Right now, as you're reading this, a rider in the Tour de France is eating. On the bike, off the bike, between stages — eating is as much a part of racing a Grand Tour as pedalling. And the numbers involved are borderline absurd.
A mountain stage burns 5,000-8,000 calories on the bike. Add in basal metabolic rate, the warm-up, the cool-down, the nervous energy, and a rider's total daily expenditure can hit 8,000-10,000 calories. That is four or five times what most people eat in a day. Every day. For three weeks.
This is not normal eating. This is industrial-scale fuelling. And if you watch closely, you can learn more about how to fuel your own riding from what these riders do than from any nutrition plan you've ever downloaded.
What they eat on the bike
The fuelling starts before the stage even begins. Three to four hours before the start, breakfast is the biggest tactical meal of the day — a massive carb load. Rice, pasta, oats, eggs, toast. Some riders eat 1,500-2,000 calories at breakfast alone.
Once the flag drops, the eating doesn't stop. In the first half of a stage, riders lean on solid food. Rice cakes — and I should mention Hannah Grant here, because when she was team chef at EF, she basically reinvented what a rice cake could be. Not the dry polystyrene discs from the supermarket. Proper savoury and sweet rice cakes, wrapped in foil, easy to eat with one hand at 40kph. She wrote the book on team chef cooking. Literally. When I had her on the podcast, she talked about how the whole philosophy is real food first, because riders eat better when the food actually tastes good.
Alongside the rice cakes: energy bars, small sandwiches, fruit. The musettes come up from the team car, and riders are constantly grazing.
In the final hours — especially on the climbs — the switch happens. Solid food is too slow to absorb when you're at threshold. So it's gels, liquid carb drinks, and whatever is fastest to get from mouth to muscle. The speed of absorption matters when you're burning through glycogen at that rate.
The numbers that matter: most World Tour teams now target 80-120g of carbohydrate per hour during racing. Ten years ago, the standard advice was 60g. The science moved. The peloton moved with it.
The science that changed everything
This is where it gets interesting. For years, the assumption was that the gut could only absorb about 60g of carbohydrate per hour. If you ate more, it just sat in your stomach and caused problems. Bloating, nausea, the kind of GI distress that ruins a race.
Then Dr. Asker Jeukendrup's research on multiple-transporter carbohydrate changed the game. The key finding: glucose and fructose use different transport pathways in the gut. Glucose is absorbed via SGLT1 transporters. Fructose uses GLUT5. If you combine them — in roughly a 2:1 ratio, or the more recent evidence suggests closer to 1:0.8 — you can absorb significantly more total carbohydrate per hour. The ceiling moved from 60g to 90g, then to 100g, and now some teams are pushing 120g per hour in specific situations.
This wasn't theoretical. It was measurable. Riders who fuelled at higher rates performed better in the final hours of racing. The bonk — that catastrophic glycogen depletion that turns your legs to concrete — became preventable rather than inevitable.
What they eat off the bike
The stage finishes. The rider crosses the line. And within 20-30 minutes, a recovery shake is in their hands. Typically 40-50g of carbs and 25-30g of protein. The window matters — glycogen resynthesis is roughly 50% faster in the first two hours after exercise. Miss that window and you start the next stage with a deficit you can't close.
Within 90 minutes, a full meal. Carb-heavy — pasta, rice, potatoes — with 30-40g of protein. This is where team chefs earn their money. Alan Murchison, the Michelin-star chef who works with World Tour riders, has talked about this on the podcast — the challenge is making food that's nutritionally precise but also something a rider actually wants to eat after six hours of suffering. Boiled chicken and plain rice gets old by Stage 3.
And then there's the pre-sleep protein shake. This is relatively new in the peloton — 20-40g of casein protein before bed. Casein is slow-digesting, which means it drip-feeds amino acids into the bloodstream overnight. The research on overnight muscle protein synthesis is strong enough that most teams now include it as standard protocol. It's not a magic bullet. It's a marginal gain that compounds over 21 stages.
Breakfast the next morning completes the cycle. Three to four hours before the stage, that massive carb load again. The whole machine resets.
The amateur gap
Here's the good news. And the bad news.
The bad news: most age-group cyclists are dramatically under-fuelling on the bike. The data from the 2026 amateur fuelling benchmarks report is clear — the average club rider consumes 30-40g of carbohydrate per hour on a long ride. Some eat even less, because they've been told that eating less will help them lose weight, or because they simply don't think about it.
The good news: the science says 80-100g per hour is optimal for efforts over 2.5 hours. And closing that gap — going from 30g to 80g — is one of the single biggest free-speed improvements available to you. It doesn't require more fitness. It doesn't require better genetics. It requires a different habit.
When I had Hannah Grant on the podcast, she made a point that stuck with me. The pros didn't always eat this way. Ten years ago, the peloton was collectively under-fuelling. Riders would bonk on mountain stages because they hadn't eaten enough. The culture was to ride light, eat light, suffer through it. Dr. Jeukendrup's research, and the coaches and chefs who implemented it, changed that. The amateurs are where the pros were a decade ago.
Gut training: you can't skip this
You cannot go from eating 30g per hour to eating 100g per hour next Saturday. Your gut will revolt. Nausea, cramping, the kind of GI distress that makes you wish you'd never started.
The gut is trainable. The transporter proteins in your intestinal wall can be upregulated — your body will literally build more of them if you consistently practise higher carb intake during training. But it takes time.
The protocol is simple. Start at 60g per hour. Hold that for a week or two. Add 10g per week. Over 4-6 weeks, you work up to 80-100g per hour. Use your training rides to practise this. Not a race. Not a sportive. Training rides, where it doesn't matter if your stomach objects.
Mix your carb sources. Glucose plus fructose, mirroring the dual-transporter approach the pros use. Most commercial gels and carb drinks already use this ratio, but check the labels. And sip consistently rather than dumping a huge load of sugar into your stomach every 45 minutes. Little and often.
The weight loss trap
I need to talk about this, because it's where most of us get it wrong.
There is a version of the cycling internet that tells you the path to going faster is eating less. Cut calories, lose weight, improve your power-to-weight ratio. The maths makes sense on paper. In practice, it breaks people.
Riders who restrict calories to lose weight AND train hard end up in a hole. Performance drops. Immune function tanks. Mood crashes. Sleep deteriorates. You lose muscle along with fat, and your power drops faster than your weight does. The power-to-weight ratio gets worse, not better.
I've lived this. I lost 7kg — went from 86 to 79 — in 12 weeks. And I did it while eating MORE food than I'd ever eaten. Not less. I fuelled every ride properly. I ate enough protein. I stopped skipping meals to create a deficit. And the weight came off because my body wasn't in survival mode anymore. It wasn't hoarding energy because it was terrified of the next fasted ride.
The phrase I keep coming back to is fuel for the work required. On hard days, eat more. On easy days, eat a bit less. But never starve the engine when you're asking it to perform. The pros don't do it. The coaches behind riders like Pogacar and Froome — they've been prescribing this approach for years. The science backs it. Your body will sort itself out if you give it what it needs.
What you can actually do this week
You don't need a team chef. You don't need a €200 monthly supplement budget. You need to eat more on the bike than you currently are.
Start tracking what you eat per hour on your long rides. Most people have no idea. Count it. If you're under 60g, you have room to improve immediately.
Buy some gels, make some rice cakes, fill a bidon with carb drink. Get to 60g per hour this week. Next week, aim for 70g. The week after, 80g. Train your gut the way you train your legs — progressively, consistently, patiently.
After your ride, get a recovery shake in within 30 minutes. It doesn't need to be fancy — milk, a banana, a scoop of protein powder. Then eat a proper meal within 90 minutes. Prioritise carbs and protein.
If you want to get serious about it, add a pre-sleep protein shake — 20-40g of casein or a glass of milk before bed. The evidence on overnight recovery is compelling enough that the World Tour teams are doing it.
And stop trying to lose weight by eating less on the bike. Fuel the work. The body composition will follow. I know that sounds counterintuitive. I thought the same thing before I tried it. Then I dropped 7kg while eating more food than I ever had in my life.
The Tour riders eat 5,000-8,000 calories on a mountain stage because they have to. You don't need to match their numbers. But the principle is the same: your body cannot perform work it hasn't been given fuel for. Every calorie you don't eat on a long ride is a calorie's worth of performance you're leaving on the road.
The gap between what the pros eat and what most of us eat is the biggest untapped performance gain in amateur cycling. And unlike buying a lighter bike or finding more training hours, this one is completely within your control.
Stay hydrated. Stay fuelled. And stop leaving free speed in your jersey pocket.
If you want the same insights I get from World Tour coaches and sports scientists, turned into something you can actually use this week — come and join us in the Roadman community on Skool. Because you're not done yet.