Democratising cycling performance enhancement

-- Science will save you money

Economic uncertainty tends to bring out creative saving behaviour in everyone.

A little bit here, a little bit there – it all adds up to provide a safety cushion should things get really bad and you’ve got nothing useful to barter.

In this regard, food is a category ripe with potential savings available to the main household shopper. For example, forgoing filet mignon for chuck steak might require a few extra chews, but it won’t compromise nutritional value and yet delivers significant savings.

We’ve taken things a little further in our house.

Where once our meat patties were lovingly rendered from assorted offal and chicken giblets, these days we’ve captured fantastic savings, without comprising nutritional value, or great taste, with Fancy Feast Royale (just be sure to add a bit of cornflour and egg, to beef up your patties).

And this brings me to a significant column item on the great cycling spreadsheet – supplements.

To go without fattens the wallet, that’s for sure. But at what price? Just what is the real cost of being damned to the wrong end of an uneven playing field, languishing in sporting malnourishment and the torture of a dry mouth oxygenated with god-awful cat food burps?

Well, it doesn’t have to be this way.

In fact, it turns out that the average cyclist can have their nutrition and eat it, too. While the rest of the peleton is whooping it up on fancy adaptogens and fumbling with sticky over-priced gel sachets, the cost conscious cyclist should in no way be disadvantaged by this showy consumption.

With a little bit of thought and preparation, science-based performance enhancement is only a few ingredients and a blender away.

It’s time sporting performance enhancement was democratised.

So, I bring you my science-based high performance smoothie.

Again, I stress, unlike most of the supplements in your pantry, all ingredients are scientifically proven to enhance health and general performance.

Set-up blender and add:

- One banana (rich in vitamins and minerals)

- One medium sized beetroot, boiled till soft (nitrates contained in beetroot boost stamina by reducing the oxygen cost of exercise)

- One tablespoon of pure virgin olive oil (lowers the risk of heart disease, stroke and even Alzheimer's disease – which is especially useful for those longer rides when you can’t rightly remember how to get home)

- And a teaspoon of cod liver oil (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory)

Blend for 60 seconds, adding half a bottle of Heineken (fixes bonking).

The taste won’t be much, but it’ll work better than anything else you’re taking.

What’s more, it’ll get rid of that nasty cat food after taste.

You can beat an egg

-- But you can't beet-a-root

Chopper Guard readers were first to learn about the performance enhancing effects of Heineken. Now here’s something else for your nutrition regime. Beetroot. That’s right. Nitrates contained in beetroot juice boost stamina by reducing the oxygen cost of exercise. Get into it.

A revolutionary breakthrough in cycling endurance nutrition!

-- Get your next generation adaptogens now!!

Why are we suckers for nutritional witchcraft? Science be damned. Give me any day the pill form of herbs and spices Amazonian pygmies have for 250 years rubbed on their loins before the full moon rave and chicken slaughter.

Marketers have successfully commercialised this kink of human nature – a helpless attraction to unproven claims and hyperbole. Millions are being made from the promise of improbable gains.

Lord knows, I’ve been there myself, believing that somehow I can short circuit hard work and experience the miracle edge delivered by two pills, containing the grinds of a mythical sounding root extract, taken three times daily with meals.

Maybe if we better understood the psychology of this voodoo attraction we’d force manufacturers to better substantiate their claims.

Who better to get to the bottom of this ruse than Lunn Ave rider and Doctor of Bicycle Engineering Mike P.

He writes…….I just had to reef off. Can't help it. Because deficient and spasmodically variable diets still work for sedentary life, we probably never know until we cycle hard, that they were. One thing is for sure though, a properly balanced diet is a must if top level extended performance is required.

But how to assemble it, is the question. The answer for most is to grab "the products". They promise it all, and list so much bio-blurb we tire reading it, and just say Yes! YeS! YES! I must have it! And then the pill and powder popping becomes encouragingly placebic, and maybe even beneficial, especially if we had just depleted one or more of the harder to replace but fairly necessary micro-unknowns.

(We then become equally unwitting and enthusiastic peddlers for the product, even though the chance of our personal deficiency aligning with those of our associates is low.) So, why am I going on again? Because I read some stuff on vitamin C absorption that identifies that although a vitamin C pill carries mega vitamin C compared to an orange or a kiwifruit, the real food delivers in inverse proportion.

Extrapolating on that hugely (as my view is "Why not?") a balanced diet of minimally processed food is the real means to get the intake levels right. And better to fiddle with that, in the first place, than just estimate, then top-off with supplements.

But how to fiddle with any accuracy? My view, again, and it's just a hunch based on The Naked Ape etc, is that stuff just tastes great, when you really need it, and ever blander, when you don't.

This is my view on the food part of heavy training. Of course if I can get it there or thereabouts, toping off with supplements near race day, and when I next ride the Tour then it just becomes a be-sure to be-sure as opposed to an obsessive compulsive superstitious ritual. Do it the other way round - supplement up, and eat haphazardly - is not only not so good in terms of absorbability, it is likely to mask the taste-hunt.

So, yeah I will buy the stuff, but only for use after I work out on my primary (which I will spend the $128's on first). Hey - don't take this as a rejection of first-endurance etc. Far from it. When we earn, best we use the good shit.