We all get consumed about getting the miles in and most of us keep a close eye on what we eat. But have you really thought about how nutritious your food is? Or are you a slave to habits handed down to you by those who've gone before that may now be outdated?
Working as a nutritionist with BMC's U23 team and also advising the pro squad, Italian-based Dubliner Barry Murray has learned there is a lot more to nutrition that simply how much energy is in the food riders consume or how many calories in contains. In this column, he says some of the practices handed down in the sport of cycling are outdated and that nutrition and the good a rider gets from food can be influenced by many factors including sleep and stress.
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Most cyclists now realise the importance of nutrition. But it is still often overlooked and for the majority it remains largely misunderstood. This can be attributed to a few things.
The first is related to antiquated recommendations based on outdated and misinterpreted research. In more simple terms; modern nutrition science remains relatively unknown to the general public and many recommendations and guidelines do not represent the latest findings.
Secondly, food industries and manufacturers want you to believe that consuming the foods and drinks they produce will make you fit and healthy. Athletes are told what foods they need to eat to give them “energy”, what drinks will help them “stay hydrated” and what pills and powders they need to take to improve performance and recover.
However, when you are “told” something, the purpose is usually to make profit.
The third misconception relates to tradition, which the sport of cycling is steeped in. This takes on a variety of forms; from stories about training methods to equipment, clothing and foods. It can mean trial and error becomes a great teacher for individual riders.
However, it can also lead to nutrition-based practices grounded in individual experience, which can then get lost in translation. Advice and recommendations are clouded in hearsay and anecdotal evidence, particularly when it comes to nutrition.
For example, it's a common misconception that a rider has to eat a bowl of pasta with parmesan shavings and olive oil three hours before a race. And that at the finish they should drink a can of Fanta or Coke. And that later at dinner you should eat more pasta with only small amounts of protein and absolutely zero fat.
These are all recommendations that have been in play in the sport for decades. But they are also based on science and theory that is decades old.
Tradition is hard to change. If the Tour winner from the 1980s did it that way; it has to be the best way, right?
Much of what’s passed down the generations is not based on modern physiology or biochemistry.
I have learned that the mechanisms by which the body functions - in terms of energy production - are far more complicated and advanced than simply stocking up on as much pasta as you can.
I have also realised that a lot of today’s foods considered unhealthy - like cholesterol and saturated fat - are actually very good for you. Everything related to nutrition has to be put in context.
The way the body works all depends on a multitude of variables: age, training status, place of birth, lifestyle and genetics.
A standard recommendation of a 55/15/30 diet (carbohydrate:protein:fat ratio) might work perfectly for one rider but not the other.
A gel every 30 minutes may be the perfect fuel mix for one rider’s engine while blunting the performance of another.
Nutrition is not a simple case of black and white. It needs to be looked at with 3-D glasses.
To best understand how food works, you need to understand the physiology of how the body works. And you need to understand how that physiology is governed by other variables, such as sleep and exercise.
To share a practical example: consider the standard nutrition recommendation of consuming carbohydrate as our primary source of fuel for energy production.
The general theory is that carbohydrates can be stored and burned in the muscle to produce ATP – the energy that allows the muscle to move and push the pedals.
Eat carbohydrates – which the muscle can convert to ATP – and a cyclist, in theory, has all the energy he needs to ride his bike.
Let’s assume the rider consumed an adequate amount of carbs yet didn’t perform, and actually had no energy.
The blame then is on the carbohydrate intake: the rider didn’t eat enough so the muscle did not have enough fuel to burn.
However, delve into the mechanism by which carbohydrate is converted to ATP and you find it is a long chain of reactions with various contributing factors.
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For instance, carbohydrates release insulin which can inhibit the other energy pathways that can burn fats and other intermediates.
In order for the carbohydrates to enter the muscle cell in the first place, there needs to be transporters activated and receptors switched on on the cell wall to allow entry.
Sleep can affect insulin function and also cortisol function, which, if not working in tandem, can affect the way carbohydrates are burned in the muscle.
Sleep also expresses certain genes, which help to promote mitochondrial growth in the muscle that also control carbohydrate processing.
You can then look deeper into the reaction mechanism and see that the conversion of glucose to ATP involves a series of electron transfer steps.
These electron transfer steps can be knocked out of sync by poor signalling from the brain caused by high stress levels and even lack of exposure to direct sunlight.
To go into the detail behind these sorts of processes would require a thesis. But I just want to highlight the point that a host of factors govern how nutrition works.
In other words, the reason the rider has low energy might have nothing to do with the carbohydrate consumption. It is probably more related to sleep patterns, hormonal balance and cognitive function.
In order to really assess nutrition, it is essential to have a good grounding in physiology, endocrinology, anatomy and even neurology.
It is not about knowing how many calories are in a bowl of cereal and a sandwich. It is about understanding how these calories affect hormones, what signal cascades this causes and how everything is interlinked.
This is the approach I have been taking with the athletes I work with. It is still a work-in-progress as the complexity is huge and the learning is almost infinite.
The critical step is how the theory and the science can be put into practice and that’s what I have been doing in my work with BMC.
The biochemistry, the journals and the books are all very interesting to me. But when it comes to the crunch, it is about how a rider can put this into practice during, say, a stage of a Grand Tour like the Tour de France.
My nutritional strategy is all about using real food –I cannot stress that enough. It is also about looking beyond the pages of a textbook and really digging into the science and linking everything together.
The final piece of the jigsaw is listening to the rider’s body and how it responds. This is a no one-size-fits-all approach. Certain metabolic traits and characteristics have to be figured out.
This takes time but it gets easier as you go. Ultimately, it provides a better way to make nutrition-related recommendations to improve health and performance.
A plate of food is not just a plate of carbohydrates, proteins and fats to me anymore. It is a plate of switches, triggers, inhibitors and promoters.
The trick is figuring out how all these things work in conjunction and how you can apply that to an individual rider.
It brings a new perspective to deciding the best types of food to eat for the cyclist and certainly helps dispel a lot of the myths and dogmas.
This is nutrition for the 21st century cyclist.
Thanks for reading
Barry
- Barry Murray BSc MSc is a Performance Nutritionist with the BMC Development Team and consultant for BMC Racing professional team.
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