It would be virtually impossible to COMPLETELY run out of fuel, since even the thinnest of us have vast stores of fat for energy. The problem arises when you begin to elevate your HR and your system begins to alter it's reliance on fat for fuel towards a mixture more dependent on glycogen. Once all the glycogen is gone, your body will force you to slow down to a level where you are again using fat stores for energy. The only other option is lean-muscle cannibalization... and we know when this happens because we get that strong ammonia odor in our sweat.

This leads me to wonder... and maybe the experts can weigh in... is a certain amount of muscle cannibalization good? I.E... is it helpful to break down the muscle in order to build it back up? Would it be beneficial to allow some muscle to be burned, only to heavily supplement with protein post-workout?

Just thinking out loud...

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"Deserve's got nothing to do with it." William Munny

Your talking chemical breakdown which is entirely different to fibre damage/repair cycle.
I'd imagine recovery from a chemical breakdown would be long and most certainly unwanted, let alone unproductive.

Good point, but essentially aren't both taking place at the "chemical" level? I'm not sure...

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"Deserve's got nothing to do with it." William Munny

Its not, and you should not get yourself in that state, because like someone stated before, your recovery can take time and you dont have good training in that period.

But there are better ways to do it

How I do it is:

no breaky, train about 3-6hours. in Endurance zone!!!! very important because this zone uses mostly Fat as energy(in theory if you stay in this zone(very easy riding) you should last almost the whole ride). Ride first hour without food, then eat about 50cals every 20mins. This gives just enough energy(for me) to keep a good level of training and forces my body to use as much fat as possible WITHOUT Bonking. Now, best to do these ride by yourself, cause you must always stay in your zone, so very slow on the uphills, but constant.

the good thing about it is, if you ride say 5 hours and spend 3250cals and you have only eaten, 600cals, then you are about 2650cals in minus, plus male is about 1800cals for daliy rate of normal living and you start at 2pm when your home for the day, your at minu 3450cals. You have a big lunch(8000cals - thats huge!) big dinner(8000cals - thats huge!) and a few snakes(200cals) for the day you are 1650cals under. And you helped your body use fat as an energy source.

8500cals = 1kg of body fat.

For however long I've been riding, I have bonked 3 times 1st "real" ride, 1st century ride, and 1 race that I should have done 1 instead of 2. They were all "unplanned"...and after those experiences, now I would do everything in my power to be fully prepared and avoid bonking before riding.

It sucks to bonk.

I don't know why you would do that do yourself. It doesn't give you any physical benefits, and I'm sure there are many, many other ways to get better than purposely bonking.

But hey, to each their own, and bonking....not for me brotha.

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grind it out

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grind it out

Hey,

Is there a way of calculating the 50cal number? Or is this just based off past experience?

One way to do this.. and I remember reading something that Andy Hampsten did is start a low intensity ride without any food in your system. I recall him saying it usually took about an hour to an hour and a half to get to Ketosis. You detect it by your mood (cranky) once you get there you then start eating to keep your energy up.. BUT you have already tricked your system into burning fat. This ride is done at low intensity the entire time so it's best to do it alone. One half wheel Harry will blow it for you.

Just for reference, there is a large prevalance for that exact sort of thing in distance running (i.e. Kenyan marathoners) who were shown somewhere to do 2.5 (on average) sessions per week in a fasted state to promote ketosis

I tried it a bit myself but found that going out for 90' of easy riding was essentially not making me any fitter whilst wasting potential training time, so I stopped doign it so often. Still do the odd session in a similar state e.g. doing an hour after work having only had a moderate lunch or going out for around 3 hours with only BCAAs in my bottles.

If you want to burn fat then ride at around 60% for a few hours . If you push to hard then other factors come into play and you will not lose so much fat. It might feel like that really hard ride was a fat buster but in truth it was not . Remember getting rid of fat is not the same as trying to ride fast .

Bonking on purpose? Really? Just ride your bike.

Jeez. Let it die. My neighbor plays professional hockey (correction, played ). They already think cyclists have eating disorders!

Intermittent fasting, look it up. I have done this in the past couple of weeks, get a good nights sleep, dont wake up early just to eat breakfast. Meet at the coffee shop, grab an espresso and then hit the road. As others have stated, endurance zone average for the day. 3 to 4 hours on the bike. Get home and then eat my plant based meals. This targets the stubborn areas that just dont seem to let go of the fat stores.

HUMP

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Why are the best things in life always the ones you start last?

You really misunderstood the IF protocol if that's what you think you should do to utilize it. You're not supposed to even train in any way when cortisol is high, so basically not until mid-afternoon. Berkhan and all the IF guys say its really not for endurance athletes or long course athletes at all. They also espouse eating little in the way of fiber after exercise or anything that will slow digestion/absorption down.

I do agree that some rides are excessively fueled the morning of, which only saturates glucose and won't do much for sparing glycogen, however, there is little benefit to having nothing. A better alternative is to have something with a good amount of leucine and balance that is low in fiber.

All you're doing is depletion training, which is pretty stupid in the long run. You're just draining glycogen stores and you're not going to utilize any more fat than if you ate- fat utilization is based on percentage of vo2 max, fiber type, and metabolic make up. You're noticing a drop in weight from losing glycogen and/or the water that goes with it. Its a pretty bad idea long term especially if you're not eating on the bike.

If you do not eat on the bike you're setting yourself up for chronic underfueling. The body utilizes less and less glycogen as duration increases and ends up utilizing glucose instead. When glucose isn't present because you haven't been taking in exogenous energy, you start draining liver glycogen and cortisol sky rockets. Fat utilization is fairly fixed and decreases over the ride duration so another potential side is gluconeogenesis, where the body breaks down amino acids and tissues for glucose.

All in all a really poor idea and not the goal of IF at all. IF cannot work with endurance sports such as cycling unless you manage to only do short rides and only ride at night. There is no way to get in enough kcal eating clean to compensate for your energy expenditure and you'd have to train very late in the day completely fasted, which would be somewhat disastrous when you did top end work or raced.

A smarter thing to do would be to simply hold off on breakfast on normal days until cortisol is lower (2-3hrs after waking) or skip it and compensate at lunch if you're riding mid-day or late in the day. If its an early morning ride, you can ride fasted, but should take in exogenous fuel if your ride is longer than about 1hr and the rate of fueling depends on energy expenditure and what you can handle. You definitely shouldn't compensate for PWO by only taking in 10g of BCAA's, as IF protocols suggest and should take in some CHO as well since you use up a ton more glycogen than someone that only lifts weights for 45-60 min a few times a week.

Great read, I have only done it once, I have actually been doing a breakfast as usual and then take a bar and some mix on the ride, I just dont eat as much as I usually ate before training, but I do have something.

HUMP

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Why are the best things in life always the ones you start last?