Ride smarter — one read at a time.
Guides, honest comparisons and the training science behind free coaching and a real route for every ride.
41 posts in Nutrition
Featured
Rice cakes, bars and gels you can make at home for a tenth of the price
Three kitchen recipes with the carbohydrate worked out per piece from USDA food data, and an honest look at where home-made ride food loses to the packet: shelf life, bulk and hard efforts.
Read the guide
What to eat the night before a long ride
A bigger plate of something familiar, less fat and fibre, little alcohol, finished early. The glycogen targets behind that sentence, three menus that work, and what to leave off the table.
Hydration in the heat: sodium, ice and the pre-cool
Heat costs watts whatever you drink. What helps: starting cool with ice slurry, keeping body-mass loss under about 2%, matching sodium to how salty you sweat, and not drinking past thirst.
Fuelling on a budget: cheap carbs that work on the bike
Bananas, raisins, jam sandwiches and potatoes have been tested against gels and sports drinks and fuel a ride just as well. The grams per pocket portion, what they cost, and where they fall short.
Eating to recover from a big week, not just a big ride
A camp or a hard block leaves a hole one recovery shake will not fill. Carbohydrate scaled to the load for several days, protein spread across each day, and the signs you have slipped into under-fuelling.
Coffee-stop nutrition: the mid-ride food that helps and the food that sits
Cake and coffee is a good refuel; the fry-up is why the second half feels worse. How much caffeine is in the cup, why fat and fibre sit when you restart, and a ranked café menu.
Fuelling six days back to back
On one long ride, fuelling decides how you feel at the end. On six consecutive long rides it decides whether the week produces fitness at all. The daily rhythm, four traps, and why day four feeling grim is often a food problem wearing a training problem's clothes.
You dehydrate in winter too
Dehydration is a summer problem — that assumption sits behind almost every winter ride and it is wrong. Five reasons riders run short in the cold, what it costs, and the one change that fixes most of it.
Eating abroad without losing a day to it
The food is one of the best parts of a cycling trip and a reliable way to lose a morning. What to sort before you go, how to enjoy local cooking without gambling the queen stage, and when it stops being a fuelling problem.
Gels, drink mix or real food?
There is a mild moral dimension to this argument that does not deserve to be there. The real distinction is mechanical — how fast you need the carbohydrate and how hard you are riding when it arrives. Why most experienced riders end up using all three.
Bonking: what is actually running out, and what to do about it
Not ordinary tiredness — the shaking hands, the emotional flatness, the inability to decide anything. Why a bonk feels like a mental event, why "push through it" is uniquely bad advice here, and the mistake that happens two hours before the symptoms.
How much do you actually sweat? An hour with a towel and some scales
Two riders finish the same hot four hours having lost 1.2 kg and 4 kg. "Drink 500 ml an hour" is useless advice for one of them. The DIY protocol that gives you your own number, and how to tell whether you are a salty sweater.
Vitamin D for cyclists: a strong case, narrower than the marketing
One of the few supplements with real evidence behind it — and that evidence says something the labels do not. Why cyclists are a higher-risk group, what correcting a deficiency does, and what topping up when you are already fine does not.
Low energy availability and REDs: when eating less stops making you faster
Cycling's fascination with being lighter has a cost the arithmetic leaves out. What low energy availability actually is, why bodyweight is a poor detector of it, and why the performance argument fails on its own terms.
Iron and ferritin for cyclists: the blood test worth asking for
Low iron is one of the more common causes of unexplained fatigue in endurance athletes, and one of the few that is genuinely fixable. Why "your bloods are normal" can still mean you are short — and why you must never supplement on a hunch.
How much should you actually drink on the bike?
Most riders get hydration wrong in both directions. Here's a practical strategy by conditions, the simple sweat test that replaces all the guesswork, and why indoors is its own category.
Ready to ride with a plan?
Connect Strava and get your first three-week block today — free.
Continue with Strava