Right now at the Tour de France, a rider has just finished a 5-hour stage. He's burned somewhere north of 5,000 calories, absolutely emptied himself, and tomorrow morning he's going to do it all again. And the morning after that, 21 days. Think about what that actually asks for body. You or me, we head out the door and we do one really hard 5-hour ride, and we're wrecked for like 2 days after it. These lads do it 21 times back-to-back, and they get faster into the third week. I've got one question. How? How is this possible? Everyone assumes it's genetics or drugs or something that you can't touch. And look, the engine of these world tour riders is freakish. There's no argument there. But the recovery, the recovery's not magic. It's a checklist, and it's a checklist built on principles that almost every world tour rider follows. Because the science underneath this checklist, it's solid. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you I've got Pogacar's exact routine off his swan euro. I need to be transparent about it about that. Nobody outside the team knows exactly how Pogacar recovers. What I can tell you is that nearly every world tour pro does the same thing after a stage. I'm going to show you each piece. I'm going to tell you why each piece works. And the bit that actually matters for you, which pieces are actually worth copying for your Sunday club run, and which ones aren't. Because some of this, it genuinely moves the needle for an amateur cyclist. And some of it, it's a total waste of your time and your money at best, and at worst, it's actually counterproductive to your goals. So, let's sort out which is which. The clock starts before the shower. The first thing that separates a pro's recovery from yours has got nothing to do with fancy tech. It's actually really basic. It's timing. The second a pro crosses the finish line, the clock starts. They're eating before they even get onto the bus. They're eating before they've showered. Not because they're precious about it or it's some ritualistic thing, because it's the single biggest lever in back-to-back day recovery. It's how fast you start refueling, That glycogen reabsorption window, and they know it. So, why the rush? Because the whole game in stage race, it's glycogen. It's managing glycogen stores day-to-day. That's your muscle's stored carbohydrate. It's your premium fuel. And hard stage racing drains that tank close to empty every single day. Refill it, and you've got legs tomorrow. Don't, and you don't. It's as simple as that. And here's the key fact that most amateurs, we get badly wrong. The rush only matters when your next hard effort is coming soon. In a grand tour, the next stage is like 24 hours away. Actually, it's probably more like 18 hours away. And that's the one scenario where front-loading your carbohydrates straight straight after a stage measurably speeds up the refill and shows up in better legs the next day. So, file that now because it's the theme of this whole video. The pros optimize this stuff obsessively because they race tomorrow. You on a normal training week with your next hard ride two or three days away, well, you've got all the time in the world to refill. We're going to come back to that idea around timing and when it's important and when it's not in a little bit. So, put a pin in that for a second. But first, let's actually go through the checklist of what these guys do after a stage of the Tour de France. Well, the carbs go in fast. That's number one on the list, and it's the one that matters most. The recovery carbohydrate is sacrosanct. Straight after a stage, the pros will hit a recovery shake. That's going to be carbs with a touch of protein. Often before they're even back on the team bus. Then appropriate proper recovery meal within an hour on the team bus. That's going to be rice, pasta, wraps, something easy to get down when the appetite is not great after being in the heat all day. So, what's the actual number of the amount of carbohydrates you need to take in post ride? Well, on the podcast recently, I had spoke to Dr. Sam Impey. He's the author of Fuel for the Work Required and he's the co-founder of Hexis. And he was giving me some really good guidelines for this. After a hard or long ride, you want to be taking in roughly 1 to 1.5 g of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight in the first hour. So, for 75 kg rider, that's about 75 to 95 odd grams in the first hour. So, that manifests itself or shows up as a big bowl of pasta or rice and a recovery drink plus a banana, maybe some toast. Now, don't confuse that with your on-the-bike number. This is totally different. Impey's whole point in our chat was that on-the-bike fueling most amateurs should start at at around 60 g an hour depending on your absolute power and you can scale upwards from there based on your capacity for your ghost to A, take it in without getting gastro distress and B, utilize it.
You don't need to start out at 120 g an hour that the pros, you know, routinely talk about. That's fueling during the ride we're talking about there. What we're talking about here in this instance is what you eat now straight after the ride, refueling those glycogen tanks, that glycogen reuptake because you've emptied that glycogen during the ride. This is the one piece the pro checklist I'd actually copy without hesitation. If you're doing back-to-back days, if you're training on a Saturday and then again a big ride on a Sunday, training ride on a sportive the next day, any of those big Saturday Sunday blocks or a training camp, get 1 to 1.5 g of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight within the first hour. Copy that pro secret down. That's not this pro fairy dust. That's just how glycogen resynthesis works and it'll give you legs on the second day. But on a normal week, if you're finishing on a Sunday and your next hard ride is not till Tuesday or Wednesday, you don't need to stress so much about the timing of all this. Your ordinary meals across the day, that's going to refuel your glycogen tank with room to spare. It's the same science, but it's a completely different urgency. Okay, number two and you're going to see the pros been handed this in their swan year straight after a stage. It's that cherry juice. But, I need to be honest about this, because the cherry juice has become a bit of a symbol of recovery with, you know, UAE swan year handing it to Poggy straight after a stage. Nearly every pro team has that cherry tart shot in the post of stage or routine. You'll see it in the nutrition breakdown if teams publish it. Cherry shots, recovery shake, recovery meal in that order. So, what's the deal? Cherry tarts are rich in anthocyanins. That's the compound that makes them dark and red. They've got anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. The theory is that they take the edge off muscle damage, off that oxidative damage and inflammation from a hard stage, so you recover a bit faster and feel a bit less trashed the next morning. Does the evidence and the science actually back this up? Well, it reasonably does, yes. For that specific situation that these guys are in, the research on cherry tart, it's strongest exactly where the pros are using it at the moment. Intense, repeated back-to-back efforts where you have to perform again the next day. And here's the part that these supplement ads aren't going to tell you. There's a lot of debate about about whether you even want to blunt that inflammation on a normal training day, because inflammation isn't purely the enemy. It's part of the signal that tells your body it needs to adapt and get stronger. If we hammer it flat every single day with antioxidants, you might be sanding down the very stimulus that you've trained to create. So, the pros in July, mid Tour de France, needing to survive again, possibly another mountain stage tomorrow, they're not trying to build long-term fitness. So, cherry juice makes total sense for them. You, in a normal training block in the middle of the season, you're trying to build. You're trying to actually get adaptations and get fitter and get stronger. I'd probably skip the cherry juice. I'd save it for days when you need to perform tomorrow. Stage races, when going deep tomorrow matters, when you're not looking to prioritize adaptation. If you have a big multi-day event, a stage race of your own, that's the time to reach for it. And that's the nuance with this. You can't just copy the pros without the context. It's a race week tool, not an everyday tool. If you tune into the cycling media, you'll hear a lot about carbon bikes. But the truth is not all carbon is created equal. And that's really what Parlee is about. Basically, instead of mass producing frames as quickly as possible, they're taking sheets of high-end carbon and laying them up by hand, piece by piece, with really precise control over how everything is oriented. It's a slower, more labor-intensive process, and that's exactly the point. Most brands don't do it this way because it takes way too much time. It takes too much skill, and it's just more expensive. But Parlee have always leaned into that. Parlee frames are made in small batches by experienced builders in the US and Portugal, with a big focus on how the bike actually feels to ride, not just how it looks on paper. Yes, these bikes do sit at more of a premium price point, but once you understand how much work goes into each frame, it starts to make a lot of sense. So, when you ride a Parlee, you're not just getting a carbon bike. You're getting something that's been built by a level of precision and attention to detail that most brands don't aim for anymore. If you're curious, you can check them out at parlee, dot com, and see the full range there. I've been riding my Parlee bike for the last couple of months, and I'm blown away by the ride and the experience, and even people's reaction to it.
It's a true work of art. Number three, the massage. The swigneur, the post-stage race massage, may be the most iconic image in pro cycling recovery. Every rider, every evening, on the table, getting legs worked on. So, does massage actually flush out lactate acid and physically speed up recovery? Well, here's the straight answer with this. The mechanical flushing of toxins out story, that's mostly a myth. Lactate's long gone from your legs within the hours that pass between the end of the stage and the time you go to get a massage. It isn't just sitting there pulled waiting to be squeezed out. The performance recovery evidence of massage, it's genuinely not that strong. And where there's benefit, it is really small. So, why does every pro rider still do it every single night? Well, I think there's two reasons for this. One, it makes them feel better. It reliably reduces the perception of muscle soreness and stiffness. And when you're 12 stages deep and you're mentally fried, feeling less trashed, that actually has a real value, even if the muscle fibers don't much care. Secondly, and this one's under races, a half an hour of lying still, your parasympathetic system switched off doing nothing. In the context of a grand tour, forced rest and a little bit of human care, that really matters. So, for you, a massage now and then, yeah, it's a nice to have, it feels good. It's definitely not going to do you any harm, but if you're choosing between paying for a weekly sports massage and say getting an extra hour of sleep, sleep is a known performance enhancer. You're going to reduce that You're going to produce that human growth hormone when you're sleeping. So, I have to say, sleep wins every single time, and it's free. So, don't mistake the most visible recovery tool for the most effective recovery one. Which actually brings me neatly onto my next point. Number four, the cold plunge. We're seeing this so much in the Tour de France this year, especially with the extreme heat, where it's serving a dual purpose of reducing core body temperature. I'll park that for a second. The cold plunge, that's the thing that's maybe escaped cycling with this uh escape velocity entirely, and it's taken on this whole new wellness internet. Post-stage race, you'll see riders in cold water. And the logic is in the same family as that cherry juice. Cold constricts blood vessels, it reduces inflammation and swelling, and it calms muscle damage down, so you're going to feel fresher tomorrow. And for that specific job, recovering fast from repeated hard efforts and then going again tomorrow, well, the evidence for cold water immersion reducing next day soreness and fatigue in a congested schedule, it's actually pretty decent. It's a legitimate tool for a stage racer. But, this is where copying the pros can actively make you worse because there's now a stack of research out there showing that regular cold water immersion after training it blunts long-term adaptation. Specifically the strength and muscle building response and some of the endurance signaling, too. Same mechanism as the cherry juice, just dialed up. That cold plunge suppresses inflammation so effectively that it also suppresses the adaptation inflammation was supposed to trigger. So, you freeze the soreness away, you also freeze away some of your gains with it. So, the pros in the Tour de France who are not trying to get fitter this week, he's actually just trying to survive all the way to Paris. Yes, a cold plunge is absolutely brilliant. You on a Tuesday in the middle of your season where you've trained specifically to get that adaptation, where you're looking to get stronger, jumping into an ice bath afterwards, well, that's like doing a workout and then hitting the undo button on the workout straight after the workout, the rule right itself. Cold water for recovery when you're performing tomorrow, when that's the goal is to bang out back-to-back days performances. That's race week, that's stage races, it's back-to-back hard days, but never in a build phase when adaptation is the goal. The pros know the difference and now you do, too. Number five, this isn't glamorous, but it really matters, the evening meal. This is the one that genuinely matters more than the cherry juice, the massage, the ice bath, all of that combined. People fixate on flashy recovery gadgets and completely overlook the biggest one, dinner. So, how big is a pros evening meal after a stage? It's big. I had a Giro breakdown with one of the Q36 0.5 riders, Chris Harper, on the podcast and we went through a rider's post-stage I think he had nearly 7,000 calories. Huge, huge days. And dinner alone was around 200 g of carbohydrates plus another 50-odd grams of protein on top of the recovery shake and the meal that they'd already had on the bus. It's an enormous evening of feeding, and that scares amateurs totally because we've been trained to think that eating big at night makes you fast. And here's the principle from the conversation I had with Dr. David Don, founder of Hexis, on the podcast. And it's the most useful idea maybe in this whole video.
Your evening meal needs to be periodized. It needs to be fitting of the work that you have done and are going to do. And this has to scale to training load. David's line was something like, "Today you go out for a 4-hour ride, you burn 2,000 calories on the bike. Tomorrow you're resting. So, your fueling, and specifically your dinner, has to adjust day-by-day, meal-by-meal. Big day behind you or a big day ahead, dinner's going to be big. Rest day either side, dinner's going to be a little smaller. Stop thinking in terms of calendar days and start thinking in terms of 72-hour windows." That's why a pro's dinner is huge because the load is huge and there's another stage tomorrow. The size isn't this reckless grab for calories because you're depleted after the day. It's matched to the demands of your training. And it's the reason that David's so hot on this because the classic amateur mistake is to do the exact opposite. Under-fuel throughout the day, then overeat in the evening when the willpower's gone. But as that panic binge isn't It's not a planned refuel. On the flip side, you do have like, when I was in France, the old French team superstition that eating after 8:00 in the evening makes you fat. And so, you end up going to bed under-fueled and absolutely wrecked the next day. Both of those are wrong. The pro's version is a deliberately big, load-matched dinner. And that's the bit that you need to be copying. And here's the little add-on from the podcast I had with Dr. Mike Ormsbury. Really interesting podcast. Dr. Ormsbury's work, two decades of it, lands on 30 to 40 g of protein about half an hour before you go to sleep, roughly 2 hours after your dinner. He recommend a casein shake, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. It keeps muscle protein synthesis ticking over overnight while you repair, and this is the myth buster that it doesn't actually make you fat even if it's on top of your normal caloric intake. That old nothing after 8:00 p.m. rule is simply not supported. For back-to-back days or if you train in the evening like most working amateurs do, it's one of the highest return, lowest effort things on this list. Summer is usually when the big gravel adventures happen, and Vittoria have made it incredibly simple to choose a tire that matches the terrain you actually ride. Historically, gravel tire names across the industry are a complete mess. Even experienced riders like me, we often don't know which is faster, which is gripier, which suits mud or hardpack. That's why I like what Vittoria have done with their gravel range. They've simplified it. Instead of confusing names, their tires use a simple terrain scale. Lower numbers mean faster rolling tires for smoother terrain. Higher numbers mean more grip and more control when conditions get rough. My go-to tire this summer is the Vittoria T50. It's built for mixed terrain, which honestly suits most of the gravel riding that I do, especially when you don't always know what conditions the route is going to throw at you. So, whether you want speed for fast gravel races or confidence on loose technical descents, it's easy to find the right tire when you're going riding with Vittoria. Go over now to vittoria.com and check out the full range of Vittoria tires, which are going to keep you rubber side down. So, that's five things nearly every world tour rider does after a stage. Fast carbs, cherry juice, massage, cold plunge, and a big periodized evening meal. If you take one thing from this, make it this. The pros are optimizing for a race tomorrow. You, me, most of the time, we're optimizing to get fitter over time, and this single difference flips half of this list on its head. The stuff that's about about refueling, the fast carbs, the load match dinner, the bedtime protein, take all of that and just copy it. It works for you exactly like it works for them. And most amateurs are leaving free recovery on the table by getting that stuff wrong. But the stuff that suppresses oxidative damage, the cherry juice, the ice bath, that's a race week tool. That's not a training week habit. Use it when performing tomorrow is the whole point. Skip it when you're trying to be in a build phase to build adaptation. Because on these days, soreness is the signal and freezing it away is going to freeze away your progress. The massage, enjoy it if you can get it, but if the choice is between massage and an early night, it's going to be sleep always wins. That's the real secret of pro recovery. It's not a magic shot or a freezing tub. It's knowing exactly what tool to use in what situation and at what time. Do that and you're going to recover like a pro without needing the table. I'm going to see you in the next one.