Fuel Your Ride: Complete Performance Nutrition for Cyclists - Softcover

Hurford, Molly; Guest, Nanci

 
9781623366193: Fuel Your Ride: Complete Performance Nutrition for Cyclists
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1623366194 ISBN 13: 9781623366193
Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Athletes know that proper nutrition is important, but finding the right balance can be complicated. Fuel Your Ride is a comprehensive guide to performance nutrition for cyclists and provides all the tools you need to customize a unique nutrition plan to achieve maximum performance. This book teaches riders everything from what to eat on race day to avoid the dreaded bonk to how to lose weight while consuming enough nutrients and power hard training rides. Fuel Your Ride combines the expert advice of numerous nutritionists, coaches, and professional cyclists to present a simple, clean, and whole foods approach to eating complete with easy-to-follow recipes that include delicious and nutritious vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options.

In addition to chapters on in-exercise food and hydration, supplements, and weight loss, special attention is placed on what to eat and the best time to eat, taking into account the different nutritional requirements for training rides, race performance, and recovery. Fuel Your Ride provides cyclists with the comprehensive nutritional information you need to efficiently power your rides and perform at your very best.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Molly Hurford is a writer-at-large for Bicycling magazine and a level 3 coach with USA cycling. Prior to working with Bicycling, Molly was an editor at Cyclocross Magazine. She lives primarily on the East Coast but spends most of her time on the road chasing races and good cycling weather.

Nanci Guest, MSc, RD, CSCS, is a registered dietitian with both the Ontario and BC College of Dietitians. She is a certified personal trainer and certified strength and conditioning specialist, was the director of sport nutrition and head dietitian for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, and is the current dietitian for the Pan Am games. She lives in Toronto.

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CHAPTER ONE

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

N utrition doesn't start on the bike. Every single person--racers, nutritionists, and coaches--I talked to said this over and over, so it's worth repeating. On your race day, or that epic endurance ride you have marked on your calendar, your breakfast and ride fuel are only a small part of the equation. How you've been eating for the past few months plays a huge role, not just in body composition, but in how you digest, how you use energy, and how you perform. You wouldn't start training the morning of a race, would you? So why should your nutrition start then?

The first thing we want to focus on is where we are now. Without knowing how well (or poorly) you're eating, it's hard to know what to tweak to fix your diet. And when it comes to macronutrient breakdown, most people are surprised by what the breakdown actually looks like for their daily diets. Hint: Carbohydrates and fat sneak in more often than you think, whether you cook a lot at home or eat at restaurants for every meal.

What is a macronutrient? Macronutrients make up our food, and the big three are fat, protein, and carbohydrates. They work together to keep our bodies running. Carbohydrates fill up glycogen stores so we have energy to function and to ride; fat provides energy as well and helps to protect our cells and dissolve certain vitamins, while protein builds and repairs muscle--not just bodybuilder muscle, cyclist muscle, too.

In the next three chapters, we're breaking down these three into bite-size pieces (pun emphatically intended) so you know just how much of each to eat, the best time to eat each one, and the best options in each. Macronutrients aren't created equal; there are good and bad fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Let's get started so we can cut out the bad and begin focusing on the good.

YOUR BEST BIKE BODY

This is the big question for cyclists. What the heck is a bike body anyway? Is it one where your quads are so huge that you need specially tailored jeans to fit over your bulging muscles, or is it one so slender that even the tightest of skinny jeans are sagging off of your thin frame? Unfortunately, there's no one right answer, and like much of nutrition, it's all about the individual, as Smart Athlete coach (and slim but reasonably muscular elite racer) Peter Glassford explains.

"It's a complicated question--it depends on the sport you want to participate in," he admits. "There are a bunch of different sports within cycling, from ultra-endurance road cycling to multiday stage events to a track cycling event that may only last a couple of minutes. So there is a wide range of body types in cycling, not just skinny arms and huge legs."

Thank goodness.

But there are a few generalities that he shares.

Road Cycling: A road cyclist will typically be leaner, with not much muscle, low body fat, and much less upper body strength. Keeping weight low is even more important when you're doing more hilly rides and races versus flatter criterium races--to be successful, you have to watch out and keep weight low and muscle to a minimum. Not that strength training or consuming protein is bad, but you don't want to overconsume protein or do activities that tend to bulk up the upper body.

Mountain Biking: For mountain biking, on the other hand, you need a bit more muscle and upper body strength to navigate the varied terrain. It is common to see a mountain biker with a little more weight than your average road cyclist.

Track Cycling: This one is pretty variable, but generally, you'll see a more muscular sprinter body, similar to a running sprinter. It's very much power based, so having more muscle in the legs is key. They tend to be a bit bigger, but still pretty lean.

Glassford adds that when it comes to women, while the body types are similar to those we just described, there's a higher tendency toward outliers in the field. Just look at a women's professional field, and you'll see what he means. Tall, short, muscular, slender--there are so many different body types that can fit the winning bill for professional women's cycling. Even among the women interviewed for this book, there are huge discrepancies. "You see a much wider variation than you do in the men in terms of body types," Glassford says, and he's completely right.

But that just leads to the next point. Ride and eat right and your ideal cycling body type will find you. You can't change your DNA, but you can make your body most effective by--no surprise here--doing what you want it to do, and gradually letting it change. You wouldn't lift Olympic weights to get ready for a marathon, so why would you push heavy gears on the track if you're hoping to be a climbing specialist on the road?

"The sport takes care of it--whatever discipline you do the most of is how your body will start to develop," Glassford explains. "But you are limited a bit by your frame. That shouldn't discourage anyone though--there are outliers all the time. You see people make what they're born with work well- -a smaller, more muscular racer may be great at cyclocross, where being a little more built muscularly can help with lifting the bike over the barriers, running with the bike, and staying steady on the bike through the mud. There's always a discipline for you . . . or a technique that lets you compete in the discipline that you want to be in."

So before you throw this book out because you're afraid you'll never make it as a pro roadie because you pack on muscle like a linebacker heading into training camp, don't panic. There's still hope.

Look at this first task the same way you would look at creating a household budget: You can't make a reasonable budget if you don't have a clue where the money is going right now, can you? A food diary is a great place to start. Even if you're not trying to lose weight and are simply trying to appropriately fuel your workouts, keeping a food diary for a few days to make sure you're getting enough calories, or to see if you are consuming too many (and to see what your nutritional macronutrient makeup is), is an easy, cheap, and noncommittal way to get a snapshot of where your diet is. You can use a notebook, a spreadsheet, or one of the countless free fitness apps available on your smartphone. Pro cyclocrosser Jeremy Powers swears by MyFitnessPal, but choose whatever one you will actually use.

"You don't just know all of this nutrition stuff," Powers says when he talks about why he records what he eats and why he cares about the nutritional makeup of his food. "You have to be in a place where you make time to learn and to cook. I don't think any rider just immediately starts doing this. But I knew, for me, it was something I needed to do to get to the next level and keep my body healthy. And as I get older, I need to be on top of that."

Once you've recorded a few days of normal eating, you should be able to see patterns emerge. Maybe you have a huge breakfast, but don't go for a ride until midafternoon. Or, are you a late-night snacker because you train later in the day but eat a small dinner? Are you eating way more calories than you thought, or far less? Are you drinking enough water, or too much coffee? We make food choices that may not be the smartest (like that midday muffin 30 minutes before lunch) when we're not thinking about what we're doing, and having a written log is a great way of both taking note of those tendencies and working to curtail them.

The good news: Keeping a log isn't something you need to do forever. Think of it as an occasional exercise in mindfulness. "You do it, and then you take a step back the following season and say, 'Okay, that was good.' You begin to recognize where your nutrients are coming from," says retired pro road racer Ted King. "I think cyclists, in general, have their ears to the ground,...

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Verlag
Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1623366194
ISBN 13 
9781623366193
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
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