On a hard ride, take one ExoLactate® Gel 5–10 minutes before the effort you care about, then one every 20–30 minutes — between 1 and 3 gels per hour depending on intensity, duration and gut tolerance. The gels do not sit on top of your carbohydrate plan. They replace part of it, because each one already carries 40 g of carbohydrate alongside its 5 g of lactate.
This is the practical article: how much, how often, and how to fit it into what you already do on the bike. If you want the underlying idea first — what exogenous lactate is and why a second oxidisable fuel matters — start with our guide to exogenous lactate. The physiology in depth lives on our science site, exolactate.com.
What actually limits you on a hard ride
Cycling is the discipline where fuelling strategy has been pushed hardest, and it shows. Carbohydrate intakes that were considered reckless a decade ago are now standard in the bunch: 90 g an hour is unremarkable, 120 g an hour is common at the front, and the products have been re-engineered around the single goal of getting more grams past the gut.
It worked, and it has a ceiling. Carbohydrate oxidation during exercise is limited by intestinal absorption, and past a certain rate the extra grams stop becoming power and start becoming gastrointestinal distress. That ceiling arrives soonest on the days that matter most — the sustained climb, the crosswind section, the last hour of a gran fondo — because that is exactly when demand for oxidisable substrate is highest and blood flow to the gut is lowest.
Exogenous lactate is not an attempt to raise that ceiling. It is a different substrate arriving alongside carbohydrate, one that muscle, heart and brain oxidise directly without converting it first. On the bike that matters in the specific places where you are asking for power you cannot currently sustain.
What one gel actually contains
Everything below is arithmetic on this table, so it is worth having in front of you.
| Per ExoLactate® Gel (68 g) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Lactate | 5 g |
| Carbohydrate | 40 g (1:1 glucose to fructose) |
| Energy | 171 kcal |
| Sodium | 284 mg |
| Magnesium | 100 mg |
| Potassium | 104 mg |
| Calcium | 85 mg |
Two things follow from it. First, this is a full-size carbohydrate gel, not a supplement you add to one — 40 g is roughly what two conventional gels give you. Second, it carries a real electrolyte load, so it belongs inside your hydration plan rather than beside it.
How many gels per hour on the bike
The honest answer is that it depends on how hard you are riding, how long you are out, and what your gut has been trained to take. The ranges below start from the recommended 1–3 gels per hour; the fuelling calculator on the product page will narrow it down for a specific session.
| Ride | Gels/hour | Lactate/hour | Carbohydrate/hour | Sodium/hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long endurance ride, Z2, 2–4 h | 1 | 5 g | 40 g | 284 mg |
| Tempo or sweet spot, 2–3 h | 1–2 | 5–10 g | 40–80 g | 284–568 mg |
| Race, gran fondo, hard group ride | 2–3 | 10–15 g | 80–120 g | 568–852 mg |
| Time trial or criterium under 75 min | 1 before + 1 during | 5–10 g | 40–80 g | 284–568 mg |
Three gels an hour is the upper end of the range: 120 g of carbohydrate an hour, which only works with a well-trained gut, built up over weeks of gut training (practising your race fuelling on training rides until your stomach tolerates it). Above three gels an hour you are into 160 g of carbohydrate and 20 g of lactate per hour. That happens — it is what the front of a Grand Tour or an elite ultra looks like — but it is a trained, supervised practice, not a number to copy off the internet. Start at one or two an hour and build.
When to take them
Lactate is oxidised faster than carbohydrate, which changes the timing logic. With a conventional gel you eat ahead of a deficit. With this one you can also fuel ahead of a specific effort.
- 5–10 minutes before the effort you want. Before the bottom of the climb, before the section you know splits the group, before the last hour when the pace goes up.
- Every 20–30 minutes after that. Regular small inputs rather than one large one — the same rule that governs any carbohydrate strategy.
- From the start on long days. Fuelling from behind is the classic cycling error and lactate does not fix it. Begin in the first 30 minutes, while the gut still works well.
Swap, don't stack
This is the point most riders get wrong on the first attempt, and it is the one that causes stomach problems.
If you already take 90 g of carbohydrate an hour and you add two ExoLactate® Gels on top, you are now attempting 170 g an hour. Almost nobody absorbs that, and the failure mode is bloating, cramping and a ruined last hour. The gels are the carbohydrate. Two an hour is an 80 g per hour strategy with 10 g of lactate included.
The rule is to replicate your usual carbohydrate intake, then decide how much of it comes from ExoLactate®. What changes is the composition of the fuel, not the total.
Gravel and long days away from support
Gravel puts the same metabolic demands on you as road racing and adds two problems: the intensity is far more variable, and you are often hours from anywhere to restock.
The variability is an argument for lactate rather than against it. A gravel day is not a steady 250 W — it is repeated hard efforts up loose climbs, technical sections that spike your heart rate without much forward speed, and stretches where you cannot eat at all. Fuel before the hard sections rather than after them, and treat the segments you know are coming the way a road rider treats a categorised climb.
For the restocking problem, the gel dilutes cleanly. One or two gels in a 500 ml soft flask or bottle turns a fuelling problem into a drinking problem, which is far easier to solve while your hands are busy. Several of the athletes we work with prefer it that way for exactly this reason: it covers hydration and fuelling in the same movement, with nothing to unwrap and nothing to carry out.
Sodium, magnesium and fluid
At three gels an hour, the upper end of the range, you are taking 852 mg of sodium, 300 mg of magnesium and 312 mg of potassium from the gels alone. That is not a warning, it is a planning number. Count it inside your electrolyte strategy rather than adding your usual tablets on top of it, especially in the heat, and drink to it. Anything with an osmotic load needs fluid alongside it to be absorbed comfortably.
We publish the research that complicates this alongside the research that supports it. A study of oral sodium lactate found that it slows gastric emptying and blunts appetite, with the sodium and osmotic load acting as a co-variable. ExoLactate® is formulated around that finding rather than in spite of it: the lactate is delivered as a combination of ingredients and salts in a pH-neutral hydrogel built for rapid gastric emptying. It is still a reason to take it with fluid and to rehearse it.
Train the gut before you race it
Gastrointestinal tolerance to any fuel is individual and trainable. Give yourself four to six sessions that resemble the demand of your target ride before you rely on it — the same gut training you would do before raising your carbohydrate intake, because that is effectively what you are doing.
Use those sessions to settle three things: how many gels an hour you tolerate at race intensity, whether you prefer them neat or diluted, and how they sit with whatever else is in your bottles. A race is not the place to discover that your electrolyte mix and your gels do not get on.
What this does not do
It does not replace carbohydrate, and cutting your carbohydrate intake to make room for it leaves you running two fuels at half strength. It does not compensate for going out too hard, and it does not make an untrained gut tolerant. If your rides are three hours at conversational pace, substrate availability at intensity is not what limits you, and no gel will change that.
Where it earns its place is the ride that has a hard part: the climb you want to hold power on, the last hour of a long event, the day with repeated efforts you have to keep answering.
What we saw at UTMB
The best evidence we have on tolerance at volume did not come from a lab. At UTMB this year our Chief Scientific Officer Aitor Viribay and his team supported more than fifteen athletes, and found that elite runners used and tolerated more than thirty gels across a 19–24 hour race — a number none of us expected and one that had not been reported before. The full field report is here.
Trail running is not cycling, and thirty gels is not a target. What it tells a cyclist is narrower and still useful: at the top end, tolerance for this format is a good deal higher than the category assumed, which means the practical constraint on your own ride is likely to be your gut training rather than the product.
See ExoLactate® Gel and the fuelling calculator to build a protocol for your next ride.