EatMyRide nutrition app Fanatic subscription

EatMyRide is an excellent app for improving your cycling performance, in which nutrition is often the key to doing well – especially in endurance. I found it intuitive to use and it provides heaps of useful data, tips and advice – plus it comes in free as well as paid subscription forms, so you can try it without financial commitment.

The only slight drawback is that the head unit widget/app is only available for Garmin at the moment, but you can still use the app on your phone to help you perfect your nutrition plan, regardless of your bike computer brand.

> Subscribe now: EatMyRide Fanatic for £40.99

It was designed for endurance athletes and their coaches, with the aim of helping you improve performance by providing personalised nutrition advice and insights to balance your energy burn and intake rates.

Although most cycling computers have some sort of timed nutrition prompt available, the EatMyRide app promised and delivered a lot more than just that. Just in the short testing period I learned a lot more about why my long rides were such a slog sometimes, and how much my ride intensity actually affects my energy needs.

Compatibility and different plans

Getting set up with EatMyRide is simple: you register through the app, and insert some core details such as your gender, weight and FTP. After this, you can create ride nutrition plans and also plan your daily nutrition more broadly around your cycling.

At the moment, the app is only compatible with Garmin head units and watches, so if you're riding with anything else you'll need to wait patiently – but then again, you can still use the app on your phone, plan your nutrition and, for example, stick it on a piece of paper taped on your top tube if you don't have a Garmin.

I tested the product on a Garmin Edge 830, which has a touchscreen, and I definitely think it made things a lot easier to have that. The nutrition plan widget does work on non-touchscreen Garmins as well, but you cannot have the real-time nutrition app on.

There are three membership plans you can choose from: the free, Recreational plan; the Fanatic (as tested) that costs £40.99 a year; or the Pro plan starting at €29 (around £24.50) a month.

The Pro plan is meant for coaches who can offer EatMyRide as part of their training plans for clients.

Both the Fanatic and Pro plans offer you more post-ride data, but even the Recreational plan gives you the ability to create ride nutrition plans – they just won't take account of your personal data such as height and weight, but use a general one instead.

In-app functions

On the phone app, you can use your planned routes as the basis for your nutrition plan. The app supports Strava, Ride with GPS, Komoot and Trainingpeaks, or you can import your route as a file, or plan it manually on the app. I found it really simple to choose my planned route through one of these apps and then I got to the most fun part, planning the nutrition.

After you've chosen your route, the app will calculate your nutrition plan based on the stats you've given it and tell you how much energy you need, in grams per hour (for example, 47g/h).

You can also define the intensity of the ride which will affect your nutrition needs. I found that very useful – I could see how much more food I needed for the three-hour ride I was doing with a group of fast riders, compared with the one I planned to do in a low heart rate zone.

The app then prompts you to choose foods and drinks to fulfil your required energy needs. It has a database of thousands of products to choose from, including the most common sports nutrition brand gels and bars, but also bananas and cafe stop foods like apple pie. Some things were missing, such as the Precision Fuel gels I was using, and my go-to Haribo sweets, but I was able to add these manually, and once done, they stayed in the system so I didn't have to do this more than once. Finding staples such as SiS, Torq and High5 was easy in the app.

> How to eat right for sportives and long rides

This was my favourite part of testing the app, and it's also the one I struggle with the most as a cyclist. I have no issue eating on the bike, but the pre-ride faff of figuring out how much and what I need has always caused me a slight headache. With EatMyRide, once I had chosen what I have available to eat (raiding the snacks drawer), the app gave me a plan that detailed when and what I should eat during my ride.

You can also tailor the plan – to make the apple pie coincide with your mid-ride cafe stop, for example. It really felt like I had my own nutritionist helping me out – which is kind of the idea of the app, to give consumers a light version of the nutrition advice that the pro riders enjoy as part of their training.

Using the nutrition plans – functionality on Garmin

As fun as planning is, executing it is even more important, and in order to do that the EatMyRide gives you the option of sending the nutrition plan to your Garmin computer or watch. This is as simple as clicking 'send to Garmin' on the app – but before this, you need to have the EatMyRide widget downloaded on your Garmin (available in the Connect IQ store).

Here it's worth mentioning that the app allows two different widgets in the head unit. One data screen details your real-time energy needs and allows you to choose what products you're consuming from a very simplified list (eg 'bar, large 40g carbs). You can use this without a nutrition plan, and you can see a colour rating for your fuelling level (from green to red).

I found this  really useful when I had no time to really plan properly, or when I was doing a route I already know at a pace I didn't really want to specify beforehand. Granted, my energy input wasn't as accurate as with the detailed plan, but this still helped me fuel a lot more efficiently as I saw how many carbs I was burning.

The other widget simply allows you to get notifications of your nutrition plan – telling you what product you should be having at a certain time. A screen pops up telling you what product you should have, when, and, for example, if it's liquids, over what time period.

I definitely found this the most time-consuming part of getting set up and familiarised with the app. I first didn't understand I needed to allow my Garmin to show the data fields separately, and then I could not log in to the app through the Garmin (it needs to connect with your Garmin Connect app to do this), but in the end I got it all figured out. I had the chance to voice these issues with the app's founder and he assured me that the updates would make the process easier – which they did, noticeably.

And finally, at the end of the ride, you can analyse your performance on the EatMyRide app on your phone. This is also possible with rides that you've not made a plan for, as the app can be connected to Strava, Komoot, Ride with GPS, and TrainingPeaks.

Value and conclusion

I think, at £5.99 a month, this app is very well priced for the functionality it offers – most of which can be obtained free of charge, though with a little less data.

I didn't use the app for every single one of my long rides, but in just the short testing period it's given me more insight into how I should fuel on my rides than I've ever had before. Using it like this, periodically, I think you quite quickly get the hang of how you should fuel yourself, and if a ride feels a bit harder than it should, you can return to more precise planning and tracking.

> Buyer’s Guide: 29 of the best cycling apps for iPhone and Android

The app really made me think of my fuelling strategy in a more holistic way, not purely focusing on the ride food but also about the pre- and post-ride meals and hydration, which the app also gives advice on.

In conclusion, I think this is an app that will help all cyclists, regardless of their performance levels and aims, to have a more enjoyable ride. It's like having a cycling nutritionist helping you, giving you a plan to follow but one that you can still tailor if you feel it's not quite right. You don't have to use the app religiously every day and for years, it helps you learn what you should be doing on certain types of rides quickly, and you can then apply that knowledge even without the app.

Verdict

An excellent app that really helps with understanding the ins and outs of cycling nutrition in an easily digestible way