The Best Way To Lose Weight For Cycling Performance

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Roadmen, welcome back.

Anthony Walsh (0:01)

Losing weight is hard, and that's stubborn in the last few kilograms is even harder, especially when you're training properly and you can't afford to lose power. Most cyclists who try to do this, they end up slower, they end up a little flatter, and a lot of time getting injured. And the best coaches in the world say all of this is avoidable. I've interviewed some of the top minds in cycling nutrition and performance to find out exactly how to lose fat without losing watts. I've aggregated these interviews into this master class today from some of the greatest minds in sports nutrition. Please watch this. It's a special episode. Watch it before you cut another calorie. So the grand over arching goal for today.

I was 86 kilograms starting off this journey. I have a target weight around 77 kilograms. We're gonna dive heavy into the strategy. But first, when an athlete approaches you and you hear that sort of weight loss, where does your head go as a nutritionist?

SPEAKER_1 (1:00)

The simplest answer and always the first answer to that is how long.

Anthony Walsh (1:06)

Okay, interesting.

SPEAKER_1 (1:07)

Always how long.

And you get a wild mix of answers from the number of kilos divided by two, and that's the number of weeks they've got. Or you get a, hey, you know, I'm going to do this over a three-month period, a five-month period. It's something that I want to work towards as a much longer, you know, a much bigger goal. Or yeah, it varies wildly. And yeah, so most of the time it's around setting expectations and kind of tempering some initial plans sometimes.

Anthony Walsh (1:50)

I surveyed a section of our e-mail lists around this, and most people came back with, they want to hit race weight. And then I was kind of left just before this podcast a little bit earlier, I was jotting down some notes and I was like, what is race weight? Is race weight, do you think it's a number? Is it a feeling? Is it a performance metric? Is it a body calipers reading?

SPEAKER_1 (2:13)

It's, do you know what? That's the, that's the eternal question. I mean, I've been asked this a few times, like, how do I, how do I find my race weight? What is my race weight? Race weight is the, is the eternal question.

And honestly, it's probably a combination of, how do you feel?

What's, what's your perception of how your performance is? And, you know, kind of is that tied to, or, you know, would you be confident to back up absolute capacity with a little bit of durability? Like, how long can you sustain the sort of physiological state that you're in? I would love to tell you that there's a formula for it, but there really isn't. We, you know, we were kind of chatting a little bit about Jonas Aberhansom there before. I think he's quite a nice example of someone who you would have asked him five, six years ago, what's your race weight? You get a very different answer than you would today.

Anthony Walsh (3:16)

58 or 78, I think.

SPEAKER_1 (3:18)

Exactly. So, you know, it's the, it's really the, it's a really tough question to answer, particularly with someone who's, you know, with athletes potentially who are sort of younger in their, in their training, racing experience, even with some people who are kind of quite well established. I remember one rider I used to work with quite a bit, who would, would cycle through the same pattern every year. And I'll be like, in two weeks time, you're going to get sick because you're pushing too hard. And he's like, no, no, no, no, I'll be fine. Every year, same two week period, get sick, you know. So it's, it's honestly, it's, it's a combination of like, what's the, what's your aggregated tolerance for body mass reduction? How's your power output? How's your tolerance to training?

And kind of the kind of convergence of a number of different factors, not, not just what you see on the scales.

Anthony Walsh (4:13)

But that's why I'm excited to work with you on this project this year, to take this weight off sustainably, because I have fallen into like that trap that you're talking about, like the unnamed rider where I am super motivated. So I hit it really hard. At some point, I push it too hard that I get sick, I get injured, or I just can't sustain it in terms of wheel power.

Oh, sure, one chocolate won't hurt before I know what I'm eating, full box of roses on my own, crying, watching episodes of Father Ted. And then it's this boom and bust cycle of just, I go through a period of self-loading, gaining weight, and then it's like, no, I'm back on it, I catch it, Goggins video, I'm back on it. Who's going to carry the boats, bro? And then it's just rinse and repeat. But does this yo-yo dieting cycle, that's got to do damage to us.