Victoria, Gozo, Malta
Filmed by Aidan Buttigieg
Join Bec from FulGaz as she chats to Chris Harris from Precision Fuel and Hydration on all things exactly that! The pair will deep dive into the importance of fuelling and hydrating your body appropriately, specifically when it comes to indoor riding, not only during a ride but pre and post your ride as well.
DISTANCE
29.53 km
ELEVATION GAIN
468 m
DURATION
00:59:24
TOUGHNESS
227
Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning full gas rider. Welcome to you wherever you’re joining us from on our ride today. My name is Beck and I’m excited to join you for the ride today. I’ve al also got a special guest along with me who I’ll introduce very shortly. Now, you probably noticed that this ride is a little different to our normal rides and something we at Full Gas like to call a coach cast. Think of this as a podcast on wheels where we deep dive into a range of different topics, chatting to a bunch of special guests, and you get to listen along while you ride. This coach cast is all about fueling and hydration, and more specifically the importance of getting this right when you’re riding indoors. Strangely, some of us, and I know that I’m guilty of this sometimes as well, just don’t put the same level of consideration into planning our indoor rides. Often you just turn the trainer on, get changed, jump on, and you’re away. And sometimes you don’t uh plan out your nutrition or your hydration too well. So hopefully after today, um you’ve you’ve learned a thing or two. I’m hoping that I will as well. And that we’ve also changed your mindset mindset when it comes to planning um your indoor sessions. both pre- session, during session, and after the session. So, before I introduce our special guest for today, a little bit of housekeeping. You may have noticed that this ride is locked into steady mode, which means that the video will play at a speed independent of how much effort you put into the pedals. This is so you can hear and see what we’re talking about at the same time. Plus, if you go any faster, our voices will speed up and we’ll sound like chipmunks. So, trust me, it’s better locked in steady mode. All right, let’s get into it. So, some of you may have heard of a company called Precision Fuel and Hydration. They’re certainly making waves in this space and have been around since 2011. They they partner with some of the best uh triathletes and cyclists as well as professional athletes from a range of endurance sports around the world. Um even some F1 drivers, uh Premier League players and players from the NBA. So, very exciting stuff. So, a big full guest welcome to Chris Harris from Precision Fuel and Hydration, who is their senior sports scientist and has kindly agreed to give up an hour of his time to chat with me and you on all things fueling and hydration. Welcome, Chris. Hey, Beck. Thanks very much for having me. No problem. Great um that you could give us some of your precious time. I know you’re a busy man. Um, tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be the senior sports scientist at Precision Fuel and Hydration. Sure. So, I’ve always been a bit of a endurance junkie myself and I’ve I’ve competed in sports um a whole host of different sports. Um, I grew up as a as a regional national level swimmer. And yeah, I I so I’ve got the bug for long hard training sessions every day, staring at the black line for hours and hours and hours on end. As I started to progress um older, I started to look further field at different sports. Yeah, there was there was nothing really much taking my fancy. By the time I got to university, I decided I wanted to study sports and did an undergraduate and a master’s degree in sport science specializing in environmental physiology. So looking at altitude, heat, cold, and how it affects the human body and how it can perform. And naturally as a as an athlete myself, I was uh interested in what I was eating. So I had a particular interest in nutrition. And as it happens when I when I came out of uh university, sort of fell out of university into the global pandemic that was hitting us at the time and I moved to to an area where I met a couple of friends of mine, was doing some swimming in the sea with a couple of guys that that work for Precision. Got chatting, started explaining some of the issues that I would have when I was racing in hot conditions. And they they suggested come in, have a chat, and basically I haven’t left. Um, and that was a couple of years ago. And so now my role is as a sport scientist is helping athletes of a whole range of abilities from people giving their first half marathon, their first marathon a go, what they should eat and drink before, during, and even after right up to those that are trying to break eight hours for the Iron Man triathon, for example. So mainly it’s about iterating, optimizing, but fundamentally it’s about individualizing these strategies because there’s so many websites and forums and YouTube channels that people can you know you can Google and find the answers that you want realistically and so you’ll you’ll find someone telling you to eat cake and bacon rolls and and you’ll convince yourself that it’s a good idea. So essentially what what we do is help you know guide people towards the the sort of dos and don’ts based on scientific literature but also based on uh the practical application that we see with the athletes that we’re already working with what people are doing in the real world so to speak and helping sort of cross that bridge. Um the role also involves sweat testing which is a a primary part or a core part of our business and I’ll I’ll dive into that a little bit later rather than bore you in the introduction. Um, but essentially traveling around an awful lot, meeting a lot of athletes and and working sort of hands-on is is a a core part of what I do here. I love that. And I love that you guys are taking, you know, you’re constantly evolving and learning as a business. So, you’re taking the information from elite professional level athletes all the way down to, you know, first- timers in their marathon or or Iron Man or whatever it might be and and using that to constantly evolve, I think, which is which is awesome. And we were chatting, I guess, before we we came on to record about, you know, you can go down so many rabbit holes of, you know, do this to get this, you know, improve this on your bike or, you know, like you said, like eat cake, jump on your bike and you’ll go faster or, you know, like there’s so much fake news around nutrition and hydration. So it’s it’s awesome that um you guys are you know obviously at the core of leading scientific backed recommendations and knowledge but also from your own learnings through all the people that you deal with on a day-to-day basis. Absolutely. And that that’s a really important point what you finish with there that we are always learning from the athletes that we’re working with. Yes, we can we can certainly offer the advice based on years of experience and you know scientific research papers that are investigating the human body, but also you you’ve got to zoom out sometimes and realize that what people are doing perhaps in the field might be a disconnect between those two areas and often there are and so the optimization often doesn’t involve one or the other. It involves a hybrid sort of in the middle. So yeah, like you said, you know, eating one thing will equal another thing. Well, Chances are two people will have different opinions on that and perhaps just meeting in the middle somewhere might be a a more beneficial strategy. And basically just lifting the veil on on what people often regard nutrition as this secret science. And so know our philosophy is is sharing what we know and encouraging others to share with us what they know in the hope that we can basically just help you know not fake news. Real news. Real news. Exactly. That’s what we want. Uh just looking at this ride in Malta. So we’re doing the tour de Go um today, which was actually filmed by Aiden Butter Gig, who’s uh a ride engineer here at Fulgas. He was over in Malta training to win the national uh road championship and time travel championship over there, I believe. Um and he came away with that crown this year. But he um he is a stickler for for the right fueling and hydration, and he has to be at that level of of cycling. But um yeah, I mean this town is just stunning as we cruise through some of these really cool buildings. Um all right, so you know, thinking about, you know, let’s put our full gas rider hat on. Um you know, you could be doing an hour on the indoor trainer. You could be tackling, you know, one of our challenge events like the the grand tour that we’ll we’ll kick off shortly. It’s 21 stages over six weeks, so it’s a decent decent amount of time on the trainer. probably, you know, five, six hours a week, you know, doing indoor sessions and things. When we you mentioned sweat tests um earlier, do you get a lot of people coming to you from the indoor space wanting to have a sweat test done given that you know, you generally sweat a lot more too when you’re riding indoors? Yeah. So, that’s a that is certainly true. you know, your the the requirements for indoor training and and racing as the evolution of of indoor racing has come about, the the requirements are slightly different to the um those from outside and the main reason that those are different is because the way that your body responds indoors to out outdoors is different and so you need to adjust accordingly. The main difference between indoors and outdoors other than the you know the obvious that you’re not going anywhere is air flow uh and cooling. And so the reason the reason why you know our our business um essentially evolved was was from the sweat test which I talked about in the intro which essentially analyzes individual sweat sodium concentration. Now it does that through a process called pyocarpine ion speresis. Essentially that is artificially stimulating the sweat glands in a very localized area on the inside of your forearm which very closely mimics full body sweat sodium concentrations in that area. So if you were to take full body sodium concentration and a concentration from the forearm, they’d be very similar. So essentially the test will collect a small sample of sweat after stimulating the sweat glands and then that concentration is analyzed by a little machine that tells you how much sodium is in your sweat. The reason why we’re interested in sodium is because it makes up the largest uh conductivity percentage of your sweat of all the electrolytes that you lose. You lose more sodium than anything else. Sodium also plays a very very long list of roles within the body during rest but also during exercise. The main one is fluid balance which at the end of the day keeps us alive. And so during exercise it also helps uh with cooling and blood plasma um regulation etc. So combined with you’re losing more of it than any other electrolyte and it’s one of the most important electrolytes in the body. It makes sense that it’s a pretty important metric to to to understand and know how much you’re losing. And the reason why you might get it measured is because the difference, the individual variation in sweat sodium concentrations personto person can be huge. We’ve tested around 14 and a half thousand uh athletes globally from uh all different ages, uh genders, ability levels, from those that are couch potatoes right up to those that are, you know, training 30, 40 hours a week. And we see ranges from as little as 200 milligrams of sodium in each liter of sweat right up to those that lose in excess of 2,000 milligrams per liter of sweat. So you imagine using a copy and paste hydration strategy for those two individuals on the extremities would leave possibly both of them in in pretty sticky situation whereby one of them is either over or under uh replacing the electrolytes that they need which can lead to imbalances within the body and and cause unnecessary stress essentially. So that whole process is designed to individualize the electrolyte replenishment that you require in order to replace what you’re losing. Now, for indoor training, it can be sort of a a rabbit hole to to dive into because the most for the most part indoor sessions are shorter because they’re more intense and you go for quality over quantity when you know racing and training indoors. There are of course the exception and I probably put myself in this category of those you know the nutters that like to do three, four, five hour indoor rides um voluntarily. you know, it’s not even against my will. That is where the the replenishment of individualized amounts of electrolytes comes particularly important because the amount that you’re going to lose throughout that time becomes, you know, is larger and larger. So, the the amount that you could upset your body’s balances can be quite significant. During the shorter stuff, essentially, it becomes uh less important to know exactly the concentration of of what you should be aiming for, and it’s it’s less prescriptive. mainly because there’s there’s far more room for error. And if you arrive at the session well hydrated and you have something to drink during the the ride and then you rehydrate again afterwards, then the the likelihood is it doesn’t need much more thought than that. And you can certainly overthink things like this during the the shorter intense stuffs. But realistically, anything over 75 minutes or 90 minutes is probably where you’re straddling the realm between, you know, I should start including some sodium and some electrolytes in my drinks certainly. And I’ll talk about the the fueling alongside that a little bit later. But realistically, anything sort of north of two two and a half hours, that’s when the individualizing of, you know, okay, trying to replenish a similar concentration to what you’re sweating can really benefit and help you. We use this phrase limit your losses because everybody’s going to get dehydrated somewhat and if anything it’s not necessarily a bad thing to an extent but you want to limit the extent of which you get dehydrated so that it doesn’t impair your performance because typically we we everybody has a tipping point whereby beyond a certain level of dehydration their performance starts to become affected by it as a direct direct result of being dehydrated. Yeah. Right. And is there you talk about um being hydrated adequately before you start. What’s a good you know good way to is there a way that you can sort of tell you’re you’re hydrated well? Is it because you’re not thirsty? Is it you know for someone that’s just starting out? Like what or is it just making sure you drink a certain amount of of liquid before you jump on the bike? Yeah. So that’s a that’s a really good question as to how to know whether you’re hydrated. Realistically, there’s a most people have a far better understanding of their body than they probably give themselves credit for. And like you said, if you’re really really thirsty, chances are you need to drink a little bit. And so, you know, certainly listening to that thirst response, especially if you’re preparing for a, you know, a 1 hour or 90 minute ride. You the thirst response is one of the key mechanisms to listen to because your body’s really good at telling you what it does and doesn’t need. And so listening to that and usually we’d recommend for if you were doing for example an evening session then you can basically you can help your body out and prime it for highintensity exercise and lots of sweating by a process called preloading where because of the way that water and sodium are balanced within the body. They’re aiming for a particular concentration within the in the blood which it’s happy with. Essentially, it doesn’t matter what that concentration is, but your body is always trying to fight water and sodium to balance each other out for an optimal concentration. What you can do is take a strong strength electrolyte drink which can offset that balance and make the concentration slightly saltier than your body would like. And the way that the body combats that is then draw a little bit more fluid into the blood plasma which in doing that this is the preloading protocol I’m talking about whereby you’re increasing your blood plasma volume which can increase your body’s ability to thermorreulate reduce the cardiovascular strain on your system. So you might see a slight reduction in heart rate all by just taking a small dose of a strong electrolyte drink. We recommend something in around the region of 1500 milligrams of sodium per liter and drinking around four or 500 milliliters of that sort of concentration about an hour before you start. Basically, that’ll just make sure that you’re starting optimally hydrated. Now, that’s not going to cure everything. If you’ve if you’ve been savagely dehydrated the whole day and then you think four or 500 milliliters of some electrolyte will will cure everything. It’s it’s not. And so normal hydration still has to take priority throughout the day if you’re if you’re you know preparing for an evening ride or run. But oftent times people that are racing or training first thing in the morning doing an indoor session it can be really helpful to sort of wake up sip on something like this with your breakfast then head to the you know the session that you’re planning to do and and and go from there. That’s awesome. And then in terms of making sure I guess you know what are the signs that you haven’t hydrated properly. So if you obviously you’ve come off a session you you’ve fatigued you started to drop in your performance and you can feel that um you’re thirsty um you know are there any other telltale signs that you haven’t hydrated enough throughout the session? Is it fatigue? Is it what are we looking for? Yeah. So yeah, fatigue is a is a good one, but it’s a common misdemeanor whereby you can you can associate fatigue to several things or I know, you know, there’s there’s certain uh athletic populations that like to find excuses for for for the reason why they’re feeling fatigued. And so, you know, whether that’s a poor night’s sleep or, you know, the fact that someone looked at them funny the day before or whatever it is. But yeah, certainly dehydration can uh can result in excessive fatigue or certainly a you know limited energy availability and so the yeah I mean honestly like the but pre pre-event a good indicator is the color of your pee. You know it’s a it’s a little bit graphic if you’re riding first thing in the morning here. So I apologize if you just had your breakfast but it’s a good indicator day to day and you know certainly pre-ex exercise. What you don’t want to be doing is, you know, needing to go every 20 minutes, half an hour because you’ve drunk too much because overhydration can almost be as detrimental from a performance standpoint as underhydration or dehydration because you’re essentially drowning the body. And when I talked about that concentration that your your body’s striving for all the time, you can end up diluting your electrolyte concentration and you’re we’re not camels. We can’t just store loads and loads of water. So, your body will just flush it out of you. So yeah, in in all honesty, just using a using your judgment basically and and you will know whether you are over or underhydrated and if if you feel thirsty or if you feel like you know you’re a bit bloated, then you either under or over drunk basically. So just try and listen to your body. Yeah. Awesome. Well, it’s it’s you know, it’s so good to hear all these tips and hints because I think you know a lot of us do a lot of guesstimating when it comes to doing our indoor rides. Um, so you know, we really appreciate that level of of detail and I think, you know, the the color of your pee is always a always a hot topic and I think, you know, striving to get that as clear as possible, but not, as you say, not over hydrating. Um, and and causing your body probably more harm than than good by drowning it in um in liquid is uh never a good thing. Um, so to to get a sweat test, if our rider is is listening to us today, is there a way that they can get a sweat test without being with you at one of your your sessions that you run? Is there a way that you offer that? Absolutely. Yeah. So, we have uh sweat test centers all over the globe. um I don’t actually know the exact number but it’s in the region of 70 or 75 uh test centers who are individuals who um work under the brand under the banner of precision fuel and hydration sweat tests and they are uh oftentimes friends of the business or trusted uh shops, training groups, coaches that offer sweat tests with our technology all over the globe. There’s yeah we we have centers in most countries. I’m saying most because obviously with 7 to 75 we don’t have them in all but the the test itself takes around about an hour from start to finish and everyone that offers or delivers the sweat tests on our behalf will give you a essentially an hourong consultation. It’s totally at rest so you don’t need to turn up in your lyra. Um it’s you know you can have a coffee and chat through some uh individual uh issues you might be having or just questions come prepared and you can book that through the website right at the in the footer of the the page you can find our sweat test centers. Oftentimes we find people that are you know in the UK where we’re based on the south coast who will travel to us just to uh have a have a long chat and and and a sweat test at the same time meet the team etc. But yeah, like I said, it’s it’s not always possible, of course. Um, so booking in with one of the other test centers can can help you get that information. And then if if there’s more to to be discussed after you’ve had the sweat test, then like I said right at the beginning, we we offer 20 minute free video calls on the website just to chew the fat basically about fuel and hydration. And so oftentimes if you come armed with a a sweat test score and you just have some, you know, have some frequently asked questions to to ping us, then we can we can help. Yeah, that sounds awesome. So I know um Andy and the team, we uh saw that at Kona earlier this year and they had a queue a mile long with people wanting to get um sweat tests from them there. So it was super popular. I don’t think I found the time to fit it in, but I I feel like I need to go and and get mine tested. I know there’s there’s different things on the market too in terms of, you know, some people say weigh yourself before a ride, weigh yourself after a ride, figure out how much you’ve had to drink, and then you can, you know, uh figure out some of that stuff as well. Yeah, that’s a So, so that’s a really nice segue into the into the sort of second half of your sweat profile. So, there’s there’s two things to measure. One is what’s in your sweat, which is the the electrolyte concentration, and then the other is is how much. So I I talked earlier about the concentration being measured in milligrams per liter. Well, if you don’t know how many liters, then knowing the concentration is is is helpful, but it’s not the whole picture. So having both together. Now the concentration needs to be measured by a a sweat test and you know that that has to be done you know on a in a sort of lab environment whereby it’s all standardized because the concentration is is pretty important. The sweat rate testing which is what we call it where you measure how many liters that you’re you’re sweating can be done basically during any training session and the only piece of equipment that you need is a set of bathroom scales. And like you like you said, if you weigh yourself before a session and then weigh yourself after a session, generally speaking, up to around an hour or 90 minutes of of exercise, the main reason why you would have lost any body weight is through sweat loss and evaporation, you’re going to have burned a small amount of of of calories and therefore that’ll account for a tiny amount of of weight loss. But generally speaking, most people’s scales aren’t calibrated accurately enough to even account for that if they wanted to. So we use the the the general conversion of a kilo lost in body weight is equivalent to a liter lost in sweat because sweat is predominantly water and a liter of water weighs a kilogram. So, if I were to do a 1-hour uh session, well, last night for example, I did do a 1-hour session where I was deliberately measuring my sweat rate at a set temperature because I’ve measured it and a set intensity and I lost just about 2 L in that one hour because I’d lost 2 kg of body weight. Now, the common question there is, what about if I eat and drink? The easiest way to account for that is when you weigh yourself beforehand, the best way to do it is to weigh yourself nude because your clothes can absorb quite a lot of sweat and you don’t want you want all sweat lost to be removed from the scales. So, you weigh yourself nude beforehand. If you’re going to drink, just stand on the scales with your bottle in your hand full up. And if you’re going to have a couple of gels or a couple of chews or something during the ride, then hold on to them as well. And then when you weigh yourself afterwards, you know, get dressed, do the ride, come back, strip down, towel yourself as dry as possible just to get all the sweat off of you. And then stand on the scales again holding on to the bottle, even if it’s empty. And the the wrappers of basically anything you weighed beforehand afterwards because anything you’ve held in your hand has only gone from your bottles into you and therefore it hasn’t left or been added to the scales. So it doesn’t matter if it slightly inflates your pre uh session weight. It doesn’t matter. We’re measuring change rather than absolute. So essentially I was two kilograms lighter including what I would what I was drinking at the end of the session. And so my sweat rate for 270 watts for an hour was 2 L per hour. Essentially that will change quite a lot indoors versus outdoors. The main reason for that is because your body is always trying to thermorreulate to maintain a set core temperature because it can function optimally at that core temperature or within a range. You know, sort of we can go we can get slightly hot and we don’t drop dead. Our body just starts to try and cool us essentially. So the the pre and post weights will give you an idea of how much your sweat rate might change indoors versus outside because there’s no air flow inside. Now most people try to mimic air flow uh outside which will evaporate your sweat more often. So it’ll make your sweat more effective by putting a fan on. And so you can probably get quite close if you’re you know riding indoors versus outside. You can probably get close to keeping your sweat rates the same if you can get the temperatures, you know, similar and the air flow similar and the intensity similar, but the the, you know, the what you might need as in what you might need to drink would be different because, you know, your your sweat rate would be would be lower outside, right? So, when we’re doing our sweat test inside, should we be having a fan on or off? That is that’s a million dollar question now. It’s it’s there’s there’s some school of thought and I’m probably in the camp that having no fan isn’t particularly representative of any form of cycling because there’s no cycling you’re going if you’re preparing for outdoor racing then what you want to try to do is simulate outdoor conditions. So the gold standard would be to do outdoor sweat rate testing. If you’re preparing for, you know, for example, you’ve got a, you know, a twohour stage of the of the tour on on on full gas, then and you’re gonna have a fan on, then cool, have the fan on your sweat test because you want to try and predict in training what’s going to happen during the races. So, yeah, we, you know, we we torture ourselves here in that we being sport science team torture ourselves in the lab here by not having a fan on because we’re trying to measure absolute sweat rates. And so we have standardized the protocol that we do and the one hour is done without a fan. The fan is on but it’s facing away from us to circulate air so it’s not totally dead air. Um but believe me it makes minimal difference but that’s because we’re comparing one test versus another test versus another test. And so yeah it’s it’s the easiest way to standardize things. So it’s the that’s the joys of being a lab rat basically. So yeah I would have a fan on if I was doing that testing. That explains the um the two liters of sweat lost in the one hour session if if you had no fan on. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because in in a similar if I were to do the same conditions and the same intensity for the same amount of time, if I had a fan pointing directly at me, then the likelihood is yeah, my sweat rate would be lower because my sweat would be evaporating better because the air flowing hitting my skin would evaporate that sweat and therefore my body would have to sweat less to cool me because the sweat would be more effective. But yeah, as it happened, when there’s no air flow on you, as I’m sure everybody that’s fan has ever broken or doesn’t have a fan will know, the sweat just pours off of you, which essentially from a physiological perspective means it’s not actually doing that much to cool you because it’s the evaporation of the sweat that’s important. Yeah. So, there’s a tip for anyone, you know, still playing around with their indoor setup. Make sure you have a fan pointing at you while you’re riding for optimum um optimum performance really. I feel like if if um that sort of how the how sweat works, you you want it to be evaporating off your skin faster than just sitting on it. Right. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, the the only counter to that would be if you are specifically preparing, you’re doing some heat preparation, some heat acclamation where you want your body to get hot and have to be stressed and to to sweat a lot. In which case, yeah, the fan off is the is the only way to to try and jack the heat up and stress the body in that sense whereby you’re not giving it the easy out, which is is a fan that will cool you down because I know certainly we’re in the depths of winter here in the UK and there are people that are preparing to go and race, you know, down in Australia and the conditions there are very, very different. And the only way to simulate that is usually indoors, windows shut, no fan. Sometimes people put the heating on or they’re sticking their turbo trainers in the in the shower, you know, or in the bathroom with the shower running to get the humidity up. And I’ve seen all sorts of tricks trying to get themselves hot. But yeah, if you’re in for for just general comfort, get the fan on. Yeah, I know. We’ve got a um a greenhouse set up in the full gas office with a a smart bike inside and Mike our founder spends quite a bit of time doing various tests on his body and things in there in terms of you know uh using like core body temperature sensors and all that sort of stuff to see where his performance goes when he gets that temperature up. So yeah, I mean it’s good for that heat heat acclamation and if you are prepping for for a race um you know that is in that hot climate then yeah let’s turn the fan off. But I think anyone that’s doing a a grand tour um advice would be to have have the fan on to help you help you get through it and keep your body working efficiently. Um okay so we’ve spoken about uh the importance of air flow um the sweat sweat tests and the the sweat rate tests as well. So I think anyone who’s is interested in maximizing um their performance I’d highly recommend u you know going and doing that. What are your tips for you know staying well hydrated during a training session? We spoke about arriving um really hydrated. What about like during the session? Are we what are we are we drinking to a number or are we drinking to thirst? How are we tackling that during the session? Yeah. Well, essentially the the main the main takeaways during a session, like I said, most people aren’t going to be on the turbo trainer for hours and hours and hours. And so, the key recommendation during the one hour or 90 minute session is to just not overdo it. People can get caught up in especially having just sent you down a rabbit hole of testing and and iterating amount of fluids you’re losing. People can also get carried away thinking I need to drink X amount and I need to you know I it needs to have this much sodium in it even for a 1 hour session when like I said right at the beginning in reality for the shorter sessions the likelihood is if you arrive hydrated and you have something to drink during the session then you don’t actually need to do much more than just drink the thirst. There is only a specific sort of criteria or scenario whereby you might aim for a specific amount of fluid per hour and that is for example if you are preparing for a very hot race that was going to last several hours and you struggle to drink. That is where having a set amount to drink on an hourly basis can be beneficial to train yourself and also to train your body to be able to absorb a certain amount of fluid whilst riding on an hourly basis. But like I said, that’s a very unique scenario that a lot of high-end professional athletes that know their sweat rate, know their sweat sodium concentration, and know how much they’ll likely be losing in a four or five hour race, and they might need to run off the bike for for a few hours. During that bike, they might know that, okay, I need to drink this amount, otherwise by the time I get off the bike, I will be too dehydrated to to run the marathon. So drinking to thirst is 100% the the recommendation for indoor riding unless you’re going really long or you’re preparing for a specific event. And that drink to thirst can be both water and electrolytes. So you’re not going to get so depleted during a one-hour turbo session in terms of electrolytes or water really unless your sweat rate is you know excessive. you know I’m talking three four plus liters per hour which we have seen but yeah the likelihood is that drinking to thirst salting to taste during these short sessions will likely you know be more than enough and like I sort of I feel like I I’m a I’m a broken record here but I your body is is something that you understand you as an athlete everyone listening will understand better than they give themselves credit for and so if you find yourself you’re getting a slightly dry mouth for example and you feel like you’re just craving some plain water, chances are you’ve just tipped the scales one way whereby you’ve overs salted, you’ve put too much electrolytes in your drink. If you find yourself craving salty foods, for example, then give yourself what your body’s after. Your body is telling you that it’s slightly deficient in something and therefore maybe add some extra electrolytes to the drinks or increase the amount of salt on your foods afterwards. for example, I know plenty of people, you know, come back in from a a long hard hot workout in, you know, in the in the sun and they just crave something really salty and so, you know, listen listen to your body in in that sense, especially during in your training and try not to overthink it. Yeah. Nice. I know a lot of our Iron Man athletes um love a hot chip after after a long day racing in the Iron Man, so can relate to that. All right, so we’ve spoken about hydration. Let’s move on to fueling because this is just as important um as the hydration stuff. Tips for fueling, I guess, when you’re on the indoor trainer. I know you’ve obviously mentioned that hydration and things start to the importance of that start to ramp up the longer the ride. What about what about with fueling and carbohydrates and stuff like that? Sure. The thankfully the the recommendations from a scientific perspective for fueling are a little bit more generic whereby the hydration is very very individual. The amount that the the fuel that any human being requires is as I said far more general. And in terms of indoor training, the main goal is to arrive at that session with topped off energy stores so that you can perform without needing to, you know, without bonking. Basically, we’ve all bonked during a session where you go too hard or you, you know, you’re in the evening and you haven’t eaten since lunchtime and your body basically is is running out of energy. Now, that energy is going to primarily come from carbohydrates. When you’re working at a moderate to high intensity, the higher intensity you work at, the more reliance on carbohydrates your your body’s going to going to use. And so, you can prepare for that and and similar to the way you preload in terms of uh having some electrolytes beforehand to start hydrated, you can pre-carb, so to speak. The trendy phrase is carb loading. You don’t need to do that for every training session of course, but giving yourself a carbohydrate rich meal, you know, within three or four hours before a training session, it’s going to be key high intensity will make sure that your muscles and liver carbohydrates are predominantly stored are topped off or you know, best case scenario is that they’re full or at least they’re not running on empty because you can uh store enough carbohydrates most people for an hour to 90 minutes worth of moderate to high intensity exercise, then it starts to become depleted and your body’s response to that is it slows you down because it can’t carry you can’t carry on pushing 300 watts anymore without, you know, with the current energy stores because you’re running out. So, it will slow you down. You’ll feel like you’re, you know, getting low. Your blood glucose levels start to drop and you’ll feel awful basically. And we’ve all been there, right? So you can preempt that for these shorter intense sessions by making sure that you have something with plenty of carbohydrates in it to top off those stores, you know, within the the three or four hours beforehand. And and that could look like a bowl of porridge or some pasta or some some chicken and some rice, whatever your preference is, as long as it’s got plenty of of carbohydrates in it, basically. Nice one. And what about if you’re doing an early morning ride? What do you suggest for people that are sort of rolling out of bed and onto the the turbo? Should they take the time to, you know, have a piece of toast or something and before they get on? Yeah. I mean, this is this all comes down to, you know, what your what your priorities are basically. So if that session is a really high quality, highintensity session, then preparing for it, you know, just planning ahead by having a carbohydrate rich meal for dinner the night before and then when you wake up, yeah, just as you said, try and have something like a carbohydrate snack like a piece of toast or a bagel with some jam on it or something, you know, with a bit of honey on it will certainly help. I’m guilty of it and I think probably most most people are. I roll out of bed and I’m in the pool about 15 minutes later. And if I’m going to do a particularly high intense high intensity session, then I’ll try and have what we recommend anyway, which is a final carbohydrate hit sort of within 15 to 20 minutes before starting something high intensity. And what that does, it looks like between 25 and 30 grams of carbohydrates. So something like an energy gel or a chew, fast acting carbohydrates that’ll hit the bloodstream quite quickly and therefore when you start exercise, your blood glucose levels, glucose being the the energy that your the muscles use, are already primed and ready for exercise. And so, you know, you can’t trick your body into priming it and suddenly you’re able to do four hours of training off of that. But for the shorter intense stuff, having something that is, you know, short fast act or quick fast acting um carbohydrate dose can basically just prime yourself for exercise. So I find myself doing that in the car on the on the way to swimming, just having something like a chew just to give my body the best chance. And then, you know, if I were to do a three-hour trainer ride at that time of the morning, I would have to just prioritize getting up a little bit earlier and eating something a little bit more. I’m not saying I’m getting up two hours before a session to, you know, because then you’re trading off, you know, breakfast versus sleep, you know, so recovery versus preparing for that session optimally. But using your better judgment and understanding if you’re trying to achieve quality and you’re not eating, you’re going to sacrifice quality. And so moreover, you’re going to sacrifice how quickly you recover from that session because your energy availability post session is a key determinant of how quickly you recover. So thinking about it all as a one big picture and so carb meal the night before get up try and have something you know sort of 45 minutes an hour beforehand if it’s not possible try and have something you know at all and then when you hop on if it’s going to be a long one structure out your fuel plan to make sure you’re getting this is a nice segue into the during fueling somewhere between 30 up around 30 grams per hour if you’re going between an hour um 75 minutes and then between 30 and 60 grams per hour. If you’re going up to around two two and a half hours if it’s going to be longer than that, aiming for between 60 and 90 grams per hour of carbohydrates. So yeah, that was a lot of numbers all at once, but basically shorter sessions don’t require a huge amount during because your energy stores are likely enough to cover you for that session. But something might just help with perceptual energy. So, you might just feel a little boost from having something going slightly longer. The sort of mid-range, 90 minutes to two and a half hours, you’ll need something certainly, and the recommendations are between 30 and 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. And then the longer stuff is where you’re going to need to replace a good proportion of the amount of energy that you’re burning. So therefore, a minimum of 60 grams per hour is recommended for that. And if you’re training at a very high intensity or preparing the body again for for race scenarios, then pushing up towards the the upper end of those recommendations, sort of 75 or 90 grams per hour can help simulate that, but also give your body, you know, the the amount of energy that it’s burning. Yeah, that’s um I mean a lot of numbers, but really useful information for our writers to take in. And there’s been a lot of talk of late I guess in the last year really of you know when you look at the the professional pelaton u you know racing in the tour to France and all the grand tours and things and the times um for some of these clims just you know coming down and and the riders getting faster and you know people putting um obviously you know technology and bikes is always evolving and things but I think the biggest thing has been this understanding of of fueling and hydration and and you know being able to replenish that carbohydrates that the body needs has and that understanding across you know professional sports I’m sure you’ve seen that in your role has just you know help performance massively. Absolutely. And it’s a general sweeping statement. I don’t particularly like to make them but when it comes to carbohydrates fueling generally speaking as long as it’s tolerable the general consensus is that more is better. And so we’ve seen a trend, an upward trend in the amount of carbohydrates that people are consuming during races. And the the key determinant to whether that’s successful or not is the tolerance. So the the gastrointestinal comfort. So whether it’s if it’s making you feel sick, obviously that’s not benefiting your performance. And the only reason why you would increase the amount that you’re having is to benefit your performance, right? So there is an an ability to to train the gut. We’ve seen, like you said, tour level cyclists that are hitting 120, 130 grams of carbohydrates per hour with no issues at all. But the average person, if you told them to go and, you know, they’re doing a one, you know, one hour training ride, a, they don’t need it, and b, they’d make themselves feel very, very sick if they just went straight in taking the same amount. And so there’s certainly there is a there is a space for that at the top end of peak performance whereby yeah you are pushing your muscles to the absolute limit and you’re also therefore needing to fuel them to the absolute limit of the amount that they can digest but there is going to be an upper limit of that. I think we are probably reaching you know that that sort of upper limit and the longer the event goes on for the stomach is a working muscle like every other working muscle it becomes fatigued and therefore the tolerance for that high amount of energy and the high amount of macronutrient breakdown becomes you know impaired and so there’s a reason why you don’t see people running for 24 hours that are that are hitting 120 grams per hour because you know it’s a again not necessary the intensity would have to be low enough to maintain it for 24 hours, but also the the stomach just simply wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely a good lesson in um if you are prepping for a longer longer ride might be a long uh fondo or sportif or even an iron man that um training your gut to be able to tolerate the required level of of um carbohydrates and and hydration and all that sort of stuff is is so important because you do see it unravel on course pretty quickly for people that haven’t trained with the the right processes in place. Absolutely. And and you we we’ve probably all had it where you feel a little bit bloated or your stomach feels a little bit full or you get a stitch or something like that. There’s it’s not saying that you can bulletproof yourself from ever getting any issue like that. But yeah, like you said, training your gut is this emerging philosophy that you you can indeed adapt your stomach because and and this is a really important point for indoor training whereby and especially in the in the heat when you get warm is that the amount of carbohydrates, the amount of fuel and the amount of fluids that your stomach can digest and process is determined or regulated by the amount of blood flow that your stomach gets. And during hot environments, blood flow, well, during exercise for starters, blood flow is redirected to or prioritized to the working muscles. Rightly so, your legs, your, you know, your arms if you’re swimming, the the key working muscles. There’s a reason why when you’re a kid, your parents told you don’t run around after you’ve just eaten a full meal because you’ll feel sick. The reason is because the blood flow is being redirected away from the stomach and so it just sits in there and make you feel sick. You can over time in the same way that you can or a similar way that you can train your legs to be able to, you know, six minutes per kilometer might feel like, you know, you’re running full, you know, full gas, pardon the pun, then suddenly 12 months later, you’re running a fiveminute pace and, you know, you’ve trained them to to to to be able to do that, whereas it wouldn’t, you know, it wasn’t possible 12 months ago. Likewise, you see a progression in the ability for the stomach to absorb and tolerate carbohydrates whereby sometimes people having one gel every hour makes them feel really full and really sick. And then, you know, I’ I’ve gone along this process. So I’m, you know, I’ve tried and tested my own guinea pig of of this this protocol whereby increasing the amount that I was taking during key sessions once or twice a week meant that by the time I arrived on race day, 100 120 grams per hour was no issue at all. The reason why I said it was so important for for um performing in the heat, so for indoor sessions, is that blood flow is, you know, compromised by virtue of your sweating an awful lot more. So your your blood volume is reduced and therefore blood flow and the the ability to transport nutrients into the stomach into the bloodstream is is compromised more so in the heat. So there is a very very clear crossover between hydration and fueling and it’s easy to talk about them separately but they are so interlin that you could find yourself getting dehydrated and even though you could eat as much as you like you can find yourself bonking and that’s because the lack of fluid the dehydration means that those carbohydrates aren’t able to get into the bloodstream. So, it’s a yeah, that’s sort of a a good I’m struggling to think of the right word, but it’s a it’s a good way to uh calibrate whether you’re doing something right or something wrong. Because if you’re bonking and you feel like you can look back and think, actually, no, I’ve been smashing, you know, 60 75 grams per hour. How am I feeling this? And then you look at your water bottle and it’s sat there in front of you on your desk perfectly full. Then, you know, there’s there’s there’s they have to cross over. And so, Just understanding both of those two things working in harmony together can be really important for making sure that you’re getting things right. Yeah. Nice. Another good takeaway. I’m writing notes feverishly. Um hopefully writer you’re doing the same in your in your mind. This is all gold from Chris. So thank you. Before we wrap this up because we’ve got a bit of a climb left to the finish here, I wanted to talk about our 21 stage grand tour. um which Precision Hydration are partnering with. They’re offering up some great prizes. Um if you’re listening to this and the tour’s already happened, my apologies, but you know, we have plenty of challenges throughout the year. Um whereby we’re asking people, as I said, to do, you know, three or four indoor sessions a week for a six week or so period. Um which is a lot. It’s a lot to fit in between life and work and family and all the rest of it. What would be your kind of tips for getting the most out of your tour when it comes to I know we’ve spoken about a lot of tips already, but if you had to say, you know, leave our rider with one gem, I guess, of of wisdom to get them on their way to having a good tour in terms of their fueling and hydration, what would you say? It’s probably quite cliche and I think it probably goes for most areas indoor training, but just planning ahead. don’t arrive at the, you know, if you’re doing two or three a week on the on the third one for the week, if you’re time crunched that, let’s be honest, we’re all time crunched, right? And so if you can be proactive and you know you’re you’re going to reduce barriers by making sure that your train is set up properly, making sure that your iPad or your laptop’s charged, whatever it is, if you can also just prepare that if you know that you need to do a session first thing in the morning, then put a a banana next to your bike. So as soon as you wake up, you’re you’re eating that, have your water bottle filled overnight. you know, if you’re if you’re already feeling a bit dehydrated, pop an electrolyte tablet in that bottle to make sure that you’re you’re not doing yourself, you know, a disjustice or, you know, underpinning your undermining your performance by being dehydrated or underfueled. Just yeah, get ahead of the game. And it’s it really isn’t that much work to do. If you’re already going to prepare, you know, you get your kit out and have it ready to go, then just prepare for it. And that goes for before during stages. again they’re unlikely to be like savagely long. But afterwards if you’ve then got a full day of work or you want to do a you know another session for example at lunchtime or you know whatever it is then just have yourself you know a a meal ready immediately afterwards. So your your overnight oats for example. So as soon as you finish the session you can start recovering you know start drinking straight away so that session on session on session for each stage to stage you’re not just gradually declining in performance because you’re getting more fatigued and and more dehydrated and and and underfueled. And if it’s going to be a very aggressive stage and and high intensity stage and you want to go all in then yeah just prepare for that. Make sure you’ve got some form of carbohydrates in your bottles or, you know, on the on the desk in front of you, a gel or a chew, whatever it is, just so you’ve got enough to get you through. All great advice. One other question I had before we before we wrap this up is recovery is obviously important. It’ll be important for a rider that if they’re doing this grand tour once they jump off the bike, you know, and and often the reflex is to to go for a protein shake as soon as you jump off the bike and and smash one of those down. What What’s your thoughts around um protein versus carbs for recovery? Yeah, a much more common question now than it was probably five years ago where like you said protein was king for for post exercise recovery. It’s certainly not, you know, it it’s it’s not dethroned. Protein is still important, but protein is is mainly involved in the rebuilding of of broken down muscles. And essentially the what what you could optimize is is adding carbohydrates to some form of protein whereby you help the muscles rebuild but you’re also replenishing your energy stores because like I mentioned earlier the quicker you can restore your energy levels or the the lesser degree that you can deplete them if that makes sense a double negative then the the quicker you will recover and put it into context of what you want to try and achieve if you have have another training session within 24 hours, then recovery from this session is going to be quite important and you’ll have to optimize it to restock your glycogen stores, rehydrate properly. And also, you know, a little bit of protein can always help with with muscle, you know, reynthesis. As long as you, you know, you don’t need a protein shake after a one-hour steady ride, you know, you certainly don’t need to be going crazy for this sort of stuff because your day-to-day diet should be giving you, you know, the the macro and micronutrients that you need in order for that. But if your, you know, session is is not for another couple of days, then, you know, you can you can relax a little bit and a decent amount of of carbohydrates post exercise is is always a good idea because your body is primed for absorbing those sorts of nutrients post exercise. But yeah, the ideal combo is is a a bit of both basically. And I should have said uh earlier that one of the the one of the things that we do uh as a company is we publish um a whole host of blog posts on our website which essentially do a deep dive into almost I’m not going to say all but just about every topic in fueling and hydration and sports nutrition and even topics outside of that. And so things like training the gut that we talked about preloading, timing of your carbohydrates, and even we’ve got a blog post called proteins or carbs, which one’s best for recovery. Have a look on the website. We we’ve got blog posts that sort of talk through all those bits and bobs in a little bit more detail, and you don’t have to listen to me waffle on about them. Now, I must admit, I got lost in your website down rabbit holes of blog posts and and different articles and things. So, highly recommend as a as a trusted source of of um advice in this space for sure. We are what four minutes or so away from our ride. The other thing that’s really cool on your website and from what I believe um in chatting with Andy is it’s relatively new and it’s a free um fueling and hydration planner. So, you can basically go in and, you know, tell your tell your robots what event um what event you’re doing or planning to do and um where it is and when it is and all that sort of stuff and and a bunch of sort of information on yourself um as a writer and then it will spit out kind of a strategy for for your day. Is that right? I probably oversimplified that massively. Absolutely. No, absolutely not. So that it’s designed to be a simple tool that you can use as many times as you like. You can, you know, for every race that you’re planning to do or even if it’s just a a specific training session that you want to prepare for, but you want to make sure that you’re you’re along the right lines of what you might need to eat and drink, then yeah, absolutely. We have a free fuel and hydration planner that is far more uh complicated and um detailed than your your your regular algorithmic you know drink this eat that because it accounts for basically we as a sport science team designed it and so the the best will in the world we’re trying to get our brains into this you know the the planet and so that is basically the first step if you’re looking for general advice of what to eat and drink go to the planet If from there you’re after a little bit more detail or you have some questions from that, book a video call and then from that we can talk about everything that the the planner recommends. But basically you can quite rightly as you summed up swim, bike, run, triathlon, training session, race, whatever you want to to to put in there, you you put in how long it’s going to be, where it’s going to be, likely temperatures, a little bit about you, how sweaty you are, how hard you’re going to work. um your a bit about your training history and it’ll essentially pull together uh a plan for what to do beforehand, what to drink and what to eat and how much and some recommendations of what you might use to to do that. They of course re they recommend our products because it’s our fuel and hydration planner. Um and it’ll it’ll give you an example of of what you might need to to get to get you through that race optimally. Yeah, I know. I I did it for my race that’s coming up and um it worked a treat and highly recommend your carb chews. They are delicious. We are almost at the end of our ride now. Roughly 250 meters to go coming through this cute little street in uh in Malta. Thank you, Chris, so much for your time. I know I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully our rider has as well. Um, we really appreciate you taking the time to chat to us today. And yeah, head over to the precision fuel and hydration website for stacks of information on how to nail this stuff, whether it’s in your training or your race, and uh, you know, get your race plan ready from their their planner. So, thanks again, Chris, and I’ll look forward to chatting with you soon.