FILLING THE TANK

WE KNOW: RECOVERY IS ALL-IMPORTANT. BUT YOUR ON-RIDE NUTRITION CAN DETERMINE HOW WELL IT WORKS...

YOU READ A LOT ABOUT RECOVERY METHODS - and recovery tools: gimmicks and gadgets that massage, freeze, or compress your muscles into accelerated bounce-back from hard training. The pursuit of performance has created an industry to sell recovery.

This sometimes happens at the expense of the fundamentals: sleep and nutrition. That's not to say there's no industry around those too; spend some time at a bookstore, or online shopping, and you'll soon discover a hundred new ways to sleep and eat.

In one example study, cyclists did hard blocks of training lasting seven days each. During these blocks, they ate a diet that was either low in carbohydrates (5.4g/kg/ day, so an 80kg cyclist would eat 430g of carbs a day), or high in carbs (8.5g/kg/day, or 680g for our 80kg cyclist).

What they found was that the high-carbohydrate diet 'protected' performance against the effects of fatigue; and in the 

time trials they did at the end of each hard seven-day block, the high-carb cyclists had much smaller performance impairments than the low-carb cyclists.

TOPPING UP

The same is true of energy intake during exercise. Studies have found that muscle damage is reduced when carbohydrate intake is higher during exercise, and performance improves considerably particularly compared to when we run out of fuel, and enter the dreaded no man's land of hypoglycaemia.

Remember that our bodies are like very sophisticated cars - without fuel supply to the working parts, they stop on the side of the road! But unlike cars, we have multiple fuel tanks, of different types. We have carbs in the muscle and in the liver, we have fats in the muscle and in the adipose tissue; and we can even convert one fuel type to another, all to protect our brains from running on empty.