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Analysis of Usain Bolt Sprint Performance

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Altitude Sickness

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Our Everest Challenge With Ben Fogle & Victoria Pendleton | Altitude Sickness Hits Hard | ITV

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Some help for the age questions

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Assessment

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'Bionic' powerlifter still competing at almost 90

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Superhuman Ted, 89, has no plans to slam the weights down just yet.

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Olympic 3,000m steeplechase champion Ruth Jebet has been given a four-year ban after testing positive for man-made EPO.

The 23-year-old Bahrain athlete was suspended in February 2018 after failing an out-of-competition test.

Jebet told the Athletics Integrity Unit in March 2018 she had not taken it intentionally, but a disciplinary tribunal has now ruled against her.

The AIU said the ban would run from the date of the initial suspension in 2018.

Jebet, the former 3,000m steeplechase world record holder whose landmark was eclipsed by Kenya's Beatrice Chepkoech two years ago, tested positive for the banned blood booster r-EPO (recombinant erythropoietin) on 1 December 2017.

Recombinant erythropoietin is a man-made version of natural erythropoietin, and improves athletic performance by stimulating the production of more red blood cells.

The AIU ordered the disqualification of all her results between 1 December 1 2017 and 4 February 2018.

Kenya-born Jebet has the right to appeal against the suspension, but currently will not be able to defend her Olympic title in Tokyo this summer.

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Four-year ban for Olympic champion Jebet

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Olympic 3,000m steeplechase champion Ruth Jebet has been given a four-year ban after testing positive for man-made EPO. The 23-year-old Bahrain athlete was suspended in February 2018 after failing an out-of-competition test. Jebet told the Athletics Integrity Unit in March 2018 she had not taken it intentionally, but a disciplinary tribunal has now ruled against her.

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The butcher in Salmon van Huyssteen's home town did more than sell meat.

It also operated as an informal post office, a collection point for parcels and packages in his Pretoria suburb.

In September 2012, a delivery arrived for Van Huyssteen.

Then 16 years old and a promising number eight, he wanted to fill out his frame fast. But instead of steak, sausages or some other protein hit from over the counter, a small container, wrapped in tape to hide the contents, waited for him in the back.

It had been sent by his body-building cousin and was collected by his parents. That same evening, Van Huyssteen's mother took a syringe and injected him with a millilitre of the product, named 'Deca 300'. In the morning, she did the same again.

A year later, Van Huyssteen was part of an excited band of teenagers collected together at Loftus Versfeld, home of the Bulls, Pretoria's Super Rugby team.

They were to compete in Craven Week, perhaps the world's most famous showcase of elite teenage rugby players.

Televised by South Africa's biggest broadcaster and sponsored by a global soft drinks giant, it draws in overseas and local talent scouts to watch the age-grade sides from the country's biggest teams face off in a week-long festival format.

Alongside Van Huyssteen in the squad photo was RG Snyman, who would go on to play in South Africa's World Cup final win over England in 2019, and Ivan van Zyl, another future Springbok.

But any plans that Van Huyssteen had of following a similar path were derailed.

A sample given to anti-doping officers at Craven Week showed traces of the steroid nandrolone, two times over the World Anti-Doping Authority's permitted limit.

Van Huysteen appealed unsuccessfully against a two-year ban. World Rugby's lawyers had questions over his story.

If, as he claimed, his parents had stopped using it after those first two injections, why was nandrolone still present in his system at such high levels 10 months later? Why was the container still in the family's fridge?

As for the question of why he took the drug in the first place - there is perhaps an easy answer. But it wouldn't tell the full story.

"Steroids are going to give you everything that a young rugby player would want - strength, power, speed," says Dr Jon Patricios, a past president of the South African Sports Medicine Association and a former team doctor to the Cats and Golden Lions teams.

"It is going to make you a much better athlete, regardless what position you play. Those are the benefits. What these young players don't realise are the side effects.

"Steroids can affect almost any system in the body, but most are hidden. Blood pressure, changes to the heart, sugar and cholesterol levels, potential infertility, liver, kidneys, psychological damage - almost every aspect can be affected.

"That is what they are not too concerned about, because they can't see them."

Van Huyssteen is not the only one to run the risk.

All were teenage rugby players who tested positive for steroids at the 2018 edition of Craven Week. It was no blip. The event has turned into one of the most reliable hunting grounds for anti-doping officers.

Three players tested positive at the 2017 event, four in 2016, five in 2015 and three in 2014. All for steroids.

It would be more surprising if all these schoolboys turned out to be clean.

A survey of more than 12,000 boys in 23 rugby-playing schools in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province in 2014 revealed that almost a tenth of 18-year-old boys had tried steroids.

One prominent Johannesburg school offered an amnesty to its pupils, encouraging them to hand in unused steroids and turn things around.

Dr Patricios has been visited by parents who want advice after discovering cooler bags of potions and pills under their sons' beds.

"A lot of it is pressure that builds in making an elite sports team or the first XV rugby team," he says.

"That pressure may be internal from the boys themselves, or from their parents or peers, and certainly a significant amount of it is from the coaches.

"There are cases where coaches will tell players they need to pick up 10kg before the start of the season if you want to make the team.

"There is that sort of innuendo that the kid interprets as them needing to 'bulk up' to make the team.

"I honestly believe that there are coaches and headmasters who are turning a blind eye, and I think there are parents who turn a blind eye. Not all parents come to see me."

Clinton van den Berg agrees. Formerly sports editor at South Africa's Sunday Times, he now works as a communications manager for SuperSport, the country's leading rugby broadcaster.

"Anecdotally people tell me it is happening all over schoolboy rugby," he tells BBC Sport.

"There is a demographic of schoolboy whose great ambition is to become a professional rugby player and there are absurd amounts for contracts.

"Even if that doesn't happen there is the possibility of being poached by another school, where the bursary system would see part of your fees being paid. There is an enormous incentive to excel - to be faster, bigger, stronger, better.

"But what you have to also understand is that a lot of schoolboys are taking 'juice' for vanity, not performance. It is because they want to be big and buff. That also comes into it.

"There is a big gym culture in South Africa. People love the outdoors and the beach and the guys want to look big."

It is an aesthetic the Springboks have perfected.

In the build-up to to the Rugby World Cup, a photo of the champions-to-be went viral. Apparently shot in the aftermath of an intensive training session, the squad are stripped to their shorts, gleefully showing off a collective mountain of shrink-wrapped, shredded muscle.

Admiration was not universal.

One Twitter user shot back with a GIF of peak-dominance Lance Armstrong making his infamous 'zipped-lips' gesture during the 2004 Tour de France. The syringe emoji was also given an extensive work-out.

Despite none of the Springbok World Cup squad ever having tested positive, South Africa's schoolboy steroid tests have fed into a subculture of suspicion.

But they are not the only factor.

Aphiwe Dyantyi, International Breakthrough player of the year in 2018, was not part of that Springboks gym group shot.

The 25-year-old wing, who made a try-scoring debut in June 2018's win over England in Johannesburg, tested positive for a sophisticated cocktail of banned substances a little over a year later.

As he waits for his hearing, so does Chiliboy Ralepelle.

The hooker, who preceded Siya Kolisi as the the Springboks when he led them in a non-cap match against a World XV in 2006, is facing the third anti-doping ban of his career.

For Ralepelle, now 33, another ban would surely mark the end of his playing days. For Dyanti, perhaps not.

During his time with Munster, current Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus decided that a served steroid ban was no reason not to sign second row and compatriot Gerbrandt Grobler for the Irish province.

Grobler has since moved to Gloucester where the head coach is Johan Ackermann, another former Springbok who served his own two-year doping suspension.

The incidence of doping in South African rugby and the speed with which offenders have been reintegrated prompted questions during the World Cup. And not only of the Springboks.

"It's something that, if you want to go look for it and you want to do it, it's probably there," he said.

Patricios believes that the positive tests at Craven Week come because South African youth rugby builds so momentously towards that one week, rather than being indicative of a malaise that has spread to the upper reaches.

"Craven Week is pretty much a watershed. If you break through at that level you are going to be noticed, pulled into the Varsity Cup system, contracted to unions and the path is easier for you," he says.

"Those kids that don't break through then and make it later are few and far between.

"There is a massive disconnect between what goes on in schoolboy rugby and what goes on in professional rugby.

"As soon as these players enter the professional ranks they are subjected to regular squad and random testing, not only by South African drug authorities but also in other countries, for Super Rugby fixtures for instance.

"You are tested regularly and it is difficult to get away with it."

Rugby is second only to athletics as the most tested sport in South Africa. A total of 342 tests in rugby last year unearthed 16 offenders. All but two were for steroids.

But those stark stats are no reason for northern hemisphere complacency or condescension.

The majority of UK teenage players are educated, rather than tested.

Daniel Spencer-Tonks, a former England Under-16 rugby union player banned for four years for steroid use in 2015 at the age of 20, warned that doping was "hugely widespread through all levels of rugby".

In the wake of Sam Chalmers testing positive for two anabolic steroids while on a Scotland under-20s training camp in 2013, an anonymous 19-year-old Scottish National League player told the BBC that illegal drug use was rife north of the border as well.

"I cannot comment on how South Africa compares to other countries. I have no data to support such comparisons," says Khalid Galant, chief executive at the South African Institute of Drug-Free Sport.

"Sport is only a mirror of our society. Currently in South Africa we are dealing with lots of corruption and ethical breaches at the highest level of leadership.

"Our society may be becoming more tolerant towards cheating as a means to achieve goals because there is also an absence of consequences."

Van Huyssteen, Ralepelle, Grobler and Dyantyi have certainly felt the full implications of their offences. For unknown others, in South Africa and beyond, Galant is right.

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The schoolboy dopers taking steroids at 16

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The butcher in Salmon van Huyssteen's home town did more than sell meat. It also operated as an informal post office, a collection point for parcels and packages in his Pretoria suburb. In September 2012, a delivery arrived for Van Huyssteen. Then 16 years old and a promising number eight, he wanted to fill out his frame fast.

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Contextualised evidence

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25 Years On....

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25 Years Later: Ben Johnson's Doping Scandal

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Ben Johnson

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The Dirtiest Race in History: Richard Moore at TEDxYouth@Manchester 2012

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Richard Moore is a freelance journalist and author, originally from Scotland but now living in London. His first book, In Search of Robert Millar (HarperSport), won Best Biography at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards. His second book, Heroes, Villains & Velodromes (HarperSport), was long-listed for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

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AAS use - Ergogenic Aids

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1000000 miles!

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An 82-year-old cyclist will become the first person in the UK to ride 1million miles in their lifetime.

Russ Mantle, from Aldershot in Hampshire, is due to complete the unbelievable milestone on Thursday (November 7) after 68 years of cycling.

Mr Mantle, a former carpenter and joiner, has averaged a staggering 14,700 miles every year since 1951, and will reach the one-millionth mile at Canal Café in Mytchett, near his hometown.

He said: "I haven't really been going for it, the miles have just naturally piled up because I enjoy cycling so much that it's just natural to be a mile-eater.

"Even when I was in my 60s and 70s, I was doing my highest mileages, so it just shows that as you get older you don't necessarily have to do less.

"In 1989, when I was up to near enough 400,000 miles, I realised that yes eventually I was going to reach the million."

Mr Mantle began his odyssey without the benefit of Strava or GPS recording, so he wrote down details of his rides in paper diaries (including results from many race wins, including time trials).

He was a key member of West Surrey CTC, leading rides for the club for 20 years, and is still a member of several cycling groups.
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Chief executive of charity Cycling UK, Paul Tuohy, congratulated Mr Mantle on his achievement: "Cycling a million miles is not only incredible, it's almost incomprehensible. Russ never set out to break any records, cycling is simply a part of his life.

"Cycling UK's mission is to get a million more people out on their bikes, it's amazing that we're celebrating one man's achievement of cycling a million miles in his lifetime.

"Russ is an inspiration and he shows us all what is possible."

Mr Mantle's rides have included trips in America, Canada, across mainland Europe and throughout the UK.

This milestone is the equivalent of riding Land's End to John o'Groats 1,052 times, circumnavigating the Earth 40 times, or travelling to the moon and back twice.

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An 82-year-old cyclist will become the first person in the country to ride 1million miles - Cycling Weekly

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An 82-year-old cyclist will become the first person in the UK to ride 1million miles in their lifetime. Russ Mantle, from Aldershot in Hampshire, is due to complete the unbelievable milestone on Thursday (November 7) after 68 years of cycling.

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"Cycling is in your blood. It's passed on from father to son. And if it's in you, you can fight it all you want, you can't escape it.

"But if there's one thing I've learned from my dad, it's fighting. Fighting against everything and everyone. Especially against yourself."

These are the opening lines of Kenneth Mercken's 'The Racer', a film about his own experiences of the murky world of doping in professional cycling.

Mercken was an up and coming prospect, winning a national amateur championship in his homeland of Belgium in 2000. On his way to becoming pro, helped along by performance enhancing drugs, the now 43-year-old turned his back on the sport and instead enrolled at film school, graduating in 2011.

This year he's released an autobiographical film about his career. The central conflict of 'The Racer' isn't between the young Belgian rider and the performance enhancing drugs, at the turn of the millenium that was par for the course. Instead, Mercken's sullen father, a rider who never fulfilled his own ambitions, provides his son with a route into the sport, encouragement to dope, and also the emotional baggage that culminates in the young rider's eventual implosion.
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"When I was 14 I wouldn't even swallow a vitamin, so I was principally against it," Kenneth says of his route into doping. "It kind of started very innocently. When I was 16 years old I started to use some caffeine and that worked really well for me, but you can't call that doping really.

"But it did kind of ease the way in, and at a certain point I went to the doctor and h e actually extracted some blood and enriched it. T echnically, that can be called blood doping because it's taking it out of the body and re-infusing it. But of course, in those days it was seen as innocent b ut It was kind of shady."

Mercken's story is a familiar one, of lines incrementally being crossed until a dose of EPO is no bigger of a deal than your morning coffee.

"Once you get used to the needles [it becomes normal]. The first time I injected myself was like with magnesium, and of course that's a mineral so it's not doping, but that kind of eases the way to other products," Mercken says. "It's also culture within the sport, there are guys shooting around you, y ou get the feeling that you will never make it if you don't."

Whilst the riders in the film depicting Mercken and his former team-mates just look like any other skinny two-wheel obsessives, it's important to remember these riders were barely adults, while the real-life grown-ups were the ones providing and encouraging the use of PEDs.

"It just became totally normal," Mercken says. "I remember a moment in Italy and my team boss gave me a flagon of EP in a clandestine way and said tuck it away in your trainers, make sure the others don't see it. I then went upstairs and they were all shooting EPO and in the meantime all talking about the weather.

"In one way it had become something banal, but in another way everybody knew this was something big."

The depiction of the real, lived experience of doping is done with such candour that it's refreshing, as well as being obviously concerning. The stress of the young men trying to make it to the next level in their career while trying to make peace with the fact they're cheating often proves combustible. There are fallings-out and emotions are nearly always running high. Mercken's is a rare story about cycling where the finish line and who crosses it is of little importance.

While the Belgian's decision to start doping was gradual, getting out of that world was a decisive moment.

"I went to see the doctor a nd she told me that I had to use a growth hormone because of my delayed puberty. And I was like 'yeah let's do it'. Everybody else was doing it. Why not me? And then she said 'hold on, you're gonna have to do it your whole career every day.'

"Then she told me I might have a higher chance of cancer if I take it that much. And really the moment I heard those words was the moment I realised that it was over, it was an epiphany. Then back in the team house I decided to do film school or to go to acting school. I really made the decision on a whim like that.

"Basically, one day woke up. I realised that it was all crazy and I'd gone too far."
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And what does he think of the doping landscape now? Having retired before his pro career had really begun, and with no skin in the game anymore, Mercken is unfailingly honest with his insight.

"I think it's a bit better as the time when the film is situated was a really crazy time a nd there's a lot more products that can be traced nowadays," Mercken says, before admitting: "I think it's still really bad.

"Every once in a while there's a new product, which they cant trace. They're still using EPO, still using a lot of cortisone. Yeah, it's still really bad I think, and maybe it's just part of the sport, I don't know. And I don't know what's going to happen when genetic doping is going to be developed or become widespread."

Mercken does, however, see hope for the future due to the fact that young riders are now able to compete in some of the biggest races, potentially hinting at the likes of Remco Evenepoel, who won the Clásica San Sebastián this year at the age of just 19.

"I'm still hopeful because I think nowadays you see young kids that are 19 years old that can win big races with the pros again, that was impossible in my day.

"So that means something has changed and that there's a different mentality that now it's possible, because in my day you'd have to get used to all those products and after 10 years, maybe you you get to a good level. So I think nowadays it is possible for somebody who's clean and got a lot of balance to get very far and that makes me hopeful."

And what about his Dad? How did he react to being portrayed as such a brutal character by his own son?

"The first time he saw the film, was at the film festival in Ghent at the international premiere and his first reaction was that I didn't portray him as brutal enough," Mercken laughs.

" I think it was just a macho reaction, to hide himself behind that. But afterwards we had a few drinks and suddenly he became silent, and then he told me 'I was wrong'.

"That was very strange for me to hear because he never said that to me. And that's the only time he ever said it to me, he probably won't repeat it anymore. I felt c onfused and maybe maybe afterwards happy you know that that maybe the film has a meaning and maybe it can make people change. Even him. Make him change his mind and realise things."

The film opens with his Dad winning a local race, and a pre-teenage Mercken tugging at his jersey trying to get his attention, but he is ignored as his father revels in the glory and adulation of TV cameras and fans.

The film closes with grainy home footage of the same scene, but this time it's the real Mercken and Mercken Snr. Despite the theatrics and metaphors used in the film, Mercken coughing up blood after collapsing on the side of the road during the baby Giro or a crazed Russian team-mate firing a gun in their team's guest house, this real moment does more to portray the pain of professional cycling than double-digit gradients ever could.
The Racer (Coureur) had its UK Premiere at Raindance Film Festival and will be available on digital download from November 4.

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'Doping is still really bad today': Former Belgian champion reveals own blood doping past in gritty autobiographical film - Cycling Weekly

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"Cycling is in your blood. It's passed on from father to son. And if it's in you, you can fight it all you want, you can't escape it. "But if there's one thing I've learned from my dad, it's fighting. Fighting against everything and everyone. Especially against yourself."

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As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the seminal moment of the Mexico City Games, when Americans John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised a black-gloved fist from the medals podium, GlobalSport Matters looks back at the year from a global sporting perspective. From the World Series helping a wounded Detroit heal to athletic innovations that trace their origins to those Olympics, 1968 served as a critical pivot point in the role sports plays in society and introduced the modern era of athlete activism. To see all of our stories, please click here.

Before the International Olympic Committee awarded the XIX Summer Olympic Games to Mexico, questions regarding the altitude of its capital, Mexico City, and its effect on athletic performance had already sprouted.

Competitors in the long jump, shot put and high jump believed the city's location approximately 7,350 feet above sea level would benefit them because of the thinner air. Distance runners and swimmers believed they would be at a disadvantage because they wouldn't be able to take in as much air as they had during their training sessions.

"After 1968, training at altitude, even if the events were going to be held at sea level, was seen to be a great way to prepare," wrote Tim Wendel, in his book "Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball - and America - Forever."

"What Mexico City did in an offhand way was point out that if you can prepare the body in the right way, you can exceed expectations in athletics," Wendel wrote.

Although altitude training wasn't a new concept in the early 1960s, it took the rise of sport science and the elevation in Mexico City to fully understand its effect.

By 1960, researcher Bruno Balke had done extensive research with non-elite athletes at high altitude. He claimed in Johnson's Science and Medicine of Exercise and Sport , which was published that year, the "oxygen supply to the body becomes inadequate as a result of lower pressure of oxygen and the diminished oxygen content of the arterial blood."

He expressed the need for athletes to extensively acclimate at altitude prior to competing, but he did not understand the matter enough to offer guidance as to how long they needed to do so.

Regardless of the degree of research prior to Mexico City being awarded the games, athletes and scientists knew participating in an elite athletic competition at high elevation was going to have some effect on performance.

Pan-American Games records were set in 16 of 22 events, seemingly giving the IOC little concrete evidence that the altitude was playing a negative role in the competition in Mexico City.

Brundage's opposition to the science had more to do with his agenda for the which were emerging in the media spotlight as the premier sporting event in the world. The issues of doping, gender verification and amateurism within the IOC held more weight among the public eye when it came to presenting a polished final product on television, which for the first time in history was to be airing the games in color and live action.

However, Arthur G. Lentz saw the importance of understanding altitude. The administrative chairman of the American team and assistant director of the United States Olympic Committee lobbied that in order to test altitude effects in athletes efficiently, it would be best to take a group of athletes to Mexico City and allow them to work out on their own after conducting private, controlled preliminary tests.

Instead of conducting research and spending resources to get to the bottom of what needed to be done about the altitude issue in the 1968 Games, the IOC organized "pre-Olympic" research weeks in which elite athletes could be tested in the actual athletic facilities with state-of-the-art equipment instead of using primitive research studies conducted at altitude of the past.

For many sports scientists, professional athletes and Olympic committees, this was the golden opportunity use the state-of-the-art infrastructure provided by the Mexico City Olympics at the perfect testing altitude.

In 1966, the International Sport Week for research drew 788 participants from 25 countries. In many ways, the week sparked individual countries' plans for further testing at altitude. During this time period, many countries, including the United States, France and Great Britain, began sending athletes to state-owned altitude training centers.

During the International Symposium on the Effects of Altitude on Physical Performance held in March of 1966 at the University of New Mexico, Balke recommended to the IOC athlete training at high altitude before the Mexico City Games based on the research gathered from the International Sport Weeks.

He said three weeks of pre-Olympic training was the minimum recommended, and, realistically, a period of six weeks would be best for optimizing performance. That recommendation was made formally to the IOC and the International Federations.

Except Avery Brundage and the IOC had a different agenda. IOC Vice President David Burghley was also a major proponent of amateurism, much like Brundage. In the face of as much up-to-date research scholars, doctors and scientists provided, both men decided to ignore it.

"I am not sure in view of the hullabaloo all over the world about the altitude of Mexico City that we should not permit an extra four weeks in the year 1968," Brundage said.

of the Olympic Rules and Regulations states any athlete who spends more than four weeks training for their Olympic event is no longer considered an amateur. This played a major role in the IOC's decision regarding what to do about the 1968 Games.

Forcing an athlete to commit more time to training during an Olympic year meant spending more time away from their job. Adding four extra weeks of training would put added strain on smaller nations' Olympic committees' finances. Due to the rules of amateurism that prevented payment of the athletes at the time, many already were dealing with hardships and the financial strain that comes with training athletes for Olympic competition.

Brundage, Burghley and the IOC saw the information presented by outside medical and science professionals as unimportant, largely because of the success of the 1955 Pan-American Games. So despite opposition from athletes and sports scientists, they set only a two-week addition to the four-week training period already allotted to the athletes.

Once the Mexico City Games began, it became apparent from the first event that the altitude was going to play an integral role in the competition.

Temu's time, while good enough for gold, was 1 minute, 48 seconds slower than Australian runner Ron Clarke's world-record time. In Mexico City, Clarke collapsed at the end of the race and was unconscious for about 10 minutes.

The story kept repeating. The men's 1,500 was swept by Kenyan runners. The men's 5,000 was dominated by African runners as well.

World records were set in all of the men's track events 400 meters or shorter along with the field events. The most famous of those records came in the long jump, which was won by American Bob Beamon and his 29½ foot effort.

After the 1968 Games, the consequences for athletic performance based on how altitude affects the supply of oxygen within the body became a focal point of research. So did the emphasis on athletic training at altitude.

Athletes quickly understood that if they were to reach their athletic goals, training smarter was key. In addition, by the end of 1968, many athletes had begun the ideological transition from amateur to professional. They moved to cities or areas located at high altitude to live and train there.

Based on the research that became available after the 1968 Games, the USOC moved their home base to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1978. The city's location 6,000 feet above sea level has been helping American Olympic athletes train since.
Ross Andrews is a senior journalism student at Arizona State University
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Altitude had major impact on performances at Mexico City Olympic Games - GlobalSport Matters

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As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the seminal moment of the Mexico City Games, when Americans John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised a black-gloved fist from the medals podium, GlobalSport Matters looks back at the year from a global sporting perspective.

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What's free:
Online introductions to your personality, what makes you tick, career analysis (three good matches), relationships, and leadership.

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Over 200 pages of analysis and information, analysis of 300 careers, comparison of your leadership style with 16 industry sectors, and more.

Instructions:
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Personality Test, in-depth analysis of Isabel Briggs Myers types

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What's free: Online introductions to your personality, what makes you tick, career analysis (three good matches), relationships, and leadership. Premium options: Over 200 pages of analysis and information, analysis of 300 careers, comparison of your leadership style with 16 industry sectors, and more.

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7So long as you train, you can maintain and (hopefully) build your fitness levels. However, stop training and your fitness levels will steadily decline.

The obvious question that you might therefore ask is, "How much fitness will I lose if I decide to take a break, or if I'm forced to stop training because of injury or illness? And how rapidly will this fitness loss occur?" To answer this, it's important to understand that there are several different components of fitness, including muscular strength, muscular endurance and cardiovascular - heart, lung and circulatory - endurance.
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Stop training and the performance decline in each of these components will take place at different rates. So let's take an imaginary well-trained cyclist and observe what happens to their body over a period of six months following the complete cessation of training.

Day 0
This is your last training day for the next six months. After today's ride, you store your bike away, hang up your cycling shoes and join the bulk of Britons who do no regular vigorous exercise whatsoever!

Day 3
After three days of inactivity, you might expect that your fitness has already begun to decline. In reality, however, the losses at this stage are very small. If you had been training hard prior to day 0, after three days of rest, your cycling fitness is now probably enhanced.

That's because in those three days, your muscles have had time to fully recover; muscle carbohydrate stores (glycogen) have been topped up, muscle fibres damaged during hard training have been fully repaired, and favourable metabolic changes in the muscles have had time to occur.

Indeed, this peak in performance after a few days of rest is exactly the reason why tapering works, and why you shouldn't train right up to the day of a big event.

Day 7 (Week 1)
After a week's complete inactivity, changes begin to occur in the body that result in fitness losses. For example, after three days, your blood volume can be reduced by five to 12 per cent. This means a decrease in the amount of blood your heart can pump - both in terms of amount of blood pumped per beat and total blood volume per minute.

The result is that your heart has to work slightly harder to maintain a given workload on the bike. There are some metabolic changes too. After six days or so, muscles begin to become less efficient at 'soaking up' glucose - the body's premium fuel for exercise - from the bloodstream. This means that during exercise, you need to place more reliance on your (limited) muscle glycogen stores, and also that you become less efficient at building up those glycogen stores after exercise.
>>> Fuel properly for winter cycling
A third change is that your muscles start to become less efficient at coping with lactate accumulation during sustained efforts of hard cycling. The upshot is that you won't be able to sustain quite the same exercise intensity before having to back off, because of the burning sensation in the legs and laboured breathing.

Weeks 2-3
At this point, your maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max, the prime measure of your aerobic fitness) will have declined by anything from four to 20 per cent. Part of this stems from reduced cardiac output, not helped by the fact that the muscle mass in the pumping chambers of the heart can decrease by almost 20 per cent after three weeks of inactivity.
>>> Recover right with these four post-cycling meals (video)
It also arises because of changes in muscle physiology and biochemistry that are beginning to take place. For example, the fine network of muscle capillaries built up with endurance training begins to decline. As a result, oxygen uptake in the muscles can decline by up to eight per cent.

One month
All of the detraining changes outlined above continue to progress, but fundamental muscle changes are now becoming prominent. By now, your muscle capillarisation will have returned to your pre-training baseline. However, it is still likely to be higher than that in people who have never trained. Alterations are taking place in your muscle biochemistry.

The biochemical pathways that help your muscles burn fat for energy start to become less efficient, making it harder to burn while you ride, which in turn reduces your endurance capacity. On top of that, not only is your overall muscle mass declining (reducing your maximum power and strength), muscle fibres known as Type IIa (used during high-intensity sustained efforts) start to revert to Type IIx fibres, with greatly reduced endurance capacity.

In short, your ability to maintain a full-out effort, for example, a sprint to the finish line, diminishes dramatically.

2-3 months
After two months of inactivity, your heart is noticeably less muscular, the thickness of the muscle walls that comprise the pumping chambers reduced by as much as 25 per cent. The muscle mitochondria are also becoming less efficient at using oxygen to produce energy in your muscles. This efficiency can decline by 25 to 45 per cent up to 12 weeks after training cessation.

After three months, you also begin to undergo 'hormonal detraining'. Hormones are chemical messengers that regulate the body's biochemistry; as you become detrained, more stress hormones are released during exercise, which basically means that the same exercise intensity becomes more stressful for the body, which in turn increases recovery times.
Keep trim this winter
6 months
By six months, your fitness declines have mostly stabilised. However, there are still undesirable changes taking place. For example, the actual volume of mitochondria per unit volume of muscle is declining, further reducing your ability to utilise oxygen during exercise.

You've almost certainly gained body fat due to a lower daily calorie burn and a loss of muscle mass. So while you may not have gained weight on the scales, you will have almost certainly become 'fatter', with all the health risks that involves.
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The science

The decline of fitness components during detraining
There are a number of components of fitness that become 'detrained' when you cease training. These include:

Cardiovascular Stop training and your blood volume falls, which means there is a decrease in the total amount of blood your heart can pump during exercise. The dimensions of the heart muscle also decrease, as does respiratory (lung) function, caused by weakening of the muscles in the ribcage. All of this reduces the amount of oxygen you can transport to your working muscles, which means your maximal performance will start to decline.

Metabolic Over time, your muscles will find it harder to produce energy from your fat stores. This effectively decreases your endurance since carbohydrate stores - the other major fuel source during exercise - are quite limited, whereas energy from fat stores is virtually unlimited. Something called 'insulin sensitivity' is also reduced, which means your muscles find it harder to take up glucose (muscle fuel).
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A less efficient oxygen metabolism means that for a given effort level, higher levels of fatiguing blood lactate are produced in your muscles, making it harder for you to maintain high training intensities.

Muscular detraining In your cycling muscles, the density of capillaries - the tiny blood vessels that carry oxygen to your muscles - decreases, and the concentration of enzymes in muscle mitochondria (the 'aerobic energy factories' within cells) used to release energy from oxygen, also decreases. As well as this, muscle fibres shrink in cross section and cell-signalling hormones involved with gaining and maintaining strength decline, leading to strength losses.

Fitness Tip

Keep your fitness in 12 minutes a week!
If you're a seasoned cyclist, don't worry about taking a training break of up to two weeks as your fitness losses will not be too large. However, fitness losses for those new to cycling, or those or with a low fitness base will be proportionately greater.

For breaks of more than two weeks, you'll need some kind of training stimulus to avoid a bigger decline in your fitness. For example, interval sessions consisting of just 8×30-second efforts, two or three times a week - just 12 minutes a week - can be very effective at preserving aerobic fitness.
>>> Why stress can make you fat - and what to do about it
During any period where you drastically cut down on training volume, remember you will also need to curtail your calorie intake in order to prevent the performance-blunting effects of increased body fat.

If you haven't already done so, think about investing in a turbo-trainer or other training device for the long, dark winter nights and inclement weather.

Bad and good news

Stop training and your fitness begins to decline quite soon after, continuing to fall away the longer you stay off the bike, until after six months of inactivity, you'll be a long way behind in the fitness stakes.

There is good news, however; although you'll lose plenty of fitness, you'll likely maintain a higher fitness baseline than someone who's never trained. Studies have shown that the muscles of previously trained people are better at coping with lactate accumulation, and have better capillarisation and mitochondrial density than lifelong couch potatoes.

If you need to take a short training break, there's more good news as research shows that a relatively short break (two weeks or so), is not considered too disruptive, providing the previous training adaptations have been achieved over a period of at least 12 weeks or more.

And if the winter months are a real struggle for you, there's evidence that even relatively small volumes of the right kind of training can reduce detraining to a minimum.

For example, research shows that reducing your training volume by two thirds won't harm your fitness, provided you include some very intense work, such as intervals, in the remaining one third.

Indeed, just by doing a little bit of high-intensity interval work, such as 7 x30-second 'all-out' bouts performed three times per week, may be enough to preserve the bulk of your hard-earned cycling fitness.
This post was updated on 14 December 2017

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Detraining: The truth about losing fitness - Cycling Weekly

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7So long as you train, you can maintain and (hopefully) build your fitness levels. However, stop training and your fitness levels will steadily decline. The obvious question that you might therefore ask is, "How much fitness will I lose if I decide to take a break, or if I'm forced to stop training because of injury or illness?

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"I'n the lead-up to the European age-group duathlon championships, I hurt my leg," says 53-year-old Doug Bentall, recalling his 2016 season. "I thought I'd pulled a muscle, and somehow got round the race with the injury."

Bentall, a PR man from Tonbridge, Kent, had returned to cycling in his late 40s, having raced as a younger man, and made solid progress to a sub-23min 10-mile time trial. He decided to give duathlon a try after his wife Bridget pointed to her collection of rosettes from equestrian events and jokingly challenged him: "When are you going to win something?"

Duathlon seemed to provide his best chance of levelling up the matrimonial palmarès.

"It turned out I was a much better runner then I am cyclist," he says. "In duathlon, you can make up a hell of a lot of time on the cyclists who aren't such good runners - I was chuffed."

However, his high hopes came crashing down as the pain persisted, eventually compelling a visit to the GP. "I was referred to a specialist, who diagnosed a stress fracture in my pelvis," recalls Bentall. "Tests showed I had a really low vitamin D and would need months of rehab. I haven't run since."

A few months after his diagnosis, Bentall spotted in CW a call from Dr Nicky Keay for participants to take part in a bone density study. He put himself forward and in early 2017 had his first DEXA scan, the most accurate means of measuring bone health. "I took a deep breath when I sat down to hear the results," says Bentall, "and they revealed my lower spine is in the osteoporotic range."
>>> Here's how to stop cycling leading to unhealthy bones
With a standard deviation 'T' score of minus three, Bentall's bone density in his lumbar spine was seriously compromised: a level of deterioration not usually seen in anyone aged under 75 - and less common in men than women. As a fit, active sportsman in his early 50s, why on earth had his bones become so fragile?

Meeting the doctor

"Doug had the lowest bone density in the study," Dr Keay tells me, when we meet at her home in south-west London. "He is an extreme example, but it can happen at any age if you go too far down the wrong track."

It's a point she is keen to stress: among competitive cyclists, low bone density is not unusual. It may, in fact, be endemic.

Of the 50 cyclists in Keay's study, published in BMJ Open Sport and Medicine, 22 had low bone density - that's a whopping 44 per cent, almost half the group.

The main cause, according to Keay, is inadequate fuelling, compounded by lack of weight-bearing in cycling.

"Fourteen out of the 50 cyclists had low energy availability," says Keay, "and 10 of those had chronic low energy availability - they were the ones with lowest bone density."

By asking a series of questions about their nutrition, training, body weight and fuelling habits, the doctor made a judgement call about whether they were giving their body the energy it needed. Twenty per cent were persistently under-fuelling and, as a consequence, their bones were literally breaking down.

Low bone density is a silent problem. The first sign for Bentall was a fractured bone, which may sound extreme but is actually the most common route to diagnosis.

"If you repeatedly train while not fuelled properly," warns Keay, "you're not only wasting your time, you're also storing up health issues for the future. And the first thing you will know about it is when you fall off your bike and fracture a weakened bone."

Improper fuelling does not mean starvation or crash dieting, but rather "a mismatch between energy intake and the energy expended in exercise" - as defined in an International Olympic Committee consensus statement of May last year.

The technical term is relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S), meaning "inadequate energy to support the functions required by the body to maintain optimal health and performance".

Even if you're eating enough over the long term to maintain an apparently healthy weight, just two or three weeks of poorly fuelled rides can disrupt the secretion of hormones such as testosterone and human growth hormone, which are vital for recovery and the repair of body tissues.

The longer-term consequence of relative energy deficiency is a gradual wearing-down of multiple systems: bone health, metabolism, menstrual function, immunity, protein synthesis and cardiovascular health - everything on which cycling fitness depends. In other words, riders who under-fuel put their performance on hunger strike.

"It seems I wasn't eating enough - but I had no idea," admits Bentall. "I'd let my weight drop down to about 63.5kg, so for my height [5ft 11in] I was quite light, but I know plenty of cyclists who are lighter."

He insists he wasn't deliberately striving for super-low body fat. Friends remarked on his thinness but he assumed they were comparing him to the non-athletic average. "I assumed people had got too used to seeing fat people because we're so overweight as a nation," says Bentall. "My body mass index was still in the healthy range, admittedly at the bottom end - I didn't know about the association between body fat, hormone cycles and bone density."
>>> Fat burning and cycling: separating the myths from the truth
On doctor's orders, Bentall is now fuelling his rides more carefully, snacking more, and no longer worries about overstepping the government's recommended calorie intake of 2,500 per day (a broad-brush guideline of little use to athletes).

"It's really hard," he admits, "because it's so ingrained in us, the whole controlling-calories culture that we live in - it's hard to fight that off."

He has put on three kilos, and accepts that it's necessary weight. Having been out of action for four months nursing his hip, he is now back on the bike and tentatively weighing up a return to running. Taking vitamin D in supplement form and an osteoporosis drug, he hopes his bone density will gradually recover.

"I want to keep competing," he says. "I really enjoy it - and I don't want to throw away the health benefits of keeping fit."

Disordered eating

While some riders like Bentall fall into under-fuelling inadvertently, others do so through over-zealous efforts to lose weight - potentially even more dangerous. Another participant in Keay's study was 28-year-old Sam Woodfield, from Oundle in Northamptonshire, who in 2017 had to face the fact his desire to shed weight had gone out of control ( as reported in CW magazine November 16, 2017).

"I wanted to lose weight quite drastically to be competitive," says Woodfield, who was striving to achieve his first-cat licence. "I was doing lots of long, fasted rides, not eating during three-, four-, even five-hour rides."

In Dr Keay's view, fasted rides are not worth the risk for amateur riders who, unlike pros, don't have a support team to constantly monitor them. Those insisting on low-carb training should do so with extreme caution.

Woodfield admits that, at his most weight-fixated, he was stepping on the bathroom scales 12 times a day. High-calorie foods were strictly off-limits.

"For a whole year, I didn't eat a pizza and ate out only four times, refusing every invitation. I thought I could always lose more weight, which unfortunately is the definition of anorexia."

He was ultimately diagnosed not only with anorexia but also orthorexia - the systematic avoidance of foods believed to be unhealthy or 'unclean', e.g. boycotting carbs. Blood tests showed his testosterone levels had plummeted and his stress hormones were soaring.

"I make a joke of it now, but my testosterone was so low that I was basically a prepubescent boy. It was off-the-scale low," says Woodfield. "To top it off, I'd developed osteoporosis, despite having normal vitamin D and calcium."

Working with his coach Ali Slater and nutritionist Renee McGregor, Woodfield slowly got back on track, rehabilitating his beliefs and attitudes around nutrition - but adapting to healthy habits wasn't always easy.

"It's hard because in cycling you always want to be lighter at the same power," Woodfield admits. "Being two kilos heavier, my body was happy but my mind went into turmoil thinking, 'You're happy - why? You don't need to be happy!' I'd been in a hole for so long that my body asked, 'What on earth are you doing?'"

Getting professional help and facing up to the problem gave Woodfield a second chance - and he has turned around his fortunes in stunning style.
>>> How to fuel for long distance rides
"My mindset has drastically improved. I'm no longer cutting out calories or carbohydrate," he says. "Over the past four months, I've stepped on the scales only once or twice - it's quite a change."

The psychological progress has given rise to leaps forward physically. "This time last year I did 355 watts for 20 minutes, whereas at the end of the 2018 season, after my last race, I did 404 watts."

Fuelling results

Woodfield finished second in his divisional championships, recorded a string of second places in national-level races, and bagged eighth in the prestigious Victor Berlemont Trophy road race - in the process, earning himself an elite licence. He is under no illusions about what made the difference.

"It's purely through getting myself out of a mental hole in which I was holding back on calorie and carbohydrate intake, then rebuilding from the ground up - focusing on being healthy and fuelling properly."

Does he see more clearly now, looking back, how he got into such deep trouble?

"Yes," he pauses. "I needed to control my life within an inch because I lost somebody very close to me, my mother, and I lost complete control of my life." In the midst of disorder and sadness, diet, weight and exercise were the holy trinity Woodfield could rely on. "I was trying to control everything in my life to keep it stable," he says. "That's how it spiralled."
>>> Nutrition for cycling: 10 tips to get your food and drink dialled
Completing the success story, Woodfield's Active Edge Racing Team is taking a step up for 2019, targeting podiums in UCI 2.2 and National Road Series events. In terms of bone health, though, he will live with the legacy of his illness for an indefinite time to come.

"Bone density in my spine has remained the same, with slight deterioration in my hips, purely because of the racing." The changes were small, but Woodfield's case highlights how bone density, once lowered, does not bounce back like fitness and hormone levels.

According to Keay, it is unclear how bone density responds once nutrition is improved. "There is a lot of conflicting evidence on this," she says. "There are reports and case studies but no consistent general trend. How long is a piece of string?" Getting fuelling sorted and hormones back to normal levels is vital, but even so it might be too late, as Keay acknowledges: "You might have ended up with a long-term problem."

Could this problem really be as widespread as her study suggests: nearly half of all racing cyclists affected?

"I can't say for sure, but ours wasn't a selected group or skewed population - and to me, that's alarming." Potentially, it's a health time bomb: millions of bike racers might be riding around on weakened bones.
>>> Why are so many riders suffering from spinal fractures?
"Just look at the injuries listed on procyclingstats.com, the vast majority are fractures," adds Keay. "OK, if you fall off, there's always the chance of a fracture, but there is a not insignificant number of vertebral fractures - [Fabian] Cancellara, [Vincenzo] Nibali, [Tony] Martin - I don't know their bone density, but it's an injury far more likely if bone density is low."

When it comes to bone health, prevention isn't merely better than cure - it may be your only way to avoid long-term skeletal jeopardy. And prevention is simple: fuel properly all the time. Even if you're trying to lose weight, you still need sufficient energy to fuel your exercise, as Keay explains: "The body is clever: it will conserve energy to keep you alive. If you have low energy availability, your metabolism will slow down, making it even harder to lose weight."

Redoubled efforts to slash intake may backfire. "Studies have shown that in chronic cases, body fat actually increases because the body goes into desperate starvation mode." While under-fuelling is a physiological wrecking ball, avoiding it should be easy; Keay could not be clearer in her advice: "Cycling performance - your 60-minute FTP - is dependent on the hours of good old-fashioned training you put in. But they must be quality hours fuelled properly."

Harry Tanfield: 'I've learnt to stop worrying about my weight'

Dr Keay's study did not only involve amateurs: Commonwealth Games silver medallist Harry Tanfield also took part. We asked the 24-year-old, who is stepping up to WorldTour level with Katusha-Alpecin this year, what he got out of the process.

Why did you get involved?

I had a DEXA [bone] scan done as part of a university study in 2013. I saw the results were a bit weak but didn't think much more about it at the time. After getting quite thin in 2015, I got re-tested in early 2016, and my bone density had dropped off quite steeply.

Did you lose weight deliberately?

Yeah, I thought I was too fat, but I learnt that when you're bigger, you can run at 90 to 95 per cent [form] every day all season, whereas when you are lighter you really fluctuate between a good day and a really empty day. I've since put on three kilos, spend most of the year at 79 to 80 kilos, and I'm much better. Why did I need to be five per cent body fat to ride around the UK? - I wasn't interested in riding hilly events; I wanted to do well in crits. You have to question why you're trying to get very lean - it's not good for your body.

Do you monitor your body fat now?

I don't use body fat percentage as a measurement, I just use skin calipers - an eight-point skinfold test. It doesn't really fluctuate. It will be interesting to see what system they use at Katusha.

Do you think cyclists worry too much about their weight?

I think some do, yeah. If you get really lean... you might be 65 kilos but if you can't press on the pedals hard enough, what's the point? Fair enough, you're going to ride away on an eight- or 10-minute climb, but there aren't many of those in the UK. I've been there and done it, and you just don't really enjoy life as much. You've got to manage fuelling, giving your body what it needs when it needs it. If you get lean the wrong way, not eating enough and not recovering, suddenly your body goes into shutdown mode.

Are you at risk of under-fuelling? Take the test

Do you ride more than six hours (in total) per week?

Do you do fasted or low-carb rides more than once a week?

Has your weight changed or fluctuated by more than 2kg over the past six months?

Do you sometimes go without food/recovery drink for more than 30min after getting home from a long ride?

Do you exclude or restrict any food groups (such as carbs or dairy) from your diet?

Are you vegetarian or vegan?

Do you sometimes go without food/energy drink during rides of longer than 90min?

Are you consciously trying to lose weight or reduce your body fat?

Do you sometimes feel anxious around food or worry about overeating?

If you answer yes to three or more of these questions, you are at enhanced risk of under-fuelling and should consider consulting a medical expert - find the right one for you via the British Association Sports and Exercise Medicine Health4Performance website: health4performance.co.uk.

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Are cyclists under-fuelling to breaking point? - Cycling Weekly

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"I'n the lead-up to the European age-group duathlon championships, I hurt my leg," says 53-year-old Doug Bentall, recalling his 2016 season. "I thought I'd pulled a muscle, and somehow got round the race with the injury." Bentall, a PR man from Tonbridge, Kent, had returned to cycling in his late 40s, having raced as a ...

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Ergogenic Aids for Cyclists

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If just eating a healthy, balanced diet doesn't feel like enough, here's a look at some additional supplements which could increase your performance...
After a few years of riding, most cyclists have got their heads around the what, how and when of cycling nutrition - but when it comes to supplements there's a lot of confusion. With numerous stories of "accidental" doping and concern over side effects (even if they're felt only in the wallet), it's understandable that cyclists are wary.

There's a wide array of available sports supplements - powders, pills and potions - that carry plenty of marketing might with little scientific backing. But there are others which could help riders to feel more healthy, or indeed boost performance and results.

Anita Bean, author of The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition, comments: "The vast majority of sports supplements have no evidence backing their claims. They are at best unnecessary, at worst harmful or illegal. That said, there are a few products that are supported by a peer-reviewed body of research."

Here's a look at a selection of the available supplements that we reckon have adequate backing, and their uses.

Whey Protein

Carbohydrate is the primary source of energy used when you ride. However, during exercise, muscle fibres break down, especially if the pedalling time in question is intense. You get stronger when they rebuild, and ingesting protein helps to facilitate what the brain-boxes of nutrition call 'muscle protein synthesis' - in other words, recovery and adaptation.
>>> How to make your own recovery and energy drinks
Protein is available in food - you'll find 31g per 100g of chicken breast, 19g in the same weight of chickpeas, and 13g in a large egg.

Whey protein powder, however, makes ingesting high quality protein quick and easy - plus you'll know exactly how much you're taking.

You can mix it in with milk and fruit for a smoothie, or top your morning porridge up with a scoop. Stir it in well, or you'll end up chowing through what might as well be a standard bowl of porridge with complimentary lumps of chalk.
>>> How to burn fat cycling
There's a wide range of protein powder options - soy, egg, casein - but whey is a milk protein created as a by-product during cheese production. It's particularly popular because it contains a "high concentration of essential amino acids, which support muscle recovery, including the amino acid leucine, an important trigger for stimulating muscle building after exercise," according to Bean.

You can get enough protein from your food, but Bean says: "choose whey supplements if you aren't getting enough protein from your diet - [though this is] in most cases unlikely - or as a convenient post-workout alternative to food."

The amount of protein you need varies dramatically depending how active you are and what you're doing - a track cyclist spending time in the gym will damage more muscle fibres than an endurance rider.

Recommendations vary from 1.2g/kg of body weight to 2.2g/kg. However, one thing's for sure, it needs to be spread out. Your body can't effectively use more than 0.3g/kg - or 20g (whichever comes first) - at a time.

Beta Alanine

Beta Alanine is widely documented to have a beneficial effect on repeated sprints and surges of power - it's utilised by track cyclists, as well as road cyclists seeking the elusive kick.

An optimal dose is about 3g a day - but Bean warns: "[this is] best divided into several smaller doses e.g. 4 x 0.8g for four - six weeks, followed by a maintenance dose of 1.2g a day.

"High doses (above 0.8g) may cause side effects such as paraesthesia (skin tingling), which fortunately are harmless, transient and can be prevented by using smaller doses."

Beta Alanine is indeed famous for inducing a bizarre tingling feeling across the skin. Breaking the doses up does help reduce this. However, it's not easy to take a white powder in doses of 1g at a time through the working day. You can purchase capsules, or take the dose in one go and accept the bizarre sensation, which tends to last for about an hour.

Creatine

Creatine is naturally available in food - you'll find about 2g in a pound of red meat, and 4.5g in a pound of salmon.

However, you can take it in supplement form - and this one is widely utilised by athletes for which strength and power are important.

"Creatine supplements increase muscle levels of phosphocreatine, an energy-rich compound made from creatine and phosphorus that fuels muscles during high intensity exercise, such as sprinting or lifting weights. The greatest improvements are found in high power output efforts repeated for a number of bouts. For this reason, it's favoured by track sprint cyclists," Bean says.

The most discussed side effect of creatine is weight gain, "due partly to extra water in the muscle cells and partly to increased muscle tissue," Bean says.

Therefore, it's not recommended for those to whom the weight side of the power-to-weight equation is crucial.

There's a few options for dosage - you can load with 0.3g per kg of body weight, for up to a week - taken in four equal doses during the day. Alternatively, a load phase could be closer to 2-3g/kg for three to four weeks. After the load phase, you can reduce this to 0.03g/kg a day.

It doesn't work for everyone, "anecdotally, some people are known to be 'non-responders.' This may be due to a diet high in meat in which the body is already saturated with dietary creatine prior to supplementation," Bean says.

Another supplement popular among trackies is Sodium Bicarbonate - this is believed to buffer lactic acid build up over events lasting between one and 10 minutes. A recommended dose is about 0.2g/kg several hours before competition. However, there's little research around the benefits, and the potential side effects on the stomach are easy to imagine, so this should absolutely be avoided by those competing in longer races.

Caffeine

Cycling and coffee go hand in hand, but it's not just because of the social benefits of a good cortado and a slice of cake shared with your café ride buddy.

There's substantial evidence that points to the performance enhancing benefits of caffeine - a Spanish study found that whilst riders given 0.2mg per kg of body weight showed no boost in power, those ingesting 0.7mg/kg 70 minutes before a test saw the best improvement.

Bean recommends a bit more: "Low to moderate - 1-3mg/kg bodyweight - caffeine doses improve alertness, concentration and reaction time. There's good evidence it enhances performance in both high- and low-intensity exercise and reduces the perception of effort during endurance exercise. Levels peak at around 30-45 minutes after consumption."

It's worth being aware that the amount of caffeine in your coffee will vary. Researchers from the University of Glasgow visited 20 outlets in the city back in 2011, and found one cup could contain anything from 51mg (that one was in Starbucks) to 322mg (independent café - Patisserie Françoise).

If you want your dosage to be provided with military precision, TrueStart coffee is where it's at. This sport specific brand guarantees exactly 95mg per 2g serving.

Nitrate (found in Beetroot Juice)

There is some research to suggest that beetroot juice - or more importantly, the nitrates it contains - does more than just turn your pee purple.

"Research shows that beetroot juice can improve endurance performance and reduce the oxygen cost of submaximal exercise, as well as enhancing repeated sprint performance", Bean says.

The recommended dose is 300-600mg nitrate is ideal. You'd need to eat about 200g of beetroot to get that - so the alternative is to buy beetroot shots or tablets.

Take this one with a pinch of salt, though, says Bean: "Results have been more compelling in untrained subjects, so if you're fit already, don't count on huge gains."

Vitamin D

Vitamin D's key purpose is to help regulate the amount of calcium and phosphate in the body; thus keeping bones and muscles well fed. Low levels of Vitamin D can result in weakened muscles, bones, and a struggling immune system.

Though it's available in some foods, our bodies primarily create Vitamin D from direct sunlight, and the NHS advises that most of us get enough of it naturally from late March to September. From October to early March, those of us living in the UK are open to becoming deficient.

Bean explains: "Your GP should be able to test your vitamin D level; if it's less than 50nmol/l, then you will benefit from a supplement - 100mg per day is the upper limit. However, if testing is not available to you, Public Health England recommends taking a daily 10mg supplement during autumn and winter."

Iron

Being low in iron can result in fatigue, abnormal breathlessness and a loss of endurance and power. You can get iron in beans, dark green leafy veg such as spinach.

A serious iron deficiency will be diagnosed by your doctor - and they'll prescribe supplements.

Women, particularly those who have heavy periods, are more likely to suffer from an iron deficiency, eating more iron during menstruation is advised.

Electrolytes

Most cyclists will be pretty accustomed to taking electrolyte drinks and tablets.

Electrolytes are salts and minerals - sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphate and bicarbonate.
>>> Cycling sports drinks: hydration explained
They're lost through sweat, which is something most athletes do a lot of during exercise. Dehydration and loss of electrolytes can result in a drop in performance, so it's crucial to replace them.

Though data from studies doesn't quite stack up, there's an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence pointing towards the conclusion that low levels of sodium can result in the crippling grasp of cramp.

Most sports drinks contain about 200mg of sodium per dose, but the amount you need depends upon the salt content of your sweat and how much sweating you do. Drinks by specialist brand Precision Hydration contain up to 1,500mg per serving and could be a solution for people who suffer with cramp and fatigue associated with loss of sodium.

Fish Oils

This one is less a 'supplement for cyclists' than it is a 'supplement to support general health'.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends people eat one or two portions of fish a week to contribute to general health.

Fatty fish contains Omega-3 fatty acids which has been linked to the reduction of inflammation, joint and bone health, and improved immunity. You can get it via eating fish, or you can take a daily capsule to ensure you get enough.

Another supplement related to joint health is Glucosamine - which is linked to maintaining healthy cartilage and connective tissue and preventing injury, and some cyclists take it to beat the effect of pressure on the patella (knee cap).

Last word

If you do decide to incorporate one of these well researched supplements into your diet, do ensure it's coming from a reliable brand - check the label before you load up your innocent kale smoothie, you don't want to become the next beef steak doping victim.

Bean says: "If you are subject to anti-doping rules, then make sure that your supplements come from a reputable company that provides a certificate to prove it has been batch-tested for banned contaminants by a recognised sports anti-doping lab. Look for the Informed Sport logo on the label and check the batch number on the Informed Sport website," she says.

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Supplements for cyclists: health and performance boosters you can really trust - Cycling Weekly

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If just eating a healthy, balanced diet doesn't feel like enough, here's a look at some additional supplements which could increase your performance... After a few years of riding, most cyclists have got their heads around the what, how and when of cycling nutrition - but when it comes to supplements there's a lot of confusion.

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Glucose Loading

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Your stomach is the fuel tank for your body - and letting it run on empty over rides in excess of ninety minutes is a sure fire way of finding yourself broken down in the lanes.

There's a range of theories around the best way to keep your energy levels flourishing, but the overriding belief from experts is that carbohydrates are the most efficient top-up tool during exercise, with 1 gram per kilo of body weight the suggested dose per hour.
>>> How to fuel for long distance rides
That means a 75kg rider needs to ingest about 75g of carbohydrate per hour, once the ride duration is over ninety minutes. Requirement will increase if the ride is intense, and decrease if it's not.

Carbohydrate requirement varies between individuals - but there is a ceiling as to how much your body can absorb - so though avoiding the dreaded bonk is paramount, be sure not to overdo it.
>>> Do fasted rides really work?
Popular methods of getting the carbs in include energy drinks, energy gels, energy bars, and good old fashioned traditional food. They've each got their benefits:

Energy drinks

The quickest to be absorbed, dosage is spread out over the course of the time it takes to drink a bottle. Best combined with gels or bars and sipped throughout a ride, these include electrolytes to replace those lost in sweat.

Energy gels

Second quickest to be absorbed, a quick hit of high glucose carb to give you a kick when you need it, some include electrolytes, easy to swallow and best for races and high intensity when chewing is hard work.

Energy bars

Slower release, lower in sugar than gels so usually better for your gut and teeth. Require breaking up and chewing, so more suited to endurance rides. Conveniently packaged to suit jersey pockets.

Normal food

Usually the best for your bank balance, stomach and teeth - assuming you've chosen something healthy. Usually (but not always) harder to chew and store in a pocket. Home made oat, fruit and nut bars are a great option.

Our pick of the best energy bars

Energy bar preference varies - but within the Cycling Weekly HQ there's some clear favourites - we've outlines our top picks below.

With each product is a 'Buy Now' or 'Best Deal' link. If you click on this then we may receive a small amount of money from the retailer when you purchase the item. This doesn't affect the amount you pay.

TORQ Bar
Read more: Torq Bar review Score: 8/10
A traditional bar with traditional (nutritional) values: each 45g promises around 140-150 calories, 31-32g of carbs and 4g of protein.

Torq's bars use a blend of glucose-derivatives and fructose to get close to the 2:1 glucose/fructose ratio which studies have shown offers a higher delivery of carbohydrate per hour - delivering 40 per cent greater absorption according to the brand.

The bars have a very moist and natural taste that reminds us of the dried fruit squares we ate as kids. Around 13 per cent of the bars come from real fruit and flavours such as Raspberry and Apple, Sundried Banana and Mango provide a wholesome mouthful. The Spiced Mince Pie option will appeal come Christmas.

The bars also contain a dose of D-Ribose - said to aid recovery - plus vitamins and minerals. Flavours like Banana are fair-trade and the Mango bar is organic.
Buy now: Torq bar box of 15 from Wiggle for £20.88
ZipVit ZV8 Energy Bar
Score: 9/10
ZipVit's ZV8 Energy bar weighs in at 55g, delivering 221 calories (in chocolate coated strawberry flavour) plus 37.2g of carbs and around 2g of protein.

You also get a host of B vitamins, some Vitamin C and Vitamin E to keep you firing on all cylinders.

These bars are nutritionally good because they deliver several different carb sources, to aid easy processing of the maximum amount of carbohydrate your body will absorb. Not only that, we've found that they taste excellent.

Beware, however, of the chocolate and yoghurt coated varieties when riding in hot weather: the outer layer tends to melt. They remain delicious but can become quite messy, the uncoated versions are recommended if you're riding somewhere sunny.
Buy now: ZipVit ZV8 20 bars at Tweekz for £15.99
Trek Protein Energy Bar
Read more: Trek Protein Energy Bar review Score: 7/10
These 50g bars break easily into bite sized pieces, contain between 208 to 234 calories depending upon your choice, with 20g of carbs and 9 to 10g of protein.

The trend towards packing in protein is a healthy one - a lot of athletes don't get enough. However, the jury is out on fuelling rides with it, this bar lends itself more to the recovery bar side of the nutrition conversation.

On the plus side, these taste great and they're readily available in newsagents around the country, which can be handy when you're out and about.
Buy now: Trek Protein Energy bar x 16 from Wiggle for £11.95
SiS Go Energy Bar
Read more: SiS Go Energy Bar review Score: 9/10
SIS has altered its range slightly, now offering the Go Energy Bar Mini, Go Energy Bar Mini + Caffeine and Go Energy Bar + Protein.

The mini will take up less room in your pocket, though it's a bit counter productive if you just need to carry more of them. Each 40g serving offers 139 calories, 26g of carbohydrate and a moderate 4.5g of protein. They're made from natural fruit ingredients and go down easily.

The Go Energy Mini + Caffeine is all of the above, with an added 75mg of caffeine - to ensure you're getting the ideal dose.

The Go Energy + Protein is 60g a serving, with 200 calories and 34g of carbohydrate plus 10g of protein - this means you're still getting plenty of carbohydrate, with protein to help speed up recovery when you stop.
Buy now: SIS Go Energy Mini bars x 30 at Evans Cycles for £23.99
High5 Energy Bar
Read more: High5 Energy Bar review Score: 8/10
High5's energy bar isn't known to be the greatest tasting, but they're moist and go down easily - also providing one of your 5-a-day portions of fruit and veg which is a nice addition.

The 55g bars pack a punch - though nutritional values vary per flavour, so make sure you choose according to your needs as well as your taste buds.

As an example, the banana option provides 180 calories, 36g of carbohydrate and 2.4g of protein with 2.4 g of fat whilst peanut flavour gives you 255 calories, 25g of carbohydrate and 7.2g of protein with 13g of fat.
Buy now: High5 Energy bar x 25 from Chain Reaction Cycles for £17.99
OTE Duo Bar
Read more: OTE Duo Bar review Score: 8/10
The OTE bar is larger than most - the 65g in each packet is designed to be eaten as two servings.

Within each full bar, you'll find 278 calories, 71.1g of carbohydrate and 7.4g of protein - the added content is reflected in the cost, at over £40 for a box of 24 - but you are getting more calories for your buck.

The idea is you split them up into doses delivering 20g of carbs a go, but the great tastes means it'd be quite easy to 'forget' and just eat twice as much...

We're also big fans of OTE's 'Anytime' bars - these are designed for snacking but work well on the bike, being gluten and nut free, suitable for vegetarians and very crumbly and easy to swallow. Each 62g bar provides 213 calories, 36.6g of carb and 2.8g of protein.
Buy now: One Ote Duo bar at Rutland Cycles for £1.99
Veloforte Classico
Read more: Veloforte Classico review Score: 7/10
Veloforte won a 'Great Taste Award' for its Classico in 2017 - and it's easy to understand why. Made from fruit peel (orange, lemon, citron), with almonds, cane sugar, honey, and a host of spices they're pretty special.

Each 70g bar contains 294 calories - which is more than most, with 45g of carbs, 5.6g of protein and 8.6g of fat - it'd be easy to gobble down more than you need to fuel yourself, so beware. They're not cheap, either.

The packaging can be quite hard to peel from the product - though Veloforte has worked on this with a new and improved wrapper in recent months.
Buy now: Veloforte at Rutland Cycles for £2.50 a bar
Clif Bar
Read more: Clif Bar review Score: 8/10
Cliff bar makes a range of excellent tasting flavours, that taste natural and are easy to digest - though some need a little washing down with fluid.

The brand uses organic and whole ingredients, such as rolled oats, oat fibre and dates to make its bars - so you know you're getting real food.

These are quite large: a 68g bar contains 274 calories, 6.9g of fat, 41g of carb and 10g of protein - so there's more in there than your basic carb focused bar.

Newer on the market is Clif's 'Nut butter filled' bar, which provides 230 calories and about 10g plus about 7g of protein - the jury is out on on-bike fuelling but they make great snacks.
Buy now: Pack of 12 Clif energy bars from Evans Cycles for £13.99 All of these bars will re-stock your carb levels - preference is subjective. We'll keep adding more energy bar options as we taste and test them.

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Energy bars for cycling: eight favourite flavours - Cycling Weekly

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Your stomach is the fuel tank for your body - and letting it run on empty over rides in excess of ninety minutes is a sure fire way of finding yourself broken down in the lanes.

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Energy Drinks

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Not sure what the difference is between an electrolyte drink and a carbohydrate drink? We take you through the options
Keeping your liquid levels topped up on the bike is important - around 60 per cent of your body is composed of water - and dehydration can lead to mental as well as physical fatigue.

Energy drinks designed for cycling will serve two purposes: providing carbohydrate to fuel activity and replacing electrolytes.

Exercising of course burns calories, and when a ride is over 60-90 minutes, you need to replace them. Carbohydrates from energy drinks are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, so sipping on one as you ride is an effective way of refuelling and they're great for racers who need a steady flow of energy, without the need to chew.
>>> How to stay hydrated during a Gran Fondo
However, it's important not to undervalue real food - energy drinks are expensive and higher in sugar than the contents of an average kitchen cupboard or most energy bars.
Energy drinks explained
On to the electrolyte half of the equation: when you sweat, you lose vital salts and minerals such as sodium, potassium and magnesium. These need to be topped up to restore balance, and failing to do so can cause cramp among other symptoms.

Energy drinks are usually bolstered with these essential additives, or you can choose to use an electrolyte only mix, getting your carbs in with solid food. It's important to know the difference, and to choose the right option for you. A common approach is to carry a bottle of each on long rides, where you may want to intersperse carb fuelled sips with something less sticky.

We've pulled together a list of our best rated energy drinks - but you'll find detailed information about how they work and how to tailor your nutrition to your needs further down the page.

With each product is a 'Buy Now' or 'Best Deal' link. If you click on this then we may receive a small amount of money from the retailer when you purchase the item. This doesn't affect the amount you pay.

Recommended carbohydrate energy drinks

Carbohydrate drinks re-stock glycogen stores to stave off the dreaded bonk, and most contain added electrolytes too.

These will be 'isotonic', meaning they quench your thirst and provide energy with 4-8g carb per 100ml, or 'hypertonic', meaning their primary objective is to deliver energy via 8g+ of carb per 100ml.

The best energy drinks will provide multiple sources of carbohydrate, promoting quicker absorption and studies have shown that 2:1 glucose/fructose mixes allow for maximum uptake (up to 90g an hour).

High5 energy drink

High5's energy drink uses the 2:1 fructose mix (explained below) delivering up to 90g of carbs an hour.

You get 175 calories per 47g serving, with 44g of carbohydrate, plus sodium, magnesium and potassium.

High5's drinks come in a range of flavours - but they can be quite sticky and sweet, lending themselves to carrying an additional bottle with plain water to wash it down.

Buy now: High5 energy drink, 2.2kg at Evans Cycles for £19.99

SIS Go Electrolyte energy drink

Science in Sport (SIS) produces 'Go Energy' and 'Go Electrolyte' - the latter has the salts and minerals you need, as well as the carbs.

Each 40g serving delivers 146 calories, with 36g of carbs plus salt, calcium, magnesium and potassium.

The flavours are refreshing and go down easily.
Buy now: SIS Go Electrolyte Energy Drink at Wiggle from £16.84
Torq 2:1 Maltodextrin:Fructose energy drink

Torq's energy drinks can be bought initially in a tub, then topped up with pouches to save on waste.

The brand uses a 2:1 mix of glucose-derivatives and fructose for maximum absorption. The maltodextrin used sits just below the isotonic level - meaning its optimised to both deliver fuel and hydration in the form of the added electrolytes: sodium, chloride, magnesium, potassium and calcium.

Two scoops added to 500ml of water provides 120 calories and 30g of carbs.

The brand also offers a 'Torq Hypotonic' drink, which favours hydration over carb delivery. It was developed for shorter, but intense sessions and contains electrolytes with 61 calories and 15g carb per 18g serving.
Buy now: Torq energy drink at Evans Cycles from £11 for 500g
Recommended electrolyte/hydration drinks

Hydration drinks often come as tablets and are hypotonic - this means that they contain less sugar - generally less than 4g of carbs per 100ml - and are designed to quench the thirst, not to fuel the athlete with calories.

The primary role of these products is to deliver electrolytes, lost via sweat.

Precision Hydration electrolyte drink

Precision Hydration are experts in rehydration. Their powders and dissolvable tablets are hypotonic - they're low calorie and not designed to replace glycogen.

Because people's sweat rates and sweat content vary, the brand uses an online questionnaire to work out how much sodium you actually need to top up with.

You'll then receive a suggestion of 250, 500, 1000 or 1500mg dose of sodium alongside potassium, calcium and magnesium - the dosage may vary depending upon the duration and intensity of your event.
Buy now: Precision Hydration at Amazon
High5 Zero tablets

A zero calorie drink that contains the electrolytes sodium and magnesium as well as vitamin C, to help reduce the chance of cramp, keep fatigue at bay as well as strengthing your immune system.
Buy now: High5 Zero tablets at Evans Cycles from £3.39
Nuun electrolyte hydration tablets

These 10 calorie tablets replace sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium - they also boost vitamin C levels.

There's 13 flavour options, and four of them come with the addition of 40mg of caffeine, from Green Tea extract.
Buy now: Nuun hydration tablets at the Cyclestore for £5.85
Carbohydrate energy drinks

What are they?

A blend of carbohydrate, water and electrolytes. Most commercially available sports drinks contain a mix of carbohydrates from different sources (eg sucrose, glucose, fructose) at a concentration of around six to eight per cent. They typically come as a powder, to be mixed with water.

Why use them?

As the body's primary source of fuel during prolonged and high intensity exercise, depletion of muscle carbohydrate is one of the primary causes of fatigue, and can severely limit your ability to perform on longer rides.

Studies show that consumption of a carbohydrate drink during rides lasting over 60 minutes is an effective way to boost endurance. By providing the working muscles with additional fuel you can delay fatigue, with some research suggesting up to a 20 per cent improvement in performance during exercise lasting 90 minutes or more.

Ingesting carbohydrate during exercise also has positive effects on the central nervous system, which can provide an additional mental 'boost'.

How do I use them effectively?

During rides lasting over 60 minutes, consuming 30-60g 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 250ml every 15-20 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 2:1 glucose fructose).

Avoid concentrated drinks containing more than six-eight per cent carbohydrate (hypertonic), as these slow the rate at which fluid is absorbed, and can also cause gastrointestinal discomfort.

Are they better than real foods?

Carbohydrate drinks are a convenient option, which have the added bonus of facilitating the replacement of fluid and electrolytes.

However, this isn't to say it's not possible to fuel your rides with real food - in a 2012 study from Appalachian State University, bananas were shown to be as effective as a six per cent carbohydrate drink in sustaining power output and performance in a group of male cyclists completing a 75km time trial.
>>> What do professional cyclists eat?
Reliance on carb drinks can be an expensive habit. To get around this consider making a DIY isotonic drink by mixing 200ml ordinary squash with 800ml 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 30-60g of carbohydrate per hour.

Isotonic drinks

Electrolyte drinks containing six-eight per cent carbohydrate are known as isotonic - they contain the same concentration of dissolved particles (salts and sugars) as body fluids, which promotes hydration.

2:1 Fructose drinks

What are they?

An advanced range of sports drinks, powders, bars and gels containing a blend of carbohydrate in a 2:1 ratio of glucose to fructose with added electrolytes.

Why use them?

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 30-60g 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.
>>> Best cycling water bottles and bidons
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 1.5g per minute, increasing the rate of delivery to the muscles to up to 90g per hour. This is thanks to the fact that fructose is transported and absorbed via a different mechanism to 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? Research suggests yes - in a 2004 trial comparing glucose, glucose/fructose or control (water) beverages in trained cyclists; rates of carbohydrate oxidation were 36 per cent higher with the glucose/fructose beverage versus the pure glucose drink.

In addition researchers found that the glucose/fructose drink spared the body's stored carbohydrate, improved water uptake from the gut and reduced the rate of perceived exertion. More recently, researchers at Birmingham University simulating a one-hour time trial after two hours of riding found an eight per cent improvement in performance when using glucose/fructose beverage, compared to a glucose-only drink.

How do I use them effectively?

For rides lasting over an hour, try swapping your usual sports drink or energy gel for a 2:1 product to increase carbohydrate delivery from 60g to 90g per hour - this equates to 1,500ml of a drink, three gels or three bars.

Remember, any change in your fuelling strategy should be tried and tested, so don't make the switch on the day of a competition - work towards titrating your usage upwards from the standard 60g per hour.

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.

Are they better than real foods?

Multiple transportable carbohydrates have definite benefits which could translate into that all-important performance edge during an event. The advantage of 2:1 products is convenience and the precise ratio of glucose to fructose for maximise absorption.

Carbohydrate foods do contain a mix of sugars (bananas provide glucose and fructose in a 1:1 ratio), so you could experiment with different sources, although getting 90g of carb in the all-important 2:1 ratio will require some maths.

Electrolyte/hydration drinks

What are they?

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.

Why use them?

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. Due to dilution of electrolytes, plain water may also suppress thirst, while hydration drinks maintain desire to drink.

How do I use them effectively?

Generally speaking, a specific hydration product isn't necessary if you're riding for under an hour, but they can be useful in maintaining hydration in hot conditions, or if sweat loss is high.

If you do choose one, the rule of thumb is to start your ride well hydrated, and to adopt a regular pattern of drink intake, aiming for 125ml every 15 minutes. This will help to maintain fluid balance.

Remember that if you're riding for over an hour, you'll also need to take carbohydrate on board, as hydration drinks don't contain enough carbohydrate to boost endurance.

Are they better than real foods?

Flavoured beverages increase your desire to drink, and fluid consumption is more closely matched to sweat loss when athletes are offered a flavoured drink over plain water during exercise. In hot and humid conditions they're an effective way to maintain adequate hydration, although during longer rides you'll need to consider a carbohydrate source.

On the downside, these drinks can be expensive, and in rides lasting under an hour in relatively cool conditions, good old water will do the job nicely. If you're not a fan of plain water, you can add a bit of squash and a pinch of salt to your water bottle to increase motivation to drink.

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Energy drinks for cycling: hydration explained - Cycling Weekly

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Not sure what the difference is between an electrolyte drink and a carbohydrate drink? We take you through the options Keeping your liquid levels topped up on the bike is important - around 60 per cent of your body is composed of water - and dehydration can lead to mental as well as physical fatigue.

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Cycling's Greatest Fraud

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Cyclings Greatest Fraud National Geographic

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Uploaded by Cyclingtube.nl on 2014-01-11.

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How does a gifted young rider become a champion? Is it more about talent or training? CW asks scientists, coaches, and a teenage sensation
- Words by Jamie Ewbank
Most riders dream of winning a national or World Championship title. A few dedicate their lives to it. Fewer still achieve it. Among this successful minority, the thing they have in common is talent, in spades - talent that, for most of them, shone through at an early age.
>>> Mining for talent: How the Junior Tour of Wales uncovers the next generation of stars
But talent alone isn't enough: nature and nurture must come together to build an exceptional set of skills. What exactly does that take? How is raw potential turned into solid gold?

Who better to ask than Tom Pidcock? Aged just 18, he has won six major titles in the past year alone: the national, European and world junior cyclocross titles, the scratch race at the National Junior Track Championships, the National Criterium Championships and, of course, a stunning ride in Norway to win the World Championship junior time trial title.

Pidcock has transitioned from youth to adult racing as though he barely noticed the step up. Did he ever regard cycling as mere play?

"I took it seriously right from the start," admits the young champion, "because I always wanted to be successful. Even when I was an under-14, I was training. Mum and Dad would check that I wasn't taking it too seriously, because there's a lot of time to take it seriously later on."

Pidcock insists that, despite being very determined to get results, he always wanted to have fun too.

"I rode to school every day from the start, went to the jumps and the BMX park, just wanting to ride my bike and have fun - nothing to do with training I'd been given, it's just what I wanted to do."

The right attitude is the first building block, but there is much debate over what comes next. Does innate talent trump dedicated training?

Are our physiological limits as an adult set in stone by our DNA, or can they be stretched and redefined as we mature? Dr Laura Dugas of Loyola University Chicago founded a study group to research specialisation in adolescent athletes. Her team has made some interesting findings.

"We are all limited by our genetics, which can be considered a hard ceiling," says Dugas.

"No amount of training or hard work can overcome your genotype, which can be interpreted as raw talent resulting from your genes. This dictates your sporting phenotype: how well you actually perform. Training is fundamental to developing as an athlete, but it is not the only predictor of whether you will actually perform."

This understanding was brilliantly popularised by David Epstein in his book The Sports Gene, which investigated whether the '10,000-hour rule' - the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach expert level - actually stacked up. Epstein eviscerates the foundations of the rule, explaining that, if you don't have the genotype or raw talent, you won't become an expert, regardless of how much you practise.
Watch: Top training myths
Dugas is quick to stress two important caveats, however. Just because some people have a higher genetic potential than others doesn't mean that everyone who beats you is beating you on that advantage.

Most of us are somewhere towards the middle on the scale of 'natural talentedness'.

The guy who took your KoM probably isn't Superman; you can probably snatch it back by making some sensible improvements to your training.

Secondly, having talent isn't enough - it doesn't lead to success unless it is complemented with effective training. Talent can go unrealised for a wide variety of reasons.

Keep it varied

"Inappropriate training as a developing rider can lead to burn-out, which may impact upon outcomes later, as an adult athlete," says Dugas.

"Our research group has published on this subject extensively. Young athletes who specialise too early are at a considerably higher risk of sports-related injuries, particularly overuse injuries which take much longer to heal."

Not only excessive training but also over-specialisation can cause problems, warns Dugas. She believes that young athletes should be encouraged to pursue a wide variety of sports rather than specialising.

A young cyclist who also enjoys tennis, rowing or gymnastics will develop an array of useful skills, such as hand-eye coordination, improved endurance and balance.

According to Dugas, early specialisation is crucial only in sports that rely heavily on technique and hand-eye coordination, such as golf and tennis. In an endurance sport like cycling, a youngster may pay a heavy price for narrowing their focus too early.

"I am also wary of too many hours [of training]," adds Dugas. "Our data was clear that, for kids, as soon the number of hours per week of training exceeded their age, the risk of overuse injury jumped significantly.

"We propose that a young athlete's weekly training hours should always be fewer than their years of age; and that the number of hours adolescents spend training and competing in their primary sport should be less than twice their free play hours."

Hitting the sweet spot

Hitting the sweet spot between doing enough to develop an athlete's talent and overtraining is a complex job best handled by a qualified coach. Even then, the rider's attitude and enthusiasm may throw in some stumbling blocks.

"I first began using a training diary when I joined the Olympic Development Apprentices," says Pidcock. "I started recording my training in Excel and my coach monitored it. That's when it became structured, in my second year as an under-16."

This monitoring added control, specificity and, whenever necessary, a degree of caution.

"There were specific things in the plan intended to make me better that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to do, like more time on the rollers or turbo, controlled training, and less time on the jumps."

Pidcock pauses before wryly confessing: "Well, I say that, but on rest days I went to the dirt jumps anyway."

Occasional extra-curricular jump practice notwithstanding, Pidcock's dedicated training load remains around 16 hours per week - neatly complying with Dr Dugas's fewer-hours-than-your-age maxim. Pidcock reveals that, at junior level, there is little emphasis on objective data; intensity is based on feel.

"We don't use power at junior academy, efforts are just efforts - you go hard [by feel] or you don't go hard."

Michael Guilford is a British Cycling accredited coach who specialises in developing young riders.

"You need to be careful with expectations of physical improvement in young riders," he says.

"Development in power is likely to come mostly from natural physical growth, so setting goals like 'improve 10-minute power from 200W to 300W' may be unhelpful for a younger rider.

"It might be more appropriate to focus on a different area such as cadence."

According to Guilford, building good habits is more important than hitting numbers, since the numbers will change anyway as the rider grows.

"Habits die hard, and the best habit for a top-level cyclist is training to be a better bike rider. Young riders are more adaptable, in particular their brains are more 'plastic' so they can learn techniques quicker and form a stronger drive to train. This is their real 'headroom' to make training adaptations."

Guilford was drafted in by Surrey club VC Meudon to create a youth development plan after they noticed a high turnover of younger riders.

"Riders would move from team to team for material offers, such as a frameset on loan or a set of team kit.
The image I had in my mind was a tight-knit group of youngsters who belong to an aspirational cycling club."

The solution was to create a pathway that developing riders could follow, all within one familiar, step-by-step set-up.

"What I wanted was a road racing specific training programme with a clear exit route. That way the devo [development squad] club and VC Meudon race team all tie together and create a place which young riders want to belong."

In Guilford's view, the traditional club run no longer serves young riders as well as it used to.

The cycling boom of recent years has changed the ratio of inexperienced to seasoned riders, meaning fewer mentors to go around, and diluting the number of learning opportunities for developing riders.

With the VC Meudon development team, Guilford's approach is to harness the leadership skills of experienced riders to play a support role alongside conventional coaching.

"As a teenager, Chris Froome went cycling with much older cyclists, completing rides that must have pushed him to an uncomfortable level. I think this has played a big part in his dominance now. Successful athletes focus on progress in specific areas that will yield the performance they want, regardless of how uncomfortable it is."

Release the pressure

Linking up with a good coach is one thing, then, but finding the right group of training mates matters just as much - perhaps more.

"Finding opportunities to learn skills and techniques requires more outside input and organisation," says Guilford.

"If you hire a coach, they can easily tell you what training session to do to get fitter, but it's more difficult to prescribe someone a session that teaches them how to sprint from a group of 120 riders."

Getting a developing rider to sometimes push beyond their comfort zone is important but also risky, requiring careful control.

This raises the spectre of the overly pushy coach or parent. In a business where reputations are made by results, ambitious coaches can do more harm than good. This doesn't apply to Pidcock, who assures me that his coaches have always done their best to protect him from his own tendency to overreach.

"I've never been pushed too hard by anybody else, but I think I've pushed myself too hard. Before the Worlds last winter, over Christmas, I did a lot of miles and ended up having to take five days off training, after I blew up. I'd done too much."

Pidcock has not only had to keep his own determination in check; he's had to squeeze in schoolwork while developing the skill and versatility to switch between three different disciplines.

"I got through school and learnt things that will help me in life, although I didn't necessarily care about the grade on the piece of paper at the end. What has been difficult is going from 'cross to track. They're completely different."

This, he explains, is why he has decided to focus on just the two disciplines, road and cyclocross.

Age-appropriate training

"In winter I'd finish racing, come home, and then go straight out for training again on the track. It's difficult on the track when you're riding full-gas with no breaks. In road and 'cross, you get little breaks; it is difficult without them."

Victor Thompson (sportspsychologist.com) is a sports psychologist who specialises in working with children and young athletes.

He warns against making assumptions about younger riders, who are finding out everything for the first time. No matter how talented, they are confronted with new challenges that can be extremely daunting.

"De-emphasise the rider's lack of knowledge or unfamiliarity with the task at hand, otherwise their fear will rise," says Thompson.

"Instead, emphasise what they do know, and keep things simple. They know how to ride their bike, have an idea of pacing, effort levels and how they feel."

Aim to give advice that reassures rather than complicates.

"Tell them what the course will be like; that their only obligation is to do their best and learn and take away
some positives. Preparation should be geared towards precluding stresses that could arise on race day or even on the start line."

Of course, there are additional psychological challenges when it comes to training adolescent riders.

Irritability, lethargy and apathy can be symptoms of simply being a teenager rather than of overtraining.

Good communication and collaborative goal-setting are especially important, explains Thompson.

"Ask the rider if they are enjoying racing, liking the challenge, and want to continue or change what they are doing. Some young riders take a 'if some is good, more is better' view of training - they have yet to learn this is faulty logic."

Thompson has another concern, related to distractions off the bike.

"With social media, the temptation to compare oneself to others is ever-present. Young riders can get lured
into overtraining by reading about the big miles their heroes are doing."

Which brings us back to Tom Pidcock, and his admiration for Peter Sagan: "Well, he's pretty good, isn't he?" he
says in a knowing, slightly cheeky tone.

"But he has fun while he does it, and that's what I do too. I don't want to be boring and a goody two-shoes; I like to race a bike, have fun and win."

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Talent or training? How a gifted young rider becomes a champion - Cycling Weekly

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How does a gifted young rider become a champion? Is it more about talent or training? CW asks scientists, coaches, and a teenage sensation - Words by Jamie Ewbank Most riders dream of winning a national or World Championship title. A few dedicate their lives to it. Fewer still achieve it.

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Could you pass the UCI's Pro Cycling Test? (video) - Cycling Weekly

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This is the test that the UCI uses to spot potential professional cyclists, so we headed to the UCI headquarters in Aigle to see if we have what it takes.

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Expert Statement on Doping

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Altitude

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Altitude

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Patrick Hollingworth

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Climbing Everest: Patrick Hollingworth at TEDxPerth

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PED's in amateur sport

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Drug use at every level of sport is "fast becoming a crisis" according to UK Anti-Doping - responding to a BBC poll into doping in amateur sport.

It found more than a third (35%) of amateur sports people say they personally know someone who has doped, and 8% said they had taken steroids.

Half believe performance enhancing substance use is "widespread" among those who play sport competitively.

Ukad chief Nicole Sapstead described the figures as "incredibly alarming".

A BBC State of Sport investigation into doping in UK amateur sport also found that 49% thought performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) were "easily available" among people who play sports regularly.

What do the statistics say?

According to figures from UK Anti-Doping (Ukad), the national body responsible for protecting clean sport, there are currently 52 athletes and coaches serving bans.

Of these, only 12% are professional sports men or women; 62% are amateurs, 21% are semi-professional, and 5% are coaches.

Of the 186 sanctions handed out across 22 separate sports by Ukad since it formed in 2009, 46% have been rugby union or league players - mainly at amateur and semi-professional levels.

What does the poll tell us?

Reacting to the ComRes poll for BBC Sport of more than 1,000 men and women who are members of sports clubs and teams, Sapstead said: "Certainly the figures as regards the prevalence of performance-enhancing substances at an amateur level are incredibly alarming.

"That said, it does confirm what UK Anti-Doping has long suspected and also seen through some of our intelligence-led testing.

"I don't think any sport can say that they don't have a problem at an amateur level.

"I think now is the time for everybody to sit up and acknowledge that this is a reality in every single sport and that you can't just be washing your hands of it or hoping that someone else will address it."
Sapstead also told BBC Sport:

Ukad needs an extension of powers and extra cash from individual sports governing bodies to "address what is fast becoming a crisis for sport".

There is a "woeful lack of education" at amateur level about the health risks of doping.

There is a "robust" anti-doping programme in the UK, but it faces "challenges".

Ukad works with police forces to target suppliers of drugs to amateur dopers.

Why do amateurs dope?

Of the 79 people interviewed who had specifically taken anabolic steroids, 41% said improving performance was the main reason for taking them, followed by pain relief (40%) and improving how they look (34%).

However, when this is widened out to include those who admitted taking other performance-enhancing substances, boosting results was no longer the primary reason.

Only 25% of users overall claim they have taken substances with the intention of improving performance.

Over half say they were primarily used for pain relief, while 17% say they were used to improve looks.

"I think there are clearly a group of individuals seeking to enhance their performance by taking prohibited substances," said Sapstead, "and then there are others who were taking these substances because they have a body image problem, or actually because they think it's the done thing."

Is doping a younger issue?

Younger people are the main users of anabolic steroids in amateur sport, according to the poll for BBC Sport.

Among sports club members aged 18-34, 13% say they have taken steroids to support performance or recovery while playing. Not one interviewee aged 55 or over said they had used anabolic steroids.

However, users aged between 35 and 54 are significantly more likely than those aged 18-34 to say pain relief is among the main reasons they have used steroids or other sports supplements.

But there is hardly any difference in gender, with 9% of men admitted taking steroids, compared with 8% of women.

And 71% of all those polled said they would not know where to get hold of anabolic steroids.

Using steroids for image reasons is a "worrying" problem among young people in Wales, according to the nation's social services and public health minister Rebecca Evans, who said in January: "It's not just a problem in sport - it is a wider societal issue."

More than 50 types of anabolic steroids are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), the independent body responsible for the list of substances prohibited in sport.

The possession of steroids, which are class C drugs, is not illegal under UK law as long as they are only for personal use.

It is illegal, however, to supply them to other people.

What else are people taking?

According to the poll, a wide range of substances - both legal and illegal - are taken by amateur sports men and women to support their performance or recovery.

Performance-enhancing substances can also include recreational drugs and prescribed medications:

26% of amateur sports people say they have taken prescribed medications such as cortisone injections or asthma inhalers.

14% say they have taken recreational drugs such as cocaine, MDMA or cannabis.

8% say they have taken anabolic steroids such as nandrolone, testosterone or HGH.

We also asked people about other substances they consumed while playing sport, including: energy drinks (68% had), pain-relief gels (60%), over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medicines (59%) and protein shakes (46%).

Case study: 'Curiosity not winning - why I doped'

Former amateur cyclist Dan Stevens was banned after refusing a test in 2014. He turned whistleblower but labelled Ukad's handling of his information "a catastrophic failure".

Responding to the BBC Sport poll, Stevens, 41, said: "I think it is widespread in all ranks. I think it is widespread in celebrity, I think it is widespread in the beauty industry; I think it is certainly widespread in the sports industry.

"I also think it is just a way of modern day life - we are living in a pharmacised world."

Stevens said he took thyroxine and testosterone on prescription, and EPO out of "curiosity".

"I'd always been a clean athlete and this situation happened to me when I was 39 years old. That was enough to see a huge, huge gain.

"But the real thing for me wasn't really about racing - I didn't do a lot of racing on these substances. The main thing was curiosity.

"I don't think in the amateur ranks it is about winning. You've got a situation where someone is overweight, a little bit fat, need to lean down, get in shape. And they get in shape.

"They then get railroaded into doing a marathon or a long bike ride or some kind of competitive event and they improve their fitness levels again and they become a healthier individual and become more body conscious and more health-orientated."

Which sports are most affected?

What is the 'gateway hypothesis'?

More than a third of people (36%) who report consuming recreational drugs to support their performance while playing amateur sport have also taken steroids.

Dr Lambros Lazuras, an assistant professor of social psychology at Sheffield Hallam University who studies doping behaviour, told BBC Sport that there is a "pill-taking culture" in amateur sport and general society, which can act as a "gateway" to stronger substances.

"There are people who engage in stacking practices, using as many as 10 substances at the same time," he explained. "For these people, it's not what they use anymore, it's what they want to achieve."

So what are the health risks?

"The use of steroids, for example, has been associated with problems like heart disease, kidney failure and even sudden death," said Dr Lazuras. "You're not just cheating, you're putting your life at risk.

"This is an emerging public health issue," claimed Dr Lazuras. "You're using substances that are meant to treat diseases, and you're actually misusing them without any prescription.

"We push people into exercise because we want to promote the health benefits. We forget that people in most exercise settings might consider using substances.

"This is actually the dark side of exercise. You don't care about your health anymore. You care about your performance and how you look to other people - or yourself."

Case study two: 'You have to dope to be a good weightlifter'

A British weightlifter who has served a doping ban told BBC Sport steroid abuse is rife at all levels in his sport and that the culture starts at amateur level.

"It begins in the gym," the weightlifter, who wishes to remain anonymous, said. "In weightlifting it gets to the point where you're not growing anymore. You can train, train, train and not get anywhere.

"Every weightlifter will take steroids. Some of them are taking light stuff and some of them are really heavily using steroids - it all depends how much money you have.

"Is it easy to buy bread in the shop? That's how easy it is to get steroids in the UK.

"If you're not taking steroids, basically you're nowhere in the competition, you're not going to get anywhere really.

"I'm really proud of how they fight steroids in England. But the problem is, why are England losing? England won't cheat.

"I've been caught because I didn't think that somebody would come to my house. I left taking steroids one month before competition and I never ever thought somebody would come to my house and test."

"I can't do something that I really love. Only because I've been cheating with steroids, come on. It's like I killed somebody. I'm not even an Olympic sportsman."

Case study three: 'I felt invincible'

Lewis Conlin, 32, a publisher from Buckinghamshire, used a supplement containing the banned substance DMAA when he started weight-training in his early 20s.

DMAA is an amphetamine-derived substance banned from sale in the UK and named on Wada's prohibited list.

It has been linked with high blood pressure, tightening of the chest, stroke, heart attacks and even death, according to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

"In terms of the energy and focus that I got, it was the best pre-workout supplement I'd ever had," Conlin, who was weight-training four or five days per week with friends, told BBC Sport.

"You felt invincible, you felt you could do anything, you were just completely zoned out. You'd stare at a weight and go and lift it. That was great. Afterwards wasn't so great.

"About three hours later you would have a crash and you'd have a real comedown. I'd be depressed and I'd be ratty, happy just to keep myself in isolation and then later on that day I was getting chest pains.

"I would have trouble sleeping and would have heart palpitations - but that didn't actually stop me from taking it the next day. The training I was doing was so high and so intense I just wanted to have that every day.

"Had I known at the time exactly what DMAA did to your blood pressure and your heart rate then there is no way I would have carried on taking it."

Should there be more testing in amateur sport?

More drug testing among amateur sports people is a "waste of time", according to one amateur cyclist who received a two-year ban for missing a post-race drugs test.

It would cost too much money and detract from focusing on drug use in the professional ranks, he added.

"I don't see the point at all," said the Briton, who asked to remain anonymous.

"What effect is it going to have on anything, unless it is something like a national championship where people can move on in the professional ranks and actually earn a living from it? It is a problem then because you're actually affecting people's lives.

In my opinion more testing would be just a waste of time at low level sport

Banned amateur cyclist

"How far do you go - do you want to test people for doing a fun run? It's up to them if they want to do whatever they want to do, in my opinion," he said.

"If you want to catch someone then catch the right people - like the people that win the Tour de France and get away with it.

"But then that's too much politics and money involved. They would rather get someone that doesn't mean anything because it is easy."

How much does testing cost?

Ukad has an annual budget of around £7m, mainly state funding. A single drug test costs around £350.

Ukad directs the vast majority of its testing to elite sport, with Sapstead saying: "I would love to able to address the issues that we see at an amateur level, but the reality is we just don't have the resources to do that.

"I strongly believe a further investment needs to be paid from sport, whether that's from a levy on ticket sales - some contribution into a greater integrity pot of money, that's distributed not just to anti-doping, but anti-corruption bodies.

"Someone somewhere needs to put their hand in their pocket and their money where their mouth is, and start to help pay for us to do this job, and do it as effectively and efficiently as possible.

"Cheating impacts against the people you are competing against. So it doesn't matter if you're an Olympian, or a Paralympian, and it doesn't matter if you don your trainers at a weekend for a fun run.

"Actually, you're competing, and therefore it absolutely matters that everyone is toeing the line and playing a fair game."

How the poll was done

BBC Sport - using ComRes to conduct the poll - interviewed 1,025 British adults, who are members of sports clubs, teams or gyms, online, between 27 and 31 January 2017. The data was drawn from a nationally representative sample of British adults aged 18 or over and the full tables are available here.

All sports played by those interviewed are regulated by UK Anti-Doping, apart from gyms.

Have you doped?
Have you ever taken a performance enhancing substance? Does your sport have a problem with doping? Get in touch using this link.

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Doping in sport: Drug use 'fast becoming a crisis' - Nicole Sapstead

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Drug use at every level of sport is "fast becoming a crisis" according to UK Anti-Doping - responding to a BBC poll into doping in amateur sport. It found more than a third (35%) of amateur sports people say they personally know someone who has doped, and 8% said they had taken steroids.

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Lactate Sampling

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Watch: Behind the scenes with the pros on a pre-season training camp - Cycling Weekly

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An Post-Chain Reaction Cycles give you a behind the scenes look at what goes on at the pros's pre-season training camps in the sun of south eastern Spain.

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Nutrition

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Anecdotal evidence

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In the race to ride as far as possible in one hour, John Lee is literally peerless. Here, he explains why age is no barrier to setting records
The only other person to hold three Hour Records in this country is Chris Boardman," says John Lee. "There's nobody who has ever done it on outdoor tracks."

This September, 87-year-old Lee rode 18.815 miles on the velodrome at Welwyn Garden City, an unparalleled distance in British cycling's record books for a man his age.

Once they reach their eighties, most clubmen are content to attend the annual dinner, reminisce about their racing days with their fellow veterans and maybe hand out the trophies to the younger members.

But Lee, of the Icknield Road Club, in Bedfordshire, treated what is usually the autumn of a cyclist's career as a brand new racing season.
>>> The Hour Record: An interactive timeline
A decade earlier, as he headed into his seventies, Lee, who already had a long and distinguished palmarès in road time trialling - including eight national medals - found his motivation was beginning to wane. It wasn't that his fitness was in decline: at 72, he had set a national age record for 10 miles with 22.54.

"I was a bit fed up with the road; I'd done most of what I wanted to do," says Lee. "Mike Daniel [friend and club-mate and a former Cycling reporter] said, 'Why don't you have a go at the track records?' Stan Miles, the former BBAR, had set a lot. So I came down here. I got myself a steel track bike, a Reg Barnett, and I took all the veteran track records.

"After three years of going up to 10 miles, the timekeeper in our club said, 'Why don't you have a crack at the Hour?'"
>>> Icons of cycling: Francesco Moser's 1984 Hour Record bike
In 2009, at age 80, Lee clocked 21.281 miles, a new outdoor record. At age 84, he did 20.433. By now, he found that he was not only in a league of his own but also literally on his own - no British rider in their eighties had set an Hour Record.

Lee could in theory ride round as slowly as he liked, but for a man who has raced continuously since 1952, setting as high a mark as possible was a matter of pride.

Lee had always trained in the traditional way: as many road miles as possible. "I always liked to ride for as long as I could without stopping," he says.
>>> How to keep riding in your 80s
"I could get [from Luton] to Coventry and back without stopping on a Sunday. And Reading and back. I joined the CTC century section where they did 100 miles every Sunday summer and winter. The more miles I did, the fitter I got, and the fitter I got, the faster I got."

But for his latest Hour Record, he broke the mile-munching habit of a lifetime and instead focused on specificity, acknowledging that at age 87 it's more important than ever to sharpen the mind as well as the body.

"I came down to the track and each time I trained my body to ride for just over an hour, to get the body and mind trained to stay between those two lines. An hour, it's a mind job. You cannot let up.

"When you're flat-out in a 10-mile time trial, there's always something happening - a car coming by, you're catching somebody - but on here, there's nothing, just that gap between those lines. And you keep going round in circles. And it's hard, easy, hard, easy because there's always a slight drift.

"If you haven't got the mind to do it, you'll never do it physically."
>>> Alex Dowsett to focus on the road for UCI Hour Record attempt
For the majority of his training, Lee uses a turbo trainer rather than the road. "At my age, it's dangerous on the roads," he explains.

As for training tools: "I don't use a heart rate monitor any more because I haven't been tested recently and don't know my zones. A power meter? I'd love to have all the gizmos but I do it all on feel and gears."

For the 2016 record, Lee used 87.6 inches, a ratio he settled on during a year of training. "I rode 91 for the first Hour Record. I tried 90 this time but it was just that fraction too high now."

Lee is keen to play down this fact, but his wheels are rather special: "I borrow them off the Pendleton family. I was racing against Max [Victoria's father] in the 1960s. He was a good hill-climber and a good man on the track."
>>> Seven ways to make your commute more like the Hour Record
But after 50 minutes on the track, his wheels' celebrity stardust had all blown off. "The last 10 minutes was the hardest part. You're hanging on and as you start to get tired you lose your concentration. Once I veered slightly out during the final minutes. There are people cheering, but you don't look at them."

Clearly, Lee is not planning on hanging up Victoria Pendleton 's wheels any time soon. So what's next? "I think I could beat 20 miles indoors," he smiles.
Don't let age slow you down
How to stay fast into your 80s

Eat good food: "I'm a lucky man - I have my health. I don't take any medication. It's all done on my good wife's cooking - good, solid food."

Get enough sleep: "I need between eight and nine hours a night. I'm very rigid on sleep. That's where
you recover."

Drink in moderation: "I enjoy a glass of wine but I don't go to pubs. As regards getting drunk - no way."

Look after your knees: "I've never been overgeared. Before I do anything, I try the gear out several times to find out what I'm comfortable with."

Get health checks: "When I was 70, I rode a 12-hour time trial and my heart was a bit funny. I went to the doctor on Monday and he said there's nothing wrong. I asked for a stress tolerance test but he wouldn't send me for one because I wasn't ill. I was allowed to pay for one and went to a BUPA cardiologist and it was the best money I could have spent. He found a blip indicating that I had a weak heart valve, but in the end he diagnosed athlete's heart [where the left ventricle becomes enlarged as a result of prolonged endurance training] and he was happy for me to keep racing. I had another check three years ago and they said the same."

Behind every man...

"John is motivated by John [himself]," says John Lee's wife Freda. "He used to like doing 12-hour races and you've got to be motivated to ride a bike for that long. It's not enough to be dedicated - you've got to be committed."

Mike and Jean Daniel are Lee's Icknield RC club-mates and have also been two of the three witnesses required at his national Hour Record attempts.

Lee says Mike inspired him to take up track record-breaking, something Mike modestly denies. "Mike did come down [to the Welwyn track] with him," offers Jean.

"He'd ring him up and say, 'I'm going to the track this morning, are you going to come for a few laps?' Mike started John thinking about going on the track, and once he gets something in his head...

"Everything revolves around racing - that's what you do, that's your life. It just needs the seed to be sown, and Mike obviously did that. And then kept him company doing it."

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Meet the 87-year-old Hour Record holder: 'If you haven't got the mind to do it, you'll never do it physically' - Cycling Weekly

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In the race to ride as far as possible in one hour, John Lee is literally peerless. Here, he explains why age is no barrier to setting records The only other person to hold three Hour Records in this country is Chris Boardman," says John Lee.

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Steroid Abuse

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Doping for Gold YouTube Bing Doping for Gold Alternatives to Blood Doping East German Doping for Gold East German Doping Program Olympic Doping Scandals Olympic Doping Women Doping Documentary Doping for Gold Documentary 1976 East German Swimmers Steroids East German Doping Scandal PBS Videos About Gold Effects of Doping in Sports

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Ergogenic Aids

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EPO/Forgiveness

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Lance Armstrong National Geographic Documentary

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Lance Armstrong  The Big Interview BBC Documentary 2015

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Lance Armstrong The Big Interview BBC Documentary 2015

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EPO

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Junior Cyclists Warning

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Cycling Ireland is advising against young cyclists taking caffeinated substances after two junior riders fell ill after ingesting them at a race in Cork last weekend.

The Irish Independent reports that the competitors, aged 14 and 16, fell ill after the race and one required hospital treatment.

"Caffeine is widely used by the majority of the adult population in various foods and drinks, along with being available in a wide range of sports gels, drinks, powders and in over the counter tablets or capsules," a statement on the CI website said.

"While it can be effective in enhancing sports performance in trained athletes at moderate doses, 'Caffeine Supplementation should not be used as an ergogenic aid in athletes under the age of 18' according to the Institute of Sport."

Make a Team Sky rider's breakfast
>>> The best energy gels
It continued: "While there are a range of performance benefits for adult athletes across many sports in caffeine consumption, there are very serious concerns that are particularly relevant in relation to younger athletes, such as an increased heart rate, an alteration of fine motor control and over-arousal which can have a negative impact on race preparation, recovery and sleep."

Cycling Ireland also called on race promoters not to offer caffeine supplements to be offered as prizes in junior races.

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Governing body warns against junior cyclists using caffeine supplements following illnesses - Cycling Weekly

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Cycling Ireland is advising against young cyclists taking caffeinated substances after two junior riders fell ill after ingesting them at a race in Cork last weekend. The Irish Independent reports that the competitors, aged 14 and 16, fell ill after the race and one required hospital treatment.

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Anecdotal Evidence

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British time trial national champion Hayley Simmonds says she is very disappointed with 25th place in the women's TT in Qatar
Hayley Simmonds has aired her disappointment at placing 25th in the women's individual time trial at the 2016 UCI Road World Championships in Doha, Qatar.

Speaking after the event, British time trial national champion Simmonds said that she had suffered in the hot, windy conditions. She finished three minutes and 47 seconds behind winner and new world champion Amber Neben of the USA.

"I felt really good in training the last few days, and then today I just felt hot, not when I started but three minutes in," Simmonds said in an interview with British Cycling.

"The wind was hot and I just couldn't do the numbers. I'd accounted for the fact that my numbers were going to be lower today, I knew that. But I still couldn't do the numbers I thought I could do, even in the heat."

Having been missed out for selection for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games time trial, Simmonds evidently wanted to show that she could be up with the best in the world in a top-level time trial.
>>> Amber Neben wins women's time trial world title
"I truly believe that I am capable of being up there," the 28-year-old said. "I'm really, really upset that I'm currently not showing that.

"I really wanted to show that the faith in selecting me, that I could do myself justice and prove that selecting me was the right decision. And I don't feel like I did that."

Later in the evening, Simmonds said on Twitter that her bike had not passed UCI checks prior to the event, and had been altered.

"Obviously gutted about today - not what I'd hoped for. Found out after race that my bike had failed check & had position changed. Onwards..." she said.

Obviously gutted about today - not what I'd hoped for. Found out after race that my bike had failed check & had position changed. Onwards...

- Hayley Simmonds (@hayleyrsimmonds) October 11, 2016

Simmonds' time trialling form has been solid all year, and in mid-September she set a new women's British 10-mile time trial record, clocking 18 minutes and 36 seconds. It is the first time that a British woman has posted a time under 19 minutes.

Her average speed for the 10-mile record was 51.9 km/h, but her Worlds ride on the flat course in Doha saw her average 42.9 km/h, albeit over a longer distance.

Simmonds' GB team-mate and national road race champion Hannah Barnes placed 14th.

The elite women's road race takes place on Saturday.

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Hayley Simmonds 'really upset' with World Champs time trial performance - Cycling Weekly

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British time trial national champion Hayley Simmonds says she is very disappointed with 25th place in the women's TT in Qatar Hayley Simmonds has aired her disappointment at placing 25th in the women's individual time trial at the 2016 UCI Road World Championships in Doha, Qatar.

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Athlete Performance

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Athlete Performance

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Hayters - The UK's leading sports reporting agency

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England vs Italy: The Manaus heat explained

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Sport science expert, Professor John Brewer, who was a member of England manager Bobby Robson's support team at Italia 90, talks about the struggles the players will be under in the Manaus heat against Italy on Saturday night - with the Lucozade Conditions Zone replicating the conditions.

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Heat Stroke

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What happens when you get heat stroke? - Douglas J. Casa

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Water Immersion Project

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King's College London - Human & Applied Physiology MSc Cold Water Immersion Project (2014)

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This is video showing a research study undertaken by students from King's College London (MSc Human & Applied Physiology) whilst on a field trip to the University of Portsmouth (Department of Sport and Exercise Science) in the Environmental Chamber of Prof Mike Tipton.

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Study

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ESPN Sport Science: Impact of Extreme Cold Weather on Athletic Performance

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Sport Science uses Smartspeed Timing Systems to analyze how extreme cold weather affects athletic performance. For Information on Smartspeed and other innovative technologies for measuring, analyzing and improving human performance: GoSports Technologies Atlanta, GA 877-258-0852 info@gosportstech.com www.GoSportsTech.com

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Knowledge Check Question

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Knowledge Check

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Exhausted Briton Jonny Brownlee needed to be helped over the finish line by brother Alistair in a dramatic end to the Triathlon World Series in Mexico.

Leading with 700m left, Jonny, 26, began to weave over the road in hot and humid conditions in Cozumel.

Third-placed Alistair, 28, caught his brother, propping him up for the final couple of hundred metres before pushing him over the line in second place.

They were overtaken by South African Henri Schoeman, the eventual winner.

Victory in Mexico would have given Jonny the world title, but second place left him just four points behind Mario Mola.

The Spaniard was fifth on Sunday to top the overall standings.

Jonny, Olympic silver medallist at Rio 2016 and a bronze medallist at London 2012, collapsed to the ground the moment he crossed the finish line.

He required treatment but later tweeted he was OK, with a photo of himself lying in a hospital bed on a drip.

Alongside a video clip of the finish of the race, the 2012 world champion also wrote: "Normally when you have had too much to drink. This time it was the opposite #ouch"

Alistair said it was "a natural human reaction" to come to the aid of his brother, adding: "I'd have done the same thing for anyone in that position."

He added: "I wish the flippin' idiot had paced it right and crossed the finish line first.

"He could have jogged that last two kilometres and won the race.

"You have to race the conditions. I was comfortable in third. I raced the conditions, I took the water on, made myself cool and I was all right."

'This was not how I wanted to win'

New champion Mola said the dramatic finale had overshadowed his success.

"First of all this was not how I wanted to win the world championship," the Spaniard said in an interview on the International Triathlon Union (ITU) website.

"I was already considering that the role of Alistair was to help Jonny. Considering that, I thought, 'I'm going to be second again, but at least I will fight to the end'.

"And when I heard Jonny isn't feeling well, I thought, 'I need to fight to the end'. We want everyone to be safe after the finish line."

Schoeman, who finished fourth in the overall standings, won the race - consisting of a 1.5km swim, 40km cycle and 10km run - in one hour 46 minutes 50 seconds, with both Brownlees 18 seconds behind. Mola was 46 seconds back in fifth.

The ITU dismissed the Spanish Triathlon Federation's appeal to disqualify Jonny, because "athletes can receive help from another athlete".
Race results
1. Henri Schoeman (SA) 1hr 46mins 50secs

2. Jonathan Brownlee (GB) +18secs

3. Alistair Brownlee (GB) same time

4. Richard Murray (SA) +45secs

5. Mario Mola (Spa) +46secs
ITU World Triathlon Series final standings
1. Mario Mola (Spa) 4,819pts

2. Jonathan Brownlee (GB) 4,815pts

3. Fernando Alarza (Spa) 4,087pts
Watch highlights of the final race on BBC Two and the BBC Sport website at 13:45 BST on Monday.

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Jonny Brownlee: Alistair helps brother over finish line in dramatic World Series finale

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Exhausted Briton Jonny Brownlee needed to be helped over the finish line by brother Alistair in a dramatic end to the Triathlon World Series in Mexico. Leading with 700m left, Jonny, 26, began to weave over the road in hot and humid conditions in Cozumel.

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Knowledge Check

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Anecdotal Evidence

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High Life Questions

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High Life Article

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Age

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Cold Shock

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Swimming In Cold Water & Sudden Immersion

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Cold Water Survival & Hypothermia Realities

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Professor Michael Tipton demonstrates the effects of 10 degrees water on the human body with Olympic Swimmers Duncan Goodhew and Sharon Davis. More information on this subject can be found in Golden en Tipton's reader "Essentials of Sea Survival", Human Kinetics 2002.