14/06/2022

"1000 calories a day" - Steve Cummings details how he was used for diet testing at Team Sky

Steve Cummings was a rider for (at the time) Team Sky in 2010 and 2011, and has since returned to the team with the role of assistant DS. He's talked about his career in his new book 'The Break, Life as a Cycling Maverick' which includes a section on how he was used to experiment an extreme diet for the sake of the team.

“To give one example, which I suspect was to act as a test run for Wiggins before they tried it on him, I trialed a super-restricted diet of 1000 calories a day," he said. This was at the time used as an experiment to see the feedback from Cummings before applying to the team's stage-racers, including Bradley Wiggins who went on to win the Tour de France the year after he left the team.

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He explained how the process worked: "It was centred on what they called ‘fruit days’. In other words, two pieces of fruit five times a day and half a pint of skimmed milk for your protein, and that’d be it. Our nutritionist would measure your body fat levels and say, ‘OK, you’re 10 per cent, pop in a couple of fruit days and that’ll bring you back down.’ This is part of cycling's long-lasting tradition of trying to have the weight as low as possible. In modern years aerodynamics and training methods are having a much more important role then the weight when it comes to pro riders, specially outside of stage-racers - such as Cummings.

“These were combined with a catabolic diet of no breakfast, ride your bike for up to five hours, then have 200–300 grams of meat or fish and salad for lunch and dinner. Five days on like that, then five days off," he detailed. Cummings said that at a certain point he was 5Kg below the weight that saw him fly into the win in Mende on the iconic 2015 Tour de France finale. In 2011 Cummings had ridden to a hilltop finish win at the Alto do Malhão in the Volta ao Algarve, at the time riding a strong level on the climbs, but in an unsustainable way.