Can Conor eat 200g of carbohydrate per hour on a ride? It’s what the pros do, as he recently found out in our deep dive video with Bora-Hansgrohe nutritionist Tim Podlogar. So, should we all be eating more carbs when cycling? Conor and Manon find out by going on a ride where Conor eats 200g carbs per hour and Manon fuels normally. Who will be freshest at the end?
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26 Comments
Will you be testing eating more carbs on your next ride? 🤔
Anyone have advice for a type 1 diabetic? I need insulin to absorb my glucose but I also burn it when I work out. I’ve gotten away with just winging it so far but the 60+ mile rides end in cramps.
Did Connor say ándale ándale!? 😂
How would you do a ride like that if you follow a low carb diet?
100g sugar bidon / hr for 3 trainer hours yesterday. 235W steady state. Felt very Lydiard-like (top of Seiler's 3 zone, zone 1 effort), almost on the point of stopping, so I reckon the carbs definitely helped. Red or cola cordial + some salt made it tasty as. That's ~2500 kJ (~kCal wrt efficiency) expended for ~1200 cal intake, or around half. I've read this is ideal.
Have always washed sugary stuff down with plain water, as the dentist below recommends. 4.8 x plain water bidons consumed + 3 x sugar bidons meant my teeth felt fur-free for the entire session.
Keen to see how 120g feels tomorrow. Thanks again for the suggestion – 60g/hr has been the "max" mantra for a while now.
0:31 Manon turning up with a literal armful of bananas is even more impressive than their "picnic on the Poggio" in their recent Milan San Remo video.
I thought I manage eat a lot on long rides, 120g carbs per hour with no gut issues. Sounds like at my height (6"2') I can probably up that even further!
What if you want to lose weight by cycling? How do you find the balance between fueling to ride further and don't fuel too much to burn fat?
Have you used CGM while testing? I would love to see data.
It is very easy to cross the threshold and have a contra effect of eating so much carbs.
*15 wees and 10% poorer performance at the end may be exactly results of too high glucose
Is that sunshine in that video?
Carb. The f*#k up! 🔥 😂😂😂
An interesting video would be one where GCN presenters create their own homemade electrolyte/energy drinks, gels, bars etc, to fuel their ride and see how they fare.
I've started making my own homemade flapjacks and would like to create my own energy/electrolyte drinks and gels, but surprisingly there's very little online in terms of recipes. I also appreciate there's a science behind balancing maltodextrin and glucose levels.
I feel this is very appropriate given cost of living has gone up. The cost to make your own is a lot lower than buying ready made. I can attest this with the homemade flapjacks. £2.50 for 3 compared to about £15 for ingredients which would make a significantly greater amount.
Chapeau Manon for cycling in shorts and not complaining how bloody cold it is. Not unless that's been edited out 😊
Nope. My pay cheque is not based on my results on the bike. Instead of using a recently retired pro (Conner Dunne) use Cillian Kelly. One of two things will happen, he will be sick or have to go to the bathroom. Pros have a different physiology than the rest of us. 20-30 hours per week of riding over the course of a career they gained the ability to be better burners of fat and carbs than non-pros. Pogi's blood lactate at 2 mmol/L produces 300 watts (still considered Zone 2). Conner has an ectomorph body type. Long and lean and I suspect he finds it very difficult to build muscle or fat. Another characteristic is that they are able to get away with eating a lot more carbs than the other body types. His system is still very efficient at burning carbs. Most amateur non-racing cyclists would be hard-pressed to eat 90 grams an hour. Even those of us who do race, but live in the real world, find 90 grams/hour difficult. Finally, I estimate the cost to be about $7-8/ hour. $30 per ride.
60-90g of carbs per hour on training days 120g per hour,,racing,, or ,,grand fondo,,
Borysewitz went into this in his book in the 80s, all confirmed via Olympic results and still on point today.
I used to do 50 mile races with nothing. Just a bottle of water. So stupid.
Eat 30 baannanas and never 💩 again
Big fan of plenty of nutrition. Do bear in mind folks that you can buy powdered glucose cheaply and make up your own solutions.
As long as no one takes these videos as proof – but they are good for debate.
A huge factor is going to be ambient temperature/humidity because fluid uptake will become more important at some undefined point.
Now do the test again but test your blood glucose each hour.
Loved this video’s, will definitely be upping my intake every hour from now on 👍
Never mind a wee stop, Conor will be needing a poo stop
Great sport, ruined by hyper competitive losers. What kind of sport demands you have the body type and look like an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate while injecting yourself with all sorts of drugs and compounds to be competitive? Pro cycling. And you want us to believe riders just got faster than they were during the drug era of the 90's and are now doing it clean? Pro cycling , exactly like bodybuilding, which used to be about health, degenerated into a perversion with nothing at all to do with anyone's health, physical or mental. Good luck with that.
DURIANRIDER has been saying to Carb the FUCK Up for 20 years, what took you so long to catch up?
I’ve been using this fueling strategy on my long rides for the past 4 weeks and the difference to my energy levels during the ride is simply incredible. I just don’t seem to have the power drop off towards the mid to end part of the ride like I normally do. It’s like you’re expecting your legs to eventually just give up but they don’t, there’s always more power there when you ask for it. Like Connor mentioned, it feels like I’ve found the Holy Grail of cycling 🤣👍🏼😁
This is my second season of training in a bicycle, and I’ve always taken roughly twice as much fuel as I “should have”, meaning instead of 60-90g per hour I’m going upwards of nearly 180g per hour on some longer rides. I recently did a 75 miles day and was feeling extremely strong right up until i unclipped. I would have kept going for another couple hours if it hadn’t got dark. I weigh 165lbs or 75kg and go through about 3-4 scoops of Flow per hour most days.