“If I could just lose 5-10lb I would be so much faster!”
Have you ever thought this? Or heard someone say it. In endurance sport, the goal of getting leaner or losing weight can be very common.
However, in today’s episode, I talk all about how weight is just one factor determining your performance, why it may not lead to improved performance.
I share with you several nutrition and lifestyle strategies that you can focus on that help you FUEL your body properly and lead to performance, regardless of weight.
That being said, there can be a time and place for weight loss. It needs to be done safely and at the right time to avoid negative consequences.
Full transcript of the episode:
Hey, everyone! Welcome back to another episode of the fuel traffic. My name’s Andrea, I’m your host. And today I want to talk about the relationship between weight and performance and share with you what are my thoughts on this idea of having to lose weight to become faster or to be a better triathlete or a better runner?
Share my thoughts on that, but also what I think really you can actually do to improve your performance, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with weight. So this sport of endurance, so triathlon, running, cycling, there is a lot of sometimes focus on weight, whether it be looking a certain way, you know, looking like a runner or comparing ourselves to other people who may be smaller or leaner and then wanting to become that way as well.
This is something I sometimes hear from clients and feeling like if they could just lose a certain amount of weight then they’re going to be faster. Or if they could be a weight that they were in the past. And having done triathlons myself and doing some of my early twenties, I definitely felt the same way as well, and looked at other people and compared and felt that I needed to lose weight to be better and more so just to kind of look the part, but I think it really should not be that way.
Weight is not always going to translate to better performance, but I think where the problem becomes is usually in what happens when we’re trying to pursue that weight loss. What actions we’re taking and also what time of the year we’re taking those actions.
So first things first though, weights, and the number on the scale does not take into consideration. Where is that weight coming from? Okay. Is that weight from body fat, . You can lose weight from not eating carbs. You’re going to lose water weight. You’re going to lose glycogen. That’s not going to help your performance either. So weight does is not always equal and improvement in performance. And like I said, sometimes the strategies that people may take lead to restriction and then lead to some bigger issues with our nutrition and under fueling, which really are not going to have a good impact on. On your performance.
So I want to share with you what I think you should focus on in terms of your nutrition and your recovery, things that you can control that are going to have a benefit on your performance. And are not necessarily in the pursuit of trying to achieve a certain weight.
These have been shown to improve your performance. And if you’re not doing them already, then start here. There’s also so many other factors that go into what affects your performance that aren’t related to your body weight. So looking at the type of training that you’re doing, your VO2 max, are you doing strength training, sleep. There’s so much that affects your performance. That the number on the scale is just one.
So here are some nutrition and lifestyle strategies that I would recommend focusing on to improve your performance. It’s going to help you so much more overall, for your health, your performance, but your mental health as well because we’re not spending that time and that energy just feeling like we have to be smaller. We have to be leaner.
So. First thing is, you know, looking at race nutrition.
What can you do on race day that is going to improve your performance? Carbohydrate loading has been shown to increase your performance by two to 4%. So when you do that carb loading properly. So carb loading is not just a big pasta dinner the night before. There’s a process to it. And if you go back and listen to an earlier episode, carbohydrate loading mistakes to avoid think it’s episode number three or four, I go into all about how to carb load. But if you do this properly, like I said, a two to 4% increase in performance, which really adds up when it’s a long distance triathlon.
And here’s the thing with carb loading, you’re actually going to gain a little bit of weight. When we store more carbohydrates in our muscles, we’re going to store more water. So there’s a little bit of an increase in water weight
The next thing you can do on race day is fuel your race properly. Get an adequate number of carbohydrates per hour. So for long distance triathlon, I’m talking about 70.3 distance and higher, then we want to be aiming on the upper end of recommendations of carbohydrates per hour. So we’re looking at around 90 grams of carbs per hour, 60 to 90, 60 is on the lower ends, but I would say more like 70 to 90 grams of carbs per hour depending on many different factors. But we also see in research upwards of 120 grams of carbs per hour really can improve your performance.
So what does this take? This doesn’t take just taking all these extra carbs on race day. This takes a lot of practice in your training, training your gut, making sure you know how you’re going to fuel, what you can tolerate. So this in itself requires fueling all those long workouts leading up into training.
And I think we’re when we’re on that pursuit of trying to lose weight that’s kind of a big place that I see people cutting nutrition and cutting calories is fueling their workouts. But this is not the time to cut because when you fuel your workouts, all those long training sessions in your training block,
you’re going to recover faster because you’re not quite as depleted. And you’re going to also just get a better, have a better training session. You’re going to have more energy. You’re going to feel better, hit better paces then if you don’t fuel. So ,we want to make sure we’re fueling our body enough on race day, but that comes with also fueling all those long workouts into our training. The next one would be proper hydration.
Hydration also adds a couple percent benefit in your performance. So, what does that mean? So what does proper hydration mean? So one, when we are on race day, we want to figure out, okay, what’s my sweat rate. How much fluids do I need to be taking per hour to prevent dehydration? And this also takes a lot of practice, figuring out your sweat rate, figuring out your sodium sweat concentration.
But if you can do this, this is really going to help you. So even if you lost some weight going into your race, and if you totally ignored your hydration, think of how detrimental that’s going to be. So I know I have clients come to me before working with me they’ve had experiences where they just totally forgot to drink on the bike, whether it was a hard course or they just forgot about it, they didn’t know how much to drink. And then they’re really struggling when it comes to the run. So proper hydration is going to help you feel so much better if you’re not doing that, no matter what weight you are I think you’re going to also, you’re probably going. In a struggle.
So now looking at our day to day nutrition, you are going to have better performance if you’re fueling your workouts. So you’re getting adequate carbohydrates and nutrition prior to your training sessions. So you have good energy and then you’re also eating after those workouts.
You’re getting in that recovery nutrition as soon as possible. So what I see from people, new people that I start to work with who feel that maybe they need to lose weight or if they’re in that pursuit, another place where they really tend to cut is not eating enough before or not eating enough after.
So you don’t want to eat back those calories. But you really want to get rid of this type of thinking. You want to think to make your body perform well, do its best, do its job. Get the training that you want it to do. You gotta be eating before, you gotta be eating after .This is really not the time to cut those calories or to eat less. Because not only is it going to affect your recovery it’s also gonna put you at risk of injury and illness, and if you get injured or ill for a long period of time and you can’t train. That really is also going to affect your performance.
So along those same lines is just really giving your body enough nutrition that it needs to fuel to fuel your body and to fuel your training.
Drastically cutting our calories to achieve a certain weight is really not only going to just affect our training sessions, but it’s going to affect maybe where that weight is coming from. So if we’re having too much of a deficit or not doing it properly, we may be losing more muscle mass which is not going to be beneficial.
So when you feel your body, you feel so much better. When I work with clients who come from a place of not eating enough and then start fueling their body, like just such a drastic difference in how they feel, they have more energy, they enjoy training, they’re motivated to do their training. It’s not a burden.
So some other things that are also going to help your performance are taking care of any nutrient deficiencies you may have.
So I usually recommend at least in the off season, getting your blood work done and then test to see if you have any nutrient deficiencies. So if you are low in iron, then, if you can correct that deficiency and get it into the normal range that is going to improve your performance.
Getting enough sleep. So again, no matter, I think if you get to a certain weight, but you’re not prioritizing sleep and you’re not getting the right amount that adults need at least seven to nine hours, maybe on the upper end for us endurance athletes, then that’s gonna affect your recovery, your energy so much. Practice this, proper sleep hygiene, getting to bed at the right time so that you can get enough sleep, keep your phone out of the room, not looking at it and scrolling your phone just before bed, maybe taking magnesium before bed. These are different types of strategies that can help you get enough sleep, which can be really good for performance.
Some non nutrition things. One is incorporating strength training. So strength training has really been shown to help improve running the economy, improve your performance. If that’s not something that you’re doing already. So this is something that you can pursue, I would suggest, you know, getting some support and following the right type of plan, but doing that at least two to three times a week can be helpful. Next can be improving your form. If you can maybe improve your running form, your swimming form, then all of this can also help your performance too. Training with others, so sometimes running in a group, you’re going to push yourself more.
So next part is just looking at kind of the psychology or mental piece of this, having more confidence on race day, knowing you can accomplish this feeling good about all the training that you did when you do that on race day, I think that can really help your performance too. If you’re a little bit more distracted comparing your body or, you know, you didn’t make your goal weight, then this really just takes away from the experience and all the hard training that you did.
So I just kind of want to summarize by saying that there’s so many other things that are going to have a huge impact on your form performance than just weight.
So like I said, if you’re not doing these things really try to focus in on them. , I’m just kind of speaking from experience, this year is really when I did my first half iron man, so I don’t have a comparison, but this year I ran my fastest 5k and it was a minute faster than I had done the year or two prior.
And I was probably five pounds or more heavier. So it’s not all about weight what was I doing differently? Strength following the right type of training plan, fueling my body properly, really paying attention to that pre and post-workout nutrition. And I can say that prior to that, I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was kind of thinking more about how can I drop the weight cause that’s going to make me faster.
I also want to say that I’m not necessarily against weight loss.
If a client did come to me and they’re looking to lose body fat, improve their body composition. This is something that I can support people with but you really want to make sure a couple things of, like I said earlier. One, you’re doing it at the right time of the year. So, if your race is a couple months out or a couple of weeks out, this is not the time to put that weight loss goal or put that pressure on yourself to lose weight.
This is when we’re really focused on fueling our body properly because you have such a high volume training load that if you start to put in too much deficits you can increase your risk of injury and see a decreased performance. It’s best to really focus on this in the off season, in your base period, your training volume is lower, you don’t have that race looming. This would be the time. And it’s not about drastically cutting calories, moderate deficit, and still taking into account all of these factors that I talked about earlier that are going to keep your performance up. So it still involves fueling your workouts. It’s still involves eating right pre and post-workout it still involves hydration, getting enough sleep. But there’s little things that you can do that safely, that can help get you there. So you want to do it at the right time. Ideally with guidance, with a sports dietitian who can help you do that properly.
Everybody’s different. Everyone has a unique body. Try not to compare yourself to others and feel like you have to look a certain way to be an endurance athlete. And don’t let those comparisons affect your nutrition and cause you to under fuel because in the end it’s gonna likely backfire. And can lead to some more negative consequences, um, like relative energy deficiency or RED-S w hich can affect bone health, hormone health, a menstrual cycle, a huge variety.
So, thanks for listening. Just a quick episode today, just wanting to kind of share my thoughts on that. And I think maybe in the future doing an episode on maybe some safe practices for weight management could be good if you guys are interested in that. But let’s fuel our body properly and give it the right nutrition that it needs.
This is going to help you perform so much better. And thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions, you can send me a message on Instagram. If you have ideas for future podcasts, and I’d really appreciate if you could either share this with your fellow triathletes or give me a rating or review. It just helps more people find the podcast. Thanks and have a great day!