There's a particular kind of amateur cyclist who knows the number 120. They've read that the pros now fuel at 120 grams of carbohydrate an hour, they've watched Tadej Pogačar win Grand Tours on it, and they've decided that's the target. So they buy the high-carb gels, force them down on a Sunday club run, and spend the back half of the ride with a gut in open revolt.
Sam Impey fuels actual World Tour riders — Tom Pidcock, Filippo Ganna, the kind of names where the watts are otherworldly. So when he came on the podcast, I expected the conversation to be about the high end: the 120-gram protocols, the marginal stuff. Instead he spent most of it pulling amateurs back toward something far more useful, and far less glamorous. Start lower. Be consistent. And understand what fuelling actually does.
Start at one gram a minute
The number Impey kept coming back to wasn't 120. It was 60.
His general rule of thumb for an amateur is to put your midpoint at around 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour — one gram a minute, the easiest possible way to hold it in your head — and crucially, to do it regardless of intensity. That last part matters. The instinct is to fuel hard rides and ignore easy ones, but a steady 60-an-hour habit across your riding is a far better foundation than a feast-or-famine approach that only kicks in when you're suffering.
Sixty grams an hour is not a ceiling. It's a starting point you build from. The pro numbers — 80, 100, 120 grams an hour — are real, but they sit on top of years of gut training, the deliberate practice of teaching your stomach to absorb more without rebelling. An amateur who starts at one gram a minute and gets consistent has somewhere to grow. An amateur who starts at 120 and spends every long ride fighting their stomach has nowhere to go but down.
If you want the full picture on how this scales, our carbohydrate-per-hour guide lays out the progression. But the headline from a man who does this at the very top is almost disarmingly modest: most of you should start lower than you think.
Fuelling changes the cost of the work
The idea from the conversation that shifted how I think came when Impey described what fuelling does at a deeper level. By changing how much you fuel during a session, he said, you change how much energetic stress is placed on the muscle. You're changing the cost of the work, almost. Changing the flux through the fuel tank.
Sit with that for a second, because it reframes fuelling entirely. Most amateurs think of food on the bike as a way to avoid bonking — a safety net, something you do so you don't fall apart in the last hour. That's true, but it's the small version of the truth. The bigger version is that the carbohydrate you take in changes the physiological demand of the exact same effort. Two riders doing identical intervals at identical watts are not doing the same session if one is fuelled and one is empty. The fuelled rider is spending external energy on the work. The empty rider is digging into their own reserves, paying a much higher internal cost, and accumulating far more stress for the same numbers on the screen.
This is the science underneath the "fuel for the work required" philosophy that the whole World Tour now runs on. Fuel the session for what it demands. A hard interval day needs carbohydrate flowing in so the work lands as adaptation rather than as a hole you spend two days climbing out of. It's the same principle our fuel planner is built on, and it's why underfuelling your hard days is one of the most common and most costly mistakes amateurs make.
The amateurs' real problem: undereating
Here's the part that should reframe your week. The cycling internet talks endlessly about eating too much — the gut-training arms race, the 120-gram protocols, the fear of GI distress. But the problem Impey sees most often in serious amateurs runs the other way. They underfuel.
They ride fasted because they read it builds fat-burning. They skimp on the bottle because carrying food feels fussy. They treat the post-ride meal as something to minimise rather than a genuine part of training. And then they wonder why their legs are permanently flat, why the numbers won't move, why every session feels like a grind. The answer is often sitting in the food they didn't eat.
If your training has stalled and your fuelling is minimal, the upgrade isn't a harder session or a new training plan. It's eating more, in the right places — before the hard rides, during them, and straight after. It's the cheapest performance gain available to most amateurs, and almost nobody takes it.
Losing weight without losing the engine
None of this means weight doesn't matter, and Impey was clear-eyed about it. When the subject of losing weight came up, his framing was refreshingly grounded — no crash diets, no heroics.
For someone training a reasonable amount — say seven or eight hours a week of aggregated training time — he put a realistic, sustainable target at around half a kilo a week. Back of an envelope, that's roughly 3,500 calories across a week, which divides down to a daily deficit somewhere between 300 and 500 calories. Not massive. Deliberately not massive.
And the reason it stays modest is the line he kept returning to: training quality should always be maintained. That's the whole game. The point of carrying a bit less weight is to ride faster, so any deficit that degrades your sessions is working against its own purpose. A 300-to-500-calorie deficit lets your body keep adapting while you gradually lean out. A crash deficit shuts adaptation down, flattens your training, and usually unravels into a binge a week later. Slow and protected beats fast and brittle every time. There's more on getting this balance right in our piece on the lighter-faster myth and our daily carb-intake guide.
How to actually hit 60 grams an hour
A number is only useful if you can translate it into food on the bike, and this is where a lot of amateurs quietly fail — they know the target and still don't hit it, because they never do the arithmetic. So here it is. A typical energy gel carries around 20 to 25 grams of carbohydrate. A 500ml bottle of carbohydrate drink mix might hold 30 to 40 grams depending on how you make it. A banana is roughly 25 grams; a rice cake or homemade bar varies but is in the same territory.
So one gram a minute — 60 an hour — is modest: a gel and a bit of drink, or a bottle of mix and a banana, spread across each hour. Once you see it laid out, the realisation for most riders is that they've been taking in a fraction of that. They sip an energy drink, eat one bar on a three-hour ride, and call it fuelled. That's maybe 20 grams an hour, a third of Impey's starting point, which is exactly why their legs go hollow.
The practical fix is to make fuelling a clock-driven habit rather than a hunger-driven one. Eat to a schedule — something every 20 to 30 minutes — rather than waiting until you feel you need it, because by the time you feel it, you're already behind. Carry more than you think you'll want. And start the fuelling early, in the first half-hour, rather than trying to claw back a deficit in the final hour when your stomach is least willing to cooperate. The full progression, including how to build past 60 toward race numbers, is in our carbohydrate-per-hour guide and our in-ride nutrition guide.
What to actually do this week
Impey's message, stripped down, is a fuelling reset that almost any amateur can apply immediately.
Start every ride longer than about an hour with a target of 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour, and hold it whether the ride is easy or hard. Fuel your hard sessions deliberately, understanding that the food is reducing the real cost of the work, not just staving off a bonk. If you've been underfuelling — and most stalled amateurs have — treat eating more as the upgrade it is. And if you want to lose weight, do it slowly, with a deficit small enough that your training never notices.
It's striking that the man fuelling some of the fastest riders on earth spent his time on the podcast telling amateurs to keep it simple and eat a bit more. But that's usually how it goes with genuine expertise: the closer you get to the top, the less it's about exotic protocols and the more it's about doing the basics, relentlessly, without talking yourself into something clever and worse.
Hear the full conversation with Sam Impey on the Roadman podcast, and read what happened when I ate like Pidcock for 60 days. To dial your own fuelling in with coaching and a community of serious riders, come and find us on Skool.