HELP ME HIT RACE WEIGHT

For most cyclists, losing weight is a sure-fire way to improve performance, but the path to enlightenment is littered with pitfalls. Cyclist explores how to do it best

Spending thousands of pounds upgrading your kit is certain to improve your performance on the bike – but it’s not the best way. For the majority of us, there are greater performance gains to be had by losing body weight, because while shedding weight from your equipment has the potential to save a few hundred grams, stripping unnecessary weight from your body gives you the scope to save thousands.

The reason weight has such an impact on performance lies in its relationship with power. Accelerating a given weight or moving it uphill requires power, so it follows that cutting weight from an object will see it travel faster for the same amount of power. In other words, the lighter you are the quicker you’ll go for a similar effort. This is quantified by your watts-per-kilo (W/kg) figure. Due to this being a relative measure, in that it allows any cyclist to be fairly compared to another, it is one of the most coveted values in cycling.

Weight loss for athletes remains a minefield of fact, fiction and contradictory evidence, so Cyclist decided the best way to get to the truth was to consult the experts and then test the theories for ourselves. That’s how I find myself being prodded, scanned, measured, tested and re-tested, all with a specific goal in mind: to lose weight without any loss of power.

Energy – a balancing act

It seems logical to start by examining the basic science that underpins weight loss. We derive most of our energy from three types of nutrient: carbohydrate, fat and protein. This energy is measured in kilojoules or kilocalories (often shortened to just calories, or the abbreviation kcal) and different nutrients have different energy densities: fat has 9kcal per gram, while carbohydrates and protein have 4kcal per gram.

This energy is used by our bodies to fuel three things: metabolism (the chemical processes that occur in our cells to keep us alive), thermogenesis (the production of heat) and muscular contraction (the production of movement). The supply of

‘We are looking for fat loss, not weight loss. Losing fat will favourably change your powerto-weight ratio, while simply losing weight won’t affect it at all’