How to Lose Weight Without Sacrificing Cycling Performance
The Climb (#191)
Introduction
If you want to lose weight without wrecking your cycling performance, fuel the work you do on the bike and manage your calorie deficit away from it.
That’s one of the biggest distinctions I make when I’m coaching someone who wants to get lighter while still getting faster.
I don’t want a cyclist heading into a long ride worrying about how few calories they can consume.
If you’re going out for five hours, the priority during those five hours is performance.
You need enough carbohydrate available to actually do the work.
Then we deal with the fat-loss side of the equation away from the bike.
Why I Separate Fat Loss and Performance
I tend to look at cycling nutrition and everyday nutrition almost as two different jobs.
Your training plan is there to improve your performance.
Your wider nutrition plan allows us to control body weight.
Obviously the two interact, but trying to force the calorie deficit into every part of your day can create problems.
A cyclist might think:
“I’m trying to lose weight, so I’ll eat less before my ride.”
Then they’ll also eat less during the ride.
They get through the session, but the quality drops.
They finish absolutely starving.
And now managing their food for the rest of the day becomes much harder.
I’d rather fuel the training properly in the first place.
The food you’re consuming during the ride is there to support the performance you’re asking your body to produce.
Then, once you’re off the bike, we can be much more deliberate about your overall calorie intake.
Training A Lot Doesn’t Automatically Mean You’ll Lose Weight
This is something I explain even to cyclists doing a lot of volume.
You might be riding 12 or 14 hours a week.
That sounds like an enormous amount of activity.
But look at the whole week.
You’re asleep for roughly eight hours each night.
You might be sitting working for another eight hours each day.
Even if you ride for one or two hours, there can still be a huge portion of your day where you’re relatively sedentary.
That’s why I don’t simply assume somebody doing lots of cycling can eat whatever they want and their weight will take care of itself.
We still need to understand what happens during all those hours away from training.
That’s where tracking can become useful.
Start By Understanding What You're Already Doing
When somebody starts working with me, I don’t immediately throw a completely new diet and training programme at them.
I like having an assessment week first.
I want to understand:
- What they’re currently eating
- Their training habits
- Their lifestyle
- Their current fitness
- Their weight
- Their work commitments
- What time they realistically have available
On the nutrition side, I’ll initially use a Google Sheet to get a loose picture of what somebody is eating.
After that, we can use MyFitnessPal so I can look at their diary and get more insight into calories and macros.
That means I’m making decisions based on what somebody is actually doing rather than guessing.
Sometimes Cyclists Trying to Lose Weight Need to Eat More
One client I coached is a good example of this.
We were working through quite an aggressive phase because he had a long-distance endurance event coming up.
Over eight weeks, he lost around eight kilos.
But one of the biggest problems we discovered wasn’t that he was eating too much around his cycling.
He wasn't eating enough.
He was heading into long rides quite depleted.
So part of the solution was getting him to eat more before the bike and fuel more effectively during the ride.
At the same time, we managed the calorie deficit elsewhere.
That's the difference.
I didn't just look at his goal and say:
“You want to lose weight, so eat less.”
We looked at where the food was actually needed.
Your On-Bike Nutrition Has A Job To Do
For longer rides, I want cyclists thinking properly about carbohydrate intake.
During the call that prompted this article, I was talking with a cyclist weighing 97kg and explained that for a long ride we'd potentially be looking at around 97 grams of carbohydrate an hour.
I also use a nutrition tool that helps work out carbohydrate requirements before and during a ride depending on the duration and intensity.
The exact strategy can change, but the principle stays the same.
Fuel the work.
Doing that can also help manage what happens afterwards.
If you've spent several hours riding under-fuelled, coming home absolutely ravenous doesn't make your fat-loss goal any easier.
I Don't Want Every Client Eating The Same Way
Some cyclists need a lot of guidance around food.
Others already have very good nutritional habits.
Someone might need example meals and much more structure.
Someone else might only need to be a little more mindful of certain foods or adjust their calorie intake.
There are also periods where fat loss isn't the main priority at all.
Maybe somebody has an important event coming up and their training is going brilliantly.
Their weight might already have dropped slightly.
At that point we might decide:
“Let's focus on performing well at the event first. We can spend more time on the diet phase afterwards.”
That's completely fine.
I don't believe every week of coaching has to be a fat-loss week.
Holidays Don't Need To Become Dieting Competitions
Travel is another good example.
If you're going on holiday, I might deliberately put you into a maintenance phase.
I want you to relax and enjoy yourself.
That doesn't mean throwing everything away.
It simply means accepting that this particular week might not need to be about actively losing weight.
We can maintain where you are and then continue afterwards.
I would much rather somebody do that than feel like they have to force an aggressive diet through every holiday, work trip and social event.
The Best Plan Is The One With The Least Friction
This is probably one of the biggest things I've learned from coaching.
I want to remove as much friction as possible.
If somebody has access to a meal-preparation company that can give them the calories and food they need, brilliant.
If that removes the problem of finding time to shop and cook, I'm all for it.
I'm not going to tell somebody they have to prepare every meal themselves simply because that happens to be the method I normally use.
That would just create more friction.
The same applies to training.
I want the training plan sitting in TrainingPeaks so you know what you're doing.
You get on the bike and ride.
You shouldn't have to spend another hour trying to work out what session you're supposed to do after you've already had a busy day at work.
Coaching Needs To Adapt Every Week
I normally try to build the bigger training structure over roughly 12 weeks.
Nutrition can be looked at more on a monthly basis.
But the actual adjustments happen much more frequently.
That's why I use weekly check-ins.
A client can tell me what went well, what didn't, what's coming up and whether there's anything in the programme they're unsure about.
Then I can look at the training, nutrition and data and decide whether anything needs changing.
Maybe the calorie deficit needs increasing slightly.
Maybe it needs reducing.
Maybe training needs adapting because work has suddenly become hectic.
Maybe there's a holiday coming up.
The plan gives us structure.
The communication makes that structure useful.
I Want Cyclists To Understand Why They're Doing It
Ultimately, I don't want coaching to be something where I hand somebody a training plan and nutrition plan and they blindly follow instructions.
I want them to understand the process.
I can look at power and heart-rate data.
I can help somebody understand whether their fuelling might have contributed to what happened during a session.
I can review the profile of an upcoming sportive and help them think about pacing, where to conserve energy and how they might approach different climbs.
Over time, the cyclist starts to understand those decisions themselves.
That's the outcome I really want.
You're not just being given a plan.
You're building the tools and knowledge to recognise:
“I know what went wrong there.”
Or:
“I've got this event coming up, so I know what I need to focus on.”
Make Your Event Feel Like Another Well-Prepared Ride
When somebody eventually gets to their sportive or endurance event, I don't want race day nutrition to suddenly become an experiment.
How you've felt throughout training should give you a very good idea of how you're going to feel during the event.
You've practised the fuelling.
You've practised the pacing.
You've done the training.
The event is essentially another ride, you've just prepared more for it.
And that's why, when fat loss and performance are both goals, I don't try to achieve both by simply eating less everywhere.
Fuel the bike.
Manage the deficit away from it.
And keep adapting the process around the life you actually live.
Conclusion
If you want to lose weight and still improve on the bike, I don’t think the answer is to simply eat less around your training.
I’d rather fuel the work properly, keep the quality of your sessions high, and create the calorie deficit away from the bike.
That usually means looking at the full picture: your training, your work, your appetite, your weekends, your travel, and how much friction there is in the plan you’re trying to follow.
The goal isn’t to make nutrition or training more complicated.
It’s to make both easier to execute consistently.
Fuel the bike.
Manage the deficit off the bike.
And build the plan around the life you actually have.
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