A Scalable Carb Fueling Plan Based On Effort

Fueling advice has never been more confusing. One expert recommends fasted rides, another says 120 grams of carbs per hour, and every nutrition brand seems to have a different answer.

In this episode, CTS Head Cycling Coach Adam Pulford introduces a practical fueling framework that scales carbohydrate intake to the demands of your ride. Using kilojoule output, ride intensity, and duration, you'll learn how to build a fueling strategy that's individualized, repeatable, and easy to apply for easy endurance rides all the way to race day.

HOST

Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Resources:

• Introducing Fueling Insights: A Smarter Way To Fuel
• The Importance of Carbohydrates and Glycogen for Athletes  
• How much sodium do I need?
• Fueling Insights: Iñigo San-Millán on Optimizing Carbohydrate Intake for Cyclists
• https://trainright.com/coaching-consultation/
• Drinking to Thirst vs. Following a Hydration Plan, with Dr. Alan McCubbin 

Transcript

Why One Fuel Plan Fails

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the biggest mistakes endurance athletes make is fueling every ride in the same way. Some rides are easy recovery, some are long aerobic rides, and some rides are smashing wallets and pushing limits you never thought possible. Yet we're constantly being told that there's one perfect fueling strategy for all of them. That's why fueling has become so confusing and so expensive. Every expert has a different opinion, every brand has a different product, and most athletes end up chasing someone else's nutrition plan instead of learning what works for their own body. I'm Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS. In the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to scale up or down your fueling strategy based on the demands of the ride or race using proven science and a splash of art to help make more sense of your fueling journey. I'll also explain how to adjust on the fly, tuning into your body's individual needs as things change. Then I'll wrap up with some pro tips and actionable advice. If you watched some of my previous videos or listened to my podcasts, you know I'm a big believer in teaching frameworks to help athletes understand complicated concepts. And fueling is definitely one of them. Over the past month, I've heard any advice spanning from fasted training rise to 200 grams per hour and everything in between, promising that it will bring the best results. But is it true? It could be, but it's all about context, and that's a big part of the confusion. You see, the reason these claims can be made is that fueling rates are dependent on intensity, volume, and the goal of the workout. Short, easy rides generally need no fueling, just hydration. Long rides for people with high aerobic outputs demand high fueling rates. Maybe not 200 grams per hour for most listeners here, but maybe 100 grams or 150 grams for some. So the approach

The Scalable Carb Framework

SPEAKER_00 2:01

I've taken in my coaching practice is a scalable carbohydrate approach to fueling. This means using tools and knowledge to match the demands of the goals of the session, not just a blanketed one-size-fits-all approach. I know this adds another layer to it all, but give me a few more minutes and I'll simplify it for you. Plus, learn it once and you don't need to learn it again. Different workloads need different rates of fueling. I think most people understand that you're not burning as many calories on a recovery ride as you are on a hard threshold interval workout. Intensity is higher and rates of work are higher as well. And because our bodies store some fuel in the way of muscle glycogen, we don't need to fuel the easier rides like the harder ones. I'll get into detail more about that coming up, but it's really this rate of work that will determine how much you should fuel. Specifically, that rate of work can be measured in kilojoules, captured by your power meter, and can be used to help determine how many calories

Using Kilojoules To Estimate Burn

SPEAKER_00 3:05

you're burning per hour or in total on a training ride. Recall that one kilojoulle equals about one calorie due to the mechanical efficiencies of a cyclist, heat dissipation, and some ironic fun math. Here are some examples of kilojoul expenditure in calories burned per hour examples. Here I have 250 watt FTP, 300 FTP, 350 FTP, and a 400-watt FTP. As you can see, the work rates and burn rates are drastically different from various intensities of different FTP levels for different riders. Even if you don't have a power meter, the work rates still scale like this based on effort in your body. And the major thing to realize is the more you burn, the more fuel you need. Therefore, fueling at higher rates for higher intensity is necessary. To make it as simple as possible, we could categorize training in three different ways easy, medium, and hard. Here you see an infographic I made to show these three different intensities, the energy systems used to make the effort, primary fuel sources during the effort, and lots of other details. Feel free to pause it now and read more if you want. And for our listeners, you can head over to YouTube to see it. The overall point I'm trying to make here is as you ride easy, you're burning fat as a fuel source with some glycogen. Then as you go medium intensity and up into the higher intensity, your glycogen demands increase, and in order to not deplete your body's storage of it, we start to fuel ourselves with carbohydrates to keep the energy high. We've known this for many years now, so as coaches and nutritionists, we have given big ranges of fueling per hour to target for all athletes. Many coaches used to give advice in grams per hour for carbohydrate intake, and we still do. This is helpful, especially once you hone in on specific carbohydrate fueling needs for different types of intensity. However, there are limitations in the grams per hour approach. It may fit the majority of people who have normal FTPs in burn rates of fueling, but for those with lower or higher kJoule burn rates, we need better advice to target their individual needs. So the scalable approach is way better for every athlete. Let me show you what I

Aerobic Versus Performance Ride Targets

SPEAKER_00 5:31

mean. Scalable means more customizable. I've made this infographic to explain it as simply as possible. There's two bins that most rides fit in, and then you can scale them up or down accordingly: aerobic rides and performance rides. What I mean by each of these is for aerobic rides, these are short, easy rides, 90 minutes or less. Think zone one and zone two, but you can scale it up and aim for 25 to 35% intake of calories from your output of kilojoul expenditure. You can scale it down by just drinking water and no fuel is needed. For performance rides, these are harder interval rides, group rides, races, or hard long bays. Scale it up, aiming for 40 to 50% intake of calories from your output of kilojoul expenditure. Scale it down by aiming to around 35% intake of output. Use this as a starting point and adjust as needed for you. Higher percentage is not necessarily better, as there is a limit to what your gut can actually tolerate. These percentages are coming from observations that I've had in my own coaching practice as well as some of the work I did with training peaks in building a fun tool that I'll talk about later. And these ranges should fit 98% of the people out there. I've had some elites push up to 60% of intake, but they're also burning a lot of calories. And there's a point at which you won't be able to use all the fuel that you're putting in. The goal is not to replace everything, but on performance days up to about half is very reasonable. So from a planning standpoint, you can start developing your fueling strategies in a more targeted way for your hard training days, easy days, and race days using guidelines here along with your estimated kJoule burn

TrainingPeaks Examples And Real Math

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rates. But how do you know your kilojoul burn rate? Two simple ways. Look back on previous races or workouts to see what you actually did, or use the new fueling insights tool on Training Peaks, which I'll start with first. I was part of a group of coaches and coders that helped develop this fueling insights tool. SmartBrains combined with the man himself, Nigo Sam Milan, and tons of his data from his lab allowed us to build a model to show this better. Let's take a look at a training peaks workout to better understand how to put this into action. If you have a hard workout queued up for the day like this, 3x15 minute threshold intervals at zone four and just over two hours of total ride time, we can see based on the athlete's FTP, if they wrote it pretty much as prescribed, we should see a total expenditure of 1,560 kilojoules during this ride. This is a hard workup, so it's a performance day as far as the fueling goes. Therefore, we want to aim for that 35 to 50% intake of output. I know this athlete well, he's a high burner and has been training for years, so we'll take that 50% target and do the math. 50% of 1,560 kilojoules equals 780 kilojoules or food calories. 780 calories divided by 4.1 calories per gram in each carbohydrate gives us 190 grams of carbs for the total intake for the ride. 190 grams divided by 2.25 hours gives us 84 grams per hour for this ride. For my athletes, I'd do the same math for the low-end target. In this case, it would be around 59, 60 grams. And I would give them the range of fueling to aim for based on how they feel. This works best for longer, steady rides, interval days, and high kilojoul demand rides. But what if it's a race or if you may not have it all modeled out pretty like this? Let me pick on Dirk Friel here for a minute, since he has a good online example already existing. And this is coming from a conversation he had with Dr. Sam Milan on this exact topic. I'll link to this podcast below if you want more detail around the fueling insights tool. It's a fun one. And while you're down there, if you like this episode, give us a thumbs up. They took Dirk's file from the SBT gravel race from the year before, which had a kilojoul expenditure of 4,066 kilojoules. They then took 50% of that, and you can see the math here on the screen, using the exact process I used in the previous workout example and came up with around 86 grams needed per hour at the upper end, and the lower end would again be around 55 to 60 grams per hour. Note they did use the carb calories for this example. For hard days, you need to understand that most of the work you're putting into the cranks are coming from muscle glycogen and exogenous carbohydrate fuel sources. So carb calories are going to be pretty darn close to the kilojoul expenditure in most cases. Here it's actually within 1.5%, which is a small margin. And since I tell my athletes to use kilojoul burn rates to track this while they're actually riding their bike, I use kilojoul to make their race

Adjusting Fuel Live While Riding

SPEAKER_00 10:40

plans. What I mean by that is I have my athletes check in with their kijoul expenditure every half hour or so on long rides and races to make sure pacing is matching up with the fueling plan. If they are overpacing per the plan, they can scale up the fueling. If they are underpacing, maybe we scale it down or stay on track with the fueling if gut is good, and we bank some fuel for later. This is how you use these tools in real-time feedback to give you the best fueling and pace plan for your long days and races out there. Conversely, on easier days, we can see how the model shows lower expenditures of carbohydrate, thus the need to fuel less, if not at all. Fueling on the lower end of this, say for a three-hour ride at zone two, would look like this: around 2200 kilojoules total, and at 25 to 35% of that targeted intake, it would be right around 45 to 65 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Because the intensity is lower, you can see the model showing more calories are being burned from fat. Therefore, it's reasonable to use the carb calorie model to base your fueling on. I personally use kilojoules to keep it consistent across all my riders and give them the range prescribed and just tell them to hug the low end of this by default. And if you need more fuel, aim for the upper end. Recall that on short rides, for most people, less than 90 minutes at zone two, likely we we don't need any fuel at all. Just need to stay hydrated. This is because our bodies carry fuel for stuff like this. In fact, most humans can carry around 14 to 1600

Glycogen Stores And When To Skip Fuel

SPEAKER_00 12:20

calories stored as muscle and liver glycogen on their bodies. This would be the equivalent of maybe two to three hours easy zone one to two for most average age groupers out there. A well-trained endurance athlete can store almost double that with years of training, adaptation, and carbo loading. So this is why, even on longer days, I'll tell my athletes if you're fully topped off with breakfast a few hours ago, just hydrate in the first hour, let the stomach get happy, then pick up on your fueling rate goals after that. The key takeaway here is that you don't need to fuel every single ride the same. Fuel to match the demands of the ride, avoid depletion, and maintain performance is the strategy here. Having this knowledge should now give you the confidence to scale up your carbs on the big days when you're burning through fuel or scale down on the easier rides when you're not using as much glycogen or just drink water if it's a super short day because you have fuel on board. For short, higher intensity workouts and races, I'll be real honest with you, all the fuel better be on board at the start line, otherwise, you've already missed the

Gut Training And GI Troubleshooting

SPEAKER_00 13:30

boat. Now let's talk about training your gut. If you are new to the high-carb fueling game, I wouldn't just jump on the 50% end of things or target 120 grams per hour. I'd start with more like 35 to 40% intake of your kilojoul output and see how it feels and work up from there. If your work rates are higher and you think you could tolerate more fuel, do it. Remember, higher is not better. Too much too soon can cause GI issues. If you start there and have some stomach issues, just dial it down. Drink more pure water, let the gut clear out. The key thing is to realize that your gut is trainable and even smaller people or lower burn rates can still fuel high if they train their gut to do so. The first few sessions or weeks that you're trying to fuel high, you may not go really all that well. You might get a little burpee or you feel like your stomach just shuts down. GI issues happen for sure. And it's usually because you have too much food stuff in your stomach relative to hydration. So keep the fluid intake high as you're cramming in all the carbs. Additionally, your microbiome learns how to handle all this fuel. And so it may take up to a few weeks or even a month to spin that system up. So if you have a race coming up in a few months, I would start now, dialing in the high carb strategy that you'll use on race day. Uh the best days to train your gut, you guessed it. They are on your harder days, high intensity or long days with mixed intensity. You want to match the fuel to meet the demands. So people will have like three to four gut training days per week where I would make the push for these higher fueling targets. What about hydration?

Hydration Rules And Separating Fluids

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Hydration is the most important. I've done some podcasts about this, and you can check them out below. The key concepts are your best nutrition plan won't work on a dehydrated gut. So don't just hit the bars in the high carb drink mix only. Total fluid intake is more important than hydration versus the exact osmolarity or electrolyte composition or any other marketing hype out there. The salt trolls will definitely nail me to the cross for that one, but it's just the facts, and I'm even a salty guy. If you're mad at me about that, just check out the interview I did with Dr. Alan McCubbin in the links below. And if you have more questions, ask me there with any comment that you want, or just write still salty, and I'll work on a sodium episode for you. Just know to drive hydration best, focus on total fluid intake. Other quick advice on hydration is to have a plan that can separate fluid from carbs and sodium. Meaning, incorporate water into your fueling plan so you can scale up the fluid for hydration when needed most. Hot days or letting the stomach clear out from all the carbs is generally what happens there. Or just have some electrolyte powder that you can put into your water and you can get your salt without the carbs if needed. So much to say about hydration, but I'm focusing on the pro tips of carbs specifically today for fueling. Speaking

Pro Tip: Carry Out Your Trash

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of pro tips, here's a really good one for you. Since you're burning through all these gels and products, let me show you one thing. After you get a gel, for example, you can just roll the top down to minimize the stickiness, and then just put it in your pocket. Yeah. That's right. Don't fucking litter. Pretty wild. Huh? But you know what? I have to mention it here because at every single race and event uh where I'm at, I see gel and bar wrappers littered throughout the course, and it's completely unnecessary. Like, maybe the stupidest thing we do as a collective group of athletes. In fact, there's a training race around this Mabra region here in DC that we do every spring. But this year, after I think like the second race, we were kicked out of the business park and asked not to come back. Why? Because we were messy. We left our trash in the parking lot, and we were not responsible stewards of our space. So embarrassing. So frustrating. Just do what you were taught when you were younger and pick up after yourself. It's that simple. So the pro tip is carry out your trash. Don't litter our beautiful roads and our natural lands that we get to spend so much time training and racing in. If you do, it'll be taken away from us, and the next generation of riders too. Okay, so where

Practice The System And Get Help

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were we? Fueling. That's right. Don't be afraid to mess it up. Okay, this is a complicated journey of fueling, and some trial and error is necessary. Honestly, I haven't seen it done any other way. The first few times you try this scalable approach, you're probably going to not nail it perfectly. You'll overdo it, you'll underdo it, then finally you'll find what works best. And that's the art of it. Keep practicing though. Use the information I provided, try it on the easy days, the moderate days, and the hard days. Scale the carbs up and down to match the demands of the training session, and you'll find success. So finally, in closing, the biggest lesson I want you to take away from this video is that the best fueling strategy is the one that is scalable and individualized. That means you dial up your carbs and hydration according to the work rates of the ride or race. You can use the fueling insights tool from Training Peaks to predict the estimated kilojoul expenditure or use past training history to make a plan for race day. Start using the scalable ranges I provided here to better customize your fueling strategies for easy, medium, and hard days on the bike. And remember, don't litter. That's it for today. I hope you liked it. If you need help taking some of these numbers and making more sense of it based on your training, head over to trainwrite.com and click on free consult. You'll get paired with a coach that can answer some quick questions, and maybe that turns into a longer paid consultation or maybe some one on one coaching. We've got over 70 coaches worldwide that can help you take it to the next level if that's what you're looking for. Until then, we'll see you back here for the next one.