FUEL FOR THE WORK REQUIRED

Matching fuelling intake to energy demands is a hot trend in high-performance cycling. Anita Bean explores the underlying principles and how to get on board

- Anita Bean

If you're serious about your cycling, you'll want to maximize the benefits you get from each training session. Since each one has unique fuel demands, it makes sense to tailor your fuelling plan accordingly. That's the idea behind the mantra 'fuelling for the work required' (FFTWR), named after a landmark paper by sports scientists Dr. Sam Impey and Professor James Morton at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). In the paper Fuel for the work required: a practical approach to amalgamating train-low paradigms for endurance athletes - the two scientists described a new strategy that marked a paradigm shift in sports nutrition. It helped Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) and Chris Froome win the 2016 Tour de France and has since been adopted by many professional and amateur cyclists.

It was already known that training in a carbohydrate-restricted state ('training low') could increase endurance training adaptations and improve fat-burning and glycogen sparing. But training low has several drawbacks. Firstly, it makes exercise feel much harder than training with full carb stores, so even an 'easy' session can feel taxing. Over time, it becomes near-impossible to complete intense training sessions, and you can lose your top-end performance. Second, training low puts your immune system under stress, leaving you at much higher risk of illness and infection. Third, it can lead to an increase in the breakdown of muscle protein for use as a fuel. Over weeks, this protein breakdown can amount to a significant loss of muscle, which will have a negative effect on your performance.