Ive been your exact height and weight around 10 years ago. Most years I will ride 10,000km with 90% of that at Z1/Z2 or endurance level.
I was always active in the gym but would not have been described as big or muscular, i think your bodyfat must be lower.
Consistent Z2 plus aging I guess has resulted in my weight dropping to 65kg at my lowest 2 years ago despite still doing gym sessions. Endurance volume, clean diet, no alcohol meant ive found it difficult put up weight. Ive no doubt I’m a better cyclist at 66kg but sometimes I wish I had some of that muscle mass back when i was 75kg+.
What type of riding do you do? Hills important?
If your priority is the bike reduce the number / time of weight sessions, no reason to give them.
I think if you think about this mechanistically, it should be a simple enough solution. If you are creating an environment of progressive overload and a calorie surplus you’ll create the conditions for weight gain and hypertrophy. Neither good nor bad, just the outcome of that process. Time under tension and the subsequent microtrauma are the main stimuli, and calorie intake is the additional bump. So I assume you want to maintain strength and perhaps some mass? In this case less trauma is what you want. A bit more of a focus on the neuromuscular stimulus can help maintain the ability to produce force with less additional hypertrophy. Things like concentric only, accommodated resistance or dynamic reps can be used nicely here. Reduce reps and sets so you’re overloading less and more sitting in maintenance. For example 5X3 @85% might become 3X3 etc. Finally, check your calorie intake. Very easy to get this wrong and often folks are in a surplus which only results in one thing. We generally aren’t very good at this without quite meticulous logging.
I upped my Z2 riding (one more session a week), and have been focused on heavy weights, low rep, longer rest period training about 1x/week. I also have cut back on calories to maintain a small deficit. All good advice here.
I then promptly got the sickest I’ve been in 15 years and lost about 15 pounds.
Yikes! Hope it wasn’t related the training changes. Seems unlikely, but hopefully you get back to training soon. Most of that weight loss has to be water stores, no?
