robgray wrote:
Barlow wrote:
Hi Rob,
Do you add the ginger beer to your nutrition purely for taste or does it help you absorb more calories? Just interested how you got to 500 calories. Did you experiment with different drinks?
(My limit with is 350cal/hr which is 100cal fructose/250 cal malto)
Thanks,
Will
Hey Will - mainly for taste, and also the ginger helps settle the stomach a bit. It also gives me an extra 150 calories or so. It doesn't help me to absorb more. I got to that high intake purely by accident. Back in 2012 I was using EFS liquid shot in races. That's 400 calories in a bottle, but one bottle per hour would cause some bloating for me, so I would aim for 4 bottles over 5 hours. I wanted to use it in training too, but it was very expensive to do that with the actual EFS, so I bought some maltodextrin powder and fructose powder to make my own "simulated EFS liquid shot". I just mixed it in a 2:1 ratio and then went out on a training ride. It worked quite well, but when I got back I realized I'd make a calculation error, and taken in 600 calories on my 90 minute ride. And I felt just fine! I was building up to IM Los Cabos 2013, so I started experimenting with 500-600 per hour during my race sims (120 mile bike followed by 8-10 mile run), and everything went fine. So at IM Los Cabos 2013 I dialed it back a little because it was hot. I think about 450 per hour if I recall, and I had a great race. The success seems to be the inclusion of both malto and fructose (they have different transport systems) and then the addition of gummy worms seems to help too (for me anyway). If I try maltodextrin alone, or fructose alone, I cannot take in that much. Recently I have also been concentrating my Glukos energy powder (commercial drink mix) and that seems to work well too (probably because it's so simple without complicated ingredients)
Rob do you have a theory about why Malto + Fructose works better for you than the same number of cals from either Malto alone or Fructose alone?
By the way, just as an FYI outside of training, I have been consuming about 1L of Olive oil per 2 weeks by adding large helpings in salads or soups. This is around 500 mL MORE olive oil than I would have in my weekly diet than 4 months along 500 mL. The quick math is 4000 cals out of my week coming from this source. I have gone from around 146 lbs at Xmas time to 138-139 lbs now. I am doing my usual 2 hrs of training per day, so nothing different there. I am not trying to limit my diet elsewhere, I am just eating to "feel" if I am hungry I eat more other stuff, if I am less hungry, I eat less. I THINK I am less hungry as my insulin is more stable over the day. What do you think is going on? I have also experimented with higher fat snacks before workouts, but none of my workouts are long enough right now to actually need to eat anything during workouts....eating right now is outside of workouts.