Most amateur cyclists eat the same way in February, in May, and the week before their A-event. The training is periodised. The nutrition isn't. That mismatch is the reason the mid-build slump shows up so reliably in roughly the eighth week of every plan, and it's the reason race week so often feels physically heavy rather than light.
Nutrition periodisation is not complicated. It is the recognition that the food has to scale with the work, that some macronutrients move more than others, and that the race week is a separate problem from the training weeks before it. This is the framework we run with the Not Done Yet coaching community, derived from the working consensus across the experts we've interviewed at length — Dr David Lipman, Alan Murchison, Asker Jeukendrup's published research, and the Buchheit and Stellingwerff papers on fuelling tolerance in endurance athletes.
The three phases
Most periodised plans run three macro-phases inside a 12-16 week block: a base phase that builds aerobic durability, a build phase that adds intensity, and a race phase that sharpens specificity. Nutrition tracks each.
The right way to think about this is by carbohydrate availability — how much fuel is sitting around the working muscle when the training session starts. Protein and total energy adjust, but carbohydrate is the variable that moves most.
Base phase nutrition
In a base block — 10-12 hours a week, mostly zone 2, one threshold session — the metabolic demand is moderate. Total energy availability needs to clear the 45 kcal/kg/day sustainability floor (calories minus exercise burn, divided by lean body mass) but doesn't need to be heaped above it.
Carbohydrate. 4-6g per kg of body weight per day. For a 75kg cyclist, that's 300-450g daily. The lower end of that range is appropriate on rest days; the upper end on long-ride days.
Protein. 1.6-1.8g per kg per day. The base block is a body-composition window for many cyclists, and protein at the upper end of this range protects lean mass during a moderate caloric squeeze.
Fat. Fills the remaining energy gap. Healthy fats — olive oil, oily fish, nuts — without going to extremes. Most amateurs don't need to think about fat as a primary lever.
The base-phase opportunity. This is the one phase where deliberate "train low" sessions make sense — a single zone-2 ride per week, ridden in a slightly carbohydrate-restricted state (e.g. before breakfast, or with the previous evening's meal carbohydrate-light). The intent is to drive mitochondrial and fat-oxidation adaptations. The ride must be genuinely easy — sub-65% of max heart rate, no over-threshold pushes — and the next meal restores the carbohydrate. Used surgically, it sharpens fat oxidation. Used carelessly, it crashes the rest of the week.
Train-low is not a weight-loss tool. It does not work as a calorie deficit. It is a metabolic-adaptation lever, and a narrow one.
Build phase nutrition
The build block is where the watts come from. Two hard sessions a week, plus the long ride, plus the strength work that should still be in the plan. Total weekly hours often climb to 12-15. Metabolic demand jumps.
This is also the phase where amateur cyclists most reliably under-fuel.
The pattern goes like this. The plan's volume goes up. The intensity goes up. The food stays the same. The rider hits week 7 or 8 of the plan and feels flat. They blame fitness, or motivation, or the trainer. The real cause is energy availability that has dropped 8-10 kcal/kg/day below the threshold their body needs to keep adapting.
Carbohydrate. 6-8g per kg per day. Push to the upper end on hard-session days. For a 75kg rider, that's 450-600g daily, much of it timed around training.
The 90-120g/hour in-ride fuelling target becomes non-negotiable in the build block. Earlier research suggested 60g/hour was a hard ceiling for amateur cyclists. The current evidence — particularly Jeukendrup's work on multiple-transportable carbohydrate combinations — has pushed that ceiling considerably higher when glucose and fructose are combined in a 2:1 ratio. Trained gut handling is real; the rider who works up to 100g/hour over six weeks tolerates it routinely thereafter.
Protein. 1.8-2.0g per kg per day. The strength work and the muscle damage from hard intervals both raise the protein turnover floor. Distribution matters: four to five servings spread across the day, including a post-ride serving with carbohydrate, and a slow-digesting protein (casein-rich, e.g. cottage cheese or Greek yoghurt) before bed.
Fat. Fills the remaining energy. Don't get clever with it.
Build-phase mistake to avoid. Trying to lose weight during a build block. This is the wrong window. The body cannot adapt to higher training loads while in caloric deficit; the watts plateau and the rider gets dragged into a fatigue spiral. Body-composition work belongs in the base block or the off-season, not the eight weeks of the plan that produce the watts.
Race phase nutrition
Two windows matter here: the sharpen block (weeks 9-10 of a 12-week plan) and the race week itself.
The sharpen block runs much like the build, with carbohydrate at the upper end of the build range. Specificity goes up; caloric needs hold. The cyclist should arrive at the start of race week well-fuelled, well-recovered, and with body weight stable or slightly above their build-block average.
Race week — the final 7 days.
Volume drops, but total energy roughly holds. The "extra" calories — relative to the now-reduced training load — go into glycogen super-compensation. Carbohydrate climbs to 8-10g/kg/day in the final 48-72 hours.
For a 75kg rider, that's 600-750g daily. This is a lot of food, and most of it should come from low-fibre, easily-digested sources. White rice, white bread, low-fibre cereal, fruit, simple sugars in the final day. This is the only context where the "boring carbs" are correct — fibre at the volume needed to deliver 600g of carbohydrate would create GI distress, and the goal is glycogen storage, not bowel health for the week.
The scale weight will go up by 1-2kg by the morning of the event. This is correct and is exactly what should be there. Glycogen stores 3-4g of water for every 1g of stored carbohydrate. The rider standing on the line 1.5kg heavier than their build-block average is a rider with full glycogen and the water that proves it. The rider who sees the scale move up and panics into a low-carbohydrate dinner the night before the event has just shot themselves in the foot.
Race day morning.
3-4 hours before the start: 1.5-2g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight, in an easily-digested form. Porridge with banana and honey, white toast with jam, a bowl of cereal. Whatever the rider has rehearsed in the build block. Do not introduce a new pre-race food on the day.
1 hour before: 30-40g of carbohydrate as a top-up. A banana, an energy bar, a small portion of pre-race meal.
In-ride: 90-120g of carbohydrate per hour from the first hour, not from when hunger arrives. Hydration to sweat-rate; electrolytes calibrated to weather and individual sweat losses.
This is also where TrainingPeaks Premium earns its keep — the partner-side integration with the Vekta plans inside Not Done Yet Coaching pushes the predicted kilojoule cost of each session into the calendar so the rider can size the food against the work in advance, rather than guessing in retrospect.
Protein, more carefully
Protein is the macronutrient amateur cyclists most consistently under-deliver on, and the timing of that under-delivery follows a familiar pattern.
The morning is the weak point. Breakfast is often coffee plus a piece of toast — call it 5-10g of protein at most. The rider then gets to lunch (perhaps 25g of protein) and dinner (perhaps 35-45g of protein) and ends the day having delivered 70-80g total. For a 75kg rider that's 0.93-1.07g/kg, well below the 1.6g/kg floor, and the morning gap is the one that costs them.
The fix is structural, not heroic. A serving of Greek yoghurt with breakfast (15-20g of protein), a protein-dense snack mid-morning if breakfast is light, and a deliberate post-ride feed (25-35g of protein with carbohydrate) lifts the daily total by 30-40g without requiring any new food the rider doesn't already know how to make.
For masters cyclists especially, the upper end of the 1.6-2.0g/kg range is the right target. Dr David Lipman's work on the masters athlete protein curve — the gradual rise in the protein-leucine threshold needed to trigger muscle protein synthesis with age — argues for both higher absolute intake and more even distribution across the day. The 22-year-old can get away with skipping breakfast. The 48-year-old can't.
What to actually track
Most coached amateurs do not need to weigh every meal. What they need is a weekly review against three numbers:
Total daily energy availability. Calories in minus exercise burn, divided by lean body mass. Should clear 45 kcal/kg/day on training days, every day. Anything below 30 kcal/kg/day for any sustained period is a red flag.
Carbohydrate per kg per day. 4-6 in base, 6-8 in build, 8-10 in race week. Pull it from a one-week food log; you don't need every day.
Protein per kg per day. 1.6-2.0 across the week, with a deliberate check that no day falls below 1.4g/kg.
These three numbers are enough to catch most amateur fuelling problems before they break a build block.
What this is not
This is not a meal plan. It is not a list of approved foods. It is not a body-composition program — race weight is a related but separate problem, and the two need to be sequenced carefully (body-composition work in the base, performance fuelling in the build, glycogen loading in the race week).
What it is: the structural way to think about fuel scaling with work, applicable across the 12-16 week training cycle most amateur cyclists actually run. The riders who get this right ride into race day with a body that can do the work. The riders who get it wrong ride into race day with a body that has been quietly under-fuelled for two months and cannot fire on the day it matters.
Periodise the food the way you periodise the training. The two are the same problem, and they need to be solved together.