Lactate Gels Explained: The Science Behind Cycling's New "Super Fuel"

For a century, lactate was cycling's villain. Now the pros are drinking it. Here's what exogenous lactate gels actually are, whether the science holds up, and what it means for the rest of us.

For as long as any of us have been riding, lactate has been the bad guy. It's the burn in your legs on the final ramp of a climb. The reason your quads scream and your pace falls apart. "I'm full of lactic acid" is cycling shorthand for I'm cooked.

So here's the plot twist that's set the peloton alight this summer: what if lactate was never the villain at all? What if the very thing we've spent decades trying to flush out is actually one of the best fuels the human body has — and the pros have just worked out how to drink it?

That's the story behind the lactate gel everyone at the Tour de France is whispering about. And the science is genuinely fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QfGXevbcaI

Watch: the scientist behind the gel explains the thinking, in his own words.

Why lactate gels are the talk of the Tour de France

If you've followed the 2026 Tour de France, you'll have seen the headlines: riders trialling a secretive new lactate energy gel, footage of Tadej Pogačar with unfamiliar packaging, teams like Lidl-Trek confirming they're using it. The product at the centre of it — ExoLactate, made by a small Basque company called From Lab to Field — has turned a piece of exercise biochemistry into the most talked-about fuel in cycling.

But to understand why it matters, you have to unlearn almost everything you think you know about lactate.

The ambulance at the crash: rethinking lactate

The best way to understand this comes from Aitor Viribay, the Spanish sports nutritionist behind the new fuel, who tells a lovely little thought experiment.

Imagine an alien lands on Earth and sees a car crash. Every single time there's an accident, an ambulance turns up. Watching from orbit, the alien draws the obvious conclusion: ambulances cause accidents. Ban the ambulances and you'll stop the crashes.

We know that's nonsense. The ambulance is at the scene because there's been an accident — it's there to help, not to cause harm.

Lactate, Viribay argues, is the ambulance. For a century we blamed it for fatigue simply because it was always there when we blew up. But it doesn't cause the fatigue. It shows up because of it — and it's actually part of the rescue effort.

ExoLactate: Developed by sports scientist Aitor Viribay and his company From Lab to Field.

So what actually makes your legs give out?

Not lactate. The real culprit is a drop in pH — your muscles becoming too acidic as they work harder and harder.

Think of it like body temperature. We live in a razor-thin window: 37°C is fine, 40°C and you're in serious trouble. Your body's acidity works the same way. Push the intensity high enough and your mitochondria — the tiny power stations inside your muscles — simply can't keep up. The system tips over, acidity climbs, and your legs say enough.

Here's the beautiful bit: lactate is one of the things that helps hold that line. It acts as a buffer, nudging your pH back in the right direction — in some situations doing the job as effectively as the bicarbonate athletes have used for years. Lactate isn't the fire. It's part of the fire brigade.

How lactate gels work: the body's favourite fuel

This idea isn't brand new. Back in 1984, a researcher named George Brooks proposed the "lactate shuttle" — the notion that lactate is shuttled around the body and burned as fuel rather than discarded as waste. For years it was a niche theory. Now it's reshaping how the fastest cyclists on the planet eat.

Because here's what the research is showing: when you offer a cell a choice between glucose, fat and lactate, it reaches for the lactate first. It is, in Viribay's words, the body's substrate of preference. Given the option, your cells would rather burn lactate than almost anything else.

That opens up some remarkable possibilities:

• A bigger fuel tank. Lactate is absorbed through a different doorway in the gut than the sugars in a normal gel, so it doesn't compete for space. In theory, that lets riders take on more total energy without wrecking their stomachs — raising the ceiling on how much they can fuel.

• Glycogen sparing. At steady, lower intensities, lactate appears to help you burn more fat and lean less on your precious glycogen stores. Save that glycogen early and you'll have it in the tank for the climb where the race is won.

• More punch when it's already hurting. Better pH control means more capacity to go deep, repeatedly, when you're already fatigued.

The product itself packs around 40g of carbohydrate and 5g of lactate into a single gel. It took seven years of obsession, a physical-chemistry PhD and a former two-Michelin-star chef to make something the body could actually absorb and, crucially, that didn't taste horrendous. That combination of a scientist and a chef in the same room is very much our kind of story.

A dose of healthy scepticism

Now, the responsible part — and it's the part the inventor himself insists on.

This is new. Genuinely new. Lactate simply hasn't been available to study properly until now, so the body of evidence is still thin: a couple of promising 2024 studies, plus the teams' own internal data. Some respected scientists remain unconvinced, pointing out that lactate is less oxygen-efficient than glucose and may come with its own metabolic price tag.

As Viribay himself puts it, this isn't the finish line — it's the start line. Seven years of work got them to the beginning of the research, not the end of it. Anyone selling you certainty about a fuel this young is getting ahead of the science.

Which is exactly the right note for the rest of us to hold, too.

What lactate gels mean for everyday cyclists

You are not Pogačar. Neither are we. But that's rather the point.

The best innovations in cycling always trickle down — think of the aero kit, the power meters, the fuelling strategies that were once pro-only and now live in every club rider's back pocket. Amateur riders who care about how they eat and train tend to adopt this stuff faster than the pros, not slower.

But no gel, however clever, will out-perform the fundamentals: fuelling early and often, training consistently, and riding roads that make you want to push a little harder. The magic was never really in the sachet. It's in the legs, the preparation, and the ride itself.

And that's where we come in. Here on the Costa del Azahar, our roads climb from the Mediterranean into the Desierto de las Palmas — the kind of terrain where fuelling actually matters and every watt counts. With a Sports Science background guiding the riding and a professional chef handling the recovery at the table, we're a little obsessed with the science of going well and feeling good while you do it. Lactate gels or not, that's the combination that makes the difference.

Come and find out what your legs are really capable of — with real food, real coaching, and roads worth every pedal stroke.

Pedal. Pause. Belong.

Curious about riding with us in Benicàssim? Join our Saturday Social Ride or drop us a line about a tour — we'd love to show you the roads.

Sources & further reading: Cyclist — "Lactate gels are cycling's next obsession"; Escape Collective — "Exolactate gels are the buzz of the Tour de France"; Velo/Outside — "What You Need to Know About the Next-Gen Fuel Powering Pogačar". Nutrition here is educational, not personalised advice — check with a qualified professional before changing your race-day fuelling.