Tim Podlar, a performance nutritionist for WorldTour pro teams, breaks down exactly how professional cyclists stay so lean and what actually happens to your power when you diet. You'll learn the counterintuitive nutrition strategies pros use—and the one critical mistake most amateurs make when trying to copy them.
Key Takeaways
- Power doesn't drop when losing fat; your ability to access that power drops due to energy deficit and depleted glycogen. The power returns once you stabilize your energy balance.
- Create deficits on easy days, not hard days. Fuel completely for intervals and high-intensity work, then create a 500-700 calorie deficit on recovery days when you can afford to be underfueled.
- Track energy balance from one training session to the next (not midnight to midnight) so you can fuel for the work you're about to do, not for yesterday's session.
- Fat oxidation improves naturally with fitness and VO2 max—you don't need fasted rides or ketogenic diets. A well-trained athlete eating carbs will oxidize more fat than an undertrained athlete on a low-carb diet.
- Carbohydrate absorption rates vary massively (30-180g/hour depending on the athlete), and intestinal absorption—not gastric emptying—is the limiting factor. Fructose absorption may be trainable through consistent exposure.
- Morning body weight fluctuations reveal recovery status: sudden 1kg drops mean you're empty; unexpected gains despite controlled intake suggest underrecovery and water retention.
Expert Quotes
"When you go onto a diet, you start your next ride with not full glycogen stores, so your power will drop. But when you're happy with body mass and maintain energy balance again, the power should return. It's not that you've lost power—it's your ability to access that power that's dropped."
"If I was to feed the riders based on equations from scientific papers, they would get fat during a Grand Tour. There's a massive gap between what the science says and what actually works."
"Even the efficiency would change day-to-day during the ride. Towards the end of a hard day it might drop. Everything is very fluid and we don't really account for that."