Holmer weighs a gel, finds 2 grams never leave the packet
A kitchen scale test says your 60 grams an hour plan is running slightly light.
Brady Holmer put a SiS Beta Fuel gel on a kitchen scale before and after squeezing it. Full packet, 76.0 grams. Squeezed packet, 9.3 grams. That leaves 66.7 grams that actually left the foil and went into his mouth.
The gel is labeled at 40 grams of carbohydrate. Holmer says the 9.3 grams left on the scale is mostly foil plus a thin film of gel stuck inside, which he puts at about 3.5 grams of gel, or roughly 2 grams of carbs. His call is 38 grams delivered, not 40.
The arithmetic over a whole race
Two grams is nothing on its own. Holmer's point is that nobody takes one gel. He works it out for a marathoner taking a 40 gram gel every 30 minutes for three hours, which is six to seven gels. That is 280 grams of carbohydrate on paper and about 14 grams still in the wrappers, which he calls a third of a gel that never made it to the gut.
Stretch the same habit over a five to six hour ultra and 10 to 12 gels, and Holmer says you are 20 to 25 grams short. On a 60 grams per hour plan, that is most of an hour of fuel left in the packaging.
What he does about it
Holmer's fix is mechanical. Roll the sachet like a tube of toothpaste, squeeze from the bottom, and chase it with a sip of water so the last of it does not sit on your teeth or the foil. If you want the numbers to match the plan, he suggests making up the difference with a bottle or one extra gel carrying 20 to 25 grams of carbs.
What it actually means is simple. This is one person weighing one brand of gel on one scale, not a study, and it is not a claim that the label is wrong. The gap is between what is in the packet and what gets swallowed. If you have been counting grams precisely in a long build, count them slightly generously.
Five percent sounds like nothing. It is not nothing over a race.
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