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Hey Steve.
In the past I’ve made my own sports drinks using bulk bags of Myprotein maltodextrin and smaller bags of fructose, I used fresh lemon juice to offset sweetness and it was pretty good (a slug of grapefruit juice was nice as well). Maltodextrin doesn’t taste that sweet but fructose tastes really sweet so I’d often back the fructose down a bit.
These days I can’t be arsed to mix up drinks nor do I want to pay for ready mixed products. I do however buy into the concept of fuel your rides with cabs at a rate of 40grams/hr for long, steady rides and 60grams/hr for harder stuff.
So here’s what I use:
In my bottles; squash! I know, I know it’s not sports nutrition but it’s simple sugars that taste ok and most importantly a bottle is cheap and lasts for a ages.
Solids: I rate: fig rolls, malt loaf, cliff bars, torq bars, supermarket granola slices and for those long, cold, dark, miserable night rides, nothing comes close to a big old bag of rocky road chunks. Sometimes your soul needs feed8ng too.
On the turbo I usually eat bananas as they just seem to hit the mark. I eat to hunger but would aim for at least 2 an hour. A bunch of bananas cost about £1 and there’s some fibre in there too.
In my bottles; squash! I know, I know it’s not sports nutrition but it’s simple sugars
The traditional Robinson's isn't - it's got sweeteners and no added sugar so very few calories.
Yeah it can be hard to find proper 1980’s sugary squash.
Just remembered a few other things:
Semi dried dates, figs and apricots. Very cheap, easy to pop into a bag, bite sized, and I like to think the fibre in them buffers the release of energy a bit.
In hot weather I love mixing salty snacks in with sugary ones. I often use a feed bag on my handlebars and I remember discovering the joy of honey roasted cashews mixed with chunks of heat softened torq bar chunks during one sun blasted South Downs Way epic.
Semi dried dates, figs and apricots. Very cheap, easy to pop into a bag, bite sized, and I like to think the fibre in them buffers the release of energy a bit.
Also high in fructose which has to go through the liver which makes it slower to be absorbed and makes your liver work harder.
during one sun blasted South Downs Way epic
The requirements for epics are pretty different to short XC races of course.
Betamax. Good link.
Big fan of science of ultra. Sean bearsden has an uncanny way of asking provocative questions without being a royal ****
Molegrips, in my experience it doesn’t seem to make much difference. I’ve done probably a couple of hundred off road races now and have done them on no food and knackered, with sports nutrition, with cobbled together nutrition blah blah blah...
Mainly it’s in the legs, the training and the mind. I can’t actually correlate results to any particular nutrition strategy but by god I can directly correlate it to the will the succeed.
But back to cheap carbs...
Any carbs are better than no carbs and the best carbs are those that are readily available. If you’re a working dad and training 5-10times a week then the carbs you can find in your kitchen are the carbs you’ve got for that ride.
Today I did a tough 4hr ride on Copella apple juice mixed 50/50 with water and Cliff bars (free from my lbs because they were virtually out of date, bless them).
Had a ‘For Godness Shakes’ recovery drink when I got home because I’d been to the supermarket yesterday, followed immediately by a cup of coffee then quiche, baked beans, toast and pate... then a nap...then another coffee and pecan pie.
Man I love being a cyclist!
My guts don't take too kindly to off the shelf energy drink mixes, I remember not-so-fondly a first lap of SITS back in the day after giving the free sample of High5 ago, I nearly didn't finish the lap but managed to hold out and make a beeline for the portaloo right after finishing the lap...
For the past 18 months or so I've been making up my own using malt extract (available from Holland & Barrett etc.) and orange juice. I looked the recipes of a range of commercially available products and came up the the ratio here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m6AG4QpAywgnqbLpS5WzCyTBXArg5Yij4KghulUPqag/edit?usp=sharing
No guttural moanings and sufficient energy to get me round a 4 hour club run of a Sunday morning without having to scoff half the contents of the counter at the cafe stop!
Cheers,
Jamie
Twin Dellorto 40’s worked well for me, much livelier response I found.
I came here for this. I prefer Weber twin 40's.
Mikuni flatsides on the bike.
If you’re a working dad and training 5-10times a week then the carbs you can find in your kitchen are the carbs you’ve got for that ride.
In my case that's a big sack of plain maltodextrin. Cheaper than any real food, and of course doesn't mean that you aren't eating real food as well.
trichris
Personally I’ve stopped using energy drinks (used a huge range of them over the last 30 years). I now make flapjack once a week and that fuels all my bike sessions
Any chance of posting the recipe? Would be interested as commuter fuel...
I thought the whole point of fuelling was to take on board stuff with as much nutritional value as possible - not just pure sugar/glucose/dextrose or whatever variant you want to call it.
I wouldn't be wanting to replace all of the X thousand calories I burned on yesterday's road ride with just some form of energy drink.
6 hours a week could be two ten mile TTs a day with a 25 at weekends. That would take it out of you, no?
Why would your training be such high intensity all the time.
And even if it was I would prefer decent normal food instead of crap.
Oh and plenty of sleep too. How many hours a night do you get?
Interesting topic
Without wanting to restart "flapjack wars" I've always found them a handy option amongst others (homemade or shop bought) when out for a longer ride as I've never been a big user of powders in water or gels (causes me some gut rot), but I'll admit to a complete lack of scientific rigour on the general topic of fueling exercise or measuring intake of Carbs/protein etc...
Having looked at the "carbohydrate requirements for activity" table from the earlier linked article and this comment:
I do however buy into the concept of fuel your rides with cabs at a rate of 40grams/hr for long, steady rides and 60grams/hr for harder stuff.
I had a quick browse of the wares on offer in the canteen at lunchtime, and happened upon an "Oh So Scrummy Raspberry flapjack" (110g) so I bought it just to see how it measures up:
CHO: 60.5g
of which sugars: 27.6g
Fat:19.8g
It is a Carb Rich item, but almost half of that is from (various forms of) sugar and over 1/5th of the whole thing is fat.
looking at the listed ingredients it does include "glucose-fructose syrup" and "Partially inverted refiners syrup" (same thing: essentially golden syrup by two differnt names) plus of course 50% oats...
So it would seem it's not completely imposible to use flapjack as a delivery system for a reasonable proportion of the CHO "fuel" for endurance/higher intensity rides...
Now obviously I'm not suggesting someone could get all their required carbs from such crappy shop bought flapjacks, but if you're willing to make a batch on a Sunday night, find ways to dial down the fat content (butter) replace at least some of the sugar/syrup with honey and soak the oats in milk/almond milk/water(?) to keep it moist, could they not be used to supplement liquid CHO delivery with something a bit more solid and portable?
Or is that a silly idea?
Why would your training be such high intensity all the time.
And even if it was I would prefer decent normal food instead of crap.
I'm not saying he is, my point is that 6 hours isn't necessarily an easy week.
It is a Carb Rich item, but almost half of that is from (various forms of) sugar and over 1/5th of the whole thing is fat.
Sugar is fine for fuelling high intensity training. Except perhaps for the appetite stimulating aspect of it. Fat isn't though.
So it would seem it’s not completely imposible to use flapjack as a delivery system for a reasonable proportion of the CHO “fuel” for endurance/higher intensity rides
A flapjack an hour, and the water to go with them is quite a bit. Having tried fuelling riding with high-carb normal food before, and ended up with terrible heartburn, I don't favour it.
could they not be used to supplement liquid CHO delivery with something a bit more solid and portable?
Yes, I do this, because sometimes you need some solid food on a long ride. Much more than 3 hours and I'll take something like that, but I don't like relying on it. High GI food is high GI because it's easy for your body to digest and requires less blood to be diverted to your gut away from your muscles.
For all day efforts where the intensity is of course lower, I take (or buy) savoury stuff like salted nuts or sausage rolls.
And even if it was I would prefer decent normal food instead of crap.
Have you tried relying on normal food whilst high intensity training instead of supplements? I mean things like threshold intervals and what not, not recreational riding. It's not easy.
Just buy your 1 part maltodextrine online (cheapness)
Then buy your 0.5 part fructose from Tesco (much cheapness) - available in larger stores in the baking section.
Add a pinch of salt or posh electrolytes, some cordial and hey presto you've got decent energy drink at a fraction of the price.
Can be extended to home made energy gels as well, you have to involve a microwave and things can get sticky!
So the OP's conudrum is really about how to smash carb' dense food/liquids down inside of a ~4hr window preceeding an activity, plus during the activity itself...
Today I need to get about 624g of carbs into my body
That sounds like a super high intensity session, what are you going to be doing to burn that lot? and for how long?
I've now done 5 minutes of googling (so I'm now an expert!) from what I can tell most energy drinks contain about 60g of carbohydrate per litre (gels and bars appear to be about 30g ea), not all brands seem keen to give this info out though.
So a ~100g flapjack is roughly equivalent to 1 litre of Torq? (oats are very Carb dense it seems) or what many seem to estimate as an "average" atheletes moderate to high intensity requirement for an hour, add 500ml of torq and you're at ~90g carbs; almost the same amount of carbohydrate the average family would consume having a spag-bol (~400g of pasta). You'd have taken that on in under an hour and I think you'd be hard pushed to get more in but lets say you are operating at such a high intensity that ~120g/hr is required, surely you'd want to think more about how to do some front loading with "Proper" food?
So you need to identify some high carb foods then;
turns out it's stuff like buckwheat, quinoa, bannanas, kidney beans chickpeas and sweet potato which apparently all come out at around ~20%+ Carbohydrate (Who'd a thunk it?). So you can almost guaruntee that if someone named 'Jacinta' is gushing about it being a "super-food". that's a food you want to look into for carbo-loading...
Pretty much all meats have next to bugger all carbs, so having a steak with your Quinoa would just be wasting valuable carb loading capacity (but protein is still a useful thing for recovery) and if my maths works (which it probably doesn't) at about 20% avg carbs, you're going to need to take on ~3.1kg of "Superfoods" to hit your 624g Carb goal...
Basically you'll end up doing "Veaganary" by accident just so you can carbo-load...
So the OP’s conudrum is really about how to smash carb’ dense food/liquids down inside of a ~4hr window preceeding an activity, plus during the activity itself…
No, my op was about whether Dextrose is more harmful in some way or the same as Fructose.
That sounds like a super high intensity session, what are you going to be doing to burn that lot? and for how long?
That was a Carb load preceding a 4hr MTB race. So max sustainable effort x 4hrs. A normal 1 hour VO2max is 350g per day. For me 350g of carbs is 2600cals of clean eating. You can see then my issue because at 620g carbs I would need 4000 cals of actual food, whereas 4 x 500ml carb drinks at 50g with a few more apples raisins and awn Energy bar is much easier to swallow so to speak, and has 0% additional fat intake plus has the added benefit of additional hydration.
Basically you’ll end up doing “Veaganary” by accident just so you can carbo-load…
Yup. Pressed whole foods, Houmous, wholemeal pasta, sweet potatoes.... etc.
@cookeaa - correction I took a look at Saturday which was 3304cals and 509g carbs from MfP which roughly puts me right above.
Bit disturbed that nobody else is eating pork pies washed down with red bull.
So a ~100g flapjack is roughly equivalent to 1 litre of Torq?
In terms of grammes of carbs maybe, but the flapjack will be a lot harder to digest and be lower in GI. Which is not what you want during racing.
Just buy your 1 part maltodextrine online (cheapness)
Then buy your 0.5 part fructose from Tesco (much cheapness) – available in larger stores in the baking section.Add a pinch of salt or posh electrolytes, some cordial and hey presto you’ve got decent energy drink at a fraction of the price.
Or just buy it all from Bulk Powders, they have every supplement or energy drink ingredient you can imagine (even ribose) and it's all nice and cheap.
Yes but their "complete energy drink" - pre mixed carbs - is more expensive than SIS (when on discount with the free postage I enjoy as premier member), otherwise I have to mix it all up myself and spend an hour in the kitchen mixing white powder to ensure I get the appropriate mix when I drink it.
I just got 1.6kg of SIS Energy for the same price as 1kg of their pre missed drink, minus the postage cost.
I think I'll keep posting a pic on Insta everytime I drink SIS and hope I get a free lot one day.
Yes but their “complete energy drink” – pre mixed carbs – is more expensive than SIS (when on discount with the free postage I enjoy as premier member), otherwise I have to mix it all up myself and spend an hour in the kitchen mixing white powder to ensure I get the appropriate mix when I drink it.
Don't get the pre-mixed one, it takes nowhere near an hour to mix the drink, it takes about 5 minutes. 1.5kg malto in a bin, 0.5 fructose, packet of electrolytes, done.
I added all that up. 2kg then from Bulk powders £18 on the dot plus £4 delivery - £22. Then all the hassle.
1.6kG of SiS Energy Electrolyte currently £14.56 delivered to my door. Hooray, I got the answer after 42 posts 🙂
The Southern Yeti
Bit disturbed that nobody else is eating pork pies washed down with red bull.
The weber twin 40's will swallow a pork pie, a couple of mini ones at least, washed down with high octane.
I just filled a basket and got enough stuff to make 4kg of drink and have 2kg maltodextrin left over; or 6kg of drink if you are less fussy about the ratio, for £24. Still looks like better value to me.
Oh and there also a 40% off code on the site so that makes it £15.40.
600g of carbs in a day, good god. A big meal would be say 100 carbs. That's a huge amount. My son's type 1 so we weigh his carbs out. Average evening meal 60 - 100 carbs for a hungry, hollow legged 18 year old
1.6kG of SiS Energy Electrolyte currently £14.56 delivered to my door. Hooray, I got the answer after 42 posts
I've generally found that the SiS stuff is pretty good value. Particularly when you take into account the fact that it works properly, tastes OK and you don't have to faff about mixing/weighing it.
I know I can get something that is +/- the same thing elsewhere cheaper but I really can't be arsed.
Sugar can make you fat if consumed in inappropriate amounts, but it isn't toxic.
Apologies if the above videos are satire, it is difficult to tell
Those videos aren't about fuelling intense training are they? As I said before, the circumstances are different.
600g carbs a day is ridiculous because the *max* any human can burn is 0.8-1g/min and max absorption from the gut is 60g/hr - so that carb rate is *maximum* effort sustained for ten hours. Which is tosh.
But it's from a bloke who linked to some "science" funded by the Australian sugar industry, and stuff posted by industry and vested interests is never quoted out of context to help sales. Ever.
I saw a poster in a chippy once saying chips were really good for your health. Funded by the 'British Potato Council'.
Totes trustworthy 🙂
Which is tosh.
I love these strong comments from people who either didnt read the thread,or do not understand the context of carb loading.
Please google carb loading chevy. No one here is attempting to burn 600g of carbs a day.
Absorption rate of 60g per hour is well documented, but are you sure about maximum burn rate of 1g/min? If 1g carbs is about 4 calories then that equals 240 calories an hour. Doesn't sound like nearly enough.
If you're carb loading then why not *eat* quality carbs and nutritional foodstuff rather than whack a sugar drink together?
I agree with Chevy...if you're carb loading then it suggests it is pre-race, so eating proper carbs will have more nutrients and other good stuff in them. Why would you just throw liquid sugar down you?
Does anyone thing in their right mind I was sitting at home drinking SIS bottle after bottle to get to 600g? That would be 12 bottles btw. No. Theres plenty of good quality food going in, the SIS is used to top up. As has been discussed, I'd have to eat circa 4000cals to get 600g of carbs in. Thats a lot of food and bloating, helped by using just 3 x 500ml drinks which also has the advantage of being 0% fat.
Why would you just throw liquid sugar down you?
Why? Because it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to eat and digest that much normal food - which probably isn't even possible tbh.
If you've never looked at full on training for racing, then this conversation probably isn't for you...!
If 1g carbs is about 4 calories then that equals 240 calories an hour. Doesn’t sound like nearly enough.
You won't be burning pure glycogen all the time unless you are sprinting and you can't do that for an hour.
As usual maximum tin foil hattery from YouTube it/Paton.
While I agree sugar is not what we as a species should be eating on a day to day basis.
It serves a purpose when doing hard efforts.
I train for road racing and TT and rarely touch energy drinks. Whether that's long aerobic rides, high intensity intervals or racing itself. Eating properly most of the time with a balanced diet, i don't feel that it's energy in my system that's holding me back....
There is surely a limit to how much glycogen you can load your system with beforehand, so you just have to accept you can't totally replenish what you use in a hard long race?
Interested rather than having a dig at the OP or anyone that drinks energy drinks.
Realised I needed some quick energy whilst on the turbo this evening, jumped off, nicked a fondant fancy and a chocolate cookie out of the kitchen cupboard, back on the turbo and felt them kick in after five mins or so. Remotivated me enough to do a 20min core session straight after getting off the bike. Carbs are sometimes really necessary and in my opinion any carbs are better than nothing.
Now tucking into a big bowl of a Thai style chicken thing and whole grain rice.
I eat really well (loads of fresh, home prepared food) but also hit the sugary stuff when it’s needed.
There is surely a limit to how much glycogen you can load your system with beforehand, so you just have to accept you can’t totally replenish what you use in a hard long race?
There is, and carbo loading has been in and out of favour over the years. However if Kryton's coach is who I think it is, then he doesn't just make shit up, he follows the published research and gives it out when he feels there's enough weight of evidence to be worth trying.
I train for road racing and TT and rarely touch energy drinks. Whether that’s long aerobic rides, high intensity intervals or racing itself. Eating properly most of the time with a balanced diet, i don’t feel that it’s energy in my system that’s holding me back….
I know the difference between being tired, being on my limit and being under-fuelled. The issue for me (I think) is that I'm naturally type II muscles i.e. a sprinter, and I think that makes me predisposed to using glycogen stores rather than fat - maybe because I like sprinting and I'm good at it so I do it a lot. But if I do that, and use the glycogen, then it stimulates me to eat it - so the fat stays the same. There's also a lag so I continue to want it even if my glycogen stores are replenished. So I train for fat burning and I eat for fat burning, but then that raises the question - should I? Should I train for my weaknesses or my strengths? Am I wasting my time trying to get better at fat burning?
If you are a good fat burner then you may not burn through as much glycogen and are then able to eat enough to replenish through normal food.
It's also worth noting that our guts are different. I can drink loads of energy drink and not get the shits or have any adverse affects. I'm good at burning carbs but also eating them, apparently. Others aren't so good at eating carbs.
Some interesting points of similarity Molgrips. Im also a bit type 2 coincidentally today pb'ing my sprint well north of 1200w. I read approx 7% lower on average on the turbo too 🙂
Through more carbs since xmas ive pb'd now on watts at vo2max and sprint. Last year we spotted a trend of low carbs being an issue for me as i have a w/kg paranoia. A bit of faith and im maxing my numbers. Like i said ive put on weight although this week ive started longer workouts and im in deficit despite the high carb input so it may balance itself out. But another effect it has is that i can jump off the turbo and not smash the cakes - im not hungry.