Planner
Four questions. We turn the published carbohydrate research into a target you can actually hit, then show you which Cadence products get you there. No hype. Just science.
Carb targets are not weight-based, but your caffeine ceiling and recovery numbers are.
Athletes not used to eating on the move have roughly double the risk of gut trouble. We cap the target at what you have practised.
Three ways to hit it
Same carbohydrate target, different ways to carry it. Mix and match — the number matters more than the format.
* Derived from the product page rather than read off the label — carbohydrate per serving for the bar and Marathon, and servings per 1 kg pouch for Marathon and Revive. Confirm before this goes live.
Caffeine ceiling
Citrus and Vanilla gels carry 50 mg of caffeine each; Mango is caffeine free. The performance dose is 3–6 mg per kg of body weight across a whole session — past that you get the jitters and the gut trouble without the benefit. Switch a plan's gels to Mango and this stops being a constraint.
Fluid & sodium
We do not know your sweat rate, so we will not invent one.
Starting point
Drink to thirst around that, and expect the top of the range on a hot day, a hard effort, or if you are a bigger athlete.
Find your real number
Weigh yourself before and after a one-hour session, no bathroom breaks, and account for what you drank. Every kilogram lost is roughly a litre of sweat.
Replacing heavy sweat losses with plain water is how hyponatraemia starts — CarboFuel and Marathon both carry sodium, potassium, magnesium and phosphate for exactly this reason.
After you stop
First hour target
Revive Mix
Revive Mix: Chocolate · Vanilla — R 699.99 / 1 kg
Why these numbers
The carbohydrate ladder
- Under 45 minutesStored muscle glycogen covers it. If you are racing, a carbohydrate mouth rinse or a few sips is enough to matter.
- 45 minutes to 2 hours · up to 30–60 g/hrUseful but not decisive. Intensity is what moves you up this band.
- 2 to 3 hours · about 60 g/hrA single carbohydrate source oxidises at roughly 60 g/hr. That is the ceiling for glucose alone.
- Beyond 2.5–3 hours · up to 90 g/hrOnly reachable with multiple transportable carbohydrates — glucose and fructose using separate intestinal transporters. Cadence uses a 2:1 maltodextrin to fructose ratio for this.
- Very long, high intensity, trained gut · 90–120 g/hrEmerging evidence supports pushing past 90 g/hr, but only where the gut has been trained for it. Build by about 15 g per week in training, never on race day.
Why running and cycling differ
- MechanicsRepetitive impact jostles the gut. Gastrointestinal symptoms are consistently more common in runners than in cyclists, which is why we hold the running ceiling lower than the cycling one.
- Carrying capacityA cyclist can carry two 750 ml bottles and drink freely. A runner is limited to what fits in a flask or on the course, which pushes running toward concentrated formats — gels — and cycling toward drink mix.
- ConcentrationHighly concentrated drinks empty from the stomach slowly. CarboFuel is formulated isotonic at one 46 g serving per 500 ml; going stronger than that to save carrying weight is the most common self-inflicted gut problem.
- Trail and ultraLower average intensity over much longer time. The per-hour number sits lower but the session total is enormous, so solid food and flavour variety start to matter as much as the maths.
What the sliders actually change
- DurationSets the band. This is the dominant input — how long you are out there determines whether you need carbohydrate at all, and how high you can usefully go.
- IntensityPositions you inside the band. Easy efforts burn proportionally more fat and less glycogen, so they sit at the bottom; race efforts sit at the top.
- SportApplies a ceiling and changes the product mix. Cycling can reach 120 g/hr, road running is held at 90, trail at 90 with a bias toward solids.
- Gut trainingHard cap. New to fuelling caps at 60 g/hr, used to 60 caps at 90, trained caps at the sport maximum.
- Body weightDoes not change the carb target — exogenous carbohydrate oxidation is limited by intestinal transport, not by body size. It sets your caffeine ceiling and your recovery numbers.
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Live variant IDs. Every product row carries the real Shopify variant ID and price, and the button posts to
/cart/add.jsthen redirects to the cart. It works as soon as this is on cadencenutrition.com; off-store it shows a preview of what it would add. Long term, render the IDs from Liquid rather than hardcoding them, so a product rebuild does not silently break the cart. -
Confirm against the labels: CarboFuel Bar carbohydrate (modelled at 35 g per 45 g bar); Marathon Mix (40 g carbs + 8 g protein per 2-scoop serving, derived from the 8% solution in 500 ml and the stated 5:1 ratio) and its servings per 1 kg pouch (assumed 20); Revive (60 g carbs + 20 g protein per 3-scoop serving, assumed 12 servings per pouch). CarboFuel at 40 g per 46 g scoop, 22 servings per pouch, and the gel at 30 g carbs + 50 mg caffeine are confirmed. All of it lives in the
PandCATobjects at the top of the script. - Pack selection is cost-minimising. The planner picks the cheapest way to cover the session — five sachets beat a pouch, fifteen do not — and re-picks as the session changes, until the customer chooses a pack themselves. Worth sanity-checking against your margin: it will steer short-session buyers to sachets.
- Mango is doing more work than you might think. Caffeine is tracked per flavour: Citrus and Vanilla at 50 mg, Mango at zero. On long sessions the 6 mg/kg ceiling — not the gut — is what limits a caffeinated plan, so the planner trims those gels and tells the customer that switching to Mango lets them take the full number. That is a strong merchandising argument for Mango on exactly the sessions where people buy the most gels. Vanilla's 50 mg is assumed from Citrus — the page lists caffeine anhydrous but not the dose, so confirm it.
- Images come straight from your Shopify CDN, with a text fallback if one fails. In the Liquid version pull them from the product object instead of hardcoded URLs.
- Not yet included: the Balanced Energy Bar (Apple Pie), stock/availability checks, and pre-race carb loading. Loading is the obvious next module — it needs weight, which we already collect.
This planner turns published sports science into a starting number, not a personal prescription. Bodies differ, and gut tolerance differs more. Test everything in training before race day, and speak to a registered sports dietitian if you want numbers tuned to you.
