Nutrition for cyclists, a complete guide

Why nutrition decides how your ride ends

Nutrition is probably the worst understood part of amateur cycling. Most of what is out there is written by brands that want to sell you their gel, so the message always ends in "take this product". We go the other way. We tell you what your body needs when you ride and how to cover it, without pointing you at a brand.

This is the nutrition pillar of the MoguWind blog, and behind it is Bidón, the free data field that tells you when to eat and when to drink while you ride. No accounts, no signing up, free.

Cycling nutrition guides

Below you have the most recent guides, ordered by date, and at the end the most read. It runs from the basics, what to have for breakfast, to the fine detail, how many grams of sodium you need if you sweat buckets in August.

The three moments of cycling nutrition

Everything you eat around the bike fits into three moments. Mixing them up is where most mistakes start.

Before. Set off with your glycogen stores full and well hydrated, but without an overloaded stomach. It depends a lot on how long before you eat. A big meal needs 3 hours, something lighter 1 or 2, a quick snack 30 minutes.

During. The goal changes. Now it is keeping blood sugar steady and replacing fluid and salts. The general range is 30 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour depending on intensity and duration, and 450 to 900 ml of water per hour depending on heat and how much you sweat.

After. The first 2 hours after the effort are when the body refills glycogen best. Take carbohydrate and protein there, in a ratio of about 3 to 1.

Each moment has its own article on the blog. This pillar is the way in.

How much to eat, in grams, per hour on the bike

The short answer is that it depends. The useful answer is this.

For a ride of under 90 minutes at low or medium intensity, you do not need to eat anything during the ride if you had a good breakfast. A bottle with water and salts is enough.

For rides of 90 minutes to 3 hours, between 30 and 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That is roughly one energy gel or one bar every 45 minutes.

For rides over 3 hours or at high intensity, you can go up to 60 or 90 grams per hour, with the warning that your stomach has to be trained to absorb that amount and not everyone tolerates it.

Ninety grams per hour is the practical ceiling for most riders, and the limit is not your legs, it is your gut. Glucose on its own saturates its transporters around 60 g/h. Mixing glucose with fructose in roughly a 2:1 ratio uses different transporters and gets you to 90. Beyond that you are into professional territory with protocols that need supervision and a lot of practice.

Each of these ranges has nuances we cover in the specific articles on the blog. What matters here is that you see the structure.

How much water to drink, in millilitres, per hour

The answer also depends, this time above all on temperature and on how much you personally sweat.

In cool conditions below 15°C, between 400 and 600 ml per hour is usually enough.

In mild conditions from 15 to 25°C, between 600 and 800 ml per hour.

In warm conditions from 25 to 35°C, between 800 and 1000 ml per hour, and often more for heavy sweaters.

Above 35°C it stops being about drinking. Thermoregulation as a whole takes over, and there what you change is the start time or the route, not the bottle.

Drinking a lot of water without salts is not the answer either. The more you sweat, the more sodium you lose, and drinking only water can end in hyponatremia, a dilution of blood sodium that gives symptoms like dehydration but needs the opposite treatment. Mineral salts, at least in moderate amounts, are needed on any long ride or in summer.

Gels, bars, isotonic drinks and salts compared

In the cycling ecosystem there are four main categories of nutrition products.

Energy gels. Roughly 20 to 30 g of carbohydrate per unit, fast absorption in 10 to 20 minutes. Easy to carry, useful in low moments. They exist with and without caffeine, with and without electrolytes.

Energy bars. More complete than gels, 20 to 40 g of carbohydrate with some protein and fat. Slower absorption but more filling. Better for long rides where you will get bored of the sweet taste.

Isotonic drinks. They combine carbohydrate with salts in concentrations the gut absorbs efficiently. They replace water plus gel for many cyclists, with hydration added in.

Pure salts or electrolytes. No calories, only sodium, potassium, magnesium. Useful when you already have enough carbohydrate and only need to replace salts.

On the blog we explain when each category makes sense, without recommending specific brands. The final decision depends on your gut tolerance, your taste preferences and your budget.

The classic mistakes that lead to the bonk

The bonk, that moment when the legs shut down and the head stops working, always has the same cause. You have emptied your glycogen stores and not been topping them up. It happened to me once on a nothing climb, 30 km from home, for setting off without breakfast thinking I could hold on. I could not. The mistakes that get you there are almost always the same.

Setting off without breakfast. Zero stores at the start, the bonk arrives sooner.

Starting to eat when you are already hungry. When you feel hunger on the bike, you are already 20 to 30 minutes behind. You have to eat before you are hungry.

Drinking only water on long rides. You lose sodium, cramps appear, performance drops without you knowing why.

A single kind of carbohydrate in high doses. The gut saturates the glucose transporters above 60 g/h. If you need more, it has to be a glucose plus fructose mix.

Trying new products on event day. Any new gel, bar or drink gets tested in training first. The stomach on the big day is not for experiments.

How Bidón handles the timing so you do not have to

Knowing you need 60 grams an hour is the easy part. Remembering it at hour three with a crosswind and your heart rate pinned is another matter entirely. That is the gap Bidón fills.

It is a free data field for the Garmin Edge. Two boxes on the screen, EAT and DRINK, each with a countdown, and a full screen alert with a different beep for each when the moment arrives. Low for food, high for drink.

It works from how long you have been riding, how hard you are going, the temperature and the bottles you carry in the frame. Not from your route. It has no GPX and no elevation profile, and for fuelling decisions that turns out to be enough, because what empties you is the watts you are pushing and that it reads live.

Three ways to run it. In Auto you install it and ride, no setup at all, and it works the numbers out as the ride unfolds. In Manual you fix your own grams and millilitres per hour from the Edge settings. And in Plan it follows a schedule you wrote yourself at plan.moguwind.com, with your own food and your own timings, sent to the head unit once with a six digit pairing code. You pair once and never again.

The numbers underneath come from published research, not from us. Jeukendrup for carbohydrate, ACSM and Sawka for fluid and sodium, Maughan for the heat adjustment. Every figure has its source and you can check it.

How the route changes what you should eat

A common mistake is to think of nutrition apart from the route. The route rules. A ride with a strong headwind burns 20 to 30% more energy than the same one without wind, so you eat more. A hot one makes you sweat and drink more.

The part that sees the route is MoguWind Plan, the web planner. You load the GPX, pick the day and the time, and it shows the wind along the whole route at the hour you will pass each point. With that in front of you, building the nutrition plan stops being guesswork. You know the hard stretch lands at kilometre 60 into a headwind, so you put the gel before it rather than after.

Then that plan travels to Bidón and the head unit reminds you while you ride. Plan knows the route, Bidón knows the clock, and between the two you get through the day without doing sums on the bike. Neither needs the other to be useful, but they were built to work together.