SAM IMPEY

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.

KEY IDEAS

The major positions Impey is known for in cycling and endurance sport.

• →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.
• →Sensible amateur starting point: ~60g of carbohydrate per hour (1g/min) regardless of intensity, then build from there.
• →Above FTP, glycogen burn becomes exponential — the fuelling target jumps not because of intensity per se but because of glycogen depletion rate at and above threshold.
• →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.
• →GI symptoms ≠ malabsorption — distinguish discomfort from carbohydrate not being delivered to muscle; overfeeding lower-intensity sessions can blunt fat-oxidation adaptations amateurs particularly need.