If you’ve been following this year’s WorldTour racing, you’ve probably heard whispers about a new type of energy gel making the rounds in the pro peloton — one built around lactate instead of just carbohydrate. Riders have reportedly been testing it at races as big as the Tour de France, and the buzz has trickled all the way down to amateur cycling forums and group rides. So what’s actually going on, and should you be adding lactate gels to your own fueling strategy?
As your coach, I want to walk you through this properly — the physiology, what’s actually been tested, and where the real uncertainty lies — because there’s a genuine scientific story here, but there’s also a lot of hype running ahead of the evidence.
Why Lactate Was Misunderstood for So Long
For decades, lactate had a bad reputation in endurance sport. It was treated as a metabolic waste product — the thing behind the “burn” in your legs, the byproduct athletes trained to clear faster so it wouldn’t slow them down. Entire training philosophies were built around “lactate threshold” as a ceiling to push against.
That framing has been outdated in exercise physiology for a while now. The turning point was research into what’s called the lactate shuttle — the idea, established through decades of work by physiologist George Brooks, that lactate isn’t simply a fatigue byproduct but an actively used fuel. Muscle fibers, the heart, and even the brain can take up lactate from the bloodstream and oxidize it for energy, shuttling it between tissues that produce it in excess and tissues that can burn it. Fast-twitch fibers generate lactate during hard efforts; slow-twitch fibers, the heart, and even the liver can then use that same lactate as fuel or convert it back to glucose. In this light, lactate looks less like exhaust and more like a fuel currency your body is constantly recycling.
What’s New: Delivery, Not Discovery
The physiology above isn’t new. What’s new is the delivery method: getting meaningful amounts of lactate into an athlete’s system through the gut, in a gel, without triggering digestive distress — something that had been a practical bottleneck for years. A small group of researchers, working out of the Basque Country in Spain, developed a gel combining lactate with carbohydrate (roughly a 40g carbohydrate to 5g lactate ratio in one prominent product), designed to be layered on top of an athlete’s existing carb intake rather than replacing it. The pitch is straightforward: alongside the carbohydrate already fueling the ride, exogenous lactate offers muscles another readily oxidizable fuel source, and may also act as a mild acid-base buffer that takes some of the sting out of sustained hard efforts.
What the Controlled Research Actually Shows
This is the part worth slowing down for, because it’s easy to get swept up in Tour de France rumors without asking what’s actually been demonstrated in a lab.
Independent, peer-reviewed research on oral lactate supplementation is still limited, and the results are genuinely mixed rather than a clear performance win:
- A 2024 randomized, double-blind, crossover pilot trial (Ewell et al., published in Nutrients) gave trained cyclists an oral calcium-and-magnesium lactate supplement. It found no change in VO2peak, lactate threshold, or ventilatory threshold. There was a modest increase — around 4% — in work output during a 20-minute time trial, but no shift in the underlying physiological markers researchers would expect if lactate were meaningfully boosting aerobic capacity.
- A separate 2024 trial using a 120 mg/kg dose of calcium lactate in trained cyclists found no time-trial benefit at all. Blood bicarbonate rose and perceived effort dropped slightly, both consistent with a mild buffering effect, but this didn’t translate into faster times on the day.
- More recent work, including a 2025 study on acute oral lactate supplementation and energy metabolism, continues to explore the mechanism, but a large, independent trial specifically testing the co-ingestion model used in commercial gels (repeated small lactate doses layered with carbohydrate, rather than a single larger dose) hadn’t been published as of mid-2026.
Put together, the pattern across these studies is consistent: exogenous lactate reliably behaves like a mild acid-base buffer — similar in principle to sodium bicarbonate loading, though through a different pathway — and can make a given effort feel slightly less taxing. What it hasn’t reliably done, in controlled trials, is produce a repeatable, measurable speed gain over carbohydrate alone. The mechanism keeps confirming itself in the lab; the finish-line payoff remains unproven.
It’s also worth separating controlled research from race-day anecdotes. Reports of riders using these gels at recent WorldTour races, with claims of reduced gastrointestinal issues, lower perceived exertion, and better fatigue resistance, are exactly that — reports and anecdotes from a competitive environment with every incentive to talk up a new product, not independently verified performance data.
Are Lactate Gels Safe and Legal?
Yes, on both counts, with one caveat. Lactate occurs naturally in the body and is not on the WADA prohibited list, so use is compliant with anti-doping rules. Food-grade lactate is generally recognized as safe to consume.
The caveat is the one that applies to any new fueling product: gut tolerance varies from athlete to athlete, and dose-dependent digestive symptoms (bloating, cramping, urgency) have been reported in some trials, worsening with longer exercise duration. As with any new product, the golden rule of race nutrition still applies: never trial something new for the first time on race day.
My Take, as Your Coach
I like to separate genuine performance tools from hype, and right now, lactate gels sit somewhere in between — a scientifically plausible idea without a proven performance payoff yet. Here’s how I’d frame it for the athletes I coach:
- Don’t rush to replace your current fueling strategy. The carbohydrate-first approach — typically 90–120g per hour depending on the athlete and event — remains the best-supported strategy we have. That foundation shouldn’t change based on early-stage lactate research.
- If you’re curious, treat it as an experiment, not an upgrade. Trial anything new in training first, in a lower-stakes session, and track your gut response before considering it for a key event.
- Watch the space, but stay skeptical of the hype cycle. This is a genuinely interesting area of sports nutrition research, and independent trials on the specific co-ingestion model used commercially will tell us a lot more over the next year or two. A WorldTour team reportedly testing something isn’t the same as it being proven to make you faster.
If you’re wondering how (or whether) something like this fits into your own training and racing plan, that’s exactly the kind of question worth working through one-on-one — reach out and we’ll look at your specific fueling strategy together.
Have questions about your race-day nutrition plan? Get in touch with Cigala Cycling Coaching to build a fueling strategy tailored to your training and goals.
Matteo Cigala
Founder & Head Coach
