Pasta is a source of carbohydrates for everyone, professional athlete or not. Your body needs a daily dose of energy, which it gains from carbohydrates (amongst other nutrition). The reason that pasta is linked to an athletic lifestyle, and cycling in particular, has to do with the fact that it was commonly believed that eating more pasta was better in the early years of cycling. Before and after a ride, entire plates of pasta were consumed. The well-known pasta party’s! However, eating too much of the same is never a good idea. The main goal of pasta is to provide a high dose of carbohydrates, which your body can save in its muscles as energy (by transforming carbohydrates into glycogen). The better trained, the better your body can save glycogen. Rice, potatoes, couscous, spelt and oatmeal provide the same effect, so enough options to vary out there.

When we serve pasta to our riders, we pay attention to three important things: the preparation method, the recipe and the timing. To bring a pasta to a nice flavor, we often use a (homemade) sauce or some oil. Ready-made sauces contain ingredients your body doesn’t necessarily need. Therefore, we often work with homemade sauces. Homemade can be easy and quick, so no excuses on that regard!

Our riders are always happy when they are served a nice, fresh pasta (who wouldn’t?!), but we do make conscious choices when it comes to the moments when we serve pasta. We work with the principle of “carb loading” the days before a tough stage (or training): stacking carbohydrates (glycogen) to store extra energy for the day to come. As mentioned before, pasta (amongst other food) is a perfect dish on those dash as it has a proper amount of carbohydrates, next to some protein, fat and fibers. Fibers are important in a healthy diet, but sometimes a rider has to avoid eating fibers as much as possible such as on days before a mountain stage. If you decrease the intake of fibers you can temporarily lose weight (body fluid and intestinal content), which comes in handy during mountain stages as the optimum weight is of great important. Every gram has to be carried up on that mountain! Therefore, the evenings before a mountain stage we rather serve, for example, white rice to our riders.

Apart from those days, we do serve pasta quite a lot. It is delicious, has a great potential to take in flavors and the options to vary with recipes are endless (flavor, shape, texture, sauce and ingredients). It is a favorite item on the menu from many of our riders, as dinner and as recovery meal in the bus after a ride.

Are you up for some new variation in your own Italian cooking skills? Get inspired by the sport pasta recipes below (recovery meals from our riders).

Do you want to discover how much you need to eat? The FoodCoach App will guide you to bring focus and translate your food recommendations into real food and meals.

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