Last year, Tadej Pogacar achieved the feat of winning the Giro-Tour double, a feat unmatched since Marco Pantani in 1998 and widely considered impossible given the demands of modern cycling. Now, a scientific study analyzing calorie expenditure in endurance athletes provides the key to why it is so incredibly difficult to achieve.
A recent study published in the journal Current Biology suggests that calorie expenditure could be a significant limiting factor in the performance of endurance athletes over an extended period of time, typically around 30 weeks.
The implications of this study’s findings largely explain why it is so difficult to find two cyclists who can perform at their peak in two consecutive three-week races in the same year.
The demands of modern cycling involve disproportionate caloric expenditure, which also necessitates extremely precise nutrition to ensure the body can replenish all the energy it uses. This caloric expenditure, during a race like the Tour de France, can be four to five times the basal metabolic rate.
According to this study, it’s not possible to maintain such a disproportionate expenditure for an extended period, and the body itself eventually limits maximum caloric expenditure to 2.5 times the basal metabolic rate. This means that the cyclist will not be able to perform such intense efforts that require excessive caloric expenditure, as their body has determined it cannot sustain those levels of consumption, and therefore, performance declines.
Despite obtaining these results from the study sample of 14 endurance athletes, including professionals, ultramarathon runners, triathletes, and elite cyclists, which clearly showed that after about 30 weeks their bodies limited their maximum caloric expenditure, the mechanisms behind this limitation remain unknown.
However, one of the possibilities cited relates to a limitation in the way the body digests and absorbs nutrients, which could open the door for current sports nutrition research aimed at breaking this barrier.
For the time being, feats like Tadej Pogacar’s will remain within reach of only the chosen few, although, who knows, perhaps in the future we will see more cyclists competing in two Grand Tours or even tackling all three in the same year with a general classification contender role in each.
Source: www.brujulabike.com