Training for Weight Loss

Maybe you made a goal of losing weight this Winter or offseason but feel as if you are falling short on that with about one month to go until Spring?

Weight loss with cycling can be tricky for a couple reasons.  First, the sport of cycling is about efficiency.  So the better you get, the more efficient you get.  Second, cycling is a sport that enables the athlete to push hard and further because the bike takes away things like impact that normally would hold you back.  Thus, it requires you to eat more food, and more carbohydrates.  For these two reasons, if you are not doing certain things right, you are not just going to lose weight by riding.  

So what do you need to look at and make sure you are doing correctly to lose weight on the bike? Let’s go through the list!

1. You need to train consistently!  Training each week, multiple days a week, and training back to back days is really what raises your metabolism where you need it to burn off unwanted weight.

2. The timing or your fueling.  This is KEY!  The critical points are the meals two hours prior to your workout, each hour during your workout, and in the 30 mins to 2 hours after your workout.  This is where you absolutely must be eating the right macro ratios of carbohydrates.  This will lead to you crushing your workout, recovering better from them, and optimally raising your metabolism.  

3. Complete the workouts!  You must do most of the work the best you can as this is what really rev’s the metabolism. 

4. You need to be training using the full range of zones.  That means training the explosive zones that use a lot glycogen as fuel but are short efforts, the threshold zones that use less glycogen but the efforts are longer, and the medium zones that use fat as fuel.  Using all of these zones keeps your body using all of the fuel it takes in and helps to raise the metabolism while avoiding storing fuel that is not used as fat.

Tom Danielson, CINCH Coaching and CINCH Cycling

Contributor to Colorado Avid Cyclist