EA-based fuelling · HELIOS + THRIVE
You're not really slow.
You're under-recovered — because you're under-fuelled.
Punch in your typical ride below — see the fuelling it takes to actually recover from it, and the gap you're riding with today.
Most riders eat the same on every ride and hope. But "bad legs", the fade in the final hour, the day-after slump — more often than not that's a fuelling gap, not a fitness gap.
A one-ride snapshot built on published sports-science fuelling guidelines. THRIVE runs this for every ride on your calendar — exact targets before, during and after — and when the ride changes, Marco reflows the plan and asks for your OK before anything moves.
Powered by Energy Availability (EA) — the sports-science equation that matches what you eat to what the session costs.
Enter your ride and your details — your prescription builds here.
What to eat around this ride — before you roll out, on the bike, and right after.
Energy availability is what's left for recovery after the work is paid for. When intake runs under the day's demand, recovery and adaptation are the first things your body cuts — before pace, before power. THRIVE tracks this daily as EA inside the app.
Published endurance-nutrition research: carb-oxidation ceilings (~60 g/h from one sugar type; ~90–110 g/h when glucose and fructose are mixed and the gut is trained), glycogen depletion at roughly 90 minutes of threshold work, and the energy-availability thresholds used across the sports-science literature.
Read the science →Under-fuelling doesn't feel like hunger. It feels like heavy legs at the two-hour mark, a heart rate that drifts while the power fades, a ride that ends fine but a Tuesday that feels like sludge. Most riders carry the same two bars on a 90-minute spin and a four-hour mountain day — then blame fitness for what was arithmetic. And the gap compounds quietly: glycogen you don't replace tonight is watts you don't have on Thursday. And it never acts alone: big load, short sleep and an under-fuelled day all land on the same recovery bill — each one makes the others more expensive.
THRIVE turns your body, your training plan and the day itself into a daily energy target — carbs, fluid and sodium for every session, computed from what HELIOS reads off your finger, not a generic 60-grams-an-hour poster. Every ride on your calendar gets its own prescription. Every day gets its own number.
Your fuel needs change daily. THRIVE keeps up
The HELIOS ring reads your body. The THRIVE app turns it into the day's fuelling — the plan, the tracking, the logging, the recipes. One ring. One app. Every fuelling answer.
See the HELIOS ring →
One titanium ring + one app that does it all — ride computer, training plan, fuelling, recovery.
A plan for every ride
Every session on your calendar gets its own fuelling plan: what to eat before you roll out, grams per hour on the bike, and the recovery window after. Then the ride window itself — feed by feed, bottle by bottle, with the total carbs to carry in your pockets. Change the ride and the numbers re-compute. No spreadsheet, no guessing at the servo.
Tracked against today's number
Log through the day and THRIVE holds it against today's target — an endurance day might call for 4,278 kcal where a rest day sits near 2,400. Carbs, protein, fat and fibre each track against their own number, and if you're sliding into low energy availability, the app says so before your legs do.
Logging that takes seconds
No weighing, no database digging. Snap the plate, scan the barcode, or just tell Marco — "log a banana and two espressos" — and it's in, tagged pre-ride, during or post, with the macros filled in and the rest of your day's targets moved to match. Logging is the part every nutrition app gets abandoned over. That's why Marco does it for you.
Logging,
solved.
Watch Marco log a full day of food in 15 seconds — breakfast, ride fuel and dinner, spoken in one go and filed to the right windows automatically. Logging is where every food app dies. Here, it's a sentence you say out loud.
No. Snap the plate, scan the barcode, or tell Marco what you ate and he logs it — macros included. The planning side is even lighter: THRIVE tells you what to carry before you roll out, so the decision is made in the kitchen, not at the servo. Most riders spend under a minute a day on it.
Indoor sessions burn glycogen just like the road — often faster, since there's no coasting and no descents. Every session on your calendar gets its own fuelling plan either way, and your daily energy target moves with the work. The trainer doesn't get you off the hook. It just makes the sweat more honest.
Calorie counting gives every day the same maths. THRIVE doesn't — a 2,400-kcal rest day and a 4,300-kcal endurance day are different prescriptions, split around the ride: before you roll out, per hour on the bike, and the recovery window after. When you eat matters as much as how much. That's the part a food diary never told you.
Guessing is a habit.
Fuelling is a system.
⚡ Your data fuels the plan
Your data feeds directly into Marco, the AI coach inside THRIVE. He doesn't hand you a generic carb chart. Your targets are computed from your resting burn, today's session and how you've actually been recovering — and they move when life does. Recovered, the plan pushes and the carbs go up with it; cooked, it backs off and so does the target; skip the ride and tonight's number quietly drops. Marco proposes the change and waits for your OK before anything moves. And when you ask him what to cook, he writes a dinner that hits tonight's number — down to the recipe.
📍 Reads the finger. Every morning.
Wrist-based wearables fight through skin, hair, and motion. The finger doesn't have that problem — thinner skin, stronger pulse, cleaner signal. HELIOS fuses heart rate, HRV, oxygen and skin temperature from that spot — and the full night of sleep behind them — into one clean daily read: the measurement layer every fuelling number on this page stands on.
📈 The pattern, not the day
One under-fuelled ride is noise. A month of them is a trend line. THRIVE reads fuelling, load and sleep as one picture across weeks — because that's how your body pays for them — so a slow slide into under-eating shows up as data on a chart, not as three flat weekends in a row you can't explain.
*Fuelling targets follow published endurance-nutrition guidelines — carb-per-hour ranges by duration and intensity, and energy-availability thresholds — scaled to your body and each session on your plan.
Fuelled by feel vs. HELIOS + THRIVE
What fuelling by feel misses, a per-ride prescription fixes.
| What you get | By feel | HELIOS+ |
|---|---|---|
| Per-ride carb targets | ✗ Same two bars, every ride | ✓ Before, per hour & after — per session |
| Daily energy target | ✗ One-size 2,000-kcal apps | ✓ Computed from your body + today's work |
| Ride window | ✗ Eat when you remember | ✓ Feed-by-feed timeline + carbs to carry |
| Energy availability | ✗ Invisible until you crack | ✓ Flagged as it slides |
| Logging | ✗ Weighing + database digging | ✓ Snap, scan, or tell Marco |
| Recovery window | ✗ Coffee and hope | ✓ Carb + protein targets, within 30 min |
| Dinner | ✗ Doomscrolling recipes | ✓ Marco writes one to hit tonight's number |
| When the plan changes | ✗ Yesterday's plan, today's ride | ✓ Marco reflows it, asks your OK |
"I thought a bar an hour was fuelling. THRIVE put my Saturday long ride at nearly double that. Three weeks in, the last 45 minutes stopped being survival mode — same legs, right numbers."*
— Jordan M., Cat 3 roadie · Bend, OR — beta tester
"The after-ride window was the piece I'd skipped for thirty years — ride, coffee, forget food until dinner. Now the app hands me the number and Marco writes the meal. Tuesday legs stopped showing up."*
— Greg N., masters roadie (57) · Traverse City, MI
"Coming from triathlon I figured I had nutrition sorted. First week, THRIVE flagged low energy availability three days running — big block, not enough food. Fixed the plate, and the block finally stuck."*
— Sam O., triathlete-turned-roadie · Chattanooga, TN
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*Illustrative examples — final data being collected.
