How to get fast on your bike at 40+ (part 4)

If you understand this it will help you recover faster from training and make you look leaner in your ride kit.

As you get older your muscle becomes more anabolically resistant. But, here's the cool thing, cycling training, and hitting the gym arrests this process. What you eat and when also has an impact!

There are some things to consider here. Your age, past 60 you need to eat more protein, your dieting phase, training phase, diet preference and therefore protein quality.

From what I understand from studying nutrition the body of evidence for athletes, (if you're training regularly you are an athlete) suggests between 0.3g to as much as 0.5g per kg of body weight in each meal that also has 2.3g to 3.5g of the amino acid Leucine.

To maximise recovery and training adaptions protein feedings should be spread between 4 and 6 times throughout the day. Everything under 4 protein feedings daily or over 5/6 is sub-optimal.

The thing I'm trying to get across here is as you age, protein is important for your recovery as well as driving training adaptions. For me, it makes no sense to follow mainstream dieting advice. What does make sense as we get older is eating the right amount of protein, spread across the day and focusing on its quality is crucial.

Further Reading:

https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8

https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-0189-4

https://examine.com/nutrition/how-much-protein-can-you-eat-in-one-sitting/

Thanks for reading, Simon

Performance & Nutrition Director
2 X Winner of Gym Based PT, and founder of VPCC