What can recreational cyclists learn from the cooling strategies used by the Tour de France peloton?
In this episode of the Road Cycling Academy Podcast, Cam Nicholls is joined by RCA coach and exercise physiologist Ben Treble to unpack the science behind cooling strategies, heat acclimation, hydration and performance.
With the 2026 Tour de France being one of the hottest on record, riders were seen using ice baths, cooling gloves, slushies and cold water immersion before stages. But do these strategies actually improve performance, and are they worth using for amateur cyclists?
Ben explains the physiology of riding in hot conditions, why heat dramatically reduces cycling performance, and the evidence behind practical cooling methods that everyday riders can use before and during training and racing.
Whether you're preparing for a gran fondo, summer road race, Zwift event or simply trying to survive hot weekend rides, this episode is packed with practical, science-backed advice.
In this episode:
- Why the 2026 Tour de France put cooling strategies in the spotlight
- What happens to your body when you ride in hot conditions
- How heat affects power output, recovery and endurance performance
- Heat acclimation vs simply riding in hot weather
- Ice baths, cooling gloves and pre-cooling strategies explained
- Do Slurpees actually improve cycling performance?
- The truth about pouring water over yourself during rides
- Cooling vests, ice socks and cold towels
- Does menthol actually help?
- Practical cooling tips for recreational and Masters cyclists
- Common mistakes riders make when racing in the heat
If you're looking to perform better in hot conditions, improve your endurance, or simply understand the science behind what the professionals are doing, this episode is for you.
Learn more about Road Cycling Academy coaching: https://roadcyclingacademy.com
Podcast Sponsor: https://onekloudx.com.au/
#cycling #cyclingtraining #tourdefrance #endurancetraining #heattraining #cyclingperformance #roadcycling #granfondo #masterscycling #hydration #cyclingpodcast
Transcript:
Cam Nicholls (00:01.826) Welcome to the RCA Podcast, designed for recreational and amateur road cyclists with a focus on performance. We dive into cycling training, nutrition, strength training for cyclists and even bike fitting tips, all designed to help you train smarter, ride faster and hopefully tear your mates' legs off. So without further ado, let's dive into today's episode.
Welcome back to the RCA podcast, where today I am joined by the RCA's science geek based in Switzerland now, Ben Treble. And today we're going to go through well, I wanted to ask Ben about the Tour de France, actually, because it's just been and gone. And there was a lot of scenes of riders with their arms in icy water or arms and hands in icy water. And I was like, that's interesting. Cooling strategies, Ben. But does this like
relate to, you know, everyone that's watching them, we're all recreational and amateurs at the end of the day. Like, should we be paying attention to this? Like, is it something that, you know, the mere mortal should be leaning into? Should we be dunking our arms and hands in ice before we go out for our rides?
Ben Treble (01:13.91) I think you should pay attention to it, Cam. How feasible is it for an amateur to pull off the same strategy though, at a fondo race? Probably pretty limited.
Cam Nicholls (01:24.43) True. So why should I be leaning into it? What does the science say about the cooling strategies? Especially when it's hot, of course. Like, you know, if you live in Canada and you're you're riding in the middle of winter, you're probably not gonna worry about it, are you?
Ben Treble (01:37.706) No, not necessarily. You're probably worried about hypothermia instead. Yeah, look, I think the tour is a pretty special case this year. I'm over in Switzerland and we've we had some pretty severe heat waves even here for Switzerland, which you'd think as an Australian I would be pretty well well established to cope with, but it was I can tell you it was some of the hottest periods I've gone through.
The two are I think I read this stat the other day. The two are averaged in the first two weeks thirty point eight degrees. Now, that may not sound super crazy, but to be an average for two weeks where every day is over thirty, the previous record was twenty-five point nine in twenty-two. That is enormous. Like to have a a two week average temperature to be four degrees higher than the last record.
To me that's what stands out the most. Anyway, so it was an extremely hot start to the tour. In fact, the majority of the tour. Stage eight was hitting forty degrees. They cut stage nine short because of the extreme heat protocol from the UCI, which I think is a it's a good thing it's in place and it it worked and whatnot. Yeah, what else did we read that was pretty interesting before we get into the real physiology of it? Picnic post NL put up
that they were going through twenty eight bottles per rider per stage, which was three times the normal number of bid-ons that they use.
Cam Nicholls (03:12.704) Well, crazy.
Ben Treble (03:14.902) So safe to say, I think why does this matter? Well, for the Aussies back home who listen to this, they're you probably used to the heat and probably already put in place a fair amount of attention to being able to ride in the heat safely. Maybe they already do some heat training potentially, or they at least think that riding in the heat is their heat training. Maybe not. you'll find out later.
And you know, what else can we do to cool down in the meantime? So I think there's a lot in this, Ken.
Cam Nicholls (03:49.198) Can I just like my little anecdote that I'd like to share at a recreational and an amateur level? Yep. And it's not even cycling, it's triathlon. I know we shouldn't be talking about triathlon on the Road Cycling Academy podcast, but I'm going to. So I've done the Noosa triathlon the last two years. It's the the biggest Olympic distance triathlon in the world. It's big event. I don't do very well because I'm not a very good triathlete, but on the run.
Not last year, the year before, the first year I did it. my daughter gave me a little bit of ice. I just put down my back. Because it's very hot in Noosa during November when this is on. Like I'm talking, you know, like early 30s, high humidity. By the time you're doing the run, which is a five kilometer run, you're getting quite hot. I had my heart rate monitor on. She gave me the ice. I dropped it down my tri-suit and it went down my it actually slid down my spine essentially. But I noticed my heart rate dropped.
Probably three beats, which may not sound like a lot, but when you're pushing threshold when I was I guess essentially during a ten kilometer run, which is what I was doing. It enabled me, I I noticed that all of a sudden I could run at a faster pace. So the next year, which was last year, I got it to drop me ice on the way up and on the way back. And it was almost instantaneous, like energy. Even though I was, you know, I wasn't consuming anything. It was just
The heart rate dropping and the ability to to go a little bit higher. So I see what the pros are doing and I'm like, yeah, I completely understand why they are doing it just from my own little baby recreational experience at the Noosa triathlon.
Ben Treble (05:31.03) Well, let's find out why why that may may have helped you out from a few different angles. Maybe I thought it's good to talk about I think a lot of people talk about the heat and they don't necessarily fully maybe understand what's actually happening. We know that when you ride in really hot weather, it affects our performance. You feel hot and you know, generally your your core body temperature starts to go up at some point and affect your performance.
Cam Nicholls (05:36.439) Okay.
Ben Treble (05:58.626) But I don't know if we really quite talked about this, or people don't necessarily go too deep on it. So that's what we're going to try and do a little bit here, at least to begin with. So let's talk about what happens when you ride a bike. So that could be in the trifulone or for most of our audience, masters athletes. You can think of your body as a as a space heater. So when you produce, so you push the pedals, right? You're going to produce energy. And
Only about 20, maybe 25% of your energy from metabolism that fuels those contractions gets converted to mechanical work. The remaining sort of 75 to 80% of that energy gets released as heat. So yeah, exercise raises our heat production above rest rates about 10 to 15 times. There's a big range because there's huge variance across, you know, say untrained to
well-trained and elite athletes. So I'm giving you some pretty broad ranges, but it's for a reason. You know, during strenuous exercise, your active muscles are going to produce potentially 100 times more heat than at rest. Right? So what does this look like in numbers? Well if say you're sort of a a general rider amateur, let's say you know between 250 to 350 watts, this would be like an above threshold effort. You're probably producing anywhere from 800
To 1200 watts of heat, right? So if you're a master's rider, if you're at a lower wattage, say 180 watts, you're still producing another 650 watts out of in terms of heat. If you're to talk in watts, I know we love watts. Let's talk watts instead of percentages. So I'll let that sit with you for a second, and we can take it a little bit deeper when we talk about. You know, I have a great textbook, one of my favorite scientists, George Brooks.
His exercise book is a bit of a Bible. it goes a little bit more in depth, right, and starts to talk about one of the best ways our body cools down is through evaporation. Now, if we didn't have that evaporative cooling, right, and there are circumstances where it's not functioning very well, your body temperature rises about 0.2 degrees per minute. And in terms of moderate exercise,
Ben Treble (08:22.828) This could result in thermal injuries within like 15 to 20 minutes. So you could say it's about one degree every five minutes increase in your core temperature. So and your core temperature has a very finite range before it starts to become a problem. I'll let you sit with that. We can go a bit deeper if you really want. We can talk about the heat balance equations. Maybe we don't need to go about that. But essentially there's a lot more involved in terms of your
Your body is like a heat sink, a lot of people use that term, or it's like a heat storage device, and at some point it hits its maximum, can't store any more heat, and it has to start getting rid of it. And in response to that, it has to do a few things. All right. So when we talk about heat storage, the things that become part of the equation are metabolic production, so energy production, you've got convection, conduction, and radiation. Those are all
Positive or negative variables in the equation. And the final one is evaporation, which is the only one-way street in terms of cooling and heating the body down. All those others, so metabolic production, convection, conduction, radiation, can both get rid of heat but also increase it, right? And there's a tipping point. So the only thing you end up leaning on at the end of the day there is the evaporation. So
That means that evaporation or evaporative cooling in terms of physiology is one of the most important areas we have to focus on as athletes. So let's are you ready to keep going? Is that sit well with you? Any questions?
Cam Nicholls (09:59.476) Yeah, th well there's definitely a lot more to it than you kind of you know, consider when you're either training or when you're doing a an event, because, you know, let's face it, no matter where you are in the world, events for recreational and amateurs are are typically in summertime. And as a result of that, there's a propensity for it to be really hot and and often i it is. But am I considering what's actually happening physiologically when I'm like heating up?
Like you've described? No. I'm not. I'm just thinking about how many more carbs can I get in? How much more power can I put out? Versus, you know, how could I maybe cool myself down right now?
Ben Treble (10:40.398) And I think it's it's probably a little in depth for some people, but it's also really important to get a handle on it because it might help people understand and pick between what might be a little bit more low-hanging fruit in terms of cooling strategies, which ones are worth your time investing in, and what ones are maybe less and people have different circumstances, right? If you're doing a hill climb time trial versus a road race or a crit at night
Those are t or an indoor, maybe you want to do a Zwift race, these all present very different situations that may change like which cooling strategy is more appropriate for you. So yeah, glad you're sticking with me. we'll keep going with it. So in terms of proportions across evaporation, right? Let's say you're at rest. Radiation is about 60%, evaporation is about 25 and convection is about 12%.
In terms of where's the heat coming from during exercise or if you're in the heat, let's say, I don't know, you go to the sauna, something like this, evaporation suddenly becomes the principal mechanism, right? So when the ambient temperature starts exceeding your skin temperature, your body starts absorbing heat via radiation and convection. Right. So in terms of this, the heat equation, suddenly we're not losing heat.
Through radiation convection, like at rest, your body produces heat to survive. And it it gets rid of that heat through radiation convection. But there's a flipping point to which instead of losing heat via those methods, it actually starts absorbing heat. And so the only thing you have left to get rid of the heat is evaporation. In terms of numbers, useful or not, maybe, but every gram of sweat that evaporates removes around
0.5 to 0.6 kcals. So why is that interesting? If you remember those watts we talked about before. So at 180 watts, it was around 650 watts of heat. If you need to get rid of a thousand watts of heat, you need to evaporate one and a half liters of sweat. Suddenly it's like that's a lot of sweat that you need to kind of get rid of to drop that kind of heat, right? Now if you're not
Ben Treble (13:09.022) acclimated. So if you're not heat acclimated, so a normal person, your sort of the ceiling of sweat rates is around that one and a half liters per hour. Athletes that are heat acclimated can have sweat rates up to four liters per hour. So very big difference in terms of the ability and why is a sweat rate kind of important because it's about this evaporative heat cooling
procedure, right? So heat training helps really raise that ceiling a considerable amount. So if there's probably one key takeaway in all the numbers in the last five, 10 minutes, that would be one of the big ones. What's one of the big outcomes from doing heat acclimatization? You can increase your maximal sweat rate and this improves your ability to evaporate sweat and cool your body down. Something that is interesting to note
So there was some research papers from Barnes in 2019 that did looked at sex differences in sweat rates. So men do typically average their s they're typical, so rest sweat rates are higher than women. So 1.13 versus 0.83 liters per hour. So it's probably just a side note for the the women listening. I would caution that's probably just mostly due to body size, but yeah.
Typically women have lower sweat rates, so your ability to evaporate the heat is also lower. And because the the heat sink, the physical body is smaller, it has less heat storage to start with. So food for thought for women out there, I would say it's pretty important for all people to consider heat training. you still following me? You ready?
Cam Nicholls (15:01.57) Yeah, yeah, I'm still following you. So I'm I'm I'm starting to get a little bit well, not confused, but conflicted in my mind whether I should be doing heat training or be trying to cool myself when I'm in the heat. Or maybe both.
Ben Treble (15:16.532) Yeah, well, I mean, long story short, I would say the heat training precedes the event that you're targeting and this will help you operate better. And you can still do Yeah. I would say the heat training should be done riding in the heat is not necessarily heat training, so to speak, in my eyes. Okay. It is one thing to do, but it's not people who say, I just ride my bike in summer and it was thirty degrees outside
This is good, but it's not not doing as much as you think. Yeah. Particularly when we look at s if you do any sort of heat training. We'll get into this later, but typically you need to probably at least a week's worth of heat training to see any real change and adaptation. And the decay of those adaptations is like two to three weeks. It's quite quick. You can extend that with maintenance work, but generally speaking, let's say summer finishes.
Cam Nicholls (15:49.538) Mm.
Ben Treble (16:12.952) Your heat adaptation's gone in like two weeks. Right. So you hit summer again and it's gonna feel brutal if you haven't done anything through the winter. Cycling has a very big advantage, which is nice though, because we get this additional self-generated airflow. Obviously, when you ride, you have the wind effect. Keep that in mind when we're talking about evaporation, because it means that when you're on climbs or you have a headwind.
where the the the wind effect is low, it becomes you're more at danger, right? Because the evaporative effect drops massively. And you probably notice that if you do a a nice ride in summer and you hit a climb, the pace drops right down. Let's say it's for us mere mortals on a steep climb, maybe anywhere from six to ten kilometers an hour. at this speed you probably feel like you heat up super quick suddenly.
Even though the ambient temperature outside hasn't probably changed at all. And that's predominantly because you lost this this the evaporative cooling has dropped massively because the airflow's gone. Now, something else to keep in mind when we talk about sweat rates is water that drips off you doesn't do anything for you. So when you're riding the bike up the hill and you've got buckets of sweat dripping off you, that in itself is not
evaporative cooling, right? It's just water lost. In fact, it means it's not, it's not a good thing necessarily. So the evaporative cooling, the way it works is the water is on your skin and it's evap it's evaporating because your skin is hot. You know if you get some water and you put it on a hot pan outside and it dries. Your skin, your body is so hot and when it sweats, this water on the skin evaporates because of the heat from your body, not because of the heat outside.
And that process is drawing the heat off your body and then getting rid of it. That's the evaporative cooling mechanism that we we need predominantly. So if the water, your sweat, is just dripping off your skin, it's not staying on there to actually absorb the heat from the body and take it away. So dripping buckets of sweat doesn't necessarily mean your evaporative cooling is working amazing. So where does all this go in terms of performance? What happens?
Cam Nicholls (18:29.717) Mm.
Ben Treble (18:35.146) when we do do heat training, right? So we just talked about what happens when you hit the heat, why it's really important, evaporative cooling is the main thing to take away. We have different sweat rates. Ideally we want to increase the sweat rate to improve our ability and the sealing of our evaporative cooling in terms of the heat equation. What happens when we do do everybody talks about doing heat training and increasing blood plasma volume, but what else is happening when we do heat training, right? So
Almost every system gets some adaptation. So your cardiovascular system, essentially the mechanism, you're going to get more blood flow to the skin and less blood flow to the muscle. That's also something interesting. So if you think about performance, you're going to get reduced cardiac output, your stroke volume goes down, your fatigue earlier, right? You've got less blood flow going to the working muscle group. It's instead getting redirected to the skin to try and cool it down.
Your thermoregulation, so you're gonna with heat training, you'll get increase your sweat rate. interestingly, your plasma volume can go down depending on what you're doing. Your electrolyte imbalance also kicks in, right? So this is a negative thing. So if you're riding in the heat, right, as part of that high sweat rate is your your plasma volume goes down, right? You're actually sweating out plasma volume. You get impaired dissipation, you get dehydration, you get.
cramping risk. That's all part of thermoregulation. Your central nervous system, right? So when you're hot and you're struggling in the heat, what's happening? Well, your neurotransmitters are getting altered. So you'll probably get reduced motivation, your RPE goes up, your ability to make decisions, and your reaction time goes down. This is these are reasons why we care about improving our ability to perform in the heat, beyond, you know, I guess some of the
reasons people talk about. From a metabolic point of view, your carbohydrate oxidation goes up quicker. Right? So you become more glycogen depleted and you'll actually start to produce more lactate quicker. So obviously this lactate is both good and bad. Depends at what point at the intensity and duration you're at. But that would result in earlier fatigue and potentially if the intensity gets high enough, more lactate is a bad thing. So it it's a contributor to
Ben Treble (21:04.204) metabolic acidosis. Your muscle function in the heat becomes impaired contractually. So you get this altered excitation contraction coupling process. What that means is essentially is you just get less strength, which means less power, but also you're going to get more muscle damage. So your recovery time from rides in the heat, which was significant, goes up. Obviously if you ride in the heat, you've got this hydration
I think we don't need to go into that too much, but yeah, fluid loss, you lose your plasma volume, there's a heat illness risk that gets concerned with that. Psychologically, I don't know, you've ridden in the heat cam. Do you find it harder?
Cam Nicholls (21:47.266) Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, when I first moved to Sunshine Coast from Victoria. So Victoria, for those of you not in Australia, is typically a lot colder. Well, it is a lot colder. You get the dry heat there, so summer does get hot, but there's nothing more depleting than a you know thirty-two degree day and eighty percent humidity, like combining heat and humidity. It's so draining. And I I I did find when I first moved here in particular the first year or two, the summers really drained me.
physiologically, like I I was taking a lot longer to recover and probably had to back off my intensity and volume a little bit to accommodate the shift in in environment. So completely yeah, hear what you're saying in terms of you know, the impact it can have on recovery. Yeah.
Ben Treble (22:35.726) I think two key takeaways from here would be heat doesn't just impact our cardiovascular system, right? If we talk about blood flow, cooling the body down, it's also impacts the muscle function quite directly. So this contractual excitation coupling gets reduced, right? So your legs are also worse at the muscle, huh? So it kind of it it hits you in a lot of sides. And the second one is another downstream impact we get from the heat.
Is it often impairs your GI function? So people often get gut issues in the heat. And it may not necessarily be because they had the wrong food or too much food. It's probably because your ability to absorb water from the gut decreases when you're in the heat, right? Which changes the asthmology and the ability to then absorb food. So that's because the body's moving water.
And your blood plasma is changing. So all these things, right? The blood flow is also getting redirected to the skin and the working muscle. The stomach is not getting enough blood flow. And I think this probably explains a lot why some people, particularly in hot triathlons, they have nutritional blow ups that don't necessarily make sense. They assume it's because they ate too much food or they just had a something it was the food. It's not doesn't it's not always the food.
So that's something for people to think about in the especially in the triathlon world. Maybe the Noosa tri is a pretty hot one, I think. Or Kona.
Cam Nicholls (24:05.78) Yeah, Kona is definitely a hot one. So the pros are obviously training in the heat. They're preparing for hot tour de France, maybe not to the level of what they've each just experienced, but you know, they're obviously prioritizing the cooling strategies more these days than perhaps they did in the past. Is would that be fair to say? Or is it was it just because this was a really hot Tour de France, it was more front and center?
Ben Treble (24:30.082) I think it was also just you know, when you had Net Company Ineos, is that their name? They at the the Team Time Trial, which was the first stage, you know, they just had this image of a bunch of riders with their hands at the the starting ramp in big plastic tubs of water. Later latter to the which this this didn't quite do the media rounds as much, but you may have seen it. Tom Peagcock at some point had his hands in these
Fancy looking mitts.
Cam Nicholls (25:01.42) Yes, I saw that.
Ben Treble (25:02.956) Yeah, and that's it's essentially trying to do the same thing but with technology. So yeah, they're just trying to cool the body down through some sort of more practical methods, at least in the Pro Peloton. I think teams have invested more money in this in the last couple years, especially as budgets have gone up for some teams. because it is getting hotter. Like there's sort of no no two two ways around it, but
A lot of summers we seem to break new records and if the race is getting hot, at the end of the day, performance is what matters for the propeloton. So if the environmental conditions and heat becomes the biggest limiting factor on performance, that will end up getting more money, more research and more attention than has been on, say, aerodynamics in the past, right?
Cam Nicholls (25:55.724) Before we continue with the podcast, I wanted to thank one of our team sponsors, OneCloudX, a company that's headquartered in the Gold Coast, Queensland, but they have a national presence and they provide software solutions to small to medium businesses that need support with financial management, planning and budgeting, advanced manufacturing, warehouse management, supply chain optimization, and analytics. They also specialize in multi-entity and operationally complex.
environments across manufacturing, distribution, construction, education, and services. And they go beyond core enterprise resource planning solutions like NetSuite and Epicor, which they do provide. But on top of that, they're layering automation, warehouse management solutions, and AI-enabled workflows to drive measurable operational outcomes. They're also a supporter of local Australian cycling and we're very grateful for that. So if you're a
Small to medium sized business in need of what I've just described, please check out OneCloud X and we'll drop a link to their business in the podcast description. Now, back to the podcast. Yes. So those cooling strategies before the race like starts. I I kind of the the one thing that confuses me is if you've let's just say hypothetically you've you've done the heat training, you know, you're super fit and you're about to start a hot race and
You stick your your feet your hands in these gloves to keep your hands cool. But then you're gonna go do a you know, in our case, a three or four hour fondo event and get really hot during it by using those gloves before you actually start the ride just to cool yourself down before you get going. Is that really gonna be doing anything?
Ben Treble (27:34.87) Yes. Potentially. It might be for a short period, right? But think think about it, your body's like this, this heatsink, and it has a ceiling, right? And let's say I I'm gonna s come up with some numbers for for betum, but let's say you don't use the gloves, your body's gonna be, I don't know, the heatsink is filled to fifteen percent. Then you start the fondo and at some point, maybe two hours in, you hit the ceiling, right?
Cam Nicholls (27:36.93) My guy.
Ben Treble (28:03.042) And then you have to kind of back off the intensity because your body has to redirect its resources to cooling itself down. Let's say you use the gloves instead of starting at 15%, but you're starting at now five percent. You're just delaying the point at which you hit your heat ceiling. So you're probably still gonna hit your heat ceiling and at some point you would still struggle, but you're just prolonging it. But that might be the difference between staying with I don't know, staying with the group.
that made it through to the qualifying sprint out and the group that didn't.
Cam Nicholls (28:35.31) True. So what could be there for? I mean, it's pretty obvious, not obvious, but I think, you know, people would have ways and mechanisms to keep themselves cool, whether you're using traditional forms like just ice or whether you're, you know, using modern gloves. But what about during? I mean, you see people just dropping water bottles on themselves. I'm thinking of the you know, the Australian National Titles in which is run in January. It's always very hot. There's always scenes of prose, you know, just
Pouring water down there, you know, all over them. Is that doing anything? Like, should we be doing that if if we've got a spare water bottle to pour on ourselves?
Ben Treble (29:12.876) Yeah, it's not a bad thing. It's probably important to note for the most part, and it's still beneficial, but a lot of that is probably more about your perceptual cooling, which does have a it's more psychological. Yeah. Let's go, let's dig straight into cooling strategies because it's a pretty good topic, huh? I'm gonna run through if anyone's listened to my podcast before with you, I do like the AIS for those listening, that's the Australian Institute of Sports.
Cam Nicholls (29:24.715) So psychological.
Okay.
Ben Treble (29:42.712) They do a lot of frameworks on this. sort of did a bit of a summary of it. So we've got some of the cooling strategies that they would recommend. So I'll run through them sort of just one by one. And they talk about the
Cam Nicholls (29:57.87) They have like groups, you know, when we previously discussed the AIS and we talked about supplements, they've they've kind of got your A supplements, which is like your caffeine, your creatine, your beta-alanine. and then you've got your your B and your C supplements, which are like either emerging or, you know, have dropped out because, you know, there's been more research and they've realized it actually doesn't do a hell of a lot. So with the cooling strategies, is it like categorized like that or it's just like here are all our cooling strategies?
Ben Treble (30:26.286) They just kind of put them in a big table to some respects. What they do do is talk about what methods are good for pre-event, during events, and post event. And then they kind of give them a general, you know, grading what's slightly better than the other. So we'll go through them. Highlight, they call it the mixed method, which is using multiple cooling strategies so that affect your internal and external like heat.
This is probably the best way to improve your overall experience at a hot event and ability to reduce the performance effects from the heat on you. So keep that in mind. We'll start with cold water immersion. This can be good for and for post. So cold water immersion gets like some of the biggest ticks as a an effective rapid cooling mechanism.
And you can take this in lots of different ways. So this could be, you know, if you need to cool down the entire body, obviously an an ice bath or a cold water bath, like full immersion is is one of the best ways to do it. You would have seen this at the tour. Some of the teams now have a an extra bus or a van, and in the back of the van they've got, you know, the little blow up, you know, bathtub and that they put ice water in it. So the riders finish a stage, jump in the back of this van, or they or they just bring them out.
You know, they the little blow up tubs. There's a bit of a joke because there's a few videos of Remco with his rubber duckies. the team threw some rubber duckies in the back of the van in the the cold water tubs. So they were using the full body immersion for post and for pre, they were using, particularly at the time trial, they were using that, you know, the forearms and the hands are good because they have an awful lot of your veins and all your capillaries. It's very dense. So there's a lot of blood flow.
Cam Nicholls (31:58.563) Huh.
Ben Treble (32:22.678) through there and that's where we can cool down the blood really quick and really effective, right? Like you can really effectively cool your core body temperature down just by putting your hands and forearms into cold water. So that's what you're seeing. And they have obviously the the fancy version, Tom Piccott has the expensive technological ones, which are kind of some cooling mitts that you stick your hands in. Or you can have the the cheap, easy version which is a bucket of ice water. Dunk your hands into it.
The nice thing about that is if you're doing a warm-up right, because it's kind of important at the start of an intense race. Like if I thought of say Amy's Fondo at Lawn, where you start with that climb and you're kind of cold to some respects. In a perfect world, like you're kind of sitting on a trainer next to the start shoot, keeping your your muscles warm because your muscles need to be warm to go hard and not
have a problem, right? So the the real trick with these time trials is how do you keep the muscles warm and the metabolic systems, like your aerobic system needs to be up and running and ready to go from that first pedal stroke whilst keeping your core temperature down. Right? So that's what brings us to I guess let's talk about cooling vests.
Cam Nicholls (33:38.339) Hmm.
Ben Treble (33:45.624) This is actually something you see a lot in the propello, right? And I think you even start to see it at some amateur events because it's easily accessible. They're pretty pricey, I would say, for what they are. But the cooling vests that you can buy, you probably buy them off Amazon now. it's probably only good for pre events. I wouldn't use it for of course during, and I definitely wouldn't use it post. Though I have seen some people in the propello using it post, so that's interesting.
Cam Nicholls (34:13.045) Why would you definitely not use it post?
Ben Treble (34:15.509) Yeah. Because at the end of the day, post ride, your body's gonna be very hot. Right? When you're pre-ride, your heat sink hasn't filled up yet. You're just trying to keep it the starting point as low as possible. But post, let's say your heat sink's already full, then you and your your most important method for cooling at that point is evaporation. And you go put on this plastic vest that traps heat and reduces your evaporation. I don't think it's it probably feels good.
But it would actually I think it would reduce your body's ability to lose that heat pretty quick. Rather than it'll probably feel good and cool your skin temperature down, but it's actually probably gonna prolong your core temperature reduction. And it's for sure gonna block the evaporative effect. So you're just gonna reduce your your skin temperature, right?
Cam Nicholls (34:59.054) Okay.
Cam Nicholls (35:07.086) Probably aligns with what what they say about saunas now, like when you leave a sauna, they all recommend that you let your body naturally come back to its core temperature versus forcing it back through jumping in a cold ice bath or having a cold shower or something like that. Whereas, you know, two, three years ago you'd never hear that. But when I go to my local sauna place these days, Noosa City Cave, they and even T H seven, yeah, that the the best approach when you've really heated your body up is to let it
Come back naturally.
Ben Treble (35:38.818) Yeah. Yeah, the body's pretty smart, it's pretty effective when you let it do its own thing to some respects. So if you stop putting it in that un let's call it an unnatural environment, which would be doing intense exercise or going into a sauna, when you take it out of that, you know, in let's say it's a an unnatural environment, but it's natural. it's not normal environments that it's gonna work pretty well to cool itself down. So let's keep we'll run through so that's cooling vests.
Something that I think you see a reasonable amount in the propello that the amateurs could use better, possibly, is the the slushies or the the ice slurry, as it's often called.
Cam Nicholls (36:22.626) This sounds good. This sounds more up my alley. Go to seven eleven before a race and just munch on a slurp. You get the sugar hit too. I like this one.
Ben Treble (36:25.752) Yeah.
Ben Treble (36:32.374) Yeah, me too. I'm a big fan. It's good for pre and for post and it's potentially good during. The science on this was I looked into it was was probably quite interesting because the AIS the recommendation though is for this to be effective, you need quite a lot.
you need to drink a lot of slushy. It was like, you know, around more greater than seven grams per kilogram. Right.
Cam Nicholls (37:01.868) Okay, that's a lot. Of of you just slushy ice. Not necessarily sugar we're talking here, yeah.
Ben Treble (37:04.803) Yeah.
Yeah, you're talking about, you know, easily half a litre plus.
Cam Nicholls (37:12.876) Okay, well that yeah, that's so it's it sounds good in theory, but it could require a lot of pull it stops during a Fondo event. It's gonna slow down your peaks time.
Ben Treble (37:21.718) Yeah, so I mean it's very effective, but for it to be effective from the science, my textbook from Brooks goes further and says it's between eight to ten grams per kilogram. So that was also an interesting difference between the AIS and some of the other science out there. So I would say probably the the range is between seven to ten grams per kilogram of ice slurry that you would need.
Best used when sweat can't evaporate on its own. So if you're riding and it's a very fast-paced ride where there's a lot of wind effect, at least having it during is probably only going to have a psychological effect. So it's not a bad thing. I don't think it's going to do do necessarily too much negative, but there's probably a time and place for during, but definitely something that could be used pre, right? To keep your heat sink as low as possible before you start.
But you also probably need to know that for that to really work, you have to have quite a lot and you probably need to factor that in in terms of, you know, practice. Make sure your stomach can tolerate it so you don't get a gut issue, right?
Cam Nicholls (38:31.562) Yeah. But it's also like, you know, if people are are aiming for their high carb intake pre, you know, it's it's it kind of falls into that as well. So maybe it's it's you know, there's two positives to it. One is if it's a hot race or hot event, you're getting the cooling component and irrespective, if you're if you're trying to hit what does the science say? One to four grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight, you know, two to four hours before an event, it's very hard to to achieve four grams.
Per kilogram of body weight, almost impossible. You know, but if you're getting an extra, you know, on top of what you're already doing, if you're sitting on the start line with a slurpee in your hand, full of sugar. Yeah. You know, it's gonna help help you with that, irrespective of the cooling component. Are we gonna see fondos next year? Everyone's gonna be standing there with slurpees at the start line. I like it. That'd be a great pitcher.
Ben Treble (39:17.614) Exactly.
Ben Treble (39:25.942) There's business idea for you, Cam. You need to have not the not the coffee cart, but the slushy cart at the start of the fondo.
Cam Nicholls (39:32.578) Yeah. I think so.
Ben Treble (39:35.394) Sell half litre bottles of slushy to people.
Cam Nicholls (39:38.456) Let's have a chat offline, Ben. The RCA Slurpees at the Fondo events.
Ben Treble (39:43.042) I like it, huh? We could put something else in there to help it out. Hang on. Okay, so we're gonna keep going down my list of cooling strategies. So the next one most people have probably seen it at some point, at least at time trials, which would be water misting. This is you know, you if you I know some cafes in in Australia have them, right? Like the water misters. If you go to the plant section in Bunnings, they also use the water misters. So
The water mister is good pre-per like during. Obviously during is difficult and post, but if you've ever seen people sometimes you'll see people like put the hose in the air with the water that creates water mist when the riders go through. Like this is actually like some riders probably don't like it, but it it is a good thing. So if someone offered the water spray in my face from the team car on a hot day, I would take it. It is better if you combine it with a fan.
Because you're going to get a like a wind cooling effect with the water. And this helps keep the water on the skin instead of dripping off. And it improves the evaporative process. Right. So yeah. Water misting with with fans improves both the physiological and perceptual markers for cooling. So that's a that gets quite a few ticks. Obviously, there's a fair bit of equipment and logistics required to pull that off.
Cam Nicholls (41:10.806) Okay. Yeah. I prefer the slur. I'm still on the slur. Slurpe's my number one at the minute.
Ben Treble (41:15.19) I lost you at Slurpes. Okay, let's keep going. probably something simpler, which we already talked about, but it comes in the bucket of cold towels or cold packs. I would put the ice socks in the same category. So it's good, like reasonably good. I wouldn't say it's amazing for pre-tactics. It's pretty good during, and it's okay for post. So why is it only okay pre and post?
'Cause it's predominantly only cooling down your skin temperature. Predominantly. So it's pretty hard to wrap your whole body in a cold towel or keep the ice on something like your hands and your forearms while you're cycling. It's not very practical, right? So the at the end of the day it's mostly cooling the skin temp down. You typically can only put it behind your neck.
And if you're very unlucky to be a propello rider, you weren't even allowed to use this during the time trial because the UCI said that might be an aerodynamic advantage. Which was a bit of a a shock to a lot of people. So yeah, I think this is but this isn't it may not necessarily be the best out of all of them, but it's often pretty cheap and pretty accessible. Like it's
Cam Nicholls (42:17.378) Well
Ben Treble (42:33.44) It's something that I think a lot of amateurs could pull off. Like if if you're at certain ultra events, you could probably put some ice socks in a little SC in the support car and grab one at some point if you're overheating. You could if you're lucky enough to have a friend to come support you at your event and they're at one of the the fueling stations, they could have some ice packs with them and you get a rubber band, you put it around your bottle and they could even hand it to you and do a drive by.
If you if you're one of the riders who wants to focus on time and not stop, you can even do the drive by from your mate on the side of the road. So I feel like it's pretty, pretty cheap and accessible to pull that one off. The Science was something I didn't sort of think about necessarily, but they actually recommend that you use a chamois fabric because it holds the water without dripping, which will improve the evaporation. So yeah.
I'm not sure how that compares to the pantyhose, which is probably the most common Ice SOC used material. fun fact is you probably know Cam because you might have seen the budget for the RCA Provelo team, but pantyhose are not cheap. So if anybody has a a cheaper alternative that works the same, that's accessible at a petrol station, let us know.
Cam Nicholls (43:55.277) Yes.
Ben Treble (43:57.154) okay, last one on the list at least from the AIS. It's probably an interesting one you might not have thought of, but menthol. This one is almost only really useful for during the event, and it's entirely for perceptual heat changes. So psychological. But yeah, menthol it can be actually put in two ways. It can be sort of like people have it in sort of some cooling creams.
And they put it on the working muscle to cool the skin down, or at least it's a perceptual cooling. Your skin feels cooler. I've even seen there was at some stage people were putting menthol into a like a drink product. And they even targeted Swift racing because they had a lot of cooling issues with indoor Swift races. And they were putting menthol product into sort of some sort of drink mix. So you had that cooling effect. I think this one's probably the lowest
If we had to grade them all, this would be the the lowest on my list. But it's just it's one that made the list, which I thought was interesting.
Cam Nicholls (44:59.97) Yeah, okay.
Cam Nicholls (45:05.314) Yeah, and look, I I think what might, you know, be relevant for, you know, recreational and amateurs out there listening is, you know, it depends what season you're in, of course. So Aussies might be listening to this now, you know, we're in the middle of winter thinking, yeah, don't worry about it. But if you're in you know, Europe, the US or that part of the world, you know, it it's very relevant. You know, just pick a training session. It maybe even if it's just on the indoor where you where you're getting quite hot, or if it's if it's a hot Saturday ride.
And just trial one of these strategies and and and see what it does. Because most I'm of the belief most recreational and amateurs ignore this kind of level and and just don't do anything. But from what I've seen in my own little world is you know, the impact on your rate of perceived exertion, which is in correlation to what's happening to your physiology physiology, is significant and it's instantaneous. So
I mean that's th that that would be my I don't know if you've you think differently, Ben, my th my thought for people listening. Give it a try on your next hot training ride, one of these strategies and and see how you go. And if you do notice you can produce more power, you do you know, you do notice a drop in in your rate of perceived exertion, then maybe it's something to consider for your next event.
Ben Treble (46:24.162) Definitely. Yeah, I'll bring us back to the the top of the list, right? So the first thing I talked about was the mixed method. Now, if you think about the lovely media craziness around the Tour de France or even just looking at summer racing in in general these days, if you think about the list that we just went through, what do you see the most? You see the mixed method, which is using a multiple methods through that list, right? They're using cold water immersion.
They're using slushies, they're using water misting, they're using cooling vests, they're using ice socks. They're pretty much using everything on this list. The only probably warning I would put out there, which the AIS raises around menthol or some that are perceptual, psychological only methods, which was pretty much just menthol, was when your perceived heat is dropped, physiological, you're still hot. So
What they found is that some riders just rode harder because they perceptually they thought they could, but actually they just cook themselves quicker. So there's maybe a flip side to all of that when we're talking about it. And yeah, something else that's for at least for the Aussies, very easy to try. One of my favorite things, which is not fully on the list, but maybe a version of it, was on hot summer days on a long ride.
The first thing I would do is go to the 711 gas station. First thing I'd do is actually I would I'd go into the the ice cooler outside the station and I would actually go sit in it.
Cam Nicholls (48:03.105) Right.
Ben Treble (48:03.874) I'd just open that door and go sit sit in with all the buckets, the bags of ice to cool down super quick. Then I would go in and I would grab my 7 Eleven slushie, like the big one, half a liter. Then I would go back to the ice box and for the next five minutes, drink my half a liter of slushy while sitting in an ice box, finish the slushie, then I'm grabbing the loose ice in the bottom of the big ice box, the ice, chucking it down the back of the jersey, and then getting on the bike.
Cam Nicholls (48:34.198) Wow, but some of those ice boxes are a bit small and perched up and like climbing into one of those could look a bit odd if you're kind of at a petrol station. So perhaps let's not recommend that one. But each to their own Ben if you want to do that. Yeah. It's it sounds it's ticking a lot of boxes.
Ben Treble (48:51.628) If you're really hot, like if you're getting to the point where it's you almost can't it's a bit dangerous, right? Which can happen quickly. I think that's a a little a very brief note. Like once you heat up, once you hit your ceiling in terms of heat sink, you can quickly become too hot. That it's it's not healthy. So you actually it's important to cool the body down. And that's a very effective way. like whole body immersion in the ice box. So yeah.
Cam Nicholls (49:18.766) It's a it's good one to leave with. Yeah. So is is is that the list, Ben? Are are we done? Because we've gone pretty deep there on on technical analysis of why it's important and and what people can do.
Ben Treble (49:32.632) Yeah, I think we'll save the the heat training for another time. but that's probably the continuation of this this topic.
Cam Nicholls (49:39.8) Yes. Well, of course I know you're working with some of your members, Ben and and our other coaches at the RCA are working with their members on not only, you know, heat training and cooling strategies, but also, you know, carbohydrate strategies as well. So if you're out there listening and you're thinking, yeah, I wouldn't mind blending in some of the strategies discussed today into my own training, you know, working with the coach can be a a a really
effective way to blend these in and target certain sessions and and certain events with the right strategy. So if you're if you're interested in working with a coach, make sure you check out the RCA's website. Go to www dot roadcyclingacademy.com and check out one-to-one coaching. Thanks for your time, Ben. We'll catch everyone in the next podcast.
