With races becoming an eating contest my question relates to fueling training to reduce fatigue. I haven’t red anything regarding this, but even with good post training nutrition perhaps consuming carbs during my predominantly interval based sessions could be good. What do age groupers, and pros do?
Last I remember the rule is you should be fueling all of your workouts over 45 min. I believe there wa also a study done that showed individuals who fueled during workouts had less muscle protein breakdown/markers in their blood and recovered faster.
Is Alex Harrison still around to chime in?
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Yes. Eating carbs during workouts, especially anything involving intensity, will provide a better stimulus during the training session and improve recovery after. Pretty univeral across top pros and age groupers
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And not only does fueling during hard sessions help you with the session itself. It also helps you afterwards as you don‘t have such a big calorie deficit to refuel. Especially if you do more than one session a day (eg. weekends) it is really helpful to not have to eat so much afterwards.
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Talking and/or writing about fueling training is all the rage.
Here’s but one very recent podcast that you might enjoy: The Science of Fuelling: Insid… - The Real Science of Sport Podcast - Apple Podcasts
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Im consuming a muffin, perhaps banana or even a gel for an hours effort, but is there a shift to 100+/ hr?
Very much so. Think about it. 100 g/hr is about 400 calories. At 111 watts average, you’re burning 400 calories an hour. Doing intervals, you’re likely doing a lot more power than this. Your body isn’t stupid, so if you don’t have adequate fueling on addition to this work capacity, it’s going to limit how much work you can do, and it also reduces reliance on internal stores, which helps recovery
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Correct.
No hard rule needed, but if there were one, that’s not a bad time cutoff.
100% correct. The latter point is one that surprises people a lot when they start fueling training adequately. It makes the rest of your day more effective and enjoyable. Work, family time, etc.
If race performance is a goal on the radar at all, then virtually everyone in your scenario fuels with a minimum of 75g/hr carbs on the bike, and many are using 120-150g/hr now. Run carb consumption tends to fall in the 60-130g/hr range. There are of course exceptions, and this is slowtwitch so you can expect they may say hello to me in this thread shortly. 
@GedW, For historical reference, pros have been fueling with 90-140g/hr on the bike for 20-25 years. They, nor their coaches, told many folks about it. Some of them even understated their consumption rates, either believing themselves to be some kind of nutritional outliers, or wanting to conceal their successful practices, or simply wanting to err on the side of caution with their broader recommendations. There was also a much larger low-carb camp (and a slow carb camp) for many of those years which made less friendly of an environment to share that you were not a ‘fat adapted’ or ‘LCHF’ or ‘keto’ triathlete.
It is indeed important that you practice in training, with at least 80-90% (if not 100%+) what you’ll use on race day.
Fluid-based fueling is probably the easiest and gut-safest route to start with. Solids tend to be more gut offensive, and especially problematic while you’re learning the execution and implementation logistics in your own real-world training.
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Im finding the main problem is the sweet taste at more than 60gms/ bottle, 80 is doable but i feel like i want water. I am lucky that i can consume almost anything without upsetting my gut.
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You can always use neutral taste gels like SIS.
Put some lemon or lime juice in there to flavor it and cut the sweetness.
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I love reading pretty much anything Dr Alex writes, one bit I would add that comes from TrainerRoad which I would appreciate a comment from the king (King Alex) regarding is specific types of work outs and pre-fueling.
For longer workouts no question that fueling during will help the next day; you can easily suffer through the day on water only, as Tyler Hamilton described it “pan y agua” (slightly different meaning!) with a slight decay in performance, higher RPE maybe, but the big suffering is the next day particularly for IM type training where the endless days stack up and falling behind can be a quicksand. Fueling during and immediately after helps to stop that.
But…my question is the 2nd type which is ultra high sugar consuming exercise; in my mind the biggest burner is sweet spot, where we are doing say 3X20min at 95% FTP; over unders say 9min 1 under 1 transition 1 over X3, total 4 times etc; this sort of sustained very very hard to maintain efforts with limited rests. Compared to Z2 (fat burning long and slow) or vo2 max/sprints (ultra aerobic or muscular but with big breaks) the SS/Threshold stuff is utterly brutal. The only Vo2 that might be similar is something like 30 30s where the HR goes up and doesn’t drop, although fueling is very hard since the gaps are so short, but doable.
So Trainerroad heavily recommends preloading carbs for such efforts so you go into it fully loaded, and also to be mentally ready to fuel exactly in the breaks i.e. reaching for the fuel at the last second of each effort, immediately fueling and then settling back before next effort starts. Anecdotally, it went from sweet spot being my nightmares the day before not sleeping dreading the workout to being one of my favourites as I could hammer and not feel as drained as full on Vo2.
Question for @DrAlexHarrison is:
- role of prefueling and is TR accurate in their comment that sweet spot and threshold is where the sugar consumption preloading serves the greatest benefit
- exact timing of fueling within particularly the stationary trainer workouts; is it a benefit to be exactly timing to the sec in those short breaks, or is that more mental than real
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I guess my answer is “it depends what they mean by preloading” (amounts and timing), but in general, yes, as a theme, that notion is correct more often than not, and is more true for those particular types of workouts than for other types. I’d add supra-threshold interval workouts to that list, too. Anything where effort will be high enough, and recovery incomplete enough that intra-workout fueling limits could be challenged due to gut tolerance.
The best time to fuel in training is at all moments exactly preceding times of lowest HR, but not so early that your consumption happens at a time when HR and effort is so high that you cause gut upset or inability to start recovering.
How much does that matter? Not a ton unless it’s a super hard workout and you’re also trying to absolutely maximize intake (right at whatever your fueling limit is, per gut happiness) for that workout. If both of those things are true, then yeah, timing matters, and your gut will tell you if you mess it up. (or you’ll choke and sputter trying to swallow when you would be better of breathing!)
I would argue that reaching for the fuel 3-10 seconds after prior effort is best in most cases for threshold or above intervals. Breathing is important. But I’m also a fairly large (205-210lbs) 3.2 W/kg rider so I like to breathe a lot.
The point in th second question is to make guts happy moreso than it is to get fuel into muscles at right time.
Let me know if I missed the point of either question.
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If you order maltodextrin, it’s a starch that your body actually absorbs a little faster than sugar and didn’t sweet at all.
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You can only absorb so much maltodextrin though, ~60g/hr. By pairing it with fructose you can push the higher carb intake, and fructose is sweet.
Yep. I’m just saying if you want less sweet use that. Combine with fructose as you say also (sugar is 50% fructose as well so if you just used sugar and maltodextrin that gets you reasonably close without all the extra ingredients).
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I mix 30 grams maltodextrin and 30 grams of sugar. Then use clif bloks to get something in my stomach.
Its early days, but its seems to be revaluationary, fatigue has been reduced to a manageable level. Have to say its made training so much easier.
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And it appears for the first time in over 10yrs ive put on 2kg of weight