The “research” posted above is keto based and basically incompatible with hard training IMO unless you want to be slow. It may do wonders for diabetics though.
Personally, I’ve found it harder to train 8+ hours per week and diet simultaneously. We are doing a ton of mechanical work and the calories need to be replenished. Burning 5,000 calories per week on the bike doesn’t make it magically easy to run a calorie deficit IMO.
While you might have a point about this not being a representative population, I think you’re overstating it a bit to suggest that everyone here is doing ~15 hrs / week.
Low volume plans are only 3-4 hrs, and I don’t imagine most people on those are doing 10+ hrs of extra riding outside the plan. Even mid-vol are only ~6.5 hrs.
Personally, I’m only on about 8-9 hrs (mix of Train Now and running) at the moment, and from what I’ve seen on the forum I’m not entirely unusual in that. That’s still more than the ‘typical’ population, to be sure, but still only half your 15 hrs.
Not sure what made me thought of this…but I think it would be great if there was some endurance focused cooking content.
I’m thinking someone like Pete Morris, who if I remember correctly cooked a ton and had a background in nutritional science of some sort. Youtube channel something…discussions about nutrition and food, followed up by a recipe he cooks. Half ask a cycling coach (when it was informative), half Julia Child.
Yeah, I don’t train 15 hours a week either and I’m not trying to imply that the average cyclist does. I’m just saying that if you run a study on a population that has a statistically relevant number of high volume folks in it, I’d bet you would see a correlation between training volume and body comp as the hours cross a certain threshold.
Saying that exercise isn’t a big contributer to long term body comp just doesn’t align with what I see in the cycling community (or running). Yeah, it’s easy to struggle with weight if you are doing a low volume plan. A low volume plan will give you lots of health benefits, but not a significant number of calories. Up that to 12-15 hours and the body comp challenges appear to get pretty rare. I’m not saying that everyone has the time or desire to train and live like that, but it’s probably a pretty reliable path to better body comp.
It’s kind of the old adage - "Don’t envy what people have, emulate what they did to have it.”. Good words to live by from a life standpoint (career, health, athletics, etc.). If you want a body like the typical Cat2 cyclist (with all the good and bad attributes), train and live like one and you probably have a good chance of seeing it hapen. If you want to look like an elite rock climber, train and live like one. When I got back into cycling when I was 40 and ~40lbs overweight, I would ride a route near my house that is very hilly and popular with local cyclists. I was the fattest and slowest on the that route (by a noticeable margin) and I could only ride parts of the loop to start. Nobody else riding that route looked like me and everyone would pass me like I was standing still. I figured I’d either quit or I might have a chance to ride and look like one of those people if I stuck with it. ~15 years later, I’m not the fastest (and certainly not the leanest) cyclist on that route, but I do pretty well. Again, no study, just observations of folks that train a lot and my own personal journey.
I think there needs to be a clear demarcation line between weight loss strategies for athletes and the general population. I think the observation that exercise tends to have a low adherence rate post-weight loss is pretty accurate for many, many people. As atheltes, we are motivated to keep doing what we love…for most people, once the weight is off, it becomes less motivating to keep doing something you may not love.
But maybe it’s a self selected population? People gravitate to what they are good at. Skinny people with a decent VO2max will excel at cycling. They keep coming back to it. Skinny endurance guys usually don’t take up power lifting later in life.
I’m not trying to say that exercise isn’t good for you or that it can’t help one lose weight. I’m just saying that looking at a population may not be all that helpful.
A lot of folks flunk out of cycling. I’ve seen tons show up to club rides in the spring, get smoked by fit people, not commit to the training properly, never get fast, and then eventually stop showing up. It’s a hard life we all love but most people don’t want to pedal for 8 hours a week.
Sure, that’s going to be part of it. But my vote for the big driver goes to opportunity, support, environment, etc. While genetic disposition would certainly play a role once you are into the activity, it’s likely that the most gifted endurance athletes never even get into the game and struggle with the same traps as someone with “normal” athletic potential. How do you get folks educated and motivated to pursue healthy lifestyle choices and how do you make those choices available to folks that may not have easy access? And that’s really the crux of the challenge in my opinion.
I was in Hico, TX last weekend for a bike race. At the same time, there was a steak cooking competition in town. About 10k people were there for the steak cooking, probably around 1k for the bike racing. It looked like everyone was having a good time in both camps. I’d consider both activities “luxury” activities that cost $ and time to pursue and include a big social element. While there were fit and not fit folks in both camps, the cycling population was dramatically fitter. So why do some folks trend toward “party” activities centered around eating and drinking and others are attracted to activities that are centered around physical exertion? I’d argue that each group ended up in their camp primary as a byproduct of their upbringing and environment, not so much about genetics (although upbringing and genetics do have some correlation). Most of my life decisions and habits (good and bad) have been driving by my upbringing, people I hung out with, and my spouse/family. BTW, I’m not knocking a good cook-off or questioning someone’s decision to partake, I just though it was an interesting dynamic between the 2 different populations. I am proof that a good ribeye and cycling can peacefully co-exist.
This is a good point. I see the weight/body comp stuff as a side effect of training and not the primary goal. It’s the same way it was when I was a runner, the ability to not obsess about food and generally look very fit was just a great bonus and not the goal.
Let’s face it. Most of the population doesn’t want to work out for 8+ hours per week. They think that we are maniacs!
I see this at my kids middle school. First, most of the kids are not doing sports. It’s like 20-30%. My kid is running cross country, track, and played basketball.
Track is like this microcosm of the population. The endurance guys work hard and put in a lot of miles. Being all the same people on XC, they have now bonded over all this hard work together. The sprinter types tend to be there because they are already naturally gifted in the sprint department. None of them want to work like the endurance guys. They come to practice, do a few drills, pop off a few sprints, and call it a day.
That was one of my main gripes with sports in school. What’s with all this running??? This isnt what I signed up for 
This is where I’m at. I’ve run major caloric deficits while training and that led to disaster. I’ve paid no attention to calories while training and that led to being powerfully slow. This year I may have found the sweet spot, but that remains two be determined.
I’m going to try to drop a few pounds over the summer…but my ‘offseason’ this year I plan to take a month-6 weeks if necessary and just ride all zone 1/2, maybe 6 hours a week and drop the weight. Max would be 10 pounds…probably more like 6. I think I can do 6hrs a week of 40-60% ftp whole running a substantial deficit.
I honestly think one of the big problems when it comes to kids, is that if there are physical activities it seems to be mostly in structured and competetive sports, there isn’t enough emphasis on just playing and having fun imho. And more and more spaces where kids can just do stuff outside are getting removed. Also lets not talk about the problematic state of food advertised to kids and the bad habits that creates early on.
I also don’t think it is necessary to workout a ton to life a healthy life, 3-5 hours a week would be enough and then physical activities doesn’t have to be sports, working in a Garden just going for walks etc. is already an improvement.
From my personal journey I was 114kg around 2.5 years ago and went down to 82 kg last year. I did a really aggressive weight loss for the first 15-20 kg. Which was not easy but felt managable, after that I had to slow down because of energy levels. I did it mostly with portion control cutting out snacks and eating more Veggies and Legumes as well as reducing Alcohol intake (at least for a time). Last year I stopped drinking Alcohol completely and switched to a Vegetarian diet. Fell off the Wagon a bit last fall and winter because of a lot of sickness and difficult life stress and got up to 87 again. Now I’m on 81kg, I’m currently stagnating there, but I also am not activily restricting intake because Training and life would get to hard currently. I still should have around 3-4 kg to loose (190cm tall) If I can shed some weight until my first big climbing event in August It would be great but currently more focused on getting the training in. I will probably diet down a bit after the Season is done with 1-2 Months of mostly easy Z2 riding.
I hate when people say it’s easy to loose weight. Yes it is simple from a concept with CICO, but the challenge is actually getting there, being in a big deficit can be mentally challenging and changing life long bad habits takes a lot of willpower to brake. I still have phases where I really need to use a lot of my mental energy to not fall back into bad patterns and just eat a big bag of chips or a whole block of chocolate.
Thoughts on the latest podcast’s diet/weight talk?
I’ve been dieting since January and feel a little stuck for the last few weeks so I was already taking a break from tracking and just trying to listen to my appetite and eat things that appeal to me and I think I’m going to officially stop the deficit and just focus on enjoying hard workouts and big rides in hot weather.
Yeah, I appreciate that they brought in the dietician (Alex) again. I know it must seem to belabor a point made over and over again - i.e. focus on fueling rather than weight loss while in the midst of heavy training. but I mean, I’ve heard the same from other dieticians and sports nutritionists. It’s definitely solid advice.
But, she also said if you have weight loss goals to pursue it’s best to periodize that during the off-season, when you can focus on more longer-term goals.
On another note, there was a really good deep dive with a researcher in all of this on Simon Hill’s podcast. It’s really quite good!
I like Stephan Guyenet. I think his theories of food satiety and over eating are right on the money. Basically, if we eat “modern” packaged and prepared food, it encourages us to overeat. I believe there are studies that show it’s only a small number of calories per day but it adds up over time.
The most frequently referenced study about this was not an insignificant number of calories. On the order of 500 per day from a highly processed diet.
Yeah, I thought that was a good podcast as well. One thing that resonated with me - she had a couple athletes she used as examples who were training hard and not focused on weight loss, but still ended up shedding weight. This matches my experience. I almost never go into the season with great body comp and base training never seems to improve that even when doing decent volume. The more the intensity picks up and the closer I get to events, I always drop some weight right up until it’s time to taper. There may be some subconscious improvement to diet going on or some other contributing factor, but I’m almost always dropping weight slowly during build and specialty. I find this particularly true when doing a bunch of hill work outside. Bro science makes me think that my body knows it needs to get lighter for climbing steep hills, but logically there must be other factors that help when I’m climbing a lot.
I find it’s best to just decouple the two and focus on training. And no, you’re probably not going to magically drop a bunch of pounds by doing this. Depending on your genetics, weight loss is like rolling a boulder up a hill. I think it’s better to devote the majority of one’s energy on more guaranteed gains (intervals, weightlifting, etc) with the remaining energy given to sustainable dietary goals (eating healthier foods, optimizing nutrition). The amount of extra spoons you’ll have towards dieting will wax and wane with the stresses of the season.
I would hypothesize that the amount a caloric deficit will affect your training depends partially on your fatty acid oxidation ability. If you’re good at dipping into fat stores for energy both during exercise and rest, you can get away with more deficit.