Always Eat What You Need: An Introduction to the Carbohydrate Burn / Intake Balancer

When it comes to nutrition during long cycling rides, the most important thing is to take enough carbohydrates. How many carbohydrates per hour you have to take largely depends on your burn. With the EatMyRide Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer for Garmin you can nail your carbohydrate intake.

If you want to perform optimally on the bike and want to make sure you are energized throughout the whole ride, there are basically three important nutrition related factors:

1. How many carbohydrates you burn
2. How many carbohydrates are stored in your body in the form of glycogen
3. The amount of carbohydrates you take during the ride

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be difficult to understand how these factors influence your performance. To put it even stronger, you can know your own burn, know your glycogen capacity and thus nail your carbohydrate intake during the ride. Let’s dive into how the EatMyRide Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer data screen will help you.

Keep track of your carbohydrate burn during cycling

Each ride is different. During hard interval sessions you may ride three times 20 minutes at threshold power, while on easy days you ride at only 60% of your FTP. The intensity of your ride has a big impact on your carbohydrate burn. Also, everybody has a different metabolism. So your carbohydrate burn at each intensity is very personally determined.

The EatMyRide Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer uses your personal metabolic profile – as also used in the EatMyRide mobile app – to calculate your carbohydrate burn real time during cycling. During your training you get insight in how your intensity influences your carbohydrate burn, which is a vital thing to know before you start in a big race.

Keep track of your carbohydrate intake during your ride

The Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer lets you keep track of what products you take during the ride. You simply select Food or Drink in the data screen and select what product you have taken, be it a bar, banana, gel or other product. Note that you can use your own products, instead of the preprogrammed general products. In the data field you will see your average carbohydrate intake per hour, so that you can compare it to your burn. And this brings us to the third benefit of the app.

Understand how many carbohydrates you should eat during the ride

Usually when you start your ride you have some carbohydrates available in your body in the form of glycogen. These glycogen stores may be used (partly) during exercise without a problem. However, these stores are limited, so if you wouldn’t consume carbohydrates, you would hit the wall at a certain point. In the EatMyRide Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer you see how much glycogen you have used already. To calculate this we take into account both your carbohydrate burn as well as your carbohydrate intake. We also account for the speed at which the consumed carbohydrates are taken up by the body.

Automatically sync your intake to the EatMyRide app

The intake you fill in in the data field is automatically saved to the .FIT file. If you have connected your Garmin account to EatMyRide so that rides are automatically synced to EatMyRide, your activity with the intake data is uploaded to EatMyRide. In the EatMyRide mobile app you can then see your ride, how much you burnt and how well your intake matched your needs.

The EatMyRide Carbohydrate Burn/Intake Balancer can be downloaded from the Garmin Connect IQ Store. In order to use your personalized metabolic profile in the data screen, you need to be subscribed to EatMyRide Premium.