Scroll for 30 seconds through cycling content online, and you’ll be told about a few dozen cycling performance supplements that promise to make you faster. Most of them don’t do anything. The supplement industry is enormous, loosely regulated, and very good at selling hopes and dreams.
The real picture is much smaller and much less exciting. When you look at what has actually been repeatedly tested in real athletes, under controlled conditions, you’re left with a short list of five. That’s it. Five compounds with evidence solid enough that the International Olympic Committee’s expert panel and the Australian Institute of Sport both put their names to them.
This isn’t a sales pitch for any of these. It’s what the research supports and what actually matters when you’re on a multi-hour ride. Below is what each of the five does and whether it’s genuinely worth it for an endurance rider.
Before You Buy Anything: Supplements Are the Last 1%
Your training, your fuelling, your sleep, and plain consistency account for very nearly all of your performance. Concentrate on those things for building your foundation before you look at any cycling performance supplements. The IOC’s consensus statement is blunt that supplements only make a small contribution, and only once the foundations are already handled. A gel of caffeine will not fix a base phase you skipped, and no amount of beetroot juice compensates for showing up to a long ride under-fuelled.
So before any of this is worth your money, the boring things have to be in place: a training week that’s actually structured toward your event which I’ve written about here, and enough fuel going in to support the work you’re asking your body to do. That second one matters more than every supplement on this list combined. If you’re curious why under-fuelling quietly wrecks performance, I’ve covered what happens when your body doesn’t get enough energy in detail.
With that said, here are the five that clear the bar.
The Five That Actually Hold Up
1. Caffeine — the one that earns its place for endurance
If you only ever use one thing on this list, make it this one. Caffeine is the most-studied ergogenic aid in existence, and unlike most of what gets marketed to cyclists, the evidence for endurance riding is genuinely strong. (Coffee ride, anyone?)
A moderate dose (somewhere around 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, taken roughly 45 to 60 minutes before you ride) reliably improves cycling time-trial performance by a few percent. A meta-analysis specifically in cyclists found that the 4–6 mg/kg range was the sweet spot, while very low doses were hit-or-miss. More interestingly for those of us who ride long, caffeine makes a hard effort feel easier since it lowers your perceived exertion at the same power. It also seems to blunt the performance drop you’d otherwise get riding in the heat.
One nuance worth knowing: response varies from person to person, partly down to how quickly your body metabolizes caffeine. Some riders get a big lift, others a modest one. That’s normal, and it’s exactly why you figure out your own response in training.
How I’d actually use it: a cup of coffee counts, you do not need expensive gels or chews to get the effect. Don’t debut a caffeine strategy on event day! Watch how a late-ride dose affects your sleep afterward, and resist the urge to keep stacking it. Past about 3 mg/kg, more caffeine mostly just buys you jitters and a raised heart rate, not more speed. It’s my one non-negotiable before a long event, and it’s the cheapest thing on this list.
2. Dietary nitrate (beetroot juice) — the endurance-specific one
Nitrate is the supplement with the most endurance-flavoured mechanism of the five. Your body converts dietary nitrate into nitric oxide, and one of its headline effects is reducing the oxygen cost of submaximal exercise. Studies have shown a roughly 3–5% drop in oxygen uptake at a fixed cycling power. You can do the same work for slightly less energy. For a rider, that’s an appealing idea.
The benefits show up most clearly in time-trial efforts under about 40 minutes and in high-intensity, stop-start efforts, because nitrate seems to preferentially help your fast-twitch fibres. The practical source is concentrated beetroot juice (the little “shots”). Getting a meaningful dose from whole beets means an unpleasant volume of vegetable. Green leafy veg and beets in your everyday diet help too, and are worth eating regardless.
Here’s the honest catch, and it’s a big one: the fitter you are, the smaller the effect tends to be. The clearest benefits turn up in recreational and moderately trained riders. In elite endurance athletes the effect often shrinks to nothing. It’s genuinely worth a trial since some riders are strong responders and some barely notice.
How I’d actually use it: a concentrated shot two to three hours before a hard effort, or loaded over the few days beforehand. Skip antibacterial mouthwash on those days since it kills the tongue bacteria that start the nitrate-to-nitric-oxide conversion. That quietly sabotages the whole thing. And don’t panic at pink urine; it’s harmless.
3. Creatine — more for the punch than the long haul
Creatine is the most-researched supplement on the planet and has a strong long-term safety record. It’s a compound your body already makes and that you get from red meat and fish. It works by topping up the fast-access energy system you use for short, hard efforts.
That last part is the key for cyclists. Creatine does very little for steady-state endurance directly, it’s not going to change your five-hour pace. What it helps with is the surges: the sprint for the town sign, the repeated attacks on a group ride, the ability to hold quality across a set of hard intervals, and the strength work you do off the bike to support your riding.
How I’d actually use it: creatine monohydrate, 3–5 grams a day, taken consistently (the old “loading” phase is optional). The one honest trade-off for climbers is that it holds a kilo or so of water in the muscle, and some hill-focused riders weigh that against the benefit. For most people it’s a non-issue. If your riding has repeated hard efforts, or you strength-train, it earns its place. For pure long-distance spinning, it’s the most skippable of the five.
4. Beta-alanine — for the sustained burn
Beta-alanine is an amino acid that your body turns into carnosine, which acts as a buffer inside the muscle. It mops up some of the acidity that builds during hard efforts and lets you hold the intensity a little longer before you fold.
The evidence sits squarely in the 30-second to 10-minute effort range. Think of a long, sustained climb, a hard time-trial segment, or a set of near-threshold intervals, the kind of “burning legs” effort where you’re fighting to hold power. That maps onto real cycling situations well.
How I’d actually use it: this is a slow-loading supplement, not a race-week fix. You take roughly 3–6 grams a day, split into smaller doses, over the course of 10 to 12 weeks to build up muscle carnosine. (You can reduce the harmless skin-tingling it can cause by splitting the dose.) Because it’s an investment measured in months, it’s worth it if sustained hard efforts are a genuine feature of your riding, and a waste if they’re not.
5. Sodium bicarbonate — the old-school buffer
Yes, baking soda. Where beta-alanine buffers acidity inside the muscle, sodium bicarbonate does it in the blood, the two work in different compartments and can even be stacked. The evidence points to roughly a 2% improvement in short, high-intensity efforts around a minute long, with a dose of about 0.2–0.4 grams per kilogram taken 60 to 150 minutes beforehand.
For a cyclist, that’s most relevant to repeated-effort racing (criteriums, hill repeats, hard chain-gangs) rather than a long steady fondo.
The catch: the classic version can wreck your gut, and there’s nothing worse than gambling your race on your digestive system. Newer split-dose protocols and enteric/hydrogel delivery systems have made this far more tolerable, but it absolutely must be trialled in training first. This is the most niche of the five for endurance riders, and I’d only reach for it if my racing were genuinely short and explosive.
How I’d Actually Prioritize These
The list looks the same for everyone, but the ranking shouldn’t. It depends entirely on what your riding actually asks of you.
If you ride long and steady — gran fondos, big adventure days, endurance events — caffeine is the clear winner, nitrate is worth a trial, and the buffering agents are largely beside the point. Your day is decided by pacing and fuelling far more than by any tub of powder. (If that’s your world, my gran fondo training guide is the more useful read.)
If you race punchy — crits, aggressive group rides, repeated hard climbs — caffeine still leads, then the buffering pair of bicarbonate and beta-alanine start to matter, with creatine worth it if you also sprint or lift.
For everyone: the fundamentals come first, and none of this substitutes for eating enough to support your training. A supplement can add a percent or two at the margins. Under-fuelling can quietly cost you far more than that which is the whole reason I keep pointing riders back to energy availability before anything else.
About Everything Else in the Supplement Aisle
If the evidence-backed list is only five items long, what about the other several hundred products on the shelf? They are overwhelmingly unproven, or so marginal the research can’t reliably tell them apart from placebo. The evidence is thin once you go looking.
Two things worth knowing before you buy anything, including the five above:
- Contamination is a real risk. Supplements aren’t regulated the way medications are, and products do get contaminated with substances that aren’t on the label. This can be a genuine problem if you’re ever drug-tested, and not ideal for anyone. If it matters to you, look for third-party batch testing (Informed Sport, NSF Certified for Sport).
- Talk to a professional who knows your situation. I can tell you what the research says across a population of cyclists; I can’t tell you what’s right for your body, your medications, or your health history. A doctor or a registered sports dietitian can. That’s especially true if you take any prescription medication, have a health condition, or are pregnant.
None of this is medical advice. It’s a summary of where the evidence currently stands, written to help you ask better questions, not to replace an individual conversation with someone qualified to have it.