“I enjoy the sport a lot more now” - Simon Yates reveals how change in diet reinvigorated his cycling career

Simon Yates starts the 2025 season as one of the riders to look out for. After a decade at Team Jayco AlUla under the team's various guises, Yates has moved to Team Visma | Lease a Bike for the new campaign, and starts this new challenge with much excitement.

Aged 32 now, the former Vuelta a Espana winner has seen plenty of change during his career in the peloton. One change in particular stands out as a positive for the Brit, the switch up in the required diet of a rider. “It’s easier now with nutrition,” Yates explains in conversation with Velo. “The sport is way more healthier now. I enjoy my riding much more now than I did seven, eight years ago.”

Whereas at the start of his career, a rider's diet was focused on limitation and counting calories, nowadays teams favour their riders to opt for a more carb heavy approach to eating. “I enjoy the sport a lot more now,” Yates says. “Before this huge carb boom came around, it was the opposite. It was low-carb, saving your carbs, and that was hard not just on the mind, but on your body. You were just completely tired all the time. You’re fatigued all the time. I’d get back from hard rides and remembering that you’d have to just lie down on the bed, completely knackered. You get back, OK, that was hard, you feel it in the legs, but you would feel that in the body. Now you don’t feel any sort of deficiency.”

“It used to be a lot of low-carb stuff,” Yates adds. “Two eggs for breakfast and off your pop, see you later, five-six hours, water in the bottles. Now we have a mountain of rice for breakfast, 120g of carbs an hour, it’s changed. Now it is all high carbs.”

Even since his Vuelta a Espana victory in 2018, Yates believes the sport is almost unrecognisable. “Everything’s changed,” Yates concludes. “Not that the sport was unprofessional before, but now no one takes a day off. Now training wise, everyone is laser focused about every little detail. In 2018, you could take a week off and have a few beers if you want. Now that is not the case. You cannot miss anything. You get sick for a few days and you’re already weeks behind. It’s not easy to be like that all the time, but that’s how it is.”