Eating to recover from a big week, not just a big ride

A big ride is recovered from in a day. A big week is not. After a training camp, a block of hard days or simply a week where the hours crept up, the problem is rarely the single meal after the last ride; it is that four or five days of under-eating have stacked up, glycogen has been slowly draining, and one recovery drink on Sunday evening does not refill a hole that took a week to dig. The fix is unglamorous: eat to the load for several days in a row, spread protein across each day, sleep, and watch for the signs that the deficit has already gone too far.

Why a week is different from a ride

After a single long ride, muscle glycogen is largely restored within 24 hours if you eat enough carbohydrate; Burke and colleagues' review of post-exercise glycogen resynthesis puts the requirement at roughly 1 to 1.2 g of carbohydrate per kilo per hour for the first few hours when the next session is close, and otherwise simply meeting the daily total. The problem in a big week is that "enough" gets bigger every day and appetite does not always follow. Riders on camps commonly eat the same as they would at home while riding twice the hours, so each day starts a little lower than the last. By Friday the legs are heavy for a reason that has nothing to do with the training itself.

That matters beyond feeling flat. Stellingwerff's review of overtraining syndrome and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) argues that many cases diagnosed as overtraining are really under-fuelling, because the two share symptoms: fatigue, poor sleep, falling power, mood changes, more illness. A big week eaten badly can look like a big week trained badly. Our post on low energy availability goes into the physiology; this one is about the food.

Carbohydrate: scale it to the week you just did

Burke's 2011 review gives daily carbohydrate ranges by training load: about 3 to 5 g per kilo of body weight for light training, 5 to 7 for moderate (roughly an hour a day), 6 to 10 for one to three hours a day of endurance work, and 8 to 12 for four to five hours or more. The important point for recovery is that these apply to the day after a hard day as well as the day of it. A 70 kg rider coming off a 20-hour week is still in the 6 to 10 g range on the first rest day: 420 to 700 g of carbohydrate, which is a lot of rice.

• First 24 hours. Do not taper the carbohydrate just because the riding has stopped. Eat at the top of your range for the week's load. This is when the glycogen refill actually happens.
• Days two and three. Drop towards the middle of the range if you are resting or riding easy. Appetite usually returns by now; if it has not, that is itself a warning sign.
• Choose carbohydrate you will finish. Rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, fruit, juice, milk. High-fibre choices are healthy but filling, and the constraint after a big week is capacity, not quality.

The "window" argument, that carbohydrate must go in within an hour or it is wasted, is overstated for a rider with a full day to recover; our post on the glycogen window covers when it matters. After a big week, the window is the whole of the next three days.

Protein: dose and spacing, not a single hit

Hard weeks damage muscle, and repair needs amino acids on a schedule. Moore's dose-response work found muscle protein synthesis maximised at about 20 g of good-quality protein per feeding in young men, with more simply oxidised; Areta's follow-up showed that 80 g spread as four 20 g doses over 12 hours drove more muscle protein synthesis than the same total as two 40 g doses or eight 10 g doses. Phillips and Van Loon put the daily total for hard-training athletes at roughly 1.3 to 1.8 g per kilo. For a 70 kg rider that is around 90 to 125 g a day in four or five portions of 20 to 40 g.

• Breakfast is the usual gap. Toast and jam is fine for carbohydrate and contains almost no protein. Add eggs, yoghurt, milk or a scoop of protein powder.
• Before bed. A dairy-based snack (milk, yoghurt, cottage cheese) adds a fifth feeding and covers the overnight gap.
• You do not need a shake after every ride. A meal within an hour or two does the same. See protein after every ride for the fuller argument.

Total energy: the one riders get wrong

The 2023 IOC consensus statement on RED-S is explicit that low energy availability, meaning too little energy left over after training for the body's other functions, impairs recovery, immune function, bone, hormones and performance, and that it can develop unintentionally when training rises and eating does not. A big week is the classic trigger. Signs you are behind: waking hungry at night, a resting heart rate that stays high, poor sleep despite tiredness, irritability, and a power meter that says the easy ride was not easy.

The fix is not a supplement. It is more food, mostly carbohydrate, at the meals you already eat, for several days, until those signs go. If you use WHOOP or a similar recovery tracker with Moveee, a resting heart rate and HRV that do not bounce back by the third day off is worth reading as an eating problem before it is read as an overtraining one.

Sleep, alcohol and the celebration meal

Halson's review of sleep in athletes notes that sleep is the period when most of the recovery hormones do their work and that both under-eating and alcohol degrade it. The end-of-camp dinner with a few drinks is a tradition, and one evening will not undo a week. Three evenings will. Eat the big meal, keep the alcohol modest, and get the early night the body is asking for.

A three-day recovery template

Portions are ours, for a 70 kg rider after a week of 15 to 20 hours, and are meant as a picture of what "enough" looks like rather than a prescription.

1. Day one (rest). Breakfast: large bowl of porridge with milk, banana, honey, two eggs. Mid-morning: yoghurt and fruit. Lunch: big rice or pasta dish with chicken or lentils, bread on the side. Afternoon: toast with jam, a glass of milk. Dinner: potatoes or rice, fish or tofu, vegetables, dessert. Before bed: yoghurt. Target: 450 to 550 g carbohydrate, 100 to 130 g protein.
2. Day two (rest or 45 minutes very easy). Same structure, slightly smaller portions; drop the afternoon snack if you are genuinely not hungry. Target: 350 to 450 g carbohydrate, protein unchanged.
3. Day three (easy ride, 60 to 90 minutes). Back to normal training-day eating, with breakfast before the ride and a proper lunch after. If the ride feels bad, take a fourth day.

How you know it worked

By the third or fourth day the easy ride should feel easy, sleep should be normal, and the appetite should have settled. If you track fitness and fatigue, the Fitness & Form chart will show fatigue falling faster than fitness, which is the whole point of the week; our post on fitness, fatigue and form explains what to look for. If instead the numbers are still flat on day five and the legs still heavy, do not add training to "push through". Add food first, then rest, then look again. A big week only counts once the body has absorbed it, and absorbing it is done at the table as much as on the sofa.