.
I have a bit of similar thing going on. Sometimes I ride longer endurance rides with a friend that’s a bit older, heavier and ehm, slower. Often during these rides I get hungry which I dont when I ride myself, even if I have the same pre-ride meal and on the bike fueling. I asked a friend, who is in to this stuff, and his “theory” was that I am putting “stress” on the parasympatic nervous system instead of the sympatic nervous system that activities during my usual training. This is only a thought my friend had when I mentioned it. But it sounds interesting to me
If you do your recovery ride in the morning after a light breakfast, like you do for the harder workouts, do you get super hungry? If you ride in the morning do you normally have a snack a couple hours after lunch that would line up with the timing of your afternoon recovery ride?
If you track food / calorie intake: On days with hard intervals in the morning do you end up front loading your calorie intake (i.e. light breakfast → workout → post-workout meal → lunch) vs a recovery day (i.e. breakfast → lunch → workout)? It could just be that on recovery days you haven’t eaten as much by that time of day compared to the hard workouts. Quick solution might just be to have a granola bar or something light before your recovery ride.
Hunger on rest/recovery days is often/sometimes an indicator for not having refulled enough the day before. It is something to pay attention to when figuring out how to close the energy balance.
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