Weight loss for race performance

Nutrition
41

I’d love to visit the US for gravel one day, but I fear it may have to wait until the kids have grown up and finances finally allow. Who would have thought that kids were so expensive?!

The lovely thing about the gravel here is that it is the backbone of the road network. The main roads and some of the minor roads are asphalt, but most isn’t. The gravel is generally really well maintained (topped up annually, and graded) and tends to follow the contours closely, which makes for exciting, twisty, turny, punchy riding.

I rode to and from work today (44km) but still went out for 30km with a friend after work with a grin on my face

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42

Your upper body is pretty skinny. Which is good for cycling.
When I was about your age at 82 or 85 kg at 175 cm tall I was benching 100 kg x 8, squatted 160x6 and deadlifted 180x6. But I was a hammer thrower in my teens.
Healthy bodyfat is around 10%. When you go down under 8% you start risking negative immunological response.
When I look at training of my son who is a national U23 road race champion and decent track rider, I learned about many misconceptions passed to us from older cyclists.
You don’t need to increase volume much if at all. At your age you don’t have to train harder, you need to train smarter. And if you race, you aim to get maximum results with minimum effort.
My son never exceded 20k km in a season. And rarely 15k km.
The key is mixing aerobic base with high intensity intervals.
And doing many other things properly off the bike.
Sleep, nutrition, supplements, weight training, core excercises, rest, recovery, foam roller.
Cross country skiing is a best off the bike excercise for cyclists. Swimming is also very good.
You will never be a climber. I guess it would be best to find the kind of racing that suits you best and try to excell in that kind of events.
Less mass in upper body of course means less oxygen needed for muscles you don’t use much on the bike. But that would mainly concern pro riders. You will never be a pro. So I guess, you should find a balance where you enjoy your racing and training without being too preoccupied with the results. Where some of your competitors will be ex riders, doped riders or both.

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43

Taking a recovery week every 4th week (3 on, 1 recovery, repeat) does NOT mean not riding your bike. It’s more about removing intensity and allowing your body to supercompensate. How you structure your recovery week is always individual and it depends.

For reference, I train 25 +/- hours a week and my recovery week is still 15-20 hours. However, it’s all low endurance zone for the first 5 days going mostly off RPE. Then introducing a little intensity on the 6th day to wake up the legs and judge fatigue. More if I can handle it and less if I can’t.

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44

Might be a challenge at your height. I’m 6’5"/195 cm and have had to redo a scan because my feet weren’t totally perpendicular to the table. They drooped enough so they weren’t captured and the machine threw up an error message.

I’ll just chime in to mention I wouldn’t worry about losing muscle just to be lighter for cycling. You can run some simulations to see what the performance benefits might be on a given climb, but IMHO moving up a few places in an amateur race isn’t worth losing muscle that would only be beneficial later in life.

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45

Like some of the others, I would never try to lose muscle (even upper body) for cycling purposes unless you’re a pro making your living on it. While I probably have 15-20# of muscle on my frame compared to a similar lean cycling build of the same height, I do everything I can to keep it and performance be damned.

From all other aspects of life - you’re better off keeping it, especially as we get older. And if you ever crash, that’s more protection and durability from an injury. And you don’t look like a massively muscled dude for your height - “proportional” would be how I’d describe it.

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46

That is a great question. I would recommend reading the following article to give you an idea of how much work you need to be doing per kg of body weight lost or gained in order to maintain competitive power.

Obviously if you lose a kg and that causes your FTP to drop by 100w that would be bad, but this paper has actually found that it’s the 5m raw power which is more statistically indicative.
The Compound Score in elite road cycling.pdf (379.4 KB)

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47

I look fairly skinny, but it’s remarkable how much muscle you can hide on a frame that’s structurally fairly wide and 203cm tall. When I was 18, I weighed 77kg, got fed up with being skinny and embarked on a lot of weight training and eating. 5 years later, I was 131kg and not at all happy - I’m not naturally a big guy. My numbers at 131kg were 190/140/260, but I wasn’t ever especially statically strong. I was just really good at moving and carrying things (as in, Strongman).

These days, my weight is quite static at about 102kg, and that’s with vast amounts of eating.

Cross country skiing is something I’d really like to try. The ski slope here in the village makes a cross country course most years, but we’re a bit too far south in Sweden for it to be consistent. As such, I just ride outside on studded tyres (which is nearly always fine).

I appreciate your advice and point of view as a fellow strength athlete turned cyclist :smiley:

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48

Excellent advice. Thank you. I will incorporate this, starting the week after next. I then have a three week block culminating in a race, so it should work well.

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49

I think you’re right. I got a good time on a climb today (9th out of 530 on a gravel climb that is raced) and even with a 7kg weight loss, I would only have moved up 3 places.

Interesting about the Dexa scans - I’ll add it to the list of things I’m probably too tall for!

50

I do think about the implications of muscle mass for crash protection. And of course, the weight training for bone density. Thank you for your imput.

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51

Very good - I shall read the article with my breakfast tomorrow. Thank you!

52

The general idea is that the raw 5m contributes more to race winning power than the 5m in w/kg , but across all racing where you run into issues with weight is with the accumulated amount of 5w/kg riding needed to make it through various selective parts, of course with no climbs it’s not an issue, but the issue were there climbs is that the power required for 5w/kg is close to your 5m max power which means you have to do V02max just to stay with the bunch. Eventually this leads to issues down the line, you get an etalon correction (only the 60kg guy has to do 5w/kg, you may be more like 4.7-4.6 to climb at the same pace) But you can see the issue if a race has 10m at 5w/kg you’re going to be on the limit when for most it’s just a rep and they can do more w/kg in parts and not suffer from the surges.

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53

Interesting points, though I have to ask, what is the etalon correction?

To the point of needing fewer w/kg, I noticed this on a climb with a friend last month. It was a fairly short, 7% gravel climb with a steady gradient and consistent surface. I did about 5.2w/kg and he did nearly 6w. I’m 102kg, he’s 30kg lighter and I beat him to the top by 10 seconds (on a 2.5 minute climb).

Some of it might be that my set up is a little more optimised, maybe it’s more efficient pedalling technique (gravel climbing demands it to avoid wheelspin) or something else, but I was surprised.

On longer rides, or indeed races, I find that whilst my top end (VO2 max) gets blunted, my threshold goes up. To use yesterday’s race recce as an example, I was climbing at 5w/kg at the start, but only 4.4 to 4.5w at the end (total ride was 4hrs 45), but average power increased significantly. The first hour was 285w and the last hour was 315w. Carb consumpution was OK, but I was (which is unusual for me) having a little gut discomfort so I only had about 120g/hr.

My strategy to try for racing this year (my first year of real races) is to try to hide within the bunch as much as possible (to avoid catching the wind - something I catch a lot of) and when the opportunity arrises to just try to ride folk off my wheel with sustained 6-700w efforts (something I can sustain for 1-2 minutes).

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54

Im nowhere near as powerful as you but i have an “excess” of muscle mass from 10 years of weightlifting and powerlifting. A micro version of you, if you like as i went up to 95kg at 168cm and now im back down to 76k–ish. I’m often surprised at how easy it is to maintain muscle, i use to train 5x per week in the gym and squat 290kg and now i go in the gym 1x per week and barely do any ‘heavy’ weights as i want to stay fresh for riding, and yet to get below 75kg is a real effort (+ i love food and want to keep healthy and fuel my training).

Im just playing the long game as ive “only” been riding for 2.5 years so i guess what will be will be.

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55

That’s a huge squat mate - well done!

I think once you’ve built the muscle, maintenance or regrowing it isn’t that hard.

Like you, I try to stay away from anything heavy as the day after the gym, my legs just lose their top 20%. It’s just not there - no top end power.

You’ll still be fairly stacked at 75kg and 168cm, so it’ll be interesting to see what your sprint ends up like with more training :smiley:

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56

this is the etalon correction your bike is under 10% of your total system weight whereas it is 13-14% of a 70kg rider’s system weight the bike is dead weight and doesn’t produce any power so lanterne rouge started correcting for this when comparing w./kg on a climb. end result you need to do less than a 70kg guy on the same climb and the gap between the powers you have to do shrinks as the grade goes up.

Your strategy sounds about right and since you seem pretty serious you should also consider continuation attacks over the tops of climbs . easy to say hard to do but you basically do not stop over the top and try to make all the lighter guys maintain their effort on the flat parts. rolling hills with long tops are good forthis.

You also can play the medium late attack game where you take a decently hard race and try to capitalize on the idea that you can ride threshold for longer durations in the bunch because in many cases throughout you are in tempo zone while lighter guys are in threshold. they hit a wall usually around 40-+ mins of time in zone

Not too sure about your average going up as a physiological effect it sounds more like you pushed harder and that is why it went up.

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57

Again, I much appreciate the detailed reply :smiley:

Sound advice, especially on the continuing the attack over the hill top. I was on a group gravel ride a year ago a couple of hours north of here, and a friend who I’ve ridden with a few times at various events was especially good at this. He’d put 20-30m into you just over the brow of the hill and was very good at holding an aero position afterwards, mitigating his lack of absolute power and making him hard to catch.

As regards my average going up - it’s something I see so often on middle duration (3-5hrs) rides of high effort. For what feels like a similar effort, I get to get faster as the ride goes on.

My theory for it is that I function very well on simple carbs. So once I’m a couple of hours into my ride, my stomach empties of any food consumed earlier in the day, freeing up some energy that would otherwise be diverted to digestion. Given than maltodextrin/sucrose is metabolised so quickly and easily, the body doesn’t need to exert much efffort to continue providing maximal energy.

I might be talking out of my arse, but it makes sense in my head! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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How much did you big guys eat to get big and how long did it take? I’m 185 cm and was 67 kg when I focussed on cycling. I’ve just nudged into 80 kg which has been a goal for the last 2 years. I still look kind of skinny though. Do you think I can get to 90 kg at 34 years old currently without any drugs (including trt)? Have I left it too late?

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59

I think what you might be able to achieve in most cases depends on your individual make up and response to exercise.

At age 43 I got to around 110kg at sub 15% bodyfat, at a height of 190cm. But this took literally YEARS of training - starting around age 13 in school, in the 1980s, with slow and sometimes backwards progress over the intervening years. No PEDs or TRT etc - just a long time trying (and often failing) to string together many months of consecutive steady progress.

I focused on different types of training at different points in time; dabbling in MED stuff based on Stuart McRobert’s work that I discovered in the early 1990s when I started university, I moved to the Yates / Mentzer high intensity approach a few years later and then moved away from that towards a more moderated approach, basically a modified powerlifting approach to periodisation (micro and macro time cycles) but not using powerlifting exercises.

Focused on the big compound exercises and prioritised legs and back training over the smaller muscle groups. Deadlifts / squats / pull ups / rows / shoulder press and some bench (less and less as time went on - albeit see cautionary tale below!) :smiley:

Always kept some small amount of low intensity cardio in parallel (e.g a couple of slow 5k treadmill runs a week etc) and played rugby up to age 23 and again from age 30 to 31 and then badminton once or twice a week for most of my late 30s / into my 40s.

It’s definitely not too late at your age to see improvements in strength, flexibility, muscle size etc. you don’t need TRT (all else being equal) but do need time and steady consistency over that time.

For me (I know another may disagree) I found getting sufficient protein was a game changer in terms of seeing improved muscle growth from my training, but hard to tell if it was that alone, as I equally improved my sleep and other things over time as well. I’d advocate prioritising recovery as much as the training to get a good balance.

A cautionary tale though - the high intensity training I did in my younger years came back to bite me - I had a detached peck tendon (it didn’t snap as I wasn’t using a heavy weight) in Jan 2016. The surgeon claimed I was very lucky, as he’d done many similar surgeries over the years and they were almost always snapped from too heavy weight being used. In my case the tendon end had literally peeled off the arm bone and his estimation was it had been slowly doing so for a number of years based on what he saw.

I’ve not been in a gym since that day.

Long story short - got depressed (I’d lost my lifelong pastime), lost a ton of muscle but put on a TON of fat in about 9 months - ballooned to 269lbs.

Then I rediscovered cycling as a consequence of good friends pushing me to address my health decline. Now at circa 89kg / 197lbs and a lot better for it :smiley:

Good luck :flexed_biceps:t2:

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60

Yes. It’s slow and steady progress, just like cycling fitness.

Don’t rush it, takes ages to build quality muscle.