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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I haven't been a cyclist since about the time that the market of energy drinks first exploded. And at the time there were a number of articles that said that really all you need is Gatorade, that most of these new drinks were advertising more calories per liter, but Gatorade was already tested out on absorption rates and dialed in to the maximum calories per liter of water that the average human stomach can absorb.

The tricky word there is average. If Tadej can absorb an extra 5 grams per liter, then you should give Tadej an extra five grams per liter. If Jonas can absorb 2 grams less per liter than the average then you should give him that serving.

These race results come down to mere seconds per hundred miles, for cyclists that are averaging 20 miles an hour. Any 1% difference is going into the training regimen.

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I still use Gatorade because I'm a cheap bastard.

The limits aren't wrt water absorption, but gut tolerance of sugar.

I get about 100g of sugar into a bottle by doing roughly 50:50 Gatorade and maltodextrin, and then throwing in some extra Na an K salt if it's going to be hot. Although with the super hi carb stuff you should make sure that you have some plain water as well - it sucks to be super thirsty but only have carb drink on the bike.

Sibling comment explains about the maltodextrin. I'll have to read up more.

that is outdated advice. for one, some people sweat more than others, the salt levels in the sweat is totally different too. this means that if you're really serious about sport or are doing endurance races (ie 2 hours+) you should really not just use gatorade, but something where the mix of salt/water is closer to whatever you're sweating.

if i personally use gatorade for endurance exercise, i'll just cramp up after 90 minutes and not be able to ride normally. if i use a high salt mix instead, this isn't an issue whatsoever. I'm sure the exact same is true about food itself. remember that for the tour de france, last years time difference between the winner (Vingegaard) and the second (Pogadcar) was 8 minutes out of 82h 05' 42", aka only 0.16% faster overall. every single sub-percentage matters here.

there are tons of products that cater to this. the one i've been using is https://www.precisionhydration.com/ which is cheaper and more tailored than gatorade (i have no affiliation to them).

I basically just add salt to Gatorade and cut it with extra sugar and malto. It's a couple extra steps but I train regularly enough that I make a concentrate (100ml=200kcal) that I put in bottle and dilute as needed.

One of the runners I mined for training advice was using gatorade to take salt tabs. That was not the advice I took from him, though. I will probably avoid at least one injury from other things he said.

> that is outdated advice. for one, some people sweat more than others, the salt levels in the sweat is totally different too.

People forget that. They just follow "salt is killing you" advice, meanwhile I sweat salt like it's water. Last race I did had the sense to add salty potato chips to their rest stops... I didn't cramp up.

Meanwhile Gatorade is absolute trash for electrolyte maintenance for someone like myself.

The people drinking a gallon of water (not fluids, just water) a day are often flushing out electrolytes. There are a lot of things you might expect a doctor to yell at you about in an ER but from what I understand coming in with heart palpitations triggered by low potassium due to over-hydrating is a good one.

Yeah I wasn't talking about electrolytes, just calories per minute. The top level was about glucose monitoring not electrolyte monitoring.

It's funny that Precision uses almost exactly the same bottle as Nuun.

On the Netflix TdF documentary, they mentioned that the difference between the winner and last place is 2%. There was one stage where the winner won by 4 inches.

It also said that doping made a 20% difference, so either none of the current competitors are doping or all of them are.

> so either none of the current competitors are doping or all of them are

The drafting effect in cycling means that a clean cyclist can finish very closely behind a doped cyclist

That only works on the flat stages. A small difference in power to weight ratio makes a huge difference in finishing times on the mountain stages where drafting is less of a factor.

Don't forget the GC rules for assigning times.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_classification:

    Riders who finish in the same group are awarded the same time, with possible subtractions due to time bonuses. Two riders are said to have finished in the same group if the gap between them is less than three seconds. A crash or mechanical incident in the final 3 kilometres of a stage that finishes without a categorised climb usually means that riders thus affected are considered to have finished as part of the group they were with at the 3 km mark, so long as they finish the stage.

For this year's 5th stage of the Tour de France, the first 155 riders were assigned the same time.

see https://www.procyclingstats.com/race/tour-de-france/2024/sta...

And then there’s Pidcock who has the reflexes of a fighter pilot and can scream down the hills at speeds that would make you blanch.

I'm not sure their reflexes are better. It's more like they're the master of the feel and minutia of the airplane. They're also masters of managing the energy of their airplane, constantly trading off between altitude and speed. John Boyd was a fantastic example of that. There's a fascinating biography of him, "Boyd".

https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...

Do you suppose there are stats on number and success of breakaways out there? Could be my imagination but this year seems less dramatic than the ten years or so around Armstrong’s rein.

Did anyone else feel like there was more drama around the end of the Indurain era?

I feel like doping could show up as more intense struggles for first without necessarily increasing the spread of placing. Also people who drop out don’t count right?

> for cyclists that are averaging 20 miles an hour

I don’t think modern professional cyclists even can ride at 20 miles an hour ;-)

20 miles an hour didn’t win you the Tour de France in 1950. Nowadays, with better tech, better training, and shorter stages, you have to do over 25 miles an hour to win it, and the last rider in the general classification easily is within 10% of that.

The last rider that finished and it’s not like if you or I go out and try to ride a hundred miles at 25 mph solo. Drafting and team dynamics play a significant role is energy expenditure.

I'm not a pro cyclist but I've seen one stop before. By the intermediate value theorem, they can ride at 20mph.

They count it as gram per hour. If I remember well, pro cyclists can absorb 2-2.5 times as much carbohydrate in an hour than beginners.

I wonder how much of that is adaptive and how much selective. Does your body learn to absorb more, or do you have to have a high absorptivity to make it as a pro.

Both. So they adapted themselves to it, they didn’t born like that. It’s an intentional procedure. However, not everybody can handle that.

Maximum calories per liter sounds like something you really want to avoid unless you are engaging in extremely intense exercise.

Your body can burn calories faster than you can absorb them. And if you’re concerned about what sports medicine says the limits of human absorption are, you’re either a nerd or engaging in extremely intense exercise.

The Tour de France did 124miles on its first day this year. Through mountains.

Many amateur cyclists have a 100 mile single day even or 150-300 mile multi day event as their yearly goal. And they can’t push the sort of power for the duration that a pro can. Something less than 75% as much power for less than half as long per day. And for days instead of weeks.

Sustained cycling is intense exercise. Your body burns through its glucose reserves rapidly, and if you run out of energy the effect ("bonking") is awful. On the other hand, trying to eat a bunch of energy and having too much in your stomach will make you sick and is also awful. So you do in fact want to ingest the most you can process (but no more) per hour, particularly for extended events.

Nutrition doesn't matter for rides up to 15 miles, and you can improvise almost anything for rides up to 40 miles. More (or particularly hilly courses, etc.) and it becomes very important to get the amount you eat and drink right.

I was referring to how Gatorade is a popular beverage for people not doing any kind of intense exercise, not realizing it's just as bad or worse than soda for weight gain in that case.

There are multiple kinds of carbohydrate and the differences can matter.

Gatorade’s ingredients list shows sucrose (glucose+fructose) and dextrose (glucose).

Maltodextrin is isotonic in a 6x stronger solution than fructose and glucose. This means you need to drink meaningfully less water during a race to digest maltodextrin. So do we want all maltodextrin? Nope! Fructose can be absorbed by a separate pathway, which is less efficient, but increases your total intake of carbohydrates into the bloodstream.

So you’re probably not going to see Tour de France teams giving their riders Gatorade. You want more maltodextrin and less glucose.

Powdered sugar is 50/50 fructose and glucose, a close to perfect ratio for absorption. A dash of Gatorade powder for taste and you got yourself a drink that's inexpensive and gets you all the carbs you need.

Tour de France teams don’t care about the cost savings from cheaper sugar, they do care about the time and weight effects of drinking more water to absorb the glucose.

I think that goes without saying. My advice is for the layman.

I forgot about the Fructose pathway. Yeah that's been known for ages.

It turns out though that maltodextrin didn't exist in manufactured quantities until the mid 1970's, which was after Gatorade was a national brand. That they never changed their formula is disappointing but maybe not surprising (especially after Quaker Oats bought them in '83)

But none of the 'sports drinks' that Coca Cola and friends were pumping out in the 90's had maltodextrin in them to my knowledge. It was just more sucrose and glucose, so its star fell a bit more recently.

Do you know when the isotonic research was done? I don't have any recollection of that being even mentioned in the tests I talked about.

Also maltodextrins are made from wheat in Europe and a problem for celiacs.

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