Originally Posted by
burnthesheep
This is probably too much data for you...........but......just so you don't wind up drinking too many calories........
-at a pretty raucous 277w for a whole hour you'd burn 1000KJ (raucous for a beginner or low level amateur)
-your body typically is topped with 400-700 g of glycogen (liver plus muscle), this at 4.2KJ/g equates to about 2000KJ work using just glycogen assuming starting at 500g
-meaning you'd have to ride at 277w for just over 2 hours to deplete your body's starting glycogen
I would say if you're starting out and likely doing an hour or less, simply be sure to have your last full meal about 2 hours before. Then, a small snack with light carb some 30min before. Water on the bike. If you really need electrolyte for indoors heat, look into Nuun tablets. Those are electrolyte without adding unneeded calories. Then off the bike at end, sip some water and maybe have a small snack.
For what you're after I would:
-eat standard meal at least 2hrs before
-hydrate normally before during day
-small snack with a little carb before workout (maybe a Kid's Cliff Z-bar, lower calorie and carb, but has something)
-Nuun tablet in your water for the ride
-hydrate after, maybe a light snack to stave off cravings later
By all means, don't go for the carb amounts in many full strength sports drinks or "race day" drinks.
Good luck!
That's all good, as far as it goes. I see folks here saying, oh, you don't need pre or post, or even during fuel for most workouts, because your ordinary diet will supply the carbs and calories. But think about that for a minute. I have a daily diet which keeps me within a pound of the same weight week after week. The food is different every day, all 3 meals, my wife likes it that way and it's fine with me. She cycles through about 400 different dinner recipes.
Then I add in workouts, 6 days/week, week after week, totaling only ~3Mj/week, but guess what happened? After a couple weeks at that level, I couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't overtrained, felt fine, slept well, it was just that the pedals felt heavy and I didn't have any endurance. Obviously enough, that works for one ride, but not for a lifestyle unless you're going to start counting calories or increasing the size of every meal recipe to suit whether or not you're working out that day and how many calories you expect to burn. For me, that's insanely complicated. My wife cooks a big pot of something and we eat it for 2-4 days, not consecutively of course because we eat different food every day, but spread out over the week and planned ahead for for 2 weeks, partly because Covid, and partly because that's how we've done it for decades.
The by far more rational approach is to simply add calories to each day according to the energy expenditure or some approximation to that, and mostly carbs with a some protein. We've gone back to doing what we've always done successfully: we have a startup drink and a recovery drink every day we work out. The startup drink is always the same, but the recovery drink varies in carb calories depending on the workout. No more problems, steady energy every day, very slow weight loss, no more dropping by a pound the next day.
Chris Carmichael is full of it, that one has to put out 1700 kj before one deserves a recovery drink, much less a startup. Sure, once a week one can do that fine, but do that every day and you're going down the drain and real fast. It doesn't work, not even at my miserably low power output unless all you do is work out and plan and create meals.