The App that Van der Poel uses to count calories daily

Without being obsessed with food, Mathieu van der Poel, as a front-line professional, keeps a strict control of his nutrition. To count calories and keep a balanced intake of nutrients throughout the day, as well as the nutritional needs of each day, the Belgian cyclist uses the Foodmaker app.

Counting calories is much easier with Foodmaker

In a recent interview that Mathieu van der Poel gave to a Belgian weekly, the Alpecin-Deceuninck cyclist also talked about his nutrition guidelines and about the Foodmaker app he uses to count calories, currently one of the essential factors in achieving maximum performance on the bike.

In any case, Mathieu van der Poel does not consider himself obsessed with nutrition "Now I know what and how much to eat. At home, when Roxanne prepares tasty and healthy food I don't weigh the food. But during concentrations and races I use the Foodmaker app that calculates how many calories you have burned and ingested. Although for me, as a classics rider, it is not as necessary as for a climber. My weight is quite constant throughout the year".

In fact, Mathieu confesses that he does not torture himself for committing a sin from time to time "even this year I discovered the Bicky Burger. I would have more problems with giving up those little sins than, for example with alcohol of which I did not taste a drop last year from January 1st to Paris-Roubaix".

From current sports nutrition Mathieu van der Poel highlights the need for today's cyclist to assimilate a huge amount of carbohydrates during competition, a figure that reaches up to 140 g/hour, which for an untrained person would cause digestive problems. In any case, he mentions that his competition diet is personalized using the data provided by the DNA analysis used by the nutrition firm 4Gold that supplies Alpecin-Deceuninck.

In his case, he has found that caffeine has a beneficial effect on his endurance, that creatinine does not work for him or that he needs to supplement vitamin D as his body does not naturally produce enough.

To control all this on a daily basis and count the calories the cyclist ingests and needs, the Foodmaker app, which Alpecin-Deceuninck that was already being used by Jumbo-Visma and the Belgian team incorporated after Mathieu van der Poel signed a sponsorship with them, integrates perfectly with Training Peaks, so that the cyclist knows, depending on the training he has to do and his physiological characteristics, what he has to consume.

The cyclist only has to enter in the Foodmaker app what he is consuming so that the app itself takes care of counting calories and providing information about the nutritional balance of each day to the cyclist. In addition, depending on how each day has ended, the app itself makes nutrition suggestions to the cyclist to keep him alert about his nutrition which, as we indicated at the beginning, has become one of the main factors in performance on the bike.

An App that is available for both Android and iOS and from which you can also benefit since, despite being originally developed for high-level athletes, in its basic version it provides interesting guidance on how to approach our nutrition while giving us useful tips for a healthier diet.