- Grand tours are phenomenal feats of endurance
and physical exertion, and they place huge demands
on the riders that race them.
On the one hand, the athletes need plenty of fuel
to get them 'round the three and a half thousand kilometers,
at an average speed of over 25 miles per hour.
But on the other hand, they don't want to eat too much
as to detrimentally affect their power to weight ratio,
which is very important in cycling.
(dramatic music)
To find out more I've come to the Giro d'Italia
to talk with Nigel Mitchell, who is the head of nutrition
for the EF Education First Pro Cycling team,
and formally worked with Team Sky in British cycling.
Nigel has worked with top athletes
who've had tremendous success at grand tours,
one day races, pretty much everything in top flight cycling.
So, he's an ideal person to talk to about the subject.
I just want to know if the riders
are allowed to have pudding.
Let's find out.
(relaxed music)
Good see ya, Nige. - Good to see you Riley.
- Yeah, so let's begin
with the start of the day.
- Okay. - Breakfast.
What do the riders typically have at the start,
before the stage?
- Yeah, so on a normal sort of stage,
a lot of people are surprised of how normal
the diets, the food is that we do for the riders.
I mean, we're so lucky because we've a fantastic chef
with Olga and she's a really key member of the team.
She's really really important.
She's one of the first people up
and one of the last to bed,
but it's super simple.
We start off with porridge.
We always have porridge.
- [Riley] I love porridge.
(laughing)
- You always have porridge and
the way we tend to do it is it's
just a very simple recipe that Olga uses
where it's just made with water,
so it's just very simple, very traditional.
- That's the Scottish way.
- Scottish way yeah, but we don't put whiskey in it.
We don't have whiskey and cream,
which is, I thinks more of a traditional Scottish one,
or it is when I'm in Scotland anyway.
So we have porridge and we have omelets.
Always have omelets.
Olga will count up how many eggs she gets
through in a grand tour and it's hundreds.
Hundreds and hundreds of eggs.
And then we have just normal sort of cereals,
we'll have some
cheese, we'll have some jams.
It's just really standard, simple stuff.
- Yep.
- We try not to go too massive at breakfast time,
mainly because if you do you're just swamping the system
with lots and lots and lots of carbohydrate
and what you're wanting to do
is just to be topping the system up.
- Right.
- But you're also wanting something in there
that's going to be, take some time to digest,
and that's why the eggs are great at breakfast
because they, the eggs are quite slowly digested,
they also put some protein in the system,
so that when the riders are racing
it's helping the recovery as they're going through.
- Constantly helping the recovery.
- Yeah, but it's just really standard, simple foods.
- [Riley] Yeah.
- [Nigel] People are always going
"No, it can't be that easy, it can't be that simple."
- Is there a sort of amount of
protein, carbohydrates, that kind of macro
things that you're trying to hit?
- Yeah, so what we're looking for from a
protein point of view, is aiming for about 20 grams
worth of protein, 20 to 30 grams worth.
Which you just easily get with the foods
that they're having at breakfast,
so you know, a couple of egg omelet,
the porridge that they're having,
maybe a little bit of ham.
That'll easily give them the 30 grams worth of protein,
and from a carbs perspective,
we're really looking just about a gram per
kilogram of body weight,
and again, that's easily hit without having to go
super detailed with it.
Just by the porridge, a bit of fruit,
it's really simple for them to do it
without them thinking about it
and that's really the idea.
Some of the work I'll do with them
is to try and think about those portions.
Even if we're scaling a pole down,
things like the carbohydrate.
We like to try and keep the keep pretty constant.
That's about say 20 to 30 grams of that at those meals.
(upbeat music)
- And you mentioned its different for
a shorter stage, like a TT.
- Yeah.
- So how does that?
- So TT, one of the critical, one of the really important
things, one of the critical things
is stomach comfort,
and obviously when you're on the skis
that's quite an extreme position,
so the pre-race meal,
what we'll tend to do is we work backwards,
so depending when the time trials are,
but you know, typically if your time trials
are at 2 o'clock, the guys will get up
and they'll have their standard breakfast,
but a little bit lighter portions.
They'll go for a bit of a ride, a recon
and then, three, four hours before the TT,
they'll have the pre-race meal
and the pre-race meal we always to the same.
It's just rice and omelet.
- When we get out onto the stage,
what are the riders eating during a stage?
- So during the stage, we tend to be aiming for,
depending on the intensity, and this is where
part of the education is that the riders
have got to really be thinking for themselves,
because you can't say to somebody,
you've got to have so many grams of
carbohydrate per hour,
because of the intensities that they might be working out,
so you can have guys sometimes the come back
and you look at the power files
and they haven't really been working that hard
and you've got other days they've just been
working full gas all the time,
so what we're trying to work on is
if they're riding relatively moderate
is for them to be aiming for about
40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour.
If they're working harder then it's more like 60 to 80,
even up to sort of 100 grams per hour,
and the way that we deliver the nutrition on the bike
is like a modular system.
In that we work on sort of 20 gram of carbohydrates
sort of exchanges, if you get me.
So like rice cakes about 20 grams of carbs,
a bar is like 40 grams of carbs,
so that's like two exchanges.
Depending on what drink we use,
we might be using an 80 gram carbohydrate drink,
so that's like four exchanges,
so we just work on that type of a system.
I don't think the riders always fully understand.
- Yep, but you monitor it.
- But we know, so we go you know,
if you're having a bottle of this--
So if you're having a bottle of the 80 gram
then that's going to supply you for an hour
and what we tend to do is use more of
that liquid carbohydrate feeding when the stages
are more technical, in the mountains when it's
more difficult to eat food, or later in the stages,
so at the first start of the stage,
again, depending what the riders are doing,
then in the bottles we may have
just a bottle of water and a bottle of race drink.
The race drink is Scratch which has got
20 grams of carbohydrate.
It may be that they're jobs going to be
getting in an early break,
or they know they're having to work,
so then we'll use like 80 grams worth of
carbohydrates in their bottles,
so we just sort of titrate it around that little bit
and we're very standard with the race foods that we use.
So we use a combination of
commercial bars and we also use
the rice cakes.
That's the biggest, most popular,
and most effective race food that
I think that there is out there.
(relaxed music)
- So something I want to talk about is,
is the residue of foods.
- Okay, yeah.
- 'Cause something you mentioned before
about riders avoiding foods that create
a lot of water retention in the gut.
- Well it's not so much water retention,
it's more the, it's more the fecal mass.
It's the poo,
so basically in our large bowel
and the bigger people are then,
the more there is,
so you can have a couple of kilos of
fecal mass in the bowel.
I mean, you have to be quite careful,
because of the microbiome, the bacteria.
It's important that we don't,
that we don't screw about with this too much,
so what we sometimes will do for particular stages is,
and we don't do it with all the riders all of the time,
it's really when people are particularly going for something
and is that we'll do,
we'll support a low residue sort of plan,
so this is just removing foods that the
body doesn't really digest,
but what we do is still ensure that we get in
some of the soluble fiber to help feed the bacteria,
so we're not avoiding all fiber,
but we're trying to avoid more of the--
More of what we might of think of the roughage
that really really forms that bulk.
- [Riley] Like, broccoli or something?
- Yeah and, or oatmeal bread,
so it's a really simple type of diet
which just tends to involve around eating
chicken and rice, or fish and rice,
and then we have
vegetable juices that go along side it.
- [Riley] Easier to digest.
- Well that's one of the other things with it is that,
especially as you're going into the final week
within a grand tour,
the digestive systems are going to be fatigued,
riders are eating big volumes of salad,
a lot more than what normal people would eat,
and so you can get some fermentation in the bowel
with all of the fiber, so again,
using things like the
vegetable juices.
It's a way of, in effect, concentrating the nutrients
and removing a lot of the bulk.
(light music)
- Just in your time since you've been involved
in professional cycling and nutrition,
how's it changed?
- Yeah, so I think there's been
massive changes.
I mean, I were quite lucky when I came into
world tour level cycling because I came into
a team that were brand new,
so I came into Team Sky
where we had a opportunity to rewrite the rules
and it were a very low risk so of situation
because we weren't held back by
some of the traditions,
so we were able to try and look at
what we were really trying to do,
and what we want to do,
what currently also works,
so a lot of the practices that we do now
with it is what I introduced, sort of 10 years go.
Things have evolved,
but what we tend to see now,
most of the other teams have taken
on a lot of those practices as well,
and so things have just moved along generally,
so one of the big ones
was previously, things like pasta
was really really heavily used in cycling.
Rice is used a lot more now.
Again, all of the teams do this.
Things like juicing.
You know go to--
You're in the restaurants at races
and you see a lot of teams now doing juicing.
Things like the rice cakes which
I can't take full credit for,
because it were actually Alan Lib
who got a recipe from his grandmother
about doing these years ago
and he did something similar,
and it were Brad Wiggins that said to me
"Oh Alan does these sort of ricey things"
"which are really good on the bike."
So we adopted and adapted some of those recipes
and again, all of the teams do that now
and you know, Alan tells me that when he were working
in pro-cycling, sort of 15 years ago,
people used to ridicule him
for him walking around with his rice cooker.
People used to take the Mickey
and now every team's got like, four or five rice cookers.
So there's been these changes
and I think that the fact there's much more
of a concentration on the quality
of food to what there were sort of, 10 years plus ago.
All of the teams now have a chef.
All of the teams now employ somebody
in a nutrition capacity to take the responsibility
for both the strategic, and the operational
activity of food and nutrition within the team.
The quality of nutrition products
I think have really increased,
but I think the intelligence around using
the products has increased as well now,
so I don't think it's a case that
people just go for racing we've got to use these bars,
we've got to use gels, got to use these drinks,
we're now thinking what is actually the most appropriate
fueling solution for what we're wanting to do,
so we're think about what the problem is
and then how do we address that problem,
not what have we got to do that we can just throw at it
and try to make it work.
(light music)
- Are there things that are black listed,
like you can't have?
- The way I tend to work, is I don't
really like a didactic approach,
good, bad.
What I like to try and do is to go,
okay, these are we feel supports a performance environment,
supports performance diet
and so the food that we will not provide riders,
if that's something they really want,
then they can go and get it,
but we don't ban it.
- Yeah. - If you know what I mean.
So if a rider were sat there eating or drinking it,
we won't judge them for it.
That's there choice,
so I think the only one of the things that we do
really avoid as a team, apart from on like,
the mountain stages,
so just off the bike
we avoid things like
soft drinks.
You know, colas.
- [Riley] They've been very popular in the past.
- Yeah, no no, I mean they are super popular,
but the reason that we
avoid them is because drinks are very low pH
and what we're trying to do throughout the race
is protect the digestive system
of the riders and if we have a lot
of acidic food, then it can effect how
our digestive system works,
so there's nothing wrong with a
can of soda, but the reason we don't give it
to the riders is because what we're trying to do
is to say this doesn't support what
we're trying to achieve.
And so some of the riders, when they get back
to a hotel, they might go "Oh God, I really need a can"
so they'll go and get one,
but we don't provide it as a team,
but we do use the little tins on mountian stages
'cause that can almost be a life saver mentally
for some of the riders,
so even though it doesn't support overall
what we're doing,
but on that situation, it's supporting
the performance of the guys and
there's only so much you can say you can't do.
- Yep, right.
Well, thank you very much for that.
Great talking to you as ever
and yeah, really interesting.
- Okay. - Thanks a lot for that.
Thanks to Nigel for his insight on
what the pro riders eat.
I think its really interesting
and I guess the take home messages are
they eat lots of variety,
lots of real food
that's easily digested,
but also practical for when they're
preparing things in strange places
or out on the bike.
It's also really interesting to see that the
coaches and nutritionists look at the
physical demands of each day,
'cause the days are often different,
and also the power data and the tailor
the food intact based on that.
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