I (95Kg) had -2Kg this morning. Thats more the upper end for me. But +/-1.5 or less I see multiple times a week.
I eat lots of veggies. The more I have in the evening the higher the probability weight jumps up next morning.
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Usually the morning after a rest day I get my lowest weight, fwiw.
A few lbs over a day or two for an endurance athlete isn’t that abnormal at all. For some people meals with more sodium can certainly make a big difference in water retention.
Unless someone struggles with their weight, it’d be silly to weigh daily and pretty pointless since there’s too many variables to try and make adjustments based on day to day scale readings. Most athletes should be pretty in tune with their weight just by looking in a mirror. A few lbs of actual fat is a pretty big volume of material.
In times when I have actively tried to lose a little weight I’d just way Monday and Thursday first thing in the morning. Mondays because I was usually less strict on the weekend so I knew where I stood, then Thursdays because it was usually after 3 days of very disciplined eating.
10d average is what I track
5h+, 3000kj+. I fuel more: 60g x h
I’m a bit silly/paranoid which is partly due to my ‘wild weight loss fluctuations’ due to illness in the past.
I was never big when I left school and went to college in 1994 ish, but I was about 11.5st (73kg) IIRC.
I then took Pancreatitis and within a few months was 9st (57kg).
All was normal for years and after discovering in moderation beer my weight went back up to 10.5st (67kg).
I then discovered cycling and stayed stable at 9.5st (60kg) before creeping up to 10st (65kg) when I was cycling less but training more.
Then bang (bowel cancer in my early 40s), straight after the op I was 1/4st (3kg) lighter and my lowest during chemo was IIRC sub 8st (50kg).
Now my weight 5.5 years later will fluctuate by 2-3lbs and that’s perfectly normal and reassuring for me to see that its similar to my post op weight (pre chemo).
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A big day on the bike for sure and you don’t seem to be over fueling.
This would be a great question to send to TR for discussion in one of their upcoming podcasts. Would love to get a professionals take on this. What do you think @Jonathan , maybe you can run this by Dr. Kyle?
One of the reasons I log my weight on a daily basis is to understand these fluctuations, and to have a sense of perspective about them. You’ve listed a several perfectly reasonable explanations for why you might put on weight the morning after a tough ride/race. If you continue logging over time, you’ll see that you frequently drop 2-3 lbs if you take a rest day a day or two after the hard effort, and that 2-3 lb fluctuations are normal.
When I visit my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, my weight will be up 2-4 lbs the next morning, even if I was in a calorie deficit. But when I look at 10, 20, or 100 days of weigh ins, I see that one day fluctuation is nearly meaningless. The overall trend is what I’m interested in.
FWIW, I dropped 165 lbs in 2011-2012. I learned a lot of lessons, but the biggest may be “don’t sweat the small stuff”. Understand the general principles of getting the results you want and understand you won’t progress towards those goals in a straight line.
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Your favorite Vietnamese restaurant might be using a lot of MSG brother!!
When I visit my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, my weight will be up 2-4 lbs the next morning, even if I was in a calorie deficit.
3 pounds is nothing. I’ve had that be from before and after a workout, and not a particularly grueling one either. (And that doesn’t even count what I weighed first thing before taking care of the morning business either)
Here’s another potential reason:
I weigh 93 kilos and I have experienced a 3 kilo fluctuation. That was the most extreme, 1 to 2 is more or less normal in me.
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I know talked about this on the TR podcast years ago, but some studies have shown that for trained athletes it can be upwards of 15g of water per g of glycogen that you store. So if you’re refueling after a big ride, you could be storing a lot of water weight with it, a couple kgs isn’t unheard of. Also why when you carb load for a big event, you’ll likely weigh more pre-ride.
Here’s Ponzer on endurance athletes:
Our main conclusions are as follows: A) Higher activity levels, as observed in endurance athletes, may indeed increase total energy expenditure, albeit to a lesser degree than may be predicted by an additive model, given that some compensation is likely to occur; B) That while a range of factors may combine to constrain sustained high activity levels, the ability to ingest, digest, absorb and deliver sufficient calories from food to the working muscle is likely the primary determinant in most situations and C) That energetic compensation that occurs in the face of high activity expenditure may be primarily driven by low energy availability i.e., the amount of energy available for all biological processes after the demands of exercise have been met, and not by activity expenditure per se.