The #1 Nutrition Mistake Most Cyclist Make

Most cyclists try to lose weight by eating less and riding more. But the reality is you don't get lean on the bike, you get lean in the kitchen. And this is the number one nutrition mistake that cyclists make is they don't win in the kitchen. Therefore, today I'm going to teach you how to win in the kitchen by applying these concepts, recipes, and meals immediately without calorie counting, sabotaging your workouts, following fat diets, or starving yourself.

Way back in my cycle days, I always admired my competitors who meticulously prepped their bikes before muddy, rainy, epic races. And we called that winning in the garage because if the bike wasn't dialed in the days before the race, glued tubulars and tune shifting and fresh cables, you'd already lost the race before you got to the start line. And nutrition works the very same way. Your race doesn't happen in the kitchen, but your body composition, your energy availability, your recovery, and your power to weight ratio all start right here.

Just like you prep your bike to perform, you prep your body in the kitchen. That's why it's called winning in the kitchen. Cyclists love to think that we can outride a bad nutrition. And sure, 6-hour rides burn a lot of calories, but for most people with jobs and families and less than 10 hours a week to train, you simply can't.

We've coached thousands of athletes, beginners to national champions, and the reality is 80% of weight loss happens in the kitchen, and only about 20% happens on the bike. So, when cyclists struggle with body composition and watts per kilo, climbing performance, it's rarely a training problem. It's a kitchen problem because they're not winning in the kitchen. Fueling and weight management are built on a simple approach.

You want to eat nutrient-dense, high quality food in the right amounts at the right time, consistently over the course of months and years. This is how I've learned to eat over my racing and coaching career, and I want to share it with you today. Along the way, I think I've done a pretty good job of staying skinny without losing muscle mass at the expense of my power output because I've learned to win in the kitchen. The first framework I want to teach you is about go fast and go slow food groups.

Go fast food groups are nutrient-dense, high satiety food choices that support training and recovery foods like leafy green vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains, and high quality carbohydrates and healthy fats. These foods help keep you full. They help stabilize your blood sugar, reduce cravings, and fuel your athletic performance. Go slow foods are energy dense, usually processed and easy to overconume.

Stuff like pastries and cookies, alcohol, chips, fried foods, sodas, candy, most break room snacks, and anything with added sugar. Now, we're not saying never eat these. We're just saying know when and how much. Most cyclists don't need a very strict diet.

They just need to make better choices more often. So swapping go slow foods for go fast foods is the number one step to winning in the kitchen and often can have a big impact right away because most cyclists can find up to 500 calories a day in the go slow department to eliminate. Drinking one less soda and having one less beer per day is 500 calories right there. Easy.

The second framework that I want to teach you about is winning at the grocery store. No, you can't cook healthy if you don't shop healthy. Winning in the kitchen starts in the grocery store because once it's in your cart, it's going home and it's going in your mouth. So fellas, get out there and get to the grocery store.

If you're not the one doing the shopping, someone else is and they are not necessarily shopping entirely in the go fast food department. So this is one of the most practical tools we teach with is the go fast grocery store list. vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains, healthy fats, and it's basically your shopping list. You want to shop on the perimeter of the grocery store and avoid the added sugars and the boxes and the bags up and down the aisle. So, we can get fancy with the recipes later, but the building blocks that come home in your cart are always going to be the same.

And so, you're going to develop this grocery store list over over time. And once you got it going, you're going to go to the grocery store. It's going to be like on on autopilot. And one thing I will say that really helps with your grocery store list is online ordering.

Whole Foods, Instacart have gotten really good and so you can put a lot of time and effort into your shopping cart. Press of a button, pay arrives at your doorstep, allows for you more time to ride your bike. So quick question for you. What is harder?

Is it the grocery shopping? Is it cooking? Is it eating at work? Is it all of the above?

Drop a comment below because I actually want to get some feedback from you here. That'll help me know what to cover in the next Winning in the Kitchen video. And if you're getting value out of this video so far, hit subscribe so you don't miss the rest. We've got breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and eating out coming up.

And if you want to put this into practice right away, we've built a simple grocery list right into the Coach Cat app. pairs with our performance-based meal plans and it follows this exact winning in the kitchen framework. If you start a free trial of Coach Kit, I'll give you that grocery list for free so you can shop fast, prep fast, start winning in the kitchen the right way without having to overthink it. The third framework we talk after go fast, go slow and your go fast grocery store list is it's the opposite of winning in the kitchen. It's losing in the breakroom.

Every cyclist knows this scenario, especially if you go into work, you've been you've been eating gray, you've been cooking well, feeling well, training smart, and then you walk past the break room at work and there's donuts and pizza and birthday cake, cookies and chips, all the stuffs. Whereas before you might have just grazed and just ate something randomly, but now you're on a wedding in the kitchen plan and you've brought your lunch to work. You've got this killer set of Tupperware and you've prepared your lunch and now you can just skip the break room. It's really powerful because a lot of empty calories happen in the break room.

What does winning in the kitchen look like in real life? Well, you're going to have carbs, proteins, vegetables, and healthy fats in all three meals per day. You're going to have two snacks per day. You know, one midm morning and one mid-after afternoon.

You're going to make smart choices eating out. You're not going to starve yourself. You're not going to restrict any calories. You're not going to have to calorie count with any abs.

And you're going to get simple, quick, and easy to cook recipes that take about 10 minutes or less. It's simple. It's sustainable. And you can adopt this way of eating for years to come.

Not just like a three-week fat diet. So, let me give you an example. I'll give you my favorite dinner recipe. It's called Salmon Watts.

And it checks all the boxes. It's rich in protein. It's rich in healthy fats, omega-3 fatty acids, anti-inflammatory. It tastes great.

And only takes about 10 or 12 minutes to prepare. And it pairs well with variety of carbohydrate, rice, quinoa, or sweet potatoes. And we'll do a full salmon watts cooking segment in the future, but you can find this recipe right in the Coach Cat app. Real quickly, just heat up a walk or a cast iron skillet on medium high with a little bit of olive oil.

You add this 8 oz piece of salmon for about 3 to 5 minutes rotating ever so often. And when it gets firm enough, you use a spatula to cut it into 1 in cubes. Add in some garlic, some onions, some pepper, and one cup of asparagus. You can add some soy sauce, a teaspoon of honey, and you just stir until the vegetables are crispy, tender, and then you can serve over a bed of arugula and one cup of white rice in a bowl.

It's super yummy. Takes again 10 or 12 minutes to make as long as you've precooked your rice. And you'll get 50 grams of protein per serving. We'll talk about how much protein you need later on.

Plus, you get a serving of vegetables. And because all of these ingredients are on your go fast grocery list, all you have to do is pull them out of the fridge, heat up the pan, chop up the onions, and you're ready to go. I hope you like this kickoff to the full winning in the kitchen series. We're going to go deeper into winning in the kitchen for breakfast, winning in the kitchen for lunch, for dinner, for snacks, and winning in the kitchen when you're not in your kitchen, when you're out at a restaurant, which trips up a lot of athletes.

So, if you're a cyclist trying to lose weight, improve your power to weight ratio, or fuel better for your training, and improve your recovery, you're not going to want to miss these. That's the number one nutrition mistake cyclists make is that they don't win in the kitchen. Start weighing here, and I promise you, the watts per kilo will follow on the bike. Train smarter, ride faster, and you know what to do.

Until next time, work hard, ride fast, have fun, and as always, FTF

Learn how to eat right for your cycling. Most cyclists try to lose weight by eating less and riding more and that doesn't work. Get the Go Fast Grocery List mentioned in this video for FREE → /app

In this video, Coach Frank breaks down the #1 nutrition mistake most cyclists make and explains why watts per kilo don’t improve on the bike… they start in the kitchen.

This video introduces our long-standing FasCat concept called Winning in the Kitchen: a simple, sustainable approach to performance nutrition and weight loss that works for real cyclists with real lives.

You’ll learn:

- why you can’t out-ride bad nutrition

- the 80/20 rule of weight loss for cyclists

- the Go Fast vs Go Slow food framework

- why grocery shopping matters more than recipes

- how to avoid “Losing in the Breakroom”

- what Winning in the Kitchen actually looks like day-to-day

- and one of our favorite cyclist meals: Salmon Watts

This is not calorie counting. It’s not a fad diet. And it won’t sabotage your training.

It’s how cyclists fuel smarter, lose weight sustainably, and improve watts per kilo.

🛒 Want help putting this into practice?

When you start a free trial of the CoachCat app, you’ll get:

our Go FasCat Grocery List, Performance-focused meal plans and nutrition guidance built around the Winning in the Kitchen framework including "How Much you Should Eat" before that big ride tomorrow.

👉 Start your free trial here: /app

📌 Join the Winning in the Kitchen Series

This video kicks off a full series covering:

Winning in the Kitchen for Breakfast

Lunch

Dinner

Snacks

Eating Out & Travel

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next episodes.

💬 Let’s hear from you

What do you struggle with more?

- Grocery shopping

- Cooking

- Eating at work

Or all of the above?

Drop a comment — it helps shape future videos.

Train smarter. Ride faster.

#CyclingNutrition #WattsPerKilo #WinningInTheKitchen #CyclingWeightLoss #MastersCyclists #FasCat #CoachCat #CyclingTraining #EnduranceNutrition #CyclingPerformance 00:00 Introduction 02:07 Go Fast & Go Slow Food 03:22 Winning at the Grocery Store 05:10 Free Go Fast Grocery List 05:34 Losing in the Breakroom 06:16 In Real Life 06:52 Salmon Watts Recipe