I have a question about nutrition for sport, not during the sport but the intake in the whole week.
I have calculated my BMR around 1645 kcal a day. Because of my office work i enhance 1.2. So my daily needed kcal is around 1950. (Iam 67kg and 180cm tall).
My idea is to take every day at least 2000kcal and add the burned kcal during the ride. For example yesterday i did a 3.5h ride and burned 2200kcal. So for that day i need 4200kcal…that is for me a hugh intake… Do i really need so much?
My goal is to stay at the same weight and get a good recovery…iam satisfied with my weight. For criteriums at flat terrain its maybe better to get some extra weight, when thats gives me more power…
What ratio about carbs/protein/fat do i need? I think about 55/25/20
I think i can make more progression when i improve my food intake…
For example during the weekends, most of time i did 2x 3.5-4 hours rides on saturday and sunday. I think i can improve my recovery after the saturday ride.
I train about 13 hours a week.
On midweek rides i use between 1000-1300kcal. I will keep it simple to get on restdays 2000kcal, on midweek days 3000-3300kcal and weekend long ride days 4000kcal.
For me, I have never been keen on going into too much detail regarding calories. Quality of nutrition is another thing, but needs to be balanced around real life so you remain a good person to be with socially.
Definitely fuel your rides properly though, especially the long ones. It is not much of a surprise that doing back to back 4 hr rides will leave you feeling less then fully recovered, especially if you are putting some effort in.
Looks realistic for me. I follow a similar approach by having a base target and then adding the workout on top of it.
I weight myself daily and made it a habit to ignore the daily result and only look on the 7d rolling average, to see if I stay on target.
I think it is not helpful to have a fixed ratio of macros. Its better to think about targets per kg bodyweight and let the carbs move up and down with training. Racing weight by Fitzgerald explains it quite well.
My idea is to add some good meals into my daily intake.
For example every day i breakfast with 100gram oats and 350ml soy milk. Thats give me some 550kcal (71gram carbs, 28gram protein and 15gram fat). That is also a good recovery meal.
We are eating already varied with daily +/- 300 gram vegetables, so i think adding a couple of good completes meals next to us daily meals will give enough extra kcal, without getting complicated.
If I were you I would try it and see how you feel. Everyone is individual especially with nutrition, as stated above if everything is working and you’re making gains. I wouldn’t change much. Look at it like an experiment and watch how you feel, look and perform over a few weeks. If you don’t like what is happening go back to what you were doing.
I try to make my nutrition complicated but what I’ve been doing works. Im making gains and recovering pretty well. Some days I feel hungrier than other days. If I feel hungry I’ll eat and haven’t gained much weight besides usual water weight or inflammation . I just try to eat nutrient dense food and don’t eat junk besides on the bike.
Be nice to yourself with food as corny as it sounds it’s true, for me at least.
You should make this easy on yourself and use a tool like MyFitnessPal to track your calories. It will do the math for you based on your exercise and your food intake. Use it for a few weeks and you will get much better at quickly estimating what you need to eat vs how much you burn.
You can connect your Garmin watch to MyFitnessPal and it will track your calorie burn (including from steps and other activities) for you automatically. Or you can get your calories from TR or Strava if you don’t have a garmin watch. Actually you can probably connect Strava directly to MFP as well.
Usually when KCals are much higher than KJs, they’re adding BMR during the elapsed time. While that’s technically accurate, problem is you’re prone to double counting BMR later.
Mathematical no, but as the power meter kJ’s are the mechanical energy you put on the pedal and the efficieny of the body to go from chemical enegy in food intake to mechanical output on the bike is around 25% and 1 kcal = 4,184 kJ both cancel out quite nicely for all practial means in cycling it is 1kJ on power meter = 1kcal food
Roughly 4x watts = kcals per hour. If you ride at 150w for an hour, you burn 600kcals. Roughly speaking. But following macro nutrients is only part of the story. Its important to make sure you get a balanced diet with micro nutrients in it. You can’t just eat burgers and drink beer.
Rather than this, you might try setting your protein and fat at a hard limit (recommended daily for fat and recommended Grams/Kg of protein) and getting the rest of the extra calories from carbs. A lot of people seem to find greater performance with higher carb intake.
