Drop It: 10 Steps to Achieve Your Optimal Performance Weight

By Kendra Wenzel
VeloNews

The offseason is the best time to lose weight in preparation for the upcoming race year. Here's some sound advice on how to make it happen.

1. Identify a realistic target weight for your height, age, body type and strengths. Talk to a coach or a nutritionist who works with athletes to find a realistic performance weight for you.

2. Take the amount of weight you want to lose and divide it by the amount of weeks from now until three weeks before your first race. If the amount comes out to more than about a pound a week, you'll need to cut down the amount of weight you'd like to lose this time.

3. Define your pros and cons of losing and maintaining a lower weight. Write them down now. Include everything you can think of, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Go back and add to the list as you think of items. The process of weight loss and its eventual maintenance must have a payoff more valuable to you than your current habits or you'll soon find yourself reverting.

4. Enlist support from your household by declaring your goal and asking for assistance. This includes not only spouses, but roommates and kids as well. It's a lot easier to avoid treats and alcohol when they aren't in your immediate environment and easier to stay away from the second helping when it doesn't exist.

5. Start a food journal today. You can find several free ones online that will track the calories you consume and burn and graphically display the values, including nutritional makeup. Even if you do this for only several weeks, you'll begin to learn the calorie values of food amounts, which will help you make wiser choices.

6. If you have any doubts about reaching your goal on your own or you've tried trimming down before and didn't near your goal, seek the professional help of a nutritionist who can do a diet recall, measure your resting metabolic rate, and provide healthy, accessible menus along with advice. Consistent feedback from someone who can tell you what and how much you need to eat around your workouts takes the guesswork out of the process.

7. Take the word "deserve" out of your vocabulary when it comes to food. As you lose weight you might feel you "deserve" an extra treat, or if you've struggled for a day you might even punish yourself the following day because you feel you don't "deserve" to eat much. Deal with each situation meal by meal. Dieting doesn't make for long-term weight maintenance; consistency of habit does.

8. When (and that's "when," not "if") you have a day when you overeat, don't beat yourself up. Getting back on track the next meal will make the difference even in the short run. Giving up temporarily and eating too much again the next day takes you further away from your goals. Even three bad days in a row over a month doesn't throw the entire plan off, but the loss of morale makes it more difficult to return to more positive habits.

9. Eat less on your next easy or off day. If you've fueled after your workouts on training days, you've replaced what you used. Realize it's okay to go to bed hungry while in the weight-loss phase. Your morning meal or during-ride food will fuel your training.

10. Fill a glass or bottle with water right now and start drinking it. See how easy that was? Drink water with meals instead of juice, soda and all the other empty calorie drinks. Need flavor? Any large supermarket carries those vitamin C packets that provide about 15 calories per serving compared to 100+ calories for most drinks.

Dropping Weight, Not Performance

By Gale Bernhardt
For Active.com

Q: Hey Gale - I'd love to get your take on something. I've been researching this next topic for my cycling group: encouraging riders to determine whether or not they're eating enough when training. (Who better to write this than Mr. Bonk himself?)

When I did some analysis on my own caloric intake and taking into account the variables of (1) Body weight, (2) Riding intensity, and (3) Duration, I quickly realized I was consistently training at a caloric deficit. Ok, so the simple answer could be: eat more, right?

Now here's where it gets tricky. If you have a rider who wants to deliberately subject themselves to burning more calories than they take in for the sake of weight loss (and I must confess I have a few pounds I'd like to shed), the $10,000 question is, at what point does your caloric deficit begin to affect performance on the bike? I found the following statement and I think it is pretty revealing:

"If you ride at too hard of an intensity you'll be depleting the glycogen stores within your muscles rather than training your body to burn off fat."

So, given the above statement, how would a rider know when they've taken the advantage of calorie-burning from exercise to the point of glycogen-depletion from muscle tissue, which presumably would be the threshold at which a rider would begin to experience fatigue and a negative affect on performance?

When I read the literature on manageable and safe weight loss, there seems to be a consistent figure of 1.5 to two pounds per week that is considered safe and reasonable for weight loss. Heck, I've lost that amount on one ride from becoming both dehydrated and malnourished! Yes, Mr. Bonk may not be a good example, but in our cycling world there are many riders looking to find that balance between maintaining fitness and reducing weight.

Can you help? Thanks - G.A.

A. Mr. Bonk, you have several good questions. Let me try to hit each one:

•How many calories per day can you cut without cutting performance?

I've never seen any specific research on this, but my personal experience and experience with other athletes yields an answer of 200 to 500 calories per day, average.

I write "average" because if you do a big ride on a weekend day, you might find yourself at an 800 to 1,000 calorie deficit at the end of that day. If you keep trying to maintain an 800 calorie per day deficit over the long haul, performance will suffer. People that have no sport performance expectations can run that low, but competitive athletes cannot.

The day of the big ride, you might end up being low by 800 to 1,000 calories, but the next couple of days will likely find you eating a little more. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep the weekly deficit at an average of 200 to 500 calories per day. Bigger people can usually go to the higher end and smaller people on the lower end.

If you need formulas to estimate caloric needs, see the column Maintaining Your Lean Mean Racing Machine.

•"If you ride at too hard of an intensity, you'll be depleting the glycogen stores within your muscles rather than training your body to burn off fat."

It's not exactly black and white. A point of clarification is that we are producing energy aerobically (primarily burning fat) and anaerobically (primarily burning glycogen) all the time, in concert. Even as you sit relaxed in your chair, reading this column, you are producing some energy anaerobically.

he percentage of energy coming from aerobic production changes as exercise intensity increases. So, yes, as you ride faster you will increase the percentage of energy that comes from glycogen and decrease the percentage that comes from fat and oxygen.

Whether or not you will actually deplete your glycogen stores within the muscles (i.e. "bonk") depends on how well your muscles were stored with glycogen before the ride, how fast you are riding and how well you are refueling during the ride.

Also know that higher-intensity exercise burns more calories per hour and does rev-up your metabolic engine. Increasing your base metabolic rate is a good thing.

Not bonking and not over-consuming calories during a ride takes some experience and the ability to increase or decrease calories on the fly, or by plan. This means increasing or decreasing your ride fuel rate depending on the type of ride you're doing, the condition of your fuel stores coming into the ride and whether or not you are trying to lose weight.

You might fuel at a rate of 200 calories per hour for an easy ride, but need more like 400 per hour for a very long day in the saddle or a ride with some intensity blended into the mix.

•Safe and reasonable weight loss at 1.5 to 2.0 pounds per week.

The range you mention is safe, but know that two pounds per week means 2 x 3,600 calories per pound = 7,200 calories less per week than you are now consuming to keep your current weight.

Averaging that out per day means a deficit of around 1,000 calories per day. That deficit is really tough to do in a normal training situation (not a training camp or a bike tour) while keeping your performance from dipping.

When most people begin a weight loss program, some of the battle is managing hunger (or imagined hunger) and replacing old, bad habits with new ones. If you are able to drop some weight and not decrease performance, let us know how it goes, what you did and if you used any of these tips.

Pacing Strategy: Flat Out or Even-Steven?

2005 Giro prologue winner Brett Lancaster of Ceremica Panaria

Stephen Cheung, Ph.D.
PezCycling News

If you watched the Giro Prologue (2005), you couldn't help but be struck by how many of the pros misjudged the short distance, blasting out of the gates and then crashing and burning well before the line. What pacing strategy can you use to get from A to B without flaming out?

Despite tactical nuances and racing dynamics, the essence of many endurance sports, from kayaking to swimming and long-track speedskating, comes down to an individual effort to complete a set distance in the fastest time possible. And in time trials of any distance and any sport, one of the critical determinants of success is how well you gauge your efforts.

There is nothing worse than misjudging your pace and blowing up well before the line. Well, nothing except for the bitter feeling of crossing the line knowing you still have plenty of juice to spare.

Pacing Strategies

A number of research studies have either modeled ideal pacing strategy, or else analyzed the effort of elite athletes during their time trial events. Most non-elite athletes fall into either a "go for broke" strategy or else a "J-shaped" pacing profile. As evidenced by the Giro prologue, this happens not just to beginners, but to anyone who isn't used to the effort required for a specific distance.

Going-for-Broke Strategy
In the go-for-broke pattern, you will see an athlete start out at a pace that is well beyond their sustained power output level. They fly like a bat out of hell right out of the starting gate, but then accumulate so much fatigue in their system that their power output drops dramatically throughout the event. Their hearts pound out of their throats and their legs turn to lead, such that they can barely sustain any kind of decent pace, often having to struggle at a greatly reduced pace simply to get to the finish line.

J-shaped strategy
The J-shaped strategy is a bit more sophisticated than flaming out, and is likely the default pattern that most of us fall into. Namely, we start out a bit harder than our sustainable workload, then drop below that workload for the majority of the event due to accumulated fatigue from the early effort (and also likely from lack of focus and other psychological obstacles). Then we realize that the finish line is close and we still have a lot to give, then try to make up for lost time by pushing hard the final quarter or so of the event.

Even-Steven

The problem with both of these typical strategies is that they are, in the vast majority of cases, performed at a much lower average power output than a strategy of even, or flat, pacing. With flat pacing, your goal is to maintain an even power output throughout all segments of your race regardless of course conditions.

How do you go about achieving flat pacing? As discussed below, it requires a lot of practice and discipline, along with the right tools. A power monitor is ideal, but not always necessary.

With short hills, you have to make the decision based on your self-knowledge. Do you have the fitness and condition to "attack" the hill at a higher pace and then to recover and settle back down to your target pace? If not (e.g., hill is too long or too steep), you may be better off staying seated and maintaining your target power output throughout the hill. It's a gamble but that's what racing's all about!

Obviously, out on the road, changing terrain and wind is going to affect your speed, making both time and speed of little use in proper pacing. This is completely different in a velodrome (especially indoor ones), where you can calculate the exact lap times required to ride a particular race. So one of the benefits of track riding is that a simple $5 stopwatch is just as effective as the most expensive power monitor!

If you have recently been inspired to try road racing and you're new to the sport, a reasonable question is, "Where and how do I get started?"

Let me see if I can help:

1. Fitness. Most people come to road racing from a sheer love of bike riding. Maybe you've trained for a few century rides or done other rides. In any case, you enjoy being on the bike and spending hours in the saddle. This is good. If you can comfortably spend two to three hours riding, you're off to a good start.

2. Group Rides. Investigate local group rides. There are several options for group rides, including bike shop-hosted rides, club rides and pick-up rides. Often, bike shop rides and club rides offer groups for riders of differing levels.

If they have a beginner group, with a leader that helps with skills, this is a great way to get introduced to group riding. The structure also allows you to ride with faster groups when you want a tough workout, or ride with the not-as-fast-groups when you want to take it easier.

If you join a club, you will enter races under that club (or team) name. These teams usually offer team clothing options for purchase by members. Only the big--and fast--dogs don't pay for team clothing.

Generally, pick-up rides are much less structured and meet at a coffee shop, a store or someone's front door. Some of these rides are open to anyone, while others are by invitation only. In some cases, the goal of the group ride is to...well...race. It is better to know this upfront.

3. Find a Mentor. It is really helpful to have an experienced racer take you under his or her wing. Having someone to help you learn the ropes significantly decreases your learning curve.

4. Watch Bike Racing. Catch the Tour de France--or any other bike race--on television or on the internet. Good commentators help you learn about bike racing skills and tactics. For the more subtle issues, head back to your mentor or club for some help.

5. Read About Bike Racing. A good book on competing is Racing Tactics for Cyclists by Thomas Prehn. VeloNews covers racing top to bottom.

6. USA Cycling. A non-profit corporation, USA Cycling is the organization supporting the Olympic movement for cycling in the U.S.A. Specifically, "The supreme purpose of the Corporation shall be the preservation, development, and administration of the sport of bicycle racing within the United States of America."

You can locate clubs and teams in your area through this site. They also offer education programs for coaches, mechanics and race officials.

7. What Kind of Race? For most people, it is preferable to enter a time trial, hill climb, a road race or a circuit race as your first event. Depending on where you live, a criterium might be your only local option for racing. Crits require better bike skills and are generally leg-searing fast from the start. Be ready for close quarters and some bumping.

8. Which Category? Racers are divided up into racing categories. Some races have "Citizen's Races." If you are new to the sport, this is where you will likely begin. They are split by gender, and sometimes (but not always) there are age-group splits. These events are for non-licensed racers and event brochures often have the word "fun" before "race." Make no mistake, there are people that focus on the second word more than the first.

The next categories are split into age groups that look like, "Senior Women 35+ or Senior Men 55+." Some races have only a couple of categories and others have more.

Races also have "Category" divisions, such as Cat I, Cat II, Cat III, Cat IV and Cat V. People new to the sport begin as a Cat V. As you do well in races and score points, you can apply for an upgrade to the next category. Cat I racers are the most experienced and fastest racers.

9. Learn About Rest. Eager to improve, it will be tempting for you to train, train, train. You do need to train; but you also need to rest. Plan to decrease training volume every third or fourth week so your body can rebuild and gain new levels of fitness. Know that anyone can ride "hard", not everyone rides fast.

10. Just Do It. Entering a new sport can seem overwhelming. Everyone that is a great racer now had to start somewhere. Just pick a race, get out there and give it a shot. After that first race is over, it's easy to make gains in fitness, nutrition, skills and race tactics.