THE SHORT ANSWER
Sam Impey, sports nutritionist, world tour performance researcher, has appeared on the Roadman Cycling Podcast 2 times. Here's where Impey lands on gut health. The positions below are drawn from those conversations, quoted directly.
WHO IS SAM IMPEY?
Dr Sam Impey is one of the WorldTour-facing performance nutritionists most relevant to the modern fuelling conversation — working with Tom Pidcock and Filippo Ganna at the elite level, advising Exo Analytics, and publishing on carbohydrate metabolism. His usefulness for the Roadman audience is that he is the rare practitioner willing to publicly say: stop copying the 120g/hr pro number — that protocol is built for 8–12 g/kg/day workloads across 20–30 hours of training and is the wrong starting point for amateurs.
IMPEY ON GUT HEALTH
Impey’s key positions on gut health.
- Stop copying the 120g/hr pro number — amateur fuelling should scale to total energy output and gut-training history, not to what Pidcock or Ganna eat at the Tour.
- The gut is trainable because the intestinal lining renews roughly every five days — adaptation is real but must be earned over weeks, not added on race day.
IN IMPEY’S OWN WORDS
Verbatim from Sam Impey’s appearances on the podcast.
“if you're general rule of thumb, like I would start at I'd start have your sort of midpoint at kind of 60 grams an hour at one gram a minute. Yeah, easiest way to think about it, right? Regardless of intensity.”
“by changing how much you're fueling during the session, that will change how much energetic stress is put on the muscle. You're changing the cost of the work almost. Exactly. Yeah. You're changing like the you're changing the flux through the fuel tank if you think about it.”
“anything that gets up to or above FTP, like a really like like good barometer to think about it, once you get above that, your the rate at which you burn through glycogen just becomes exponential. So, you know, you really can rip through it pretty quickly.”
HEAR IT ON THE PODCAST
Episodes where Sam Impey covers gut health and related ground.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
What does Sam Impey say about gut health?
Sam Impey, sports nutritionist, world tour performance researcher, has appeared on the Roadman Cycling Podcast 2 times. Here's where Impey lands on gut health. The positions below are drawn from those conversations, quoted directly.
What is Impey's main point on gut health?
Stop copying the 120g/hr pro number — amateur fuelling should scale to total energy output and gut-training history, not to what Pidcock or Ganna eat at the Tour.
Which Roadman Cycling Podcast episodes cover Sam Impey on gut health?
Impey discusses gut health in this episode: "Why Pros' 120g Carb Rule Fails Amateurs | Roadman Cycling".