We can only judge trends for the plotted days. For those 30 days, I would say your weight is fairly stable. Sometimes you drop. Sometimes you’re up. But it’s oscillating around a pretty stable weight…and the difference is negligible b/t start and end dates.
since last September that goes consistently from around 61kg to 64,5kg
So a drift upwards of 2.5kg over 10 months. Or averaging 250g a month. That’s no reason for concern. It’s not a perfect process where you can calculate down to the calorie. So depending on a lot factors you can “drift” upwards or downwards over time…the older you get the tendency is to drift up.
Just do a cut cycle and move on. With the cut being a 250-500c deficit under your current baseline. Would take about 4-6 weeks to cut back to your original weight. Course, it’s best to cut in off season.
I tend to view ~2kg gain as a sign that I need a cut cycle. Just so it doesn’t creep up on me.
The expenditure in these charts only accounts for the workout, not the rest of my day.
It’s hard to say without the full trend line with totals. Or a plot of (total kcal in - total kcal out) . The plot above looks like your intake is higher than expenditure…but can’t tell if it’s as much higher as your RMR.
At only a 250g gain per month average is something like 250c average surplus a day. So that could be 0 surplus for 4 days, then you take a rest day and go over by 1k. Or your RMR estimate might be off by 150c.
It’s a really small amount. I think you’re too focused on the why. Just do a cut when you can if it’d interfere with racing right now. . . .Next year, plan in a cut before the season.
This is just anecdotal, but I got out of a weight platueu by dramatically increasing my protein intake. Also, by the recommendation of Peter Attila, I’ve started a large dose of protein before bed to assist with muscle repair overnight. I have not really decreased calories, but my weight has started dropping.
I’m going to get a dexascan to look at composition and compare 6 months out, just to confirm it’s adipose I’m losing.
Yeah, I also think that’s demoralizing to see the weight going up + performance not evolving as much + bad racing results, this at the middle of the season makes me question everything, and the low volume was the first one to come up in the analysis.
But sure, I’ll try to lower my intake once possible. Still, I’ll add a bit of volume to the plan in order to help to change the trend for the next big objective.
@MxNat yeah, I’ll investigate that just like @ChefAcB also mentioned, since my intake is always more focused on carbs and I can admit that my protein intake might lack a bit.
You should get a coach, the level of detail and focus you’re doing is beyond what an app can handle, the app always must be simplified to some amount. TR even recommends coaching on their podcast now and then for those who want to get even more out of training.
Three intensity days a week is too much imo and the research which suggests 2 a week. But 2 a week plus more endurance around 0.6-0.65 IF. When doing 10-15 hours a week of endurance those 2 intense days get a lot harder in my experience and the endurance after intensity day is harder.
Peanuts are about the most calorie dense food there is, more energy than in chocolate. And with salt it’s easy to over eat them. Maybe try snacking something like carrots.
I’ve been my own coach for several years with lots of research and experiments, for sure I got some good knowledge about myself, but this year I subscribed TR in order to replace the loads of time I was spending on researching and analysis, since I also think that TR’s AI and the app’s algorithms can for sure discover patterns in the athletes data that no coach can easily find. Given my knowledge in software and being a developer, I know that for sure, but of course, it also depends on how the system is built…
It’s also a great source of protein, and since I do not consume great ammounts of protein, that was one of my options. Peanuts were also one of the snacks I was consuming before, so I can’t blame those peanuts for the extra calories.
No offense, peanuts have protein but aren’t a great source of protein. Per 28g portion = 14 g of fat and 7 grams of protein, sure it’s decent but I wouldn’t consider a great source of protein.
They are also easy to over eat, do you weigh out 28g before you eat them?
I use protein bars as a snack, more expensive but I’ll get 20g of protein and 7g of fat for similar calories.
This assumes that the AI is trained on the right data sets and with the right direction programmed it. Which I have certain issues with TR’s approach, especially for higher volume athletes. So IMO, it just won’t work for people trying to train more than ~11 or 12 hours a week. They bias too much toward intensity and not enough toward volume. So if their base data sets do that (their training plans) and their measures of success (mostly FTP measures from shorter intervals and shorter tests like the ramp test) are baised toward more intense efforts then that’s what the model is going to do to.
Ignoring the weight side of things, I think the lower VO2, FTP, and motivation can come down to the lower volume and higher intensity. I’m training between 13 and 18 hours a week and other than super hard VO2 blocks I only do 2 hard workouts a week. I wouldn’t want to add any more than that. I see steady progress from that and any more and I quickly have to slog through my training because even if I can ‘complete’ them they just dig such a deep hole that I can’t enjoy it or really gain any adaptations from it.
IMO, for you, I would drop one of the intensity days and add back in the Z2 volume to get back to around where you were before. Keep doing what you’re doing with the nutrition for now since it seems like you’re getting the basics right. Change the training first and if the weight doesn’t move after that then maybe consider small tweaks to the nutrition. But given it’s toward the end of the race season I would caution against trying to lose any weight before the end of the season as that’s likely to really put you into a hole.
25% is protein and the fat is mostly unsaturated, so most of those calories are from healthy fats. For sure some protein bars could make a difference, but that’s something that I cannot afford because it’s too expensive to use it as a snack.
Indeed, that’s what I’ve changed since I’ve started this topic, 2 intensity days per week, with added volume in Z2. I’ll also try to reduce the non-workout caloric intake very slightly and check how I feel in the following 4 weeks or so.
Just please be careful with this. Upping volume and dropping calories while also trying to get ready for upcoming races is almost always a bad combination.
Idk how far out your races are but the stress of trying to lose weight will likely hurt you much more than the pound or two you can lose by then will help.
Sure, that’s why I said “slightly” since the next races will happen only by September now, so there’s plenty of time to adjust, check and recheck, back off if needed also.
Last race was this past Sunday and just like all the other ones, it followed the same trend, ended up a completly mess.
Now it’s time to try to fix possible mistakes.
You sound a bit defensive. Any comments that weren’t affirming your beliefs you have responded negatively to. I have been in this exact boat and I too was pretty defensive. It is hard to realize that the things we are doing are actually hurting our performance. I wish you well.
I can be defensive for sure, but I think that’s because of what I’ve been experimenting, changing, and re-taking any assessments. Since I know how my body responds to different stuff along the way and all of the sudden the only thing that changed in these years was my training plan, I cannot point the finger to anything else.
Though, I might be wrong, but then again I need to experiment in a medium to long term perspective in order to see the improvements I’m trying to achieve.
Hello everyone!
After some time from the last discussions, I thought about sharing the experience I got from the changes I’ve done considering all the answers you guys gave me.
So this will also be an update that I want to dedicate to you and thank this community for all shared insights and ideas that turned into a great end of season for me.
First of all, by no means I want to disregard TR for anything here, since it was this platform that also gave me ideas/insights on how to tackle training. Like when an athlete moves to another coach, there are new things that are shared which results in better outcomes, but sometimes there are coaches and athletes that don’t match and I think this was both cases. Anyway thank you TR
Moving on to the update:
I kept most of my nutrition from July onwards with a small change that you guys mentioned here, it was Protein consumption. As I also identified, at the time I thought and confirmed that I wasn’t consuming enough daily protein, so I started to add every single day a good quality hydrolyzed Protein, 30g in the morning after the workout and another 30g in the afternoon (also in the recovery days). I’ve also kept the daily 3g Creatine intake that I was previously taking, and since that new Protein powder does not contain Creatine I could easily grant the correct Creatine daily intake.
I went back to my own training plans with a small change that I thought about implementing from Trainerroad, which was to grant that I would not add an intensity day after another intensity day. This way I could better prevent careless overtraining.
The plan was basically add Z2 volume with longer rides specially in the weekends, every other day a VO2Max basic interval session like 4x4, 4x5, 5x4, 5x5 progressively added from one week to the other.
By August I got some of training days in really hot conditions like +40ºC in my holidays, so I got some "free” outdoor heat training.
This plan was implemented for 8 weeks, since I would get 2 more races by September. On the race weeks (one followed by the other) I reduced a bit the volume and changed those VO2Max session for some smaller/higher intensity intervals to sharpen up the legs.
As you can see in the screenshots, I got improvements in Fitness, the weight average started to decline again, and both my VO2 and eFTP started to rise again.
Those 2 races I had left in my season, I finally got to the podium on both, I cannot describe my happiness given all these years in cycling. It was a 2nd and a 3rd place which felt like 1st to me
Moreover, since September I’ve broken most of my all time power records.
I’ve already made a well deserved off season, that’s why you can also see another decline in the charts from that point till now. I’ve started the next season this week and even in a 3min all out test, I was able to break another all time record.
There it is, this is what I wanted to share with all of you. Both TR and this community helped me to achieve these results!
Being a SW developer, I still strongly believe that AI training is a powerful tool for improvement and I also believe that TR will get it to work, so this feedback might also help them to refine the platform and make it better!
Thank you very much!
Every other day VO2Max? (Granted, TR’s VO2’s can under-prescribe intensity but still.) No wonder your stats shot up! Great work. Congrats on your podium finish.
I’ve also found that stacking Z2 is more effective than spacing it out. Like if you have X hours of Z2 per week, doing it all at once yields more adaptions. My n=1.
Fwiw I track absolute FTP, absolute VO2Max, and weight separately. Watts/kgs and mL/kg/min are useful for predicting performance in a race, but I’ve found the absolute values (watts and L/min and kgs) are more useful for tracking training progress.
Yeah, thanks. Well, it started on my 2 week holidays, so I had plenty of rest, even when I came back to work again and since I’m a SW Developer, I’m steated in my chair most of the day so I can recover well from those intense efforts. I also suspect that the extra protein intake and also the carbs during exercise were contributing for that recover, so it went well
Also, given the short period of time from those holidays to both races, I thought that plan would be the best approach to achieve results pretty fast.
