Tour de France 2014: To be the best you've got to eat the best

For the riders on the Tour de France, all of their physical preparation and endurance training counts for nothing if they don't have the right food to get the most out of their bodies.

And as the race on the road ends the race at the dinner table has only just begun.

That is the race to put back in what the riders have lost over the course of the latest stage.They will need to put away at least 6,000 calories a day - more than three times what an average person will eat in a day - and the equivalent of about 6lbs of steak.

And getting that much food is difficult. They either don’t feel like eating after the huge exertion they have just put in or they get bored of eating so much.

Therefore the team's chefs have to find new and exciting ways of enticing their riders into getting the calories in.

Team Sky chef Soren Kristiansen draws on his Nordic heritage to keep his riders happy and healthy. A look at his Twitter feed gives an idea of what is on offer:

Followed by:

And for dessert:

The secret is, he says, is to work with lots of easy to digest vegetables and raw food - things like beetroot, pumpkin, barley and quinoa.

Soren says he prepares food to match the stage, not just the riders’ nutritional needs. For example porridge on mountain stages is a no-no - it is just too heavy on the stomach for the fleet of foot flight up a mountainside.

Similarly, it is red meat for the brute force all-out-power-and-speed flat stages replaced by easier to digest chicken and turkey on the approach to the hills and mountains.

Though Soren does concede he will occasionally give the riders a treat:

Or:

An average day begins with riders loading up on carbohydrates - not your usual breakfast fare: pasta, rice, omelettes as well as the more traditional, cereal and toast for glycogen - energy that is easily accessible to the body and used up quickly during exercise.

They’ll top that up with sports drinks and carbohydrate gels - if not, glycogen levels will fall leaving the riders exhausted - or in cycling parlance “bonked”.

“Bonking’” is seriously dangerous, if you're lucky you will lose your place in the peloton, at worst you’ll crash; into other riders, into a barrier or even off the side of a mountain.

The first 15 to 30 minutes after a stage ends is vital to recovery. And the oldest methods are sometimes the best.

Forget fancy - and expensive - sports drinks, experts say skimmed milk is the best recovery drink going.

And then it all starts again.