How not to compromise on your cycle performance

How not to compromise on your cycle performance

On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast we catch up with cycling coach Devlin Eyden and chat about cycle nutrition.  We find out what the impact will be if we ride only with water and take solids away.  Devlin gives us some valuable advise on this subject.

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Transcript

David Katz: We’ve got a question relating to nutrition today on the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast, I’m Mr Active, David Katz, joined by Devlin Eyden and it’s a simple one today Devlin. Well, is it ever quite a simple one, but basically talking about taking solids away. Up until what point can you maintain your performance only drinking water?

Is it wise to ride with only water on your cycle training

Devlin Eyden:  This is something that I think is quite a large problem. I’ve been caught out myself doing the same sort of thing as well. Firstly to touch on, there’s a lot of guys that will ride with only water because weight loss and body fat percentage and that sort of thing is always in the back of their minds and unfortunately that’s one major focus in our lifestyle these days, is our body composition. It’s important firstly to just establish what is the goal of your training or race session? Are you there just to take part and ride because you enjoy the outdoors or are you there to race and have performance goals, that is the first key to have.

Human beings, our bodies are made up in a way that we have enough fat stores that we can ride for extended periods of time, but we have to do that at a low intensity. If we’re riding on just water and you can go on for hours and hours on end, but your performance is always going to take a knock. It’s going to be at risk of your performance because you will not be able to put high intensity out purely on water over an extended period of time. If we have a full glycogen store, if we make sure we’ve had good pre-event meals and pre-training meals and our glycogen stores are, call it a ‘full tank’ if you wish, we could probably ride at a steady, hard tempo for about 90 minutes, that you’d be able to sustain, just taking water, without having to take excess energy drinks or carbohydrates.

Determine your cycling goal before training

If we are dealing with the stop-start and the high intensity interval type training sessions or racing kind of scenarios we then probably are looking at no more than about 60 minutes of glycogen stores in our bodies that we can sustain without taking anything other than water. It’s important to just touch on the goals and what the aim is of your particular session or what your performance roles are in a particular race, and if you are only going to ride with water, keep in mind that it will compromise your performance over an extended period of time.

DK:         There you have it, as simple as that. Thanks very much Devlin Eyden and just to add there, if you want some one-on-one time with Devlin and to join a really engaged group, just sign up for our online community. Go to coachparry.com/join, it gives you exclusive members-only video content, video coaching and access to our private Facebook group, so do join us over there.

From myself Mr Active, David Katz and Devlin Eyden, we’ll catch up with you again in a couple of days’ time on the Ask Coach Parry Cycling podcast.

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