Category Archives: from Racing Weight

What’s New in Racing Weight 2?

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Racing Weight book cover image

The first edition of Racing Weight released in 2009.

The first edition of Racing Weight released in 2009 was the first weight management program for cyclists, triathletes, runners, and swimmers. Racing Weight offered athletes 5 simple steps to get lean and get faster.

Three years later, new research and new weight management practices of elite athletes prompted author and certified sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald to update and improve this best-selling book.

Here’s what’s new in the new second edition of Racing Weight released this month:

Get Lean, Go Faster: Fitzgerald explores in greater detail the several ways that getting lean improves endurance performance.

Dieting vs. Performance Weight Management: Racing Weight, 2nd Ed. explains the history and problems with diets like Zone Diet and Paleo Diet, then explains how a high-carb diet is essential for athletes—and actually helps them lose weight.

Know Thyself: A new sixth step on the best ways to monitor your weight and your performance. You’ll stop counting calories and start weekly weigh-ins and monthly fitness tests to confirm your optimal performance weight

Diet Quality Score: Improved and expanded DQS, one of the popular features of the first edition

Appetite Management: New research on how to best manage appetite every day

Nutrient Timing: Guidelines from new research on what to eat when during the day with tips from elite athletes

Year-Round Weight Management: How to manage weight throughout the year and when to incorporate Quick Starts into your training cycle

Racing Weight Foods: A new chapter of superfoods that are easy to add to a daily diet and that will support training

What the Pros Eat: Expanded food diaries from 18 pro athletes

Training for Racing Weight: Updates with new research on the training strategies that most improve body composition

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p stroke

The new edition of Racing Weight released in December 2012.

Racing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes. Find your copy in your local bookstore; bike, tri, or running shop; or from these online retailers:

It’s True: Research Shows Leaner Athletes Are Faster

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Endurance sports, of course, tend to favor two related body characteristics:

  1. low body weight
  2. lean body composition (or a low body-fat level).

This is the case because endurance racing demands the ability to move economically so that a high work rate (or speed) can be sustained for a long time and a low body weight and lean body composition contribute to movement efficiency.

The advantages of being light and lean for endurance performance are so obvious that they hardly needed to be scientifically proven, but exercise scientists have gone out and proven them anyway, and the proof is interesting. Here are just a few examples.

  • Bale, Bradbury, and Colley 1986: Among 60 male runners, the fastest runners were the lightest and leanest. The heaviest, least lean runners were the slowest. And in this study, the average weight difference between the fast, average, and slow groups was just 11 pounds. The point? Just a few pounds make a big difference.
  • Knechtle et al. 2011: Body weight had a moderate effect on race times for Ironman® athletes, but body-fat percentage had a large effect on race times. Both body weight and body fat were more strongly correlated with race times, especially for run splits, than training variables like average weekly training time. The point? Your body composition matters more than how much you train.
  • A 1999 Spanish study: Performance in a flat cycling time trial is best predicted by a rider’s maximum power output, but performance in an uphill time trial is best predicted by the rider’s power-to-weight ratio. The point? If you plan to race going up, you’ll want your power-to-weight ratio to go up first.
  • Hecht et al. 2007: Researchers found that the average body-fat percentage among age-group (i.e., non-elite) participants in an Ironman triathlon was 17 percent for males and 27 percent for females. These values are lower than average for the general population, but much higher than the values seen in the pros. And sure enough, when the researchers matched body-fat percentages against finishing times, they found that the men and women with the leanest bodies were also the fastest. The point? Yes, even triathletes can improve their finish times by getting leaner.

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is the proven weight-management program for endurance athletes. See what’s new in the new edition and then look for the book in your local bookstore; bike, running, or tri shop; or online.

Why Leaner Athletes Are Faster (It’s More Than Gravity)

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Research, common sense, and race experience have shown that leaner athletes tend to be faster. Why? It’s not just gravity.

Gravity

It’s the most obvious reason. We’ve all felt the heaviness that comes with fatigue while running or riding uphill. Swimmers that have to move larger limbs get tired more quickly, too.

Competition for Oxygen

One of the most crucial underpinnings of endurance performance is the ability to deliver oxygen to the working muscles at a high rate. As body-fat levels go down, aerobic capacity goes up, because muscle has less competition from fat tissue for oxygen and fuel.

Heat Dissipation

The primary function of body fat, of course, is insulation. An athlete’s ability to dissipate heat is an important performance factor in all forms of long-distance racing. While this ability is partly a function of the ratio of body surface area to body volume, this ratio is smaller in bigger athletes. So excess body fat impedes heat dissipation. It’s easier to stay cool on a long ride on a hot summer day if you’re very lean.

Fat-Burning vs. Carb-Burning

Sure, heavier athletes have more mass to move, but body fat isn’t just dead weight. Fat is a metabolically active organ that affects exercise metabolism in important ways that are not yet fully understood. One thing we do know is that athletes with larger amounts of body fat burn less fat and more carbohydrate at lower exercise intensities. Since the body burns carbs during racing but can only store small amounts of carbs, less lean athletes will burn through their valuable carb stores before leaner athletes.

Inertia

Lighter cyclists can accelerate more efficiently. Good criterium riders are often smaller riders who can match surges in the race more quickly than others.

Swimmers with heavier limbs have to use more energy to move their arms and legs.

But small athletes are often at an advantage on flat courses. Why? Inertia and hydrodynamics.

Hydrodynamics

In swimming, the fastest athletes tend to be tall and rangy instead of broad. Their narrower bodies present less frontal area in the water, making them more hydrodynamic.

But Get This…

Excess fat hurts performance, but excess muscle is in fact even more detrimental because it is far more dense, which is why we’re as unlikely to see a muscle-bound Tour de France winner as an obese one.

But what constitutes excess muscle is very different from what constitutes excess body fat since muscle is the engine of movement whereas body fat makes no contribution to endurance performance beyond providing energy for low-intensity exercise. Even the skinniest runner carries enough body fat to fuel 24 hours of continuous exercise.

Too Much Fat Is Bad for Athletes in Many Ways

Not only are top-level athletes quite lean, but also body composition is an excellent predictor of performance at all levels of endurance sports.

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is the proven weight-loss program for endurance athletes. See what’s new in the new edition and then look for the book in your local bookstore; bike, running, or tri shop; or online.

Why Dieting Doesn’t Work for Athletes (or Most Anyone)

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Racing Weight explains 6 simple ways athletes can lose fat without losing performance.

Everyone knows what a diet is. Because dieting is so familiar and ubiquitous, we don’t usually define it, but if we wanted to do so anyway, we could describe it as the practice of adopting a set of dietary rules—which usually include reduced food intake or forbidden food types—for the sake of losing weight.

Performance weight management is rather different from dieting. It is best defined as an ongoing effort to improve endurance performance by optimizing body composition for racing through nutritional, as well as other, means. Successful performance weight management usually results in the loss of body fat and body weight, but not always, because this is not, in fact, the goal. Some athletes attain their optimal racing weight by gaining muscle, for example.

Dieting can be an effective way to lose weight. Men and women who follow a traditional weight-loss diet such as Weight Watchers (based on calorie restriction) or the Atkins diet (based on food-type prohibition) often lose weight quickly at first. Unfortunately, few dieters stick with their program long enough to reach their weight goal, and more than 80 percent of those who do reach that goal through dieting eventually gain back most or all of the weight they lost.

Many age-group endurance athletes use dieting to lose weight as well. But dieting is not really appropriate for endurance athletes. The goal of dieting— weight loss for its own sake—is not the proper goal for cyclists, runners, swimmers, and triathletes. Improved performance is the proper goal. While weight loss in endurance athletes is frequently associated with improved performance, it isn’t always. When endurance athletes lose weight through dieting, their performance often suffers. The main problem is that the typical weight-loss diet fails to supply enough energy to support hard training. Diets based on food-type prohibitions sometimes also deprive the body of specific nutrients—especially carbohydrate— that are needed to properly absorb a heavy training load.

In fact, many diets intended for nonathletes can lead to worsened body composition when athletes use them.

A number of years ago scientists at the American Institute of Cancer Research (AICR) analyzed the nutritional guidelines presented in four diet books that were then popular: Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, The New Beverly Hills Diet, Protein Power, and Suzanne Somers’ Get Skinny on Fabulous Food (Meinz n.d.). None of these diets was promoted as a low-calorie diet. Each of them had its own distinct “secret” to weight loss. The secret of the New Beverly Hills Diet, for example, was food combining, whereas the secret of the Atkins diet was, of course, low carbohydrate intake. But the AICR analysis revealed that any reader who strictly followed the guidelines of any one of these four diets would in fact find herself on a low-calorie diet. Any weight loss that a person achieved on one of these programs would be attributable to the large calorie deficit it created, not to its proposed secret.

Other research has shown that the various popular weight-loss diets are more or less equally effective for overweight individuals who stick with them (Dansinger et al. 2005). This is only to be expected since, again, all such diets work the same way despite their disparate packaging. Endurance athletes are able to create even larger calorie deficits and lose weight even faster on traditional low-calorie diets because their training increases the amount of calories needed to maintain their current body weight. The catch—and it’s a big one—is that large calorie deficits deprive the muscles of the fuel they need for optimal performance in workouts and for fast recovery between workouts.

Racing Weight explains 6 simple ways athletes can lose fat without losing performance. For athletes who do want a more traditional diet, Racing Weight Quick Start Guide offers a training plan and nutrition plan to lose weight quickly over a short period of time between training blocks.

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

Your Weight Matters More Than Your Training

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You are not going to believe this: your weight is a better predictor of your race performance than how much or how well you train.

From Chapter One: Get Leaner, Go Faster in the new edition of Racing Weight:

The advantages of being light and lean for endurance performance are so obvious that they hardly needed to be scientifically proven, but exercise scientists have gone out and proven them anyway, and the proof is interesting. In a 1986 study Peter Bale and his colleagues at England’s Brighton Polytechnic University compared a host of anthropometric measurements in a group of 60 male runners (Bale, Bradbury, and Colley 1986). The subjects were divided into three groups of 20 based on their best 10K race times. The average weight of the men in the “average” group was 152 pounds compared to 145 pounds in the good group and 141 pounds in the elite group. Body composition measurements followed a similar pattern. Average body-fat percentages were 12.1, 10.7, and 8.0 in the average, good, and elite groups, respectively.

It bears noting that even the runners making up the average group were somewhat lighter and significantly leaner than the average nonrunner. The sport selects for naturally lighter and leaner individuals because they generally find greater initial success. The selection pressure continues within the sport right up to the top level. While most world-class runners have similar body weights (with women being lighter than men, naturally), research has shown that within the population of world-class runners, those with the lowest body-fat percentages tend to have the fastest race times.

Studies involving other types of endurance athletes have yielded similar findings. In 2011 Swiss researchers compared anthropometric variables against Ironman® swim, bike, and run split times in a group of 184 agegroup triathletes (Knechtle et al. 2011). Body weight was found to have a statistically moderate effect on total race time, while body-fat percentage had a large effect on total race time and a moderate effect (bordering on large) on swim, bike, and run splits. Both body weight and body-fat percentage were more strongly correlated with split times and total race time than are training variables such as average weekly training time.

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.

What Body Type Do You Have: Cyclist, Runner, Triathlete, Rower, or Swimmer?

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Each sport favors a particular body type.

Racing Weight explores the average body types of athletes in cross-country skiing, cycling, rowing, running, swimming, and triathlon and explains how each body type is suited to its sport.

So what body type do you have?

The Runner’s Body: Let’s face it, top runners and light and skinny. Elite male marathoners average 7% body fat (only cross-country skiers are leaner) and women weigh in at 12% body fat, the leanest of all endurance sports. Why? Runners who have less gravity to fight with each step are more efficient.

The Cyclist’s Body: There’s more than one body type in cycling because cyclists often specialize in climbing or time trialing. Cyclists tend to be twiggy up top with muscular legs. Cyclists range from 6-11% body fat for men and 12-16% body fat for women. The average elite climber is 5′ 7″ and 130 pounds. The typical time trialist body is 6 feet and 147 lbs.

The Swimmer’s Body: The best swimmers are very tall, often with unusually long torsos and arms. They have large feet and flexible ankles–great for kicking propulsion. Swimmers carry more body fat than other endurance athletes: 10-12% for men and 19-21% for women. Why? Fat is more buoyant than muscle. One study also found that swimmers’ bodies add fat because of repeated exposure to cold water.

The Triathlete’s Body: The three-sport discipline of triathlon allows for great leeway in the body types of the best triathletes. The nature of the sport means that there are more ways to win, which lessens the competitive selection pressure on body type. Triathletes are often tall, but not exclusively so. Male elites have body fat percentages from 6-10% and females range between 12-15%.

The Cross-Country Skier’s Body: Elite cross-country skiers tend to be average height or slightly tall. They are muscular but the leanest of any endurance sport. Average male: 5′ 10″, 165 lbs, and 5% body fat | Average female: 5′ 7″, 141 lbs, and 11% body fat

The Rower’s Body: In rowing, mass is an advantage so the sport is divided into lightweight and heavyweight classes. Both classes feature muscular bodies. Men have body fat ranges under 8% while women are in the 12-16% range.

Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeLearn more about athlete body types and their influence on performance in the new edition of Racing Weight, released in December, 2012. Racing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.

Why Your Body Type Matters

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Each sport favors a particular body type.

body typeDuring the Olympics, we stumbled across a blog post on a photo book called The Athlete by sports photographers Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein. This book is a collection of photographs of Olympic athletes wearing very little–and perhaps a bit more oiled up than is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, to see a tiny figure skater next to a weightlifter is a fascinating reminder that the elites in our sports are elite in part because of how they are built.

The BBC picked up on the fun of this during the London Olympics with this “body type matcher” where readers could enter just two variables–weight and height–to be matched with an Olympian of the same stats. Obviously, this little web app is so simplistic that it’s really for entertainment.

Racing Weight explores the average body types of athletes in cross-country skiing, cycling, rowing, running, swimming, and triathlon. Why? To show how the demands of each sport enforce body composition types.

Racing Weight explains why each average body type makes sense for each sport, but here’s the basic message: the best athletes in any sport tend to be built in ways advantageous to that sport’s demands.

The best basketball players are tall because the point-scoring method involves a 10-foot high basket. The best football linebackers are massive because their job is to be immovable.

So what’s the best body type for endurance sports? Mostly, one that is light and lean.

In fact, weight and body-fat percentages are more strongly correlated with finish times than training variables. That’s right, the fastest elites also have the least body fat. Why?

  • Because they are more efficient (less gravity to overcome),
  • dissipate heat better (less insulation), and
  • can send more oxygen to muscle when there’s less oxygen demand from fatty tissue.

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

Should You Eat Like a Caveman?

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Carbohydrate restriction in The Zone Diet and the Paleo Diet actually hurt endurance sports performance

In the new edition of Racing Weight just released this December, author and certified sports nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald debunks two popular diets among athletes, the Zone Diet and the Paleo Diet. Both diets are low-carb diets, restricting calories from carbohydrates, a fuel source that dozens of studies over decades have shown to be the most critical fuel source for high performing endurance athletes. Citing a wide variety of recent academic studies that show decreases in performance among devotees of the Zone and Paleo Diets, Fitzgerald argues that among endurance athletes, carbohydrate is king.

From the new edition of Racing Weight:

Such diets typically do not deprive athletes of the total calories they need to support their training. But like the popular weight-loss diets, they do tend to deprive athletes of adequate carbohydrate. Also, their restrictive, imbalanced nature makes them just as hard to sustain as low-calorie diets. Research dating back almost a century has demonstrated that lowcarb diets such as the Zone Diet reduce the body’s capacity to handle higher training loads. In 2002, researchers at Kingston University in England looked at the effect of the Zone Diet on training capacity in runners (Jarvis et al. 2002). Volunteers were required to run as long as they could at a fixed intensity of 80 percent of VO2max on two separate occasions: before starting the Zone Diet and again after a week on the Zone Diet. The average time to exhaustion before the Zone Diet was 37:41. A week later the average time to exhaustion had dropped all the way downto 34:06. Just seven days of inadequate carb intake had reduced these runners’ intensive endurance by nearly 10 percent.

Fitzgerald offers a few other critiques of the Paleo Diet in this recent post on Triathlete.com.

Read more on the Paleo Diet and the Zone Diet’s effects on performance in Racing Weight, 2nd Ed., just released this December. Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.

Holiday Weight Gain and the 8% Rule

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In the first edition of Racing Weight, author Matt Fitzgerald cited a diet study that found that most Americans gain 5 pounds of body fat during the holidays—and never lose it.

From the new edition of Racing Weight:

A majority of elite endurance athletes I’ve surveyed on the topic of off-season diet tell me they eat less carefully during the off-season than they do within the training cycle. The rationale for such dietary slacking off is not physiological but rather psychological. Athletes find it easier to eat with great discipline within the training cycle when they give themselves an opportunity to reward that discipline between training cycles.

Weight gain tends to be unavoidable for many athletes in the off-season because of a reduction in training. When reduced training is combined with a slacker diet, the likelihood of weight gain is further increased. A small amount of off-season weight gain is not a bad thing. In fact it’s a good thing inasmuch as it results from giving yourself a needed physical and mental break from the training and dietary rigors of the training cycle.

All too many endurance athletes gain too much fat in the off-season, however. Cyclist Jan Ullrich was infamous for letting himself go during the winter. His racing weight was 158 pounds, but he would routinely show up for his team’s first training camp of the year at 180 pounds. He would perform poorly throughout the early season as he scrambled to work his body back into shape in time for July’s Tour de France. Many cycling experts believe Ullrich would have won more than the one Tour he claimed at age 24 if he had taken better care of himself during the off-season.

Thanks to favorable genes, a few endurance athletes can slack off as much as they want in the off-season without putting on a whole bunch of fat (although not necessarily without losing a ton of fitness), but most endurance athletes, like most humans in general, have a built-in potential for rapid weight gain. The transition from peak-season training to off-season slacking presents the perfect circumstances for this potential to be unleashed.

The most effective way to prevent off-season weight gain from getting out of hand is to set a specific weight-gain limit. I suggest you try to limit your off-season weight gain to no more than 8 percent of your optimal performance weight. So if your optimal performance weight is 162 pounds, you should avoid gaining more than 13 pounds during the off-season. It so happens that my marathon racing weight is 154 pounds, and my off-season weight naturally peaks at 165 pounds (a difference of just over 7 percent) when I’m doing everything an endurance athlete should do in terms of training and nutrition at this time of year. But this 8 percent rule is not based only on my personal experience. It has been confirmed as a good rule of thumb by a number of other athletes, coaches, and sports nutritionists with whom I have discussed the topic of off-season weight gain.

This and dozens of new and improved weight-loss steps are available in the new edition of Racing Weight, just released in December, 2012. Racing Weight 2nd Ed. RW2 96dpi 400x600p strokeRacing Weight is a proven weight-management program for endurance athletes.