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For probably six or seven years, I've been taking the same stack as every other masters cyclist. Creatine. Magnesium. Vitamin D in winter. Beet juice if I remember. Protein after long rides. I'd seen all the threads. I knew the science, or at least what passes for consensus on r/cycling. I'd watched enough YouTube deep-dives to have an opinion on magnesium glycinate vs oxide. I wasn't some naive supplement shopper grabbing random things off a shelf. And honestly? Most of it did roughly what it was supposed to do. Fewer cramps. Felt a bit less wrecked after a heavy week. Maybe marginally more alert in the mornings. But none of it touched the actual problem. The problem being that I'm 53, I've been riding seriously since my mid-30s, and somewhere in the last four or five years, a gap opened up between what my training says I should be producing and what I'm actually producing. My FTP this time last year: 248 watts. Three years ago: 271. I'm training the same hours. Sleeping well. Eating well. The numbers just keep drifting in one direction. I'd accepted it. That's just what happens. --- Then about four months ago I was having a conversation with a guy in my club — similar age, similar history, similar frustration. And he said something that stuck with me. He said: "Everything we take is optimisation. None of it is repair." I didn't understand what he meant at first. He explained it like this. Creatine helps your muscles use the energy they're producing more efficiently. Magnesium helps your nervous system function properly. Beet juice dilates blood vessels. All of these are useful. All of them help at the margins. But none of them address why energy production itself declines as you get older. That's a different problem entirely. --- He pointed me toward some research on something called NAD+ — a molecule that exists in every cell in your body and acts as the essential co-factor for your mitochondria to produce ATP. ATP is the actual fuel. Every pedal stroke runs on it. The thing is, NAD+ levels drop significantly with age. By the time you're in your 50s, you have roughly half the NAD+ you had in your 20s. Which means your mitochondria — the tiny power plants inside each cell — are trying to run on half the fuel supply they need. And when that happens, no amount of creatine or beet juice fixes it. Because you're not dealing with an optimisation problem. You're dealing with a supply problem. The training stress is the same. But the cellular infrastructure required to respond to that stress has been quietly running down for years. --- I spent a few weeks looking into this more carefully. There's a compound called NR — Nicotinamide Riboside — that converts directly into NAD+ in your cells. It's not like taking NAD+ directly, which breaks down before it gets where it needs to go. NR actually gets absorbed and used. The research on it is legitimate. Not broscience. Not a supplement company's marketing page. Peer-reviewed studies in places like Cell Metabolism. The kind of thing where I'm slightly annoyed I hadn't come across it sooner. I found a UK supplement called Nucel that had 300mg of NR alongside Resveratrol, CoQ10, and a few other things that apparently work together to reduce oxidative stress and support mitochondrial function. That combination matters. Because the NAD+ depletion problem and the mitochondrial dysfunction problem tend to compound each other. You need to address both. --- I was skeptical. I've spent enough on supplements over the years to have every right to be. The first two weeks, I noticed nothing I could name. Around week three, my recovery between hard sessions started to feel different. Not dramatically different. Just... quicker. I'd done a hard threshold ride on Wednesday and by Thursday afternoon I didn't have that low-grade heaviness in my legs that usually hangs around for two days. I kept training. Kept notes. Week five: two back-to-back hard days. Something I'd basically given up doing because the second day was always a write-off. Both days were solid. --- Month two, I did a proper FTP test. 261 watts. That's 13 watts up from a year ago. It's not back to where I was at 48. But it's the first time in four years that number has moved the right way. And here's the thing that matters more than the FTP number: I want to train again. Properly. Not just maintain. I've been going through the motions for a couple of years — doing the sessions because I always do the sessions, but without any real belief that effort would translate into improvement. That belief is back. --- I've thought about why the standard stuff never addressed this. And the honest answer is that creatine and magnesium and all the rest of it are designed for athletes whose energy production system is fundamentally intact. They help you squeeze more out of a system that's working. If the system itself is compromised at the cellular level — if your mitochondria don't have the NAD+ they need to produce ATP efficiently — then optimisation supplements are essentially rearranging deck chairs. The supplements I'd been taking for six years weren't wrong. They just weren't addressing the right thing. --- If you're a masters rider who's noticed the gap between training input and performance output widening, and you've already got the basics covered — I'd genuinely look into what's happening at the cellular level before assuming it's just age. Link to what I've been using is below. https://justfloow.com/pages/athletic-cellular-health