What the UCI nutrition statement means for your week

You’ve packed enough food for the ride. Then the group gets moving, the road narrows, or you hit a long rough section. Half an hour later, the gel is still in your pocket.

The fuelling plan looked fine until you had to ride the bike.

That’s what caught my attention in the new UCI nutrition position statement. It brings together 14 peer-reviewed reviews across cycling disciplines. Once you get beyond the familiar advice about carbs and protein, there are some useful differences in how riders actually get through their day.

Take BMX. A race might last only 30–40 seconds, but a rider can face up to seven races in a day. Nutrition has to support repeated efforts and the gaps between them. In enduro mountain biking, the timed descents might each take 2–8 minutes, while the full event, including riding between stages, lasts 4–6 hours. Those untimed transitions are both work and an opportunity to eat and drink.

There’s a lesson there for the rest of us. Think about an early drive to an event, a warm-up, a delayed start and the trip home. The activity file only captures part of the day you need to organise food around. Or consider a weekend with two rides: what you do after Saturday’s finish is part of preparing for Sunday.

Then there’s the difference between needing fuel and being able to reach it. The statement describes how technical mountain biking and cyclo-cross restrict opportunities to eat and drink. Gravel adds another problem: event rules and remote courses can leave riders responsible for carrying supplies or stopping to restock. Professional road riders may have food handed up from a team car. Your gravel ride probably doesn’t.

For us, that makes the route part of the nutrition plan. A gel buried under a jacket isn’t much use when the next safe chance to take a hand off the bars is twenty minutes away. Look for the accessible moments: a smoother road before the rough sector, an easier stretch before the climb, a refill stop you’ve actually checked. Practise accessing the food as well as tolerating it.

Even staying indoors changes the problem. The paper notes that cycling esports races are typically under an hour, yet sustained hard efforts and limited airflow can create considerable heat strain. Food and drink are within reach, but repeated hard efforts can still make taking them awkward.

That will sound familiar to anyone who has finished an indoor race with a full bottle beside them. Having it there and finding a moment to drink are separate things.

This is a position statement aimed mainly at elite cycling, rather than a trial proving one strategy works for every amateur. What I’d borrow is the way it makes you look at the demands and practical limits of the ride before settling on a nutrition plan.

What you do with this depends on which rider you are.

• If you’re time-capped: borrow from the short-event disciplines. Put your warm-up, hard efforts and next meal on the same timeline. If you’re going straight from the bike into work, have breakfast ready before you start. A short session can still sit inside a badly organised morning.
• If you’re over 50: give your indoor setup the same attention you give your outdoor kit. Start with airflow and a bottle you can reach comfortably, then use the easier parts of the session to drink. The statement also flags that thirst can become less reliable with age, so discuss a more deliberate plan if you regularly finish hot sessions having barely touched your bottle.
• If you’re chasing a result or facing a new event: mark the places you can eat, drink and refill on the route. Rehearse with the pockets, bottles or pack you’ll use. Decide which stops are necessary before race-day excitement makes skipping them seem clever.

A useful fuelling plan tells you where and when, as well as how much.

Source. Burke LM, Dolan E, Gonzalez JT, et al. UCI Sports Nutrition Project: Position Statement on Nutrition for Cycling. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Published online 15 September 2026; ahead of print: 1–27. doi:10.1123/ijsnem.2026-0135.

On my mindWhen did we start trying to look like cyclists?

I’ve been thinking about how we find our way into cycling, and who we learn from once we’re there.

When I was riding in the 90s, cycling was pretty much the biggest thing in my life. Club kit was easier to get hold of than most other cycling clothes. The people you rode with had a large say in what you thought a cyclist was.

A club ride could put you alongside people at very different levels. You were exposed to different ideas, different abilities, and people who had been doing it much longer than you.

That’s a part of it I still value. You could learn something you hadn’t known to go looking for.

Now there are far more ways in. You can find a whole cycling identity online, complete with the clothes, the bikes and the people to follow. You can also find a group that looks and thinks a lot like you. That can be a good place to belong. I just wonder what we miss when everyone around us has similar experience.

I don’t want to turn this into a test of who counts as a proper cyclist. Spending more of your life on a bike doesn’t make you more deserving of being there. And cycling’s place in your life can change. Mine has. These days there’s much more adventure, escapism, fitness and fun in it.

But the people who come to coaching because they want to learn and develop are still the people I connect with. That depth is there. I’d like us to keep making room for it.

This week, ride with someone you can learn something from. Or pass something useful on to a newer rider. We can carry that part of the old club culture forward.

— Damian

PS. If you’d like to head into spring 2027 feeling stronger, come and join us for The Winter Block.

You’ll have sixteen weeks of structured training, indoors or outdoors, with a plan, a small group and a coach helping you stick with it. You’ll follow the same key sessions at your own effort level and get individual feedback every week. You don’t need any experience with structured training.

We start on 2 November. Join before 30 September to lock in the $499 founding-member price. You can reserve your place with a refundable $25 deposit.

Semi-Pro Limited, Suite 1104, 70 Queen's Road, Central, Hong Kong.