Avoiding the dreaded 'bonk' is one of the key tricks to increasing your enjoyment on the bike. While pacing is also an important aspect of managing your energy levels, the most fundamental point is ensuring you're consuming the right cycling nutrition.

Multiple studies have shown that keeping your carbohydrate intake up during training can improve recovery — plus continuously snacking through a bike ride does make it more fun!

There are many ways to ensure you get the necessary carbohydrates: the best energy bars are great for longer rides as they tend to be easier on the stomach and the best energy gels are perfect for a quick boost in a race or hard group ride. But here we're looking at the best energy drinks or — in most cases — the best energy powders you can pop into your water bottles to create an energy drink.

Like energy gels, this makes it super quick and easy to take on carbs while pushing the pace. But they can also be good for all-day epics, ensuring that you are taking on enough carbs and saving you some effort chewing. Believe us, you can get tired of that! Fantastic value.

Contains fructose and glucose to help increase absorption. There are a choice of flavours, the taste is highly palatable even during exercise and the cost is very reasonable. Effective and cheap - what's not to like! Best taste. OTE Super Carbs provides up to 80g of carbohydrates per ml but remains easy to ingest with a light and refreshing feel.

It's more expensive than some other drinks, but it's a great way to pack in the carbs. easiest to drink. The very mild flavour was a bit of an acquired taste, but it didn't take long to get used to it. Read more below. Best stage win. Anything that can power Chris Froome up the Colle delle Finestre at record speed is probably going to be of benefit on a sportive or club run.

Mixed well up to about g of carbohydrate per ml, but was a little on the sweet side, albeit pretty tasty. Does the job well. A classic energy drink, GO has been around for a long time.

The flavours are quite strong but not unpleasant and the cost per gram of carb is less than Beta Fuel, so it is well worth considering. It also contains electrolytes, so will help with hydration too. Glucose and fructose are two different types of simple carbohydrates and they each get absorbed into the body in slightly different ways.

Now, there is a limit to how many carbs your body is physically able to process in an hour — typically it's about 60 grams. The key to this energy drink and a few others is exploiting the different absorption pathways of glucose and fructose — by essentially splitting the traffic, your body can absorb carbs up to 90 grams which is more than if just a single type of carbohydrate were used.

Sure enough, I've been able to take on the full amount without experiencing any stomach issues — even when pushing at high intensity. It's good value, too. As a testament to this drink's easiness on the stomach, there was one time that I panic-bought a tub at Decathlon the night before a km road race with no feed zone support.

As a result, I went way over the recommended serving cramming g of carbohydrate into two ml bottles, so I had g plus a gel for the two-hour race. With a bit of bad luck, my race only lasted thirty minutes or so.

With more reasonable concentrations, the taste and consistency are great. Both flavours were pleasant and the solution felt light and refreshing — not at all syrupy-ish. The coolest feature of this drink is the amount of carbohydrates crammed in per serving. If money is no object to you when it comes to sports nutrition, I would get the OTE super carbs - it was the tastiest and easiest to digest large amounts of carbohydrates during training sessions.

In comparison, the High 5 powder was the best value option on test by a considerable margin, priced at 2. On top of this, it was also tasty and easy to digest! The gains of the OTE Super Carbs only felt marginal, so for most people, it probably wouldn't be worth the price — but if you take an uncompromising approach to your nutrition, it certainly is the one to go for.

This is a product I was really excited to try. Maurten drink mix has long been raved about by athletes in running and triathlon. This product came as a box full of sachets and each of these had 79g of carbohydrate which you can dissolve in a ml bottle so no need to double up.

It is possible — if not advised by Maurten — to have g of carbohydrate in ml of water with this product by splitting 3 sachets across two bottles. For long rides, the drink mix was perfect, fuelling five hours plus without issue!

Coming in sachets of 80g of carbohydrates, the dosage is easy to calculate however, there is a lot of packaging. For racing purposes, you often need more than g of carbohydrate in two bottles at any one time, so the ability to add extra mix was important.

Beta fuel was fine up to about g of carbohydrate per ml - at which point the solution got a little syrupy. SiS GO energy powder has been around for as long as I can remember. I have tried all flavours on this list and, with the exception of orange, found them all easily digestible, although the orange flavouring felt a bit heavy in the mouth.

A blend of carbohydrate, water and electrolytes. Most commercially available sports drinks contain a mix of carbohydrates from different sources eg. They typically come as a powder, to be mixed with water.

Studies show that consumption of a carbohydrate drink during rides lasting over 60 minutes is an effective way to boost endurance.

During rides lasting over 60 minutes, consuming g of carbohydrate per hour will delay fatigue and help you sustain an optimum pace.

One litre of an isotonic carbohydrate drink will provide around 60g of carbohydrate — so aim for around ml every minutes. Drinks containing a blend of carbohydrates have been shown to boost absorption and increase the amount of carbohydrate that gets to the working muscles see glucose:fructose.

Carbohydrate drinks are a convenient option, which have the added bonus of facilitating the replacement of fluid and electrolytes. Reliance on carb drinks can be an expensive habit.

To get around this consider making a DIY isotonic drink by mixing ml ordinary squash with ml cold water and a pinch of salt. Whether you use a carb drink is up to you — the key is to develop a plan which allows you to consume the recommended g of carbohydrate per hour.

An advanced range of sports drinks, powders, bars and gels containing a blend of carbohydrate in a ratio of glucose to fructose with added electrolytes. Consuming carbohydrate during endurance exercise delays fatigue and boosts performance, but the amount that can actually be delivered to the working muscles is limited by the rate at which it can be absorbed from your digestive tract.

Current recommendations to consume g of carbohydrate an hour during prolonged exercise are based on research showing that glucose absorption is capped at around one gram per minute or 60g per hour , with studies showing that higher concentrations are simply not absorbed, and can result in stomach upset.

However, research focusing on the impact of combining different types of carbohydrate has shown that when glucose is consumed with fructose, carbohydrate absorption can exceed 1. This is thanks to the fact that fructose is transported and absorbed via a different mechanism than glucose.

Put simply, by combining carbohydrates, you can overcome the 60g per hour saturation rule, which increases fuel availability. But does this translate to better performance? For rides lasting over an hour, try swapping your usual sports drink or energy gel for a product to increase carbohydrate delivery from 60g to 90g per hour — this equates to 1,ml of a drink, three gels or three bars.

Bear in mind that to achieve the stated 90g an hour, you'd need to get through two servings - so either a concentrated mix, or two bottles an hour.

Multiple transportable carbohydrates have definite benefits which could translate into that all-important performance edge during an event. The advantage of products is convenience and the precise ratio of glucose to fructose for maximum absorption.

Carbohydrate foods do contain a mix of sugars bananas provide glucose and fructose in a ratio , so you could experiment with different sources, although getting 90g of carb in the all-important ratio will require some maths. Hydration drinks are a mix of water and electrolytes such as sodium and potassium with little or no added carbohydrate, designed to replace the fluid and salts lost during exercise.

As core temperature rises during exercise the body compensates by sweating, creating a loss of water and electrolytes, with additional water lost via respiration. Although the body can cope with small changes in fluid volume, large sweat losses can lead to dehydration, which results in impaired performance, increased heart rate, reduced heat tolerance and lower reaction times.

The loss of electrolytes in sweat primarily sodium is also exacerbated during prolonged exercise or in hot weather. Failure to replace electrolytes, or dilution through excessive intake of plain water can result in hyponatremia low levels of sodium leading to muscle cramps, lethargy, nausea, headaches and in severe cases, death.

Hydration drinks prevent dehydration by replacing fluids and electrolytes. The addition of sodium also facilitates hydration as it stimulates thirst and also water absorption from the intestine, promoting fluid retention. In the early s, researchers started demonstrating that different receptors in the gut were used to process glucose and fructose.

This meant that while you were still limited to 60g of glucose an hour, you could also process a certain amount of fructose, increasing the total amount of available calories.

The new recommendation became 90g of carbs an hour, with a ratio of glucose to fructose. More recently, scientists like Tim Podlogar have been testing both the assumptions around total quantity and the ratio of glucose to fructose.

For longer rides over a couple of hours, I usually ride with one bottle of water and one bottle with double this recipe. Although I mentioned above that many riders are now doing more than 90g of carbs an hour, I keep my drink mix at 90g and supplement with some solid foods. Chances are good that the only ingredient in your kitchen cupboard right now is the table sugar.

But the others are readily available on Amazon or your local bulk foods store. This is the key to the whole mix. Maltodextrin is a long-chain glucose that tastes less sweet than fructose and is easier to digest.

I usually get mine off Amazon in a 5kg bag that lasts bottles. Just your regular white sugar from the grocery store. Table sugar has a mix of glucose and fructose. I used to use pure fructose instead of table sugar, but at some point during Covid, fructose became hard to find in Canada.

In addition to carb intake, electrolyte replacement is the other primary function of ride nutrition. The amount of sodium you need per hour is highly variable depending on how much you sweat, how salty your sweat is, your physical conditioning, the weather, etc. I find that when I go over mg of sodium a bottle 1 teaspoon of sodium citrate , I can start to have some minor stomach discomfort.

You could use table salt instead of sodium citrate, but sodium citrate is absorbed more easily by your gut , so you can use more of it without adding GI stress. For more info about sodium replacement, Alex Harrison has a good video that goes much deeper.

This is just for flavoring; you could substitute it for many other options. True Citrus comes in various flavors, which are all fine except for grapefruit. Of course, I burned 14, calories on that 37 hour ride, which is why there are also gels, bars, and my morale boosting secret weapon, gummy worms.

If I remember correctly, I pulled a couple of bars out of this photo because I was a little embarrassed at how much food I was bringing. Combined with a few quick stops for real food, this worked really well. Since that was the issue plaguing the beginning of my randonneuring journey, I count that as a win.

There are plenty of opportunities to experiment with this recipe. I mentioned earlier that protein has no use as a fuel source. But if you are riding ultra distances, you will need more macronutrients than just carbs for your body to function correctly. You might have better luck with a different brand than I used.

Branch Chain Amino Acids contribute to muscle repair and delay fatigue. While many people are moving to g of carbs an hour, I keep my drink mix at 90g and supplement it with solid food. There are two main advantages to making your own sports drink.

The first is cost. Over a season, making your own drink mix can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars in savings. Second, and perhaps even more important, is that you can customize everything to fit your needs.

Want to perfectly optimize your carb intake?