Great thread idea. I needed a soapbox to stand on. Thanks, and enjoy!
Unpopular
More fructose in your fuel will make your gut feel better, your current power output easier, and your health better.
Caffeine is not a meaningful diuretic.
Sugar is better fuel than 90% of the products on the market, and is roughly equivalent to the rest.
Sodium is the only electrolyte you need for 99% of your riding hours. Probably 100%.
Glycogen matters less than blood sugar during exercise.
Shots fired
Existing and upcoming product nutrition facts have more influence on science, than science.
Branding & marketing teams have more influence on product ingredients than scientists do.
Pepsi’s Gatorade Sport Science Institute (GSSI) is a marketing wing more than it is a science wing.
Existing product nutrition facts have more influence on nutritional recommendations in the media, than science.
Companies decide on product nutrition facts and ingredients before they hire the scientists who should be making those decisions.
The best sport & sport nutrition scientists end up working for very large food and technology companies, where they no longer do the best science.
SUPER unpopular
You should never sweat test. Even if it’s free, easy, and accurate.
Most variables tracked and calculated in sport, if used for prescriptive purposes make people worse at their sport. Most benefits of said tracking are placebo or psychologically mediated by increasing user adherence to consistent training. Most monitoring and tracking is an effective psychological hack to get humans to improve their choices, not to inform their choices.
A liquids-only fueling & hydration approach is the best for performance, for all durations of exercise activity, up to, but not limited to, 36 hours of continuous exercise.
Keto may not meaningfully harm performance or health for some people. It may work as well as they are ever able to make high carb fueling work for them.
Keto does harm health and/or performance for other folks, sometimes catastrophically.
Triggering
If there is a name assigned to sugar and salt, like “Speed Nectar” in our app, then you are much more likely to try using sugar and salt as all or part of your training and racing fuel than if we do not associate those two ingredients with a name. This remains true for even the most analytically minded and rational folks with advanced nutrition education.
The most analytical cyclists still make most of their decisions almost completely based on subconscious emotions and then do post-hoc rationalization to justify their emotional decisions. Data is emotionally comforting to many cyclists and provides a convenient means of rationalization.
There is no chronic metabolic benefit that confers performance enhancement in any scenario, from periodically limiting carb intake, at any time, under any circumstances. The only exception is: “I just don’t want to bother with the logistics of fueling well on my race day so I’d rather be more fat adapted” which is a perfectly valid reason to periodically limit carb intake.
There is someone reading this who does not feel comfortable interacting here because they fear judgement, ridicule, or that some level of social conflict might happen if they do, because they have seen a lack of empathy and lack of emotional validation in other threads. Only you have the power to make that person feel more comfortable because TrainerRoad does an excellent job moderating the forum. It might mean pondering your engagements a few seconds longer to consider a wider audience. Many of the audience I am referring to right now are women.
You are dramatically more likely than population average to have ADHD and/or be on the autism spectrum if you are reading this post. (don’t worry. the author of this cycling forum post is reasonably successful and has pretty okay-ish QoL even though he has both ADHD and is on the spectrum, and is now talking about himself in the third person. He’d like to inform you that you’re in good company, FWIW. YMMV, just my 2 cents, grain of salt, n=1 [insert other sign-off abbreviation commonly used by impatient ADHD autistic forum users].)
Related to this, State Champs jerseys are the dumbest thing in American Cycling and one reason(of many) why Europeans laugh at us. Have the race okay. But if you wear that jersey you’re a Fred. Same with 90% of the Masters categories. Pro, Amateur, 40+. Period. Nationals only.
I’ll add some more.
Rim brakes are undeniably inferior tech.
1x has absolutely no place on road bikes.
4 corner crits are more boring to race and watch than Little League baseball. NASCAR on bikes.
The only reason studies suggest that only a small amount of VO2max is trainable, and the majority is genetic, is because they’re not studying people longitudinally for a long enough period of time. If you took a bunch of healthy but sedentary people, started them off the couch, then had them train 20h a week for several years, pretty much all of them are going to end up with VO2max’s at least in the mid- to high- 60s (for men), and a 60% to >100% increase in their VO2max from baseline (likely in the 30s).
The reason the “maximum FTP” most semi-competitive cyclists reach is somewhere around 300w or 4w/kg is not because most people physically can’t raise their VO2max any higher than ~65 (MAP of ~400w). It’s because most people only do enough volume to get their VO2max that high. If they did more volume (than ~8h/wk) for more time (years), it would continue to slowly increase.
In the North American rando community: great big tires at low pressure (ex: 44-50c) are not faster than 28s or 32c. Rene Herse is wrong. While cyclists in the pro-peloton or ultra-endurance racers were apparently convinced by Rene Herse’s data to move towards 25c tires from narrower ones, none of them subsequently moved to even wider tires despite Rene Herse saying these are even better. There is a reason for that.
Minimization of rolling resistance losses to hysteresis with wider tires are only true when the wider tires are inflated to the same pressure as a narrower tire, and isn’t the case when you run the tires like you do in the real world (at a lower pressure than the narrower tire). Lower pressures definitely lower power losses via vibration, but you can run lower pressures on narrow tubeless tires now. And aero losses to drag at 30kph are not insignificant between a 28c tire and a 44c tire. Rene Herse’s published data on this involved testing the different wheels for only a few seconds. They did not describe whether any statistical testing was done.
However, what basically amounts to a 15-30 second time trial is too short of a test to accurately measure for the presence of a difference which is likely in the realm of only 10-20w overall. And even then, their cumulative 30 second data does actually show a trend towards 28c being the fastest - unfortunately again they provided no statistical data, and likely too short of a time of measurement for the difference to come out.
If you have issues with comfort on the bike interfering with your riding to the point where you have to stop frequently, and you find big tires help make your ride more comfy and reduce stoppage time, then go for it! But if you are not having this issue, just stick with normal 28-32c tires.
One of my best bike purchases in the past few years. Being able to get out and ride in Northern WI during Nov-March is amazing. We’re blessed with a ton of groomed trails though. Even if I lived in the southern half of the state, I’m not sure I’d buy one.
Not every new mountain bike trail needs to be a flow trail with manicured burms, rollers and all rocks removed. Trail builders need to bring back roots and rocks, off camber sections, and steeps.
Many mountain bike races courses would be faster on a gravel bike.
Most of the time for me it is the sweat. I also live in Missouri where the average humidity in the summer is over 100% (sarcasm). They do look cool sitting on top of my helmet, though.
