Energy Gel Alternatives: What to Use Instead of Gels on Long Efforts
Every long-distance athlete knows the moment. You're three hours into a ride or a marathon is grinding past the 20-mile mark, and the thought of squeezing another sachet of gel into your mouth makes your stomach turn. The flavour that tasted fine at breakfast now feels like syrup poured straight onto raw nerve endings. This isn't weakness or poor planning – it's a well-documented phenomenon called flavour fatigue, and it's one of the main reasons athletes end up under-fuelling in the second half of long events.
The good news is that gels are not the only way to get carbohydrate into your system during exercise. There's a whole range of energy gel alternatives that deliver the same fuel without the sludgy texture, and several of them are arguably better suited to long efforts because they're easier to titrate, chew, and stomach hour after hour. Here's what actually works, with the numbers behind it.
Why Gels Fall Down on Long Efforts
A standard 30-40ml gel sachet carries roughly 22-27g of carbohydrate suspended in a thick maltodextrin syrup. Swallowed quickly and chased with water, that's an efficient way to get carbs in during the first 90 minutes of an event. The problem is sensory, not nutritional. Research into ultra-endurance athletes has found that gastrointestinal complaints affect somewhere between 30% and 50% of competitors in events lasting over four hours, and unpalatable, overly sweet fuel is consistently named as a contributing factor. Once your gag reflex kicks in against a flavour, no amount of willpower makes the next sachet easier to get down. That's the gap energy gel alternatives are built to fill.
The Best Energy Gel Alternatives for Long Rides and Runs
Energy chews and pastilles are the most direct swap. Because you chew them rather than squeeze them, they engage saliva before the carbohydrate even reaches your stomach, which many athletes find noticeably easier to process than a viscous gel. They also let you dose in smaller, more frequent amounts – popping two or three pastilles every 15 minutes rather than committing to a whole sachet at once, which makes it far easier to hit a steady intake rather than a stomach-loading spike.
Dried fruit and dates are a genuinely useful real-food option. Dates in particular carry a natural glucose-to-fructose ratio close to 1:1, which happens to be close to what sports scientists recommend for optimising carbohydrate absorption during exercise. Rice cakes and malt loaf, long favoured by UK cyclists doing club runs and sportives, work well at lower intensities where chewing solid food isn't a problem, and they're cheap and easy to make yourself. Isotonic sports drinks solve fuelling and hydration in one go, though they demand more logistics – you need to mix, carry, and refill bottles, which isn't always practical on technical trail routes or point-to-point rides. Jelly sweets and wine gums are a common budget alternative too, though most are pure sucrose rather than a deliberately balanced carbohydrate blend, so they don't offer the same absorption advantage as a purpose-built pastille.
Cost and Practicality: How the Options Compare
Price is worth putting real numbers against, because it changes over the course of a season. A branded gel typically costs somewhere between 90p and £1.50 per 25g of carbohydrate, which adds up quickly if you're training six days a week on top of racing. A 1kg bag of energy pastilles works out at a fraction of that per gram of carbohydrate delivered, and because the bag is resealable you can portion out exactly what a session needs rather than opening single-use sachets you might not finish. Dates and rice cakes are cheaper again, but they take preparation time and don't travel as well in a jersey pocket on a hot day, so most athletes end up using a mix: solid food for long, steady efforts, and pastilles or chews for the harder or more technical sections where chewing needs to be quick and mess-free.
Matching Carbohydrate Intake to Duration and Intensity
Whatever format you choose, the target carbohydrate intake doesn't change. For any continuous effort over 60-90 minutes, aim for 60g of carbs per hour as a baseline. This figure isn't arbitrary – it reflects the maximum rate at which the gut can absorb glucose alone through the SGLT1 transporter. Add a source of fructose alongside the glucose, absorbed via a separate transporter called GLUT5, and the gut can process considerably more: many athletes tolerate 80-90g per hour using a glucose-to-fructose ratio of roughly 1:0.8, and elite and ultra-endurance athletes with a trained gut are now pushing 100-120g per hour in competition. This is exactly why the glucose-fructose ratio in a chew or pastille matters as much as the total carbohydrate figure printed on the pack.
In practical terms, that means working out how many pastilles or chews deliver your target and building a simple per-15-minute routine around it, rather than eating reactively when you feel low on energy. By the time hunger or a power drop shows up, you're already fuelling from behind.
Training Your Gut for Whatever You Choose
Energy gel alternatives only work if your gut can handle them under load, and gut tolerance is trainable in exactly the same way as your legs or lungs. Introduce your chosen fuel on long training sessions at least a month out from race day, starting at 30-40g per hour and building by roughly 10g per hour every one to two weeks. By race day, your gut will have adapted to processing higher carbohydrate loads without the bloating or urgency that catches out athletes who only test their nutrition strategy on race morning. If you're switching from gels to a chewable alternative for the first time, do that swap in training too – the chewing action and slightly different absorption speed both take a session or two to feel completely normal, and race day is the wrong time to find that out.
What We Use at FTP Endurance Fuel
We built our own range because we got tired of choosing between effective fuelling and something we actually wanted to eat three hours into a long day. Our Tart Cherry Pastilles pair a glucose-fructose blend with a tart cherry flavour, a sharper taste that many athletes find easier to face late in a long ride or run. If you want real Montmorency tart cherry, it's in Power Fluids (3g per serving). If you prefer variety across a long event, our Mixed Fruit Pastilles rotate through several natural flavours in the same bag, which helps stave off exactly the flavour fatigue that pushes people off gels in the first place. Both are made without artificial sweeteners, so there's no aftertaste to fight against late in a race.
Gels have their place, especially when you need a fast, low-volume carbohydrate hit early in an event. But if you've hit the wall of not being able to face another sachet, it's worth building a fuelling strategy around alternatives you can actually stomach for the full distance. Start small with a Taster Pack to find your favourite flavour, or check out our full range of bundles to build a fuelling plan that will still taste good in the final hour.
