The science behind training and performance has advanced significantly in women’s cycling over the last decade, including a deeper understanding of how athletes fuel their bodies for training and racing.
As the peloton gets stronger, race distances get longer, and the competition season extends to nearly 10 months, it’s more important than ever for athletes to dial in their nutrition and hydration strategies. And what athletes intake as fuel sources, and when, must also align with the physical demands of high-performance training, menstrual cycles and hormone fluctuations, changes in body temperature, sweat loss and potential supplementation needs – all have a major impact on an athlete’s ability to adapt to the physical demands of sport.
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“Metabolism hasn’t really changed so much over time, and so the fundamentals, such as our macro nutrients needs – proteins, carbohydrates, fats and nucleic acids – the major biomolecules are the same, and you have to fuel with these things. What has changed are the recommendations and the awareness, which is more present now,” says Dr Logan Sprenger, who has worked directly on nutrition and performance with individual athletes and teams, zeroing in on the importance of adequate fuelling to help avoid symptoms of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S).
“Energy availability is really the cornerstone of female performance. So chronic under-fuelling has always been around. It quietly erodes power, recovery, and endocrine health. What I’ve seen working with lots of different sports teams on is that low energy availability is one of the most under-recognised threats in women’s cycling; it disrupts the menstrual cycle before affecting body weight.”
“Your menstrual cycle is really important because it’s one of the earliest warning signs of under-fuelling; you lose your menstrual cycle. If the focus on nutrition is about female physiology, then there are a number of key areas that are important to consider for athletes.”
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