Tom Dumoulin began his professional career in 2012 and retired last year. During this ten-year period, there has been significant evolution, especially regarding nutrition.
In a conversation with the podcast In Het Wiel, he discussed the changes in nutrition over the past decade. “We had a cool training group in Maastricht (Netherlands), and in my early years, especially with the older pros, it was an art to eat as little as possible. One after another was starving. The last person to feel hunger symptoms was the winner of the day. There was a bit of that atmosphere.”
The philosophy behind this was that eating less would make you lighter, and your body would become more efficient at burning fats if it didn’t have too many carbohydrates to burn. “Then we did double sessions. During the first session, we had a breakfast rich in fat and proteins. No carbohydrates. For lunch again, only fats and proteins. Then we started doing training blocks while we seemed starved.”
Changes for today
This has been completely reversed. “The benefits are often much greater if you teach your body to burn a lot of carbohydrates in a specific time frame. We are in an era where everything revolves around eating, processing, and burning as many carbohydrates as possible. As a result, the level has skyrocketed.”
“In the past, you wanted to use more energy every day than you consumed, to lose a bit of weight every day. Until after a week, you realized: I’m completely messed up, and then you had a day where you ate everything that was available, hahaha. And the whole week of suffering was in vain.”
Jumbo-Visma also did it wrong
In 2015, Jumbo-Visma (then LottoNL-Jumbo) also trained in the way described by Dumoulin, eating as little as possible. “It’s precisely them who are driving the 180-degree change to eat as many carbohydrates as possible.”
“They are really trying to figure out how far they can go with this. How many carbohydrates the cyclists can process in an hour and how they can eat even more. To burn even more and arrive even fresher in the final. I find that very special.”