Most cyclists are under-fuelling. Here's why I built Velorific.

I used to think nutrition tracking was so you would eat less. A slightly miserable, overly precise way of making sure you didn't overdo it. Something for bodybuilders, pros, or people who somehow enjoy weighing every gram of food.

I don't think that anymore.

What I've realised, mainly through cycling, is that for a lot of people training seriously, the problem is not eating too much. It's eating too little, or eating the wrong things at the wrong times, or just being wildly inconsistent without properly realising it.

I started cycling about three years ago after I had to stop running because of injury issues. I took to it quite quickly. I think running had given me a decent aerobic base, and I do genuinely like structured training, so I made progress at a reasonable pace. I worked with a coach for a while, which was excellent, but after my event was done (Dragon Ride in 2024) I couldn't really justify the cost, so I started doing things myself.

Nutrition was the one area I hadn't ever really focussed on before.

For a long time I thought I was doing enough just by eating what felt like a lot. Always a big bowl of porridge for breakfast, a protein shake after rides. Sometimes that probably was enough. But the truth is I had no real idea. Some days I was fuelling training properly but it was definitely all a bit random.

That was the bit that surprised me the most when I started paying proper attention to this aspect of my fitness.

Tracking my food didn't make me feel restricted. If anything it showed me how often I was under-fuelling. I wasn't using nutrition to force a deficit. I was using it to make sure I could do the work, recover properly, and actually be ready to do it again the next day.

That is really what Velorific is about.

It isn't trying to be a huge all-purpose health and nutrition app. It isn't aimed at elite riders with a full support team around them. It's for people like me in the middle ground: people who train seriously, want to improve, care about performance, but also want something simple enough to use every day.

Velorific takes the training load, works out the likely energy demand, and gives me macro targets that make sense for that day. Protein and fat remain fairly steady. Carbs move depending on what the day requires. Hard day, more carbs. Easy day, fewer. Rest day, different again.

That sounds simple, and in a way it is. But that simplicity is the whole point. Most people don't need more complexity. They need something that helps them stop guessing.

Before this, I was basically doing what I think a lot of reasonably committed amateur athletes do: train with structure, eat by feel, and hope the two more or less lined up.

Now I have a much better sense of what the day actually requires.

The result for me has been better consistency. Hard days are better fuelled. Easier days are less random. I am much more aware of what I am actually doing. And, interestingly, I've lost a bit of weight without trying to "diet" in the traditional sense.

Looking at the numbers over the last few weeks, I've been eating plenty, but I've still drifted into a modest deficit because things are finally a bit more aligned. Not through starvation, not through being miserable, just through paying attention and fuelling with a bit more purpose.

That matters because good fuelling is not just about today's ride. It's about tomorrow's as well. If you consistently under-fuel, you don't just blunt one session. You make it harder to recover, harder to hit the next one properly, and harder to string together good weeks. And if you can't string together good weeks, you won't improve as much as you could.

That is the whole idea.

This app grew out of me wanting something that actually matched how I think about training. It started first as a spreadsheet, then as a personal dashboard running on a local server. Over time, with a lot of iteration, testing, reading and rebuilding, it turned into something polished enough to share.

I built it because I wanted it for myself. I'm launching it because I think there are plenty of other people like me: not pros, not casuals, but people who care about getting better and suspect they could be doing the nutrition side far better than they currently are.

If that sounds like you, that is who Velorific is for.

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