energy gel

Nectar Sports Fuel Cell Energy Gel Sachets are carbohydrate-based energy gels from the people behind For Goodness Shakes recovery drinks. Like many gels these days, it's a mix of glucose and fructose, designed to deliver as much energy as possible. For some riders, though, it won't last long enough.

Sponser Sport Food is a Swiss brand of nutrition products. We've previously reviewed their Liquid Energy gel on road.cc but this is the 'Long' version, designed for longer endurance events. Despite the name, it isn't really a liquid - it's also a gel - but the thing that makes it totally different from other gels is its flavour.

High5 Energy Gels are smaller than the gels available from some other brands, but they taste good and slip down easily - and certainly deliver the energy you need on a long hard bike ride.

Each sachet contains 38g of gel. According to the packaging, the main ingredients are maltodextrin (which the body breaks down into glucose), water and simple glucose. There's also some salt and flavouring. This mixture provides 20g of carbohydrate and 80 kcal of energy.

Qimmiq energy gels are one of the most interesting energy products around. A novel package and dispense method combined with a mould-breaking natural ingredients list and a intentionally smaller portion size give these energy gels plenty of genuine USPs. But, lack of bang for your buck makes them a very expensive energy source.

This 60ml gel contains a whopping 51g of carbs – which is twice as much as some others out there, which in terms of energy makes them pretty good value. That energy comes mostly in the form of malodextrin with sucrose (table sugar) and glucose syrup and provides you with 154 calories of energy. That’s enough to keep you going for maybe 30-40mins on the bike – depending on how hard you’re riding, your size and so on.

When the Agisko box arrived I delved in expecting the usual pile of gel sachets. No... what we had here was something different. I don't know why I was taken aback by gel in a bottle but I was, and I had my reservations as I set out on an Agisko fueled 70 miler on the South Downs.

Back-pocket food to eat on the go in a long sportive usually falls into one or two categories - bars and gels. (I’m not counting the other high-tech stuff like bananas, fig-rolls and oat-cakes.) Shot Bloks come somewhere in between: a stick of chewy jelly.

As well as carbohydrate, these gels contain protein, caffeine and guarana to help maximise your performance.