I used to be an avid cyclist, diddly age best on the age, but nothing
on nothing but junk miles in 2012.
But if, since lost all cycling, strengthened gained about 90 pounds.
I bought a trainer and got a train road subscription late last year, and I'm
slowly getting back into it because of some cycling and triathlon related
goals I've had on my bucket list for years and watching all those neat
little graphs show up while cycling is a massive part of my motivation.
So my question is about training while being overweight or end or losing
weight since a higher body weight is associated with a higher FTP.
Does that mean that once I start losing weight, I can
expect my FTP to drop as well.
And if so, how do I adjust my training plan with that amount?
With the workout seemingly getting harder week on week over week, even without
updating my FCP through ramp test.
I worry that I'll be at a point soon where I won't be able to finish
the workouts or where workouts might not be the most productive.
They can be due to a shift in where the different zones are as a
result of him losing weight, he's saying, and possibly dropping his.
And then he closes out by saying, see you on the successful athletes
podcast and then a year or two when I've shattered all my goals.
Thanks to all of you much love for the Netherlands.
Yes.
That's a date device.
I'll be ready on zoom, just waiting for you the whole time.
So, uh, looking forward to it, uh, Chad, this is, uh, w where do
you want to start with this one?
Well, first of all,
let me turn it over to you because everything he just described there
in terms of his concerns without the training adapts is basically
the inspiration behind adaptive.
Yeah.
I mean, if you get to that point where you feel like, oh, I'm worried that the
workouts are going to get too hard, you don't have to worry about that anymore.
It's all adjusted for you.
If you worry that the workouts are going to get too easy, you
don't have to worry about that.
It's going to adjust.
See you.
In fact, just this week, I think adapt to training picked up on the
scent that I was maybe sandbagging.
I think I'm S I've set my FTP a little bit too low, and it was like, Hey,
you're getting some serious adaptations, but all the way through, uh, for the
rest of, up until Cape epic, I had a lot of adaptations that it ended
up shifting because of some, some big workouts that I've been doing.
So, uh, yeah, it, it always makes sure that you get in the
right workout at the right time.
In this case to bias, you don't have to worry about the work that's getting too
hard or too easy, but that root question of a higher FTP, uh, being correlated
with higher weight and vice versa.
Chad, what do you think on that?
Yeah, so that's a valid concern because I think too often we associate a big
body with high work capability and that's the case, depending on the
type of tissue we're talking about.
So a higher lean weight is I think, more what you're describing and
that's the basically equates to more muscle mass that's what's
associated with higher FTPs and.
Even within that a specific lean way is what we're looking at.
So we're not looking for a bodybuilder and expecting here sheet.
They crank out 400 watt FTP.
We're looking for essentially big legs.
I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
So we're looking for the muscles that drive the pedal stroke.
And if you look at examples of that on the world teams, you've got Philippa
Ghana at 82 kilograms, which is 181 pounds and yeah, in terms of normal human.
That's just not that big, but in terms of cycling, that's very big.
Stefan Kuhn, another guy, he's a big fella.
He does not cut a small hole in the wind, but he turns out it turns out a lot of
Watts and therefore winds, high level time trials, very, very key time trials.
And then at the high end of the spectrum of the far end
of the spectrum is at 90 kg.
That's 198 pounds.
That's a big guy.
And he hangs in there and he climbs well reasonably well based on what you might
expect, but rolls like nobody's business.
'cause, he's got a lot of Watts.
He's got a lot of power coming out of very big, strong legs.
Like the rest of his body though.
There's not a heck of a lot of mass that isn't working to move that bike forward.
So ideally this is the weight.
This lean mass is the weight that won't decrease much or at all, as you go
through your training decreases in fat mass, however are almost always going
to positively affect your Watts per kg.
The losing fat seldom, if ever.
Take your threshold down, along with it.
It's just it's it doesn't work that way.
That's massive.
Isn't doing anything for you.
Yes, it's a fuel store, but we've got plenty of that,
regardless of how lean you are.
There's plenty on board.
So Tobias, my recommendation for you and anyone in this in a similar
situation, a lot of us are, is to measure your body composition.
Don't just look at body weight because body weights is not
going to tell you much at all.
It's really not.
I mean, changes in, in water weight alone can, can lead you down.
Um, daily difficulties or, or just lift you up even though
nothing really changed that.
Nothing meaningful.
Anyway.
So in doing so watch your body composition, get one of those tinnitus
scales that we've talked about many times or something similar and do
your best to maintain your muscle mass, especially relevant muscle mass.
And I say relevant cause you have to decide, and this will definitely dovetail
into our discussion on cross-training, but what's relevant to you.
Pro-level cyclists.
Yep.
All they want are the muscles that move the bike, everyone else.
Well, we're a little more comprehensive than not additionally, uh, be
patient with your rate of fat loss.
And this is a touchy subject because the science is kind of mixed on, do
I lose it super gradually over time?
And that gives me a better shot at maintaining that, that
weight loss or really fat loss.
What we're talking about here or do I do it rapidly boost my motivation
and then stay on top of it.
And I linked to a couple of articles that cover both sides of that are.
And then ideally we're looking at weight loss, and again, it's really fat loss
alongside increasing power outputs.
So if you're training through all of this, you should be seeing your numbers go up.
I don't care what your weight, your, your Watts per kilogram are.
We want to see those Watts go up up up.
FTP rises your three minute power, your 14 minute 16, second power.
All of these things come up over time, especially those that are
relevant to the type of writing.
You want to do the type of areas where you want to be.
And then on the other side of that, when you have loss of weight and
it's coupled with loss of sustainable power, and this has to happen on a
consistent basis, because we all have bad days, we even have bad weeks where
you yield those low quality workouts.
But if those are becoming part and parcel with your, your, your day
in day out, that's a big red flag.
Excuse me.
That's an indication of a really important imbalance somewhere between
your training and recovery and nutrition.
And those are really the three pillars in this instance.
Either you're training too much relative to your recovery.
You're not nourishing enough relative to your training, but something in
there is out of whack and it needs to be addressed simply because probably
from a health perspective, certainly.
And then from a performance perspective, obviously.
Yeah.
So this brings up something that I, I have a theory, zero science
to back this up, but a theory.
In with a bulking and cutting.
So, cause kind of similar along these lines, in the sense of like, um, you
know, for bulking, for the people that don't know, it's usually taken
an excess of calories and you do that, uh, habitually coupling it with more
training to basically allow yourself to add more lean mass in the bodybuilding.
That's really the goal.
So you'll see people go into build phases and cut phases in that cut phase.
They'll deprive themselves of calories and they'll, but they'll continue their
workload, uh, maybe shift a bit of how they do it, but they'll basically
deprive themselves of calories.
And two things happen.
Usually when they bulk they're like, man, I'm so strong.
It's awesome.
And then when they're cutting, they're like, oh, I'm so weak.
Now let's apply this to cyclists, cyclists think, okay.
I'm trying to lose a lot of weight.
And in most cases, That's done.
A lot of people are doing that by cutting calories, substantially
depriving themselves of calories and their power drops.
And the assumption is that, well, since my weight has dropped, my power's dropped
and they're just that they're inseparable.
They're tied to each other when.
It could just be the lack of nourishment that you're giving your body.
You know, when you don't feel your work, you can't do as much.
You can't recover as much.
You can't do those things that need to happen.
Yeah.
And then the strongest argument against the two rapid weight loss
is that you're going to sacrifice lean tissue along with it.
And again, I mean, if you, if you're carrying a lot of upper body mass and
you don't mind losing some of that, maybe that's not the worst thing, but it's
not a, it's not necessarily isolated.
It's going to come from.
That the tissues that you are concerned with.
So, and again, I mean that, that's the argument.
There is a lot to be said with gaining the motivation of seeing, say a five pound
drop in that first week, and then maybe toning it down from there or pursuing
that for another couple of weeks and what that does in terms of increasing
your motivation across the longer span.
What we're chasing is lifestyle changes.
You can't just change your intake, change your body composition, and then
go back to your initial intake and expect everything to just stay where it is.
It's going to go back to where you were and with the rebound
effect, probably going to be worse than it was the last time around.
So this is.
This is becoming a bigger discussion that I wanted, but,
but this is lifestyle alteration.
You, you you're, you're gradually changing things that you can sustain so
that you can hold the body composition and performance level, hopefully with w
w you know, sustainable changes, stuff that you can live with for the rest of.
I that you've mentioned that over the past year.
And even before that, that, um, you've struggled with, with
nourishment balance, right.
With nourishing yourself enough.
Um, and you know, we always have been flow with that, but when you
are nourishing yourself properly, what changes did you notice?
Whether it was just off the bike or on the bike?
Both of them.
If every facet of my life, like apart from training, like I had more energy, I
was able to work better, focused, better.
Um, and it was so hard to isolate that it was, um, nutrition and like feeding myself
because, um, that had all these other.
Trickle down effects.
Like I wasn't sleeping as well as I could have.
And like, my training felt so much more labor-intensive than it should
have and would have otherwise if I was just eating enough.
Um, so it was really hard to pinpoint, like what exactly.
Going on and like getting blood work done and like trying to get
more information sometimes that can yield results that are also
indicative of not nourishing yourself.
And so that led to another like rabbit hole of wondering what was going on.
So, um, yeah, it's not just about making sure that you're hitting
your marks and your workouts.
Like it had all these other outstanding effects that enabled me to start
hitting my marks and my work.
Yeah.
And there's an there's so many.
And like you said, all of those things that were kind of acting as layers
that you had to work through, all of those things now improve as well.
Once you start nourishing yourself.
Well,
it's super tough to trace it back to the root cause.
I mean, you see all these symptoms.
Manifestations and you chase each one of those, just like you said, Ivy, and
it steers you in the wrong direction.
I mean, you're, you're addressing an issue, but it's not the underlying issue.
And the underlying issue is so obvious that I think it's easy to overlook.
We're just not getting enough nourishment relative to the amazing amount of
work we're asking of our bodies.
And there's something to be said when people have to lose.
Um, if, if it's a health concern, um, you know, when we're talking about
going from obesity back to a healthy weight that you know there, um, it's
kind of like what is more unhealthy?
You know, and I can, I can, I can sympathize with, with somebody making
the decision there to cut back on calories more than somebody else would,
because they're trying to get out of that unhealthy space that they're in.
Um, so there's no judgment, right?
I want to make that clear, like there's no judgment here.
Everybody's going to be in a different spot with that.
And to achieve health and balance might look very different for
somebody compared to another person.
The one thing I think the principle that, that we can agree on is
that nourishment is important.
It's key.
It's crucial to making sure that our bodies are working well on the bike, but
also in every other aspect of our life.
And in this case, um, to buy.
Just bringing you back to what Chad was saying.
Lean mass is the main concern.
When you're talking about weight, being correlated with your ability
to put out power, uh, really what matters is the lean mass that you have.
So make sure you're nourishing amidst this, this transformation that
you're undergoing and make sure that.
Doing so, uh, adequately to drive the training that you're doing
and that's how you'll lose weight and gain power at the same time.
So we should link
Jesse's articles for the trillion at the time as well.
Yes.
Agreed, agreed.
Ivy.
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