Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Matt Fitzgerald

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by VeloPress, a division of Competitor Group, Inc.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Fitzgerald, Matt.

Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance / Matt Fitzgerald.—2nd ed.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-934030-99-8 (pbk.: alk. paper); ISBN 978-1-937716-26-4 (e-book)

1. Endurance sports—Training. 2. Endurance sports—Physiological aspects. 3. Athletes—Nutrition. 4. Body weight—Regulation. I. Title.

GV749.5.F58 2012

 613.2’024796—dc23

2012042138

For information on purchasing VeloPress books, please call (800) 811-4210, ext. 2138, or visit www.velopress.com.

Cover design by Maryl Swick

Cover photograph by Tim Mantoani

Interior photographs of Bishop, Kalmoe, Wellington, Cafaro, Bausch, Gould, Rowbury, and King courtesy of Corbis; Hall, Randall, Dombrowski, Flanagan, Haskins, and Kemper courtesy of Getty Images; Kostich courtesy of Ray Vidal; Jurek courtesy of Nick Onken; Olds courtesy of CJ Farquharson, CJFoto.com

Illustrations in Chapter 1 and Appendix by Kagan McLeod and Mike Faille

Version 3.1

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART I: FINDING YOUR RACING WEIGHT

1   Get Leaner, Go Faster

2   How Much Should You Weigh?

3   Dieting vs. Performance Weight Management

PART II: 6 STEPS TO PEAK PERFORMANCE

4   Improving Your Diet Quality

5   Managing Your Appetite

6   Balancing Your Energy Sources

7   Monitoring Yourself

8   Nutrient Timing

9   Training for Racing Weight

PART III: FINE-TUNING YOUR STRATEGY

10   The Racing Weight Journey

11   Racing Weight Foods

12   What the Pros Eat

13   Racing Weight and You

Appendix: Strength Exercises for Endurance Athletes

References

Index

About the Author

PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION

The premise of this book is simple: Weight management is as important for endurance athletes as it is for nonathletes, yet the goal and the best methods of weight management are different for those who race than they are for those who don’t.

As a sports nutritionist and journalist I have written a great deal about weight management for both athletes and nonathletes. I must confess that I find it more rewarding to coach athletes toward getting leaner. The secret to weight loss for the overweight nonathlete is motivation. Most people who are really motivated to lose weight are bound to succeed. As they say, Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Dieters seldom fail for lack of knowledge. As a weight-management coach of nonathletes, I can only educate; the motivation to succeed has to come from within each individual. If that were easy, obesity wouldn’t be so prevalent today.

Endurance athletes are different. The motivation to perform better is intrinsic to members of this group. Cyclists, Nordic skiers, rowers, runners, swimmers, and triathletes are willing to do what it takes to improve, whether it’s train harder, take recovery more seriously, work on their mental game—or lose excess body fat.

After the first edition of Racing Weight was published in November 2009, I started to receive feedback from athletes who had read it and had implemented the program. It has been gratifying to see the great number of positive results. Most of the athletes who have shared their success stories with me have thanked me for having addressed the longstanding need for a weight-management program designed especially for endurance athletes. I am always quick to point out to these folks that it is they who deserve the credit for their results. Yes, I have provided some useful information, but the motivation is theirs, and it makes all the difference.

There are other sorts of feedback that I have received from Racing Weight readers as well: questions, points of confusion, a few criticisms, and a correction or two. The book was not perfect. And any program that is based on the best practices of elite athletes and is supported by current science will begin to show its age as best practices evolve and science advances. It’s not as if the most successful endurance athletes have started doing anything radically new for weight management or as if the scientific underpinnings of the Racing Weight program have been completely inverted, but over time we reshape these ideas in subtle but important ways.

For example, a colleague of mine, Robert Portman, PhD, who is one of the world’s leading sports nutrition researchers, recently made a compelling case in favor of concentrating carbohydrate intake in the early part of the day and protein intake late in the day. A small but growing number of athletes are now practicing this method with good results. Therefore I have chosen to incorporate it into the nutrient timing step of the Racing Weight system.

Quite apart from the evolution of athletic best practices and science, my thinking on training, nutrition, and weight management has continued to evolve through my experience as an athlete and coach. Where necessary, I have refined some of the tools presented in Racing Weight. The second edition of the book has been a welcome opportunity to address the questions and suggestions of the first edition’s readers, to update the program with the latest research, and to make the changes and additions that would make the program even more effective for motivated athletes.

The biggest change is that, whereas the original Racing Weight program comprised five steps, the revised program adds a sixth step: self-monitoring. Research has shown that self-monitoring practices and the behavioral modifications that surround them are the strongest predictors of successful long-term weight-loss maintenance in the general population. In this regard, endurance athletes are not so different from non-athletes. Readers of the first edition will recall that the book contained a chapter titled Monitoring Your Progress. However, the monitoring practices described therein were extrinsic to the program. By integrating self-monitoring into the Racing Weight method, you will, I hope, be able to tap this advantage in your effort to reach your racing weight.

Readers familiar with the first edition will notice other changes. I added Chapter 3, Dieting vs. Performance Weight Management, as a general overview of the Racing Weight program. In it, I explore exactly which weight-management methods athletes can and cannot successfully borrow from nonathletic dieters. Chapter 10, The Racing Weight Journey, provides additional guidance on how to put into practice the six steps of the Racing Weight program.

Less conspicuous but no less important than these structural changes are some new tools that have been added to the chapters that outline the six steps. These tools are intended to make the program as simple and easy to practice as it can possibly be.

MATT FITZGERALD

INTRODUCTION

How would your performance change if you were at your optimal body weight? Imagine what it would feel like to set out on a run weighing 10 pounds less than you do right now. How much would it affect your efficiency, your endurance, or, more simply, your self-image? When was the last time you saw a marked improvement in your fitness? Do a few extra pounds stand between you and a faster race? Chances are that it was your quest for optimal body weight that led you to pick up Racing Weight.

You are not alone in this quest. Several years ago I assisted exercise scientists from Montana State University in conducting a survey of endurance athletes concerning their attitudes about their body weight and their weight-management practices. More than three thousand cyclists, runners, triathletes, and other endurance athletes responded. Most were serious competitive athletes who trained at least one hour a day, five days a week. The results of the survey, which were presented at a meeting of the Society for Behavioral Medicine in Montreal, Canada and published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine (Ciccolo et al. 2009), were quite interesting.

Seventy-four percent of respondents labeled themselves as concerned or very concerned about their body weight. Fifty-four percent said that they were dissatisfied with their body weight. These figures are almost identical to those that come from surveys of the general population, despite the fact that the general population is quite a bit heavier than most of the people who took the Montana State survey.

While striking on one level, these findings did not surprise me. That’s because, as a sports nutritionist and endurance sports expert, I am accustomed to communicating with and helping endurance athletes who are concerned about and dissatisfied with their body weight. As a runner and triathlete myself, I share their concern and, at times, their dissatisfaction.

The nature of the endurance athlete’s concern and dissatisfaction is somewhat different from the nonathlete’s, however. The nonathlete is typically motivated to shed excess body fat by a desire to look better and, perhaps also, by a desire to improve his or her health. Endurance athletes care about looking good and being healthy too, but they are equally concerned about their sports performance, and they know that excess body fat is the enemy of performance in every endurance sport. For example, a runner weighing 160 pounds has to muster about 6.5 percent more energy to run the same pace as a runner weighing 150 pounds.

Whereas two-thirds of American adults in the general population are overweight, most of the athletes who took the Montana State survey had body-mass indices that fell within the healthy range. Yet more than half of these endurance athletes reported being heavier than the weight they consider optimal for peak performance in their sport—hence their dissatisfaction. Do these men and women suffer from a distorted body image? By and large, no. They simply have different standards for their bodies, and they struggle to attain them just as nonathletes struggle to meet their own, more relaxed standards. You probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

As much as most athletes appreciate the importance of a lean body composition to endurance performance, I believe that many athletes nevertheless underestimate its impact. They generally assume that while excess body fat may be the greatest performance limiter for athletes who are truly overweight, athletes who are already lean are more likely to be held back by fitness factors such as aerobic capacity. In fact, leanness is as important to performance as any fitness factor at every level of endurance sports, right up to the very top. This was shown in a study involving two dozen elite male and female distance runners from Ethiopia (Beis et al. 2011). All of these runners had very low body fat levels and very fast race times, but the leanest ones had the fastest times. Even though the differences in body fat were small, these differences predicted the variation in their race times as well as differences in aerobic capacity (VO2max).

My own appreciation for the importance of body weight to running performance in particular was heightened by an experience I had in 2008. Darwin Fogt, a Los Angeles–based physical therapist, had invited me to stop by his facility to try out his Alter-G antigravity treadmill. I had been dying to step onto one of these machines since I first heard about them a couple of years earlier, so I readily accepted his offer.

The Alter-G allows the user to walk or run at the equivalent of as little as 20 percent of his or her body weight by increasing the air pressure within an airtight tent that seals around the user’s waist and thereby lifts the runner. Many elite runners, including three-time Olympian Dathan Ritzenhein, use it to train through injuries that prevent them from running on their full body weight. Others, such as Ritzenhein’s Nike teammate Galen Rupp, use it to increase their running volume without increasing their risk of injury.

My epiphany came when Fogt zipped me into his Alter-G, increased the belt speed to my normal jogging pace, and then reduced my effective body weight to 90 percent. Instantly I felt as if I had become 10 percent fitter. Scooting along at a 7:00/mile pace was utterly effortless. It was not a feeling of gross artificial assistance, like running on the moon. Rather, it felt like normal running, only so much better.

I was so impressed by the experience that I later used an Alter-G as a tool for helping other athletes to better appreciate the impact of body weight changes on performance capacity. Many of these athletes were shocked by how heavy they felt at their full body weight after experiencing 90 or 80 percent of it. What had felt normal minutes earlier now felt like trying to run while wearing a stuffed backpack. It was a very effective teaching tool that probably motivated more than a few athletes to step up their efforts to get leaner.

Unfortunately, endurance athletes seldom choose the best methods to pursue their optimal racing weight. Despite their awareness of the body weight–performance connection, their hard training, and their efforts to eat carefully, a majority of the athletes in the survey I described said they were currently above their optimal racing weight.

Why do so many endurance athletes struggle to reach and maintain their racing weight? For largely the same reasons that nonathletes struggle to avoid becoming overweight. Our modern lifestyle is different from that of our early ancestors in two important ways that promote excessive weight gain: We have easy access to cheap, high-calorie foods, and we are much less active.

ENDURANCE ATHLETES SELDOM CHOOSE THE BEST METHODS TO PURSUE THEIR OPTIMAL RACING WEIGHT.

Our early ancestors lived on wild plants, nuts, seeds, and the occasional piece of fish or meat—mostly low-calorie foods and usually just enough of them to supply the energy required to get more food. Today we still have the option to eat like hunter-gatherers, and some nutrition authorities urge people to do so, but it’s not a realistic solution for most of us. We have come to prefer the taste of high-calorie foods such as cheeseburgers (which did not exist until a little more than a century ago) to low-calorie foods such as vegetables, and we feel compelled to eat what’s put in front of us even though the portions have never been larger and the promotion of food has never been so ubiquitous.

What’s more, early humans had to work much harder and burn a lot of calories for every meal, foraging through woods and fields or stalking game for hours, whereas today we just sidle up to a fast-food drive-thru window or press Start on the microwave oven. But endurance athletes do have one major advantage over the greater population—we are hardly sedentary. But even most endurance athletes spend more time sitting around than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, and we are no less plagued by the overabundance of cheap, high-calorie processed foods than our sedentary counterparts.

So if the weight concerns of endurance athletes and nonathletes share a common cause, is their solution also the same? The answer to this question is yes and no. Certainly, a balanced, natural diet is the most effective means to manage weight for endurance athletes and non-athletes alike. However, the weight management goals of endurance athletes are somewhat different from those of nonathletes, and some of the challenges that endurance athletes face on the path toward an optimal performance weight (rather than toward the basic healthy body weight that most nonathletes pursue) are also different. For example, low-carbohydrate diets are an effective weight-loss strategy for nonathletes, but for endurance athletes they are a recipe for disaster because they starve the muscles of the primary fuel they need for endurance performance. Endurance athletes generally require their own special approach to weight management.

Following weight-loss diets that are intended for nonathletes is but one of many mistakes that endurance athletes make in pursuing their optimal racing weight. Relying on supplements, which are marginally helpful at best and dangerous at worst, is another. In 2008, for example, world champion cyclist Marta Bastianelli of Italy was banned from competition after one of her blood samples tested positive for an illegal diet drug. Bastianelli admitted that she had taken the drug after receiving pressure to lose weight from her coaches. More dangerous still is the mistake of disordered eating (usually chronic moderate undereating), which is especially common among collegiate female runners. In a 2007 study nearly one in five female cross-country runners reported past eating disorders and nearly one in four showed evidence of continued inadequate nutrient intake (Thompson 2007). Forcing yourself to go hungry as a means to attain optimal racing weight always backfires in the long run because it deprives your body of the energy needed to absorb hard training.

Not every endurance athlete goes about weight management the wrong way. By definition, the weight-management practices of the highest-performing athletes are the right way to pursue optimal racing weight. This is an important point. The purpose of weight management for the endurance athlete is better performance. The bathroom scale alone cannot determine whether a particular dietary habit or training pattern is effective. The stopwatch is the final arbiter. One of the great things about the competitive nature of endurance sports is that it proves what works and what doesn’t. If you want to know the most effective way to train for endurance performance, you can do no better than to study the general training patterns that are shared by the best athletes. Similarly, if you want to know the right way to manage your weight as an endurance athlete, your best bet is to study the common dietary and weight-management practices of the highest performers.

This isn’t a diet book. I wrote this book because I saw a need for a focused, comprehensive, and reliable guide to weight management for endurance sports. It is my belief that such a resource can be truly reliable only if its guidelines are based on the weight-management practices of the best athletes. The Racing Weight system is not some theory of performance weight management that I created by applying creativity to scientific evidence. In this book I’ve simply presented a description of what works best for endurance athletes in the real world. Furthermore, Racing Weight is not dietary shtick that I developed for the sake of having a distinctive brand. My contribution is limited to formalizing this description to some degree by developing tools such as the Diet Quality Score (DQS), which you will learn about in Chapter 4. My work puts me in the happy position of observing what the most successful athletes do, and my service is to pass along what I learn.

There are six specific practices that have stood out to me as the keys to the weight-management success of top athletes and that I believe every other athlete should emulate. Four of them are dietary, one is behavioral, and the last is training related. All six are habits that I have observed over and over again among the most successful athletes in my eighteen years as an endurance sports journalist, coach, and nutritionist. Together these six practices comprise the six steps of the Racing Weight system. Here’s a quick synopsis of the plan:

IMPROVE YOUR DIET QUALITY. Step 1 in my Racing Weight plan is improving your diet quality, or the amount of nutrition you get from each calorie in your diet. Increasing the nutrition-per-calorie ratio of your diet will enable you to get all the nutrients you need for maximum performance from fewer total calories, thus enabling you to become leaner. An effective way to improve your diet quality is to grade or score the quality of your current diet and continue to score your diet quality as you make efforts to improve it. Nutrition scientists have come up with various ways of measuring diet quality. Most of these approaches are a bit too complex to be useful to the average endurance athlete, so I created a simplified diet-quality scoring system that you will find very easy to work with and that will help you nourish your body for health and endurance performance. In Chapter 4, I will give you all of the information you need to track and improve your DQS.

MANAGE YOUR APPETITE. It goes without saying that in order to attain and maintain their optimal racing weight, athletes must control the amount of food they eat. But athletes must not go about controlling their food intake by eating less than is required to satisfy their hunger. Not only is this psychologically untenable, but it is also certain to wreak havoc on training performance because physical hunger is closely tied to an athlete’s real energy needs. Most athletes, however, eat more than is required to meet their needs and satisfy their hunger. Our modern food environment is set up to all but ensure that we overeat without even realizing it.

Fortunately, there are various proven tricks and techniques that you can use to regain control of your appetite and your personal food environment so that you neither overeat nor go hungry. I will share these guidelines with you in Chapter 5.

BALANCE YOUR ENERGY SOURCES. There are three main sources of energy for the human body: carbohydrate, fat, and protein. Many weight-loss diets have been based on the idea that to lose weight, a dieter has to maintain the perfect balance of these three macronutrients in daily eating. That none of these diets can agree on the magical macronutrient ratio is not the only evidence that it does not exist.

The best evidence suggests that individuals can balance their energy sources in a variety of different ways with equal success. But for endurance athletes, doing so is a little different because macronutrient balance also has a major impact on training performance and many athletes do not consume enough carbohydrate in particular to maximize that performance. Any measure that boosts your training performance will also tend to make you leaner. In Chapter 6 I will show you how to ensure that you get the right amount of carbohydrate to maximize your training performance and get leaner.

MONITOR YOURSELF. The most common weight-management practices shared by dieters who have lost large amounts of weight and kept the weight off are not dietary patterns such as low fat intake but self-monitoring practices such as weighing and food journaling. Such practices help dieters maintain a high level of awareness of their weight status and a strong commitment to their weight-management goals. Endurance athletes can benefit equally from self-monitoring but need to practice it somewhat differently, monitoring performance as well as diet, weight, and body composition. In Chapter 7 I will present a set of self-monitoring tools designed specifically to help endurance athletes achieve their weight-management goals.

TIME YOUR NUTRITION. When you eat affects your body as much as what you eat. The timing of your food intake has a big impact on what’s known as energy partitioning, or what becomes of the calories you consume. There are three main destinations of food calories in your body: muscle, fat cells, and energy. If you want to become leaner, you need to shift the balance of energy partitioning so that more calories are incorporated into your muscles, fewer calories are stored in your fat tissues, and more calories are used to supply your body’s immediate and short-term energy needs. This shift will lead to more metabolism-boosting lean tissue and less health-jeopardizing fat tissue.

Interestingly, you can often achieve this objective with little or no reduction in the total number of calories that enter your body. We’re really talking about redirecting calories once they’ve entered your body, not about decreasing the number of calories that enter your body in the first place. The practice of nutrient timing, or consuming the right nutrients at the right times throughout the day, will enable you to partition your energy more effectively and achieve your racing weight. In Chapter 8 I will show you how to practice nutrient timing the way many top endurance athletes do.

TRAIN RIGHT. Despite an increasingly popular belief to the contrary, exercise is the most powerful factor in successful weight management. More than 90 percent of people who succeed in losing large amounts of weight and keeping the weight off exercise regularly. One of the reasons so many people are overweight is that most of them do not exercise regularly.

Endurance athletes by definition have ticked the exercise box of the weight-management checklist. But that doesn’t mean that every endurance athlete trains optimally for weight management, and in fact most do not. To begin with, weight management should not be the primary objective of an endurance athlete’s training. Performance enhancement should be the primary goal. But these two objectives go hand in hand. If you train optimally to improve your performance, you will also get the best possible weight-management results.

THE MOST COMMON TRAINING MISTAKE ENDURANCE ATHLETES MAKE IS INSUFFICIENT INTENSITY VARIATION.

By far the most common training mistake in all endurance sports is insufficient intensity variation—specifically a tendency to do almost all training at moderate intensity. However, the best results come from a program in which roughly 80 percent of training is easy, 10 percent is moderate, and 10 percent is hard. In Chapter 9 I will show you how to avoid the most