--- title: "What the pros do with carbs, and why you might not need to" date: 2026-06-14 categories: ["Fuelling"] url: https://www.semiprocycling.com/digest/what-the-pros-do-with-carbs-and-why-you-might-not-need-to author: Damian Ruse (SEMIPRO Cycling) --- # What the pros do with carbs, and why you might not need to [Listen to this issue as a podcast](https://www.buzzsprout.com/6262/episodes/19339797) ![](https://www.semiprocycling.com/digest/images/ca165a328028383a911c2430.webp) You have seen the headlines. Tour riders shovelling down 120 grams of carbohydrate an hour, gel wrappers stuffed into jerseys, talk of a "carbohydrate revolution". It has trickled down fast. Plenty of amateurs are now chasing the same numbers on their Saturday group ride, convinced that more carbs means more watts late in the day. A new Current Opinion paper in Sports Medicine takes that idea apart, calmly and carefully. The title tells you the tone: "Fuelled or Fooled?" Here is what they found when they actually looked at the evidence. The case for ultra-high carbohydrate intake, which they define as more than 90 grams an hour, rests almost entirely on anecdote and elite practice. The controlled research does not back it up. When you line up the studies, there is no clear dose-response between how many carbs you take in and how you actually perform. One trial put 51 cyclists through two hours of riding followed by a 20km time trial and found no performance advantage from the higher intakes. Other work found no improvement in finishing times at all, only some markers of recovery. The mechanics explain why. The usual justifications, sparing your muscle glycogen and propping up blood glucose, are mostly handled at moderate intakes. Push past 90 grams an hour and the extra carbohydrate you burn mostly just replaces fat you would have burned anyway. It does not save more of your own stores. And your body gets less efficient at using it. Oxidation efficiency drops from around 86 percent at 90 grams an hour to around 76 percent at 120 grams. That leaves roughly 30 grams an hour sitting there unused. So where does it go? A good chunk stays in your gut. That is the part most riders feel before they feel any benefit. Higher concentrations slow gastric emptying and bring on the bloating, fullness and nausea that wreck the back half of a long ride. For a lot of people, ultra-high fuelling does not add performance. It adds a stomach problem. The honest summary from the authors is this. For most athletes there is no proven benefit beyond roughly 60 to 90 grams an hour, and recommending more than that is premature. The one place ultra-high intake may genuinely earn its keep is recovery, the rapid turnaround between hard days or stages, where getting carbs back in quickly helps you back up the next day. That is a different goal from race-day performance, and worth keeping separate in your head. ## What to do with this **If you race or ride hard in groups:** Build your fuelling around 60 to 90 grams an hour and practise it until it is boring. That range is where the evidence actually lives, and it is almost certainly more than you are doing now if you have been undereating on the bike. Get that habit solid before you ever think about going higher. Fading late in a race is far more often a fuelling and pacing problem than a fitness one. **If you ride big hours, gran fondos and long gravel:** Your limiter at hour four is rarely a few extra grams of carbohydrate. It is total intake over time and whether your gut can take it. Train the gut at a sensible rate, keep your drink concentration in check so you do not slow your own digestion, and treat the marginal stuff as marginal. Consistency of intake beats chasing one big number. **If your training time is capped:** Do not overthink this. You do not need a 120-gram protocol for a 90-minute session. Fuel the sessions that demand it, eat normally around your training, and spend your attention on execution, not on matching what a Tour pro does in week three of a grand tour. The thread through all of it is the same one we keep coming back to. Fuelling is a durability tool. It is how you stay strong when fatigue arrives. But more is not automatically better, and the number that sells gels is not the number the evidence supports. *Plews DJ, Booth PD, Krieger T, Maunder E. Fuelled or Fooled? Examining the Evidence and Mechanisms Behind Ultra-High Carbohydrate Intake in Endurance Athletes. Sports Medicine. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-026-02462-z* ## On my mind: The training that never shows up in the file We have been deep in heat training lately, getting ahead of the Northern Hemisphere summer, and it has reminded me of something that matters well beyond the heat. The protocols are good. The reviews are solid. You can read a sensible heat acclimation plan and know roughly what to do. A block of sessions, a controlled rise in core temperature, the active work on the bike, the passive methods like a hot bath or sauna afterwards. The science is there. But here is the part the protocol does not tell you. There is no heat training TSS. When you sit in a hot bath after a ride, your training software records nothing. Zero. As far as your numbers are concerned, you did not do anything. And yet your body absolutely did. Your heart rate was up, you were sweating, you were under real cardiovascular and thermal load. That stress is genuine. It just does not show up anywhere you are looking. This is the trap I see riders fall into. They run the heat protocol on top of a normal training week, the passive sessions cost them nothing on paper, so they assume they cost nothing in reality. Then they wonder why they feel flat, why the legs are not coming around, why an easy week did not feel easy. The lesson is not that heat training is bad. It is excellent when it is done well. The lesson is that a protocol is a starting point, not the whole job. The practical side, the part where you look at the athlete in front of you and account for stress that no file will ever record, is just as important as the science that designed the protocol in the first place. Count the hidden load. Back off something else to make room for it. Treat heat work as training, because that is exactly what it is. Numbers matter. But the stress that does not make it into the numbers can quietly undo a good week. That is true of heat, and it is true of a lot of things. Damian If you want a coach watching for exactly this kind of thing, the load that does not show up in the file, the fuelling habit that is quietly holding you back, the session order that needs adjusting, that is what SEMIPRO Guided is for. A weekly plan plus real analysis of what your training is actually doing, not just what it looks like on paper. Have a look here: [https://www.semiprocycling.com/guided](https://go.semiprocycling.com/go/578ucp)