What does it actually take to drop Matthew Vanderpole, Quinn Simmons, and Yates in a tour of France stage? Obviously, you need a massive engine, crazy talent, and a perfectly timed attack. But the part that absolutely no one talks about is nutrition.
Fueling has been the catalyst for the next level of performance we've seen in the World Tour in recent years. Faster climbing times, higher average speeds. We've entered a new generation of high octane fueling.
Ben Healey consumed 140 grams of carbohydrates per hour on route to his stage six tour of France win. 140 grams of carbs every single hour. That number sounds insane, but that's exactly what Ben Healey did.
Healey rode away from worldclass riders for over an hour solo while still absorbing nearly 140 g of carbohydrates every single hour. Now, that level of fueling, it sounds crazy to me and you, but it isn't rare anymore in the world tour. It's the new standard.
Most cyclists, myself included, used to think that this was madness, insane, a one-way ticket to gut stress. But I chatted with Dr. Sam Impi on the podcast recently.
Sam's the co-founder of Hexus, and he's the performance nutritionist who works with a large chunk of the world tour, including EF Education, and what he told me completely flipped how I think about fueling. Today, I'm going to break down exactly how Ben Healey used this strategy to win one of the hardest stages in this year's Tour to France and how it's forced me to rethink everything I thought I knew about what it means to fuel as a cyclist. Stage six of the 2025 Tour to France, 101 km of absolutely brutal terrain, over 3,500 m of climbing.
Healey got himself into the main breakaway of the day. And it wasn't just any breakaway. This was a who's who of specialists, some of the best writers in the world.
Matthew Vanderpole, twotime Valta stage winner Eddie Dumbar, Quinn Simmons, Yates. If you're in that group, you're expecting fireworks. You're expecting coming into the finale, you're expecting attacks, counterattacks, and maybe even a late battle up that final climb.
But that's not what happened at all. Healey launched his move with 42 km still to race. 42 km is a long way out for a solo move.
Now, Healey is known for catching breakaway companions by surprise, but the timing of this attack, it surprised people who were even expecting that surprise. It caught absolutely everyone flatfooted. Now, if you've had a chance to check the stats from his ride, they're wild.
He normalized 329 watts for the entire stage and hit a max of 969 watts as he was forcing that separation from his breakaway companions. He was averaging over 50 km an hour for large chunks of his solo escape. It was one of those days where everything just clicked.
But what stood out the most, it wasn't the numbers. It wasn't even the win. That was the first Irish win since Sam Bennett on Sean Celiz and the green jersey of Quickstep a few years back.
It was what happened inside his body, the fuel strategy. Because he consumed 535 grams of carbohydrates during that stage. That's just shy of 140 grams of carbohydrates per hour.
He had two meals before the race even started. I'm going to break these down in a minute because this is actually very interesting. When he got onto the bike, it was a drip feed of gels, drinks, and zero mist feeds throughout the entire ride.
That kind of fueling, that's performance nutrition dialed to the what? Optimized to the minute. And while the media have been focused, and some would say rightly so, on his unique arrow position, that aeropac helmet he wore, or that massive normalized power, the real story might be the science behind what's happening under the skin.
The fact that his gut, his muscles, his liver, his brain were all perfectly fueled for 5 hours of full gas work. Okay, let's let's take a breath here for a second because for years, and I know I'm not alone here, I thought that 60 gram of carbohydrates per hour was high. If I was getting really adventurous, maybe I would verge up to 80 grams of carbohydrates per hour.
But the idea of 140 gram of carbohydrates per hour, that was laughable. When I was full-time, I'd often train with friends who were world tour over in Jirona, and my fueling strategy looking back was laughable. It was based on their fueling strategy, so cutting edge at the time.
And it normally was a cafe stop halfway through a ride. I kid I kid you not on this one. So a six-hour ride meant that three hours into the ride, we'd stop for a scone, a flat white, and we'd roll home.
So if it was a 4-hour ride, 2 hours in, it'll be that stop. Maybe I'd have a banana bread and a cappuccino, mix it up that day. I wasn't fueling because fueling wasn't a consideration at the time.
If you taking a gel out of your pocket on a training ride, you'd be absolutely laughed at. The following day, people would literally come up to you and say, "Hey, I heard you brought a gel on a training ride yesterday. You must have been really suffering with the guys.
I used to finish these rides totally empty, hardly able to carry my bike up the stairs, head spinning, dizzy. And I then moved into a period like most of us did, where I began to cherrypick the science to support my shocking nutritional habits and strategy. I rationalized it with nonsense about fat adaptation, convincing myself that feeling shattered was somehow a sign that I was adapting, that the ride was working.
But in reality, I was underfueled every single time. Never getting the adaptation I could have from that training session. The truth is, I didn't know what I was doing.
I didn't understand the demands. I wasn't thinking in terms of energy systems or glycogen rates. I was eating like a human being, not like an athlete.
And feeling like this was such a total waste of time, especially as the years went on and I wasn't a full-time athlete anymore. When I became time crunched, I really should have been looking to maximize the return on my training investment. Like if you peel away four hours to go and do a ride.
You want to make sure you get four hours of adaptation from that ride. But fueling correctly, it takes time. And this is one of the key messages I want to get into you today.
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What I didn't understand and what Dr. Impi finally made clear is that 140 gram of carbohydrates per hour it's earned and it's earned through gut training graded adaptation where you get more used to processing that volume of sugar but the highest carb intake possible it isn't the goal for every single rider there's a difference between absolute and relative intake let me explain riding at 300 plus watts for 4 to 5 hours that's likely a zone 3 effort for Ben Healey that burns through an absurd amount of glycogen you have to replenish that at a rate at that rate to avoid decline. But your zone tree ride is unlikely the same power output as Ben Healey in absolute terms.
So unless you're matching that output, copying that intake is a recipe for disaster. And I learned that the hard way a couple of months ago when the high carb train was in full steam, I wanted to go out and I wanted to try this and I jumped straight into 140 g per hour strategy. I thought, let's see what all the hype is about.
I was using beta fuel, bottles, gels, the whole setup. I felt great for two hours. Then at about two and a half hour mark, it all came crashing down.
Stomach twisted. Nausea hit me like a train. I actually ended up pulling over to the side of the road and I ended up puking.
It was disgusting. That was it. Game over.
Now, just to clarify, this isn't a bunk. This isn't fatigue. This was my gut saying, "What are you doing to me?
I didn't train for that load. I bu didn't build a tolerance. I didn't earn that strategy.
" And that's when it finally clicked. This isn't about copying numbers. It's about understanding why these numbers work and when they don't work.
Here's where it gets really, really interesting. The gut is just like your legs, your lungs, your heart. It's trainable.
That was the one of the biggest things I took away from sitting down with Sam Imp. Most of us go out the door and we have an objective for that training session. We go and we train our V2 max, our threshold, our sprint, but never our gut.
We just expect it to keep up. And when it doesn't, we assume we're not good at digesting carbohydrates. But the world tour guys, they're training their gut all year round.
120 grams, 130 grams, 140 grams, or even higher. Not just in races, in training, on 5hour base rides, on long climbs, on hot days, on cold days. Because the gut, just like your functional threshold power, it doesn't magically adapt.
You've got to nudge it there slowly. They log the symptoms. They track glucose responses and they work with nutritionists like Sam who treat the gut as seriously his coaches treat power data.
That's why when the decisive move comes, that solo attack or the final climb, they're not hoping to have fuel left in the tank. They're focused on executing because they've rehearsed this exact situation. Let me break this down and make it real tangible.
Breaking it down into numbers. Ben's fueling strategy for the day. For breakfast, he had 225 gram of carbohydrate.
He had another pre-race meal before the stage started, 225 gram more. And during the stage, 535 gram of carbohydrate. Postra dinner, another 260 g of carbohydrate.
That's,245 g of carbohydrate in a single day. For perspective, the average amateur cyclist might hit 150 gram total on a training day. Healy setup probably looked like this.
Bottles of drink mix at around 45 gram each. gels at about 30 grams each, maybe a bar early in the day, but lightly nothing solid after the break was formed. Everything liquid, everything rapidly absorbable.
And the biggest thing, he started eating instantly, immediately. Not when the breakaway was established, not at the feed zone, from kilometer zero. It's a drip feed strategy.
A few sips every 10 minutes, a gel every 15 minutes, never large dumps, and never reactive. Sean Kelly had this old saying, if you're hungry, it's too late to eat. Like that's beyond true now.
Like hunger shouldn't come into it. You're fueling to a strategy now. All day fueling to match the effort or as Sam Impy would say, fueling for the work required.
If you watch the replay of the race, you'll notice that Healey takes on fuel even as he's establishing the gap to his breakaway companions. Now, that's a major mindset shift as well because most amateurs, myself included, often skip fueling when the pace goes up. we feel just too pinned.
My strategy, and I've often talked to friends about this as well, advised them the same thing. It used to be to eat when the terrain or the race dynamics allows you to eat. But world tour races are so fullon for the bulk of the day right now.
This just doesn't work anymore. The pace rarely relents. Here's the huge takeaway for most amateur athletes.
Most of us aren't undertrained. We're underfueled. We finish long rides feeling wrecked, thinking we need more fitness.
But often it's not fitness, it's empty tanks. Dr. Impy talked about this idea of fuel for the work required.
It's the title of one of his seminal papers and it's the entire Hexus philosophy. You eat based on what the session demands are, not based on time, not based on superstition, based on output. Ben Healey didn't guess.
He fueled with surgical precision. But you riding at 180 watts, 190 watts for 3 3 and 1/2 hours, you don't need 140 g of carbohydrates per hour to do this, you'll explode. And just like trying to, I don't know, refuel a Fiat Punto engine like it's a Formula 1 car.
Sorry for calling you a Fiat Punto, but that's the trap. We see pros doing these big numbers and we think we can mirror it. But unless you're matching that workload, unless your muscles are burning glycogen at that rate, you're not going to absorb it.
You're just going to get sick. I learned that the hard way. I didn't respect the process.
I didn't scale intake to output. And when it comes to training your gut, you need to start small. 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour.
You can start building towards 75 grams of carbohydrates when you start building your tolerance. Keep a journal. Track your symptoms.
That's how the pros got to 140 grams of carbohydrates. Not in a day, not in a week, over months and seasons. Ben Healey didn't win stage six at the Tour to France just because he had legs.
He won it because preparation, because of execution, because of fueling. It wasn't flashy. It wasn't headline worthy, but it was the foundation of his entire ride that day.
And the takeaway for me and hopefully for you is that fueling isn't about copying pro riders. It's about understanding what your work requires. Fueling is a skill.
Good training is a discipline. And that's the edge that most riders ignore. Road man.
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I'm going to put that in the description down below. If you've ever bonked, if you've ever cramped, if you've ever faded or felt like your fitness disappeared halfway through a race, it might not be your condition at all. It might be your fueling.
Start with the demands, match the intake, train your gut, and build from there. Because when the opportunity comes, when that decisive move is going clear, that late break, that moment where races are won and lost, you don't want to be the rider fading. You want to be the rider who's flying, just like Ben Healey.
Thanks for tuning in, folks. If you're curious about the specifics of this Ben Healey fueling strategy, I had a really deep dive with Dr. Sam Imp on the podcast.
I'm going to link that up there. It is phenomenal, gold standard in nutrition advice. Please check that out and don't forget to subscribe to the channel just down there and give this video a like so it goes out to more cyclists who need to see it.
Thanks for tuning in.