Author Archives: mattfitzgerald

Ignore Your Body Mass Index

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Racing Weight and Body Mass Index BMI for athletesBody mass index (BMI) has been in the news lately. It was put there put Katherine Flegal, a researcher on the epidemiology of obesity. Flegal and a few of her colleagues conducted a scientific review of past studies that had correlated body mass index with the risk of dying of various diseases. Their “meta-analysis” was published in the January 2013 edition of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association). The reason it made news was that Flegal’s study reported that men and women who were classified as overweight (but not obese) by official BMI standards tended to live longer than people who were classified as normal weight.

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Many strong opinions about this surprising finding were expressed. A number of Flegal’s fellow obesity experts dismissed it as an erroneous result of faulty methodology. So-called fat advocates hailed it as final proof of what they had known all along. As for me, when I read about the paper I merely felt glad that I had stopped giving credence to the BMI scale long before.

BMI, in case you don’t know, is a number that represents the relationship between a person’s height and weight. Since taller people tend to weigh more, BMI was created as a tool that people could use to determine whether they were too heavy for their height. The problem with BMI is that while it effectively neutralizes the influence of height on body weight, Body mass index makes no distinction between body fat and lean body mass. For example, a lean football player with a BMI of 25.5 and a couch potato with a huge beer belly and a BMI of 25.5 are both classified as overweight by the BMI scale, which defies common sense.

BMI vs. Body Composition

By ignoring body composition, BMI sacrifices a lot of predictive power in relation to health outcomes. In recent years, medical researchers have performed a number of studies comparing the effect of BMI versus that of body composition (or body fat percentage) on the risk for various diseases. The conclusion is always the same. While the effect of higher BMI on the risk for lifestyle diseases such as heart disease than normal-weight men and women is muddled, the connection between body fat percentage and disease risk is much stronger. In fact, heavier individuals with a low body fat percentage tend to be healthier and to live longer than skinnier individuals with a higher body fat percentage. In other words, body composition is a far better predictor of health and longevity than BMI. Doctors recently coined the term “normal weight obese” to categorize men and women who fall within the normal body weight range but have more than 30 percent body fat. Studies have found that normal weight obese individuals have the same levels of circulating inflammation markers—a major heart disease risk factor—as those who are technically obese.

Muscle vs. Fat

A second reason why lean men and women are healthier than skinny people with more fat hidden inside them has to do with muscle. Recent medical research has shown that muscle mass is as beneficial to health as excess body fat is damaging to health. Having a little extra muscle has been shown to increase metabolism, reduce insulin resistance and diabetes risk, increase bone density and lower the risk of osteoporosis, and more. Having a little extra muscle even increases longevity. A number of studies have found that, among elderly populations, those with the most muscle strength live the longest.

In addition to telling members of the general population more about their health than BMI does, body fat percentage tells endurance athletes more about their fitness than BMI does. Research has demonstrated that endurance athletes perform best at a body fat percentage that is close to the minimum they can attain through focused training and healthy eating. Regularly monitoring body fat percentage makes a lot of sense for endurance athletes. A 2 percent drop in body fat could easily correlate to a big leap forward in performance, even if your body weight—hence BMI—stays the same.

So if you aren’t yet tracking your body fat percentage, start. And if you are paying attention to headlines about BMI, stop!

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.

Start The New Year With Weight Loss

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By Matt Fitzgerald

It’s the holiday season—that time of year when endurance athletes are subjected to lots of articles about how to avoid weight gain by eating rice cakes for Thanksgiving dinner and bowls of steam on Christmas Day. Personally, I never read them. That’s because I don’t see anything wrong with having a little fun with one’s diet in December, knowingly putting on a bit of flab, and then shedding it after the New Year when it’s time to get serious about preparing for the next triathlon season. In fact, I think that a month of less strict eating makes it easier to eat strictly through the other 11 months of the year. Eleven months of clean eating cause a kind of psychological pressure to build; holiday feasting releases that pressure.

This system only works if it is, in fact, systematic. I recommend that athletes make their winter weight fluctuations systematic by imposing an 8-percent rule on themselves and by executing a formal “Racing Weight quick start” in the New Year. The 8-percent rule states that at no time during the year is an athlete allowed to tip the scales at more than 8 percent above his or her ideal racing weight. So if your perfect triathlon competition weight is 150 lbs, you cannot weight more than 162 pounds immediately after Thanksgiving dinner. The 8-percent rule keeps one from completely letting himself or herself go.

A Racing Weight quick start is a four- to eight-week period of programmatic weight loss that immediately follows the off-season break and precedes the start of race-focused training. In a quick start you pursue weight loss more aggressively than you can during a major build-up to racing, when you need to ensure that your body is always well fueled for performance and recovery. The idea is to literally get a quick start on reversing your off-season weight gain and returning to your ideal racing weight.

There are five components of the quick start system that is presented in full, hand-holding detail in my Racing Weight Quick Start Guide:

1. Moderate calorie deficit

During a quick start you should aim to consume 300 to 500 fewer calories per day than your body would need to maintain its current weight. This deficit is sufficient to yield fairly quick weight loss, but it would be too large within the race-focused training process, when you need your diet to support heavy training for an upcoming race.

2. Strength training

A quick start is also a good time to make a greater commitment to strength training than you do at any other time. It’s hard to find a lot of time and energy to lift weights during the training cycle. But in a quick start period it’s not so hard, and doing so will help you lose weight by adding muscle mass to your frame and thereby increasing your metabolism, so you burn more fat at rest. Building strength during a quick start will also help you perform better and stay injury free during the subsequent race-focused training process.

Try to do three full-body strength sessions per week during a quick start.

3. Increased protein intake

I recommend that athletes aim to get roughly 30 percent of their daily calories from protein during a quick start. There are two reasons for this recommendation. First, high-protein diets are more filling than moderate- and low-protein diets. So increasing your protein intake during a quick start will help you maintain your daily calorie deficit without hunger. Second, increased protein intake will help you build muscle through strength training.

Within the training cycle your protein intake needs to be lower to make room for increased consumption of carbohydrate, your most important endurance fuel.

4. Sprint intervals

A quick start is not the time for high-volume endurance training. That should wait until you’re within the race-focused training process. Of course, high-volume endurance training does promote fat loss. So if you’re not going to do it during a quick start, you have to promote fat loss through training in other ways. As we’ve seen, strength training is one way. Another is sprint interval workouts. Training sessions consisting of large numbers of very short (10-30 seconds) sprints are proven to promote significant fat loss, especially between workouts. They also develop power that will help you get off to a good start when you move into race-focused training.

This is not a type of training that you can do much of within the race-focused training period, when more race-specific types of workouts (longer intervals, tempo workouts, etc.) must be prioritized.

5. Fasting workouts

A fasting workout is a long, easy ride or run undertaken in a glycogen-deprived state. This means you don’t eat before you start and you don’t take in any carbs along the way. This forces your body to rely on fat to fuel the workout, making it a great fat-burning session. I advise athletes to perform one fasting workout per week—alternating between rides and runs—during a quick start. Later, when you’re actively training toward a race, you should consume carbs before and during most of your long rides and runs to maximize your performance in those workouts.

Circle January 1

Back in the 1980s, Mark Allen, Scott Tinley, and other members of San Diego’s elite triathlon set used to do an informal group bike ride called the Hangover 100 on New Year’s Day. It requires no further explanation. I mention it because I think it shows there’s something to be said for slacking off as a triathlete when appropriate and then suddenly getting very serious again when it’s time. (Allen went from literally not touching his bike in December to riding 100 miles on New Year’s Day.)

What do you say? Let’s all get serious about leaning out on January 1, 2012. And in the meantime, let’s all pass over those articles on how to avoid holiday weight gain by eating bowls of steam for Christmas dinner.

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.

How The Pros Stay Lean

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The smartest way to manage your weight for endurance performance is to emulate the methods of the fastest men and women on the planet.

By Matt Fitzgerald

The leanest cyclists, runners, and triathletes are typically also the fastest endurance ones. This pattern holds even within the select ranks of the professionals. One study reported that in a small group of elite Ethiopian runners, all of whom were very lean and very fast, those with the least body fat had the best race times.

Genes account for a portion of the difference in body fat levels between individual endurance athletes. But there is a tendency among us age groupers to overestimate the importance of the genetic contribution to leanness in the pros. We like to think that the world-class men and women who were blessed with the right DNA can eat whatever they want without putting on body fat.

In fact, most of the top cyclists, runners, and triathletes work very hard at managing their weight and body composition for performance. What’s more, they tend to rely on the same methods to stay lean. And guess what? The very same methods of weight management that work so well for the world’s best endurance athletes are can help everyday competitors like us achieve our optimal racing weight too, even if that weight is a few pounds greater than the pros’.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying the diets and weight-management practices of world-class endurance athletes. In 2009 I collected the top five and linked them into a systematic program in my book, Racing Weight. Since then I’ve identified a sixth key practice and added it to the recently published second edition of Racing Weight. Let’s take a look at these six methods.

Step 1: Improve your diet quality

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 2007 as a five-time NCAA champion, Chris Solinsky moved to Portland, Ore., to run professionally for Nike. He also decided to improve his eating habits. Instead of adopting a diet with a name (e.g. vegan, paleo, gluten free) and lots of weird rules, he simply improved the overall quality of his diet in commonsense ways, eating more vegetables, fewer frozen pizzas, and so forth. As a result he lost several pounds and achieved a performance breakthrough, setting an American record of 26:59:60 for 10,000 meters in 2010.

Increasing the overall quality of your diet is the simplest and most effective way to shed excess body fat and move closer to your optimal racing weight. That means eating more of the six categories of high-quality foods—vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, lean meats and fish, whole grains, and dairy—and less of the four categories of low-quality foods—refined grains, fatty meats, sweets, and fried foods. In Racing Weight I present a unique scoring system that enables athletes to easily rate the quality of their diet and systematically increase it.

Step 2: Manage your appetite

At the height of his training for the Ironman World Championship each year, triathlon legend Peter Reid kept no food in his kitchen—none—so that he wouldn’t be tempted to overeat. It was an extreme measure, but Reid knew his ideal racing weight was 164 to 165 pounds (or 7-10 pounds below his natural off-season weight) and he knew that he could not reach his racing weight if he fully indulged his appetite. It’s hard to argue with the results: three victories and three runner-up finishes in Kona between 1998 and 2004.

Research conducted by Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, and others has demonstrated that most people automatically eat more food than they need unless they take conscious steps to control their “food environment” and eat more mindfully. These measures do not need to include removing all of the food from your kitchen, but they may include removing all of the low-quality temptations from your kitchen and replacing your current dishes with smaller dishes on which you serve yourself slightly smaller portions.

Step 3: Balance your energy sources

The world’s best runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia. The diet of the typical East African runner is 76 to 78 percent carbohydrate. Compare that to the diet of the average American, which is only 48 percent carbohydrate. Research going all the way back to the 1960s has consistently shown that a high-carbohydrate diet best supports intensive endurance training. Unfortunately, the low-carb diet craze of the late 1990s and early 2000s has cast a long shadow, causing many age-group athletes to eat too little carbohydrate to properly support their training.

Actually, not every endurance athlete needs a high-carb diet. Carbohydrate needs are closely tied to training volume. The more you train, the more carbs you need. Use this table to determine the daily carbohydrate intake target that’s right for you.

Average Daily Training Time

(Running and Other Activities)

 Daily Carbohydrate Target
30-45 minutes 3-4 g/kg*
46-60 minutes 4-5 g/kg
61-75 minutes 5-6 g/kg
76-90 minutes 6-7 g/kg
90 minutes 7-8 g/kg
>120 minutes 8-10 g/kg

* 1 kg = 2.2 lbs

Step 4: Monitor yourself

When Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France in 2012 he weighed 158 pounds and had 4 percent body fat. Four years earlier, when he won his last Olympic gold medals as a track cyclist, Wiggins weighed 180 pounds and his body fat level was a few points higher. His slimming was a major factor in his Tour de France triumph, and he achieved that slimming in part by continuously monitoring his weight and body composition.

In business there’s an expression: “What gets measured gets managed.” If you’re trying to reduce your weight and body-fat percentage, it only makes sense to measure these things regularly. The pros do, and research has shown that nonathlete dieters who weigh themselves often lose more weight than those who avoid the scale. I recommend that all endurance athletes weigh themselves at least once a week and use a body fat scale such as the Tanita Ironman to estimate their body-fat percentage once every four weeks.

Step 5: Time your nutrition

A naturally big guy who once tipped the scales at 200 pounds, professional triathlete T.J. Tollakson stays lean by frontloading his daily energy intake in accordance with the dictum “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

With respect to weight management, when you eat is almost as important as what you eat. The most important times of the day to eat are in the morning and within an hour after workouts because calories eaten at these times are less likely to be stored as fat and more likely to be incorporated into muscle tissue and used for immediate energy needs.

Step 6: Train for racing weight

Nearly all professional endurance athletes train by what’s known as the Lydiard method, which entails doing a high volume of training, about 80 percent of it at low intensities, 10 percent at moderate intensities, and 10 percent at high intensities.

While a low-volume, high-intensity approach to training has gained popularity among age-group endurance athletes lately, it is not the most effective way to train for endurance performance or achieve a lean body composition. Research provides clear support for the Lydiard method that is used almost universally by the elites.

Obviously, few age groupers have the time, energy, or durability to train as much as the pros do, but that’s not the point. The point is to maintain a training volume that is close to your personal limit and to keep the intensity low for four out of every five workouts. If you do this you will burn far more calories and build greater aerobic fitness than you possibly could by doing the small volume of training you can handle if you go hard (or even moderately hard, as a majority of age groupers do) in most workouts.

When it comes to training and eating to attain your optimal racing weight, the best thing to do is the same thing you do in races: follow the pros!

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.