Up until that bit, everything you’ve been saying was quite reasonable. But, to the best of my knowledge this claim is crap. There is a reason wrestlers run. Just look at a football field or a weightlifting competition. Some of those guys are cut. Some of the biggest, most powerful guys aren’t at all.
I personally know elite triathletes, runners, and swimmers. I do not believe any of the men are above 6% or 8% body fat, and I’m sure many are lower. I’ve only met one professional bicyclist, and she didn’t have any noticeable extra weight, either. There were three 50+ year old former elite male runners in this town, and not one had any discernible body fat. (Even as a 40 year old age grouper, I was 6%, and I was plump compared to these guys.) No runner I know of middling age group level or better, which is over 50, would ever be mistaken for “chubby”. I can’t imagine a mountain lion ever bothering any of them.
I know body builders work hard at getting their body fat down, and I’ve known some body builders, but they have to go to great lengths to match up to endurance athletes. A good friend, for example, spent years carefully eating the supposed best diet for displaying muscles and was pretty impressively strong, shape, but I had noticeably lower body fat just running and eating and drinking any old crap that came my way, much to his chagrin.
Not really. Explain to me how I went from 150 to 135 last year and still hold that weight now without changing my diet at all.
I’ll tell you. I starved myself for a brief period and worked out until I got down there. Once I made it my body adjusted and that was pretty much the end of it.
I know it doesn’t work out for everybody but I’ve seen it done like that countless times before.
The only thing I did wrong was to make a general statement without qualifications.
One thing you’re doing is confusing power with strength. “Power” lifters are mis-named since what they train for is absolute strength, not power. Olympic lifters train for power, and since it’s a weight-class sport, the only fat guys you find are in the top weight class, which is essentially unlimited. They’re the strongest in absolute poundages, but many of the smaller lifters are more powerful, as measured by a strength to weight ratio.
Another probelm is that you’re conflating athletes whose performance is dependent upon weight with those that are not. Defensive tackles, for example, have to be strong, but they benefit from being massive too. Anything that makes them bigger is an advantage. Those guys force-feed themselves several meals a day to stay big. Without that, most of them would be as ripped as the running backs.
That may be, but overall performance in endurance sports doesn’t necessarily correlate well with body composition. VO2-max is a better predictor than anything else. The kind of training endurance athletes do is no better for maintaining low body fat than the kind of training sprinters do, despite the fact that sprinters do about 1/10 the volume of work.
Overtraining is a danger for any athlete, but most particularly for endurance athletes because of the high volume of training they do constantly. They work primarily in the oxidative pathway which can cause low-level damage cell processes over time. Cortisol levels tend to be higher, particularly in females, with is an indicator of stress. Increased cortisol levels lead to more visceral deposition of fat. You can have low subcutaneous fat while still having higher levels of non-visible visceral fat. Endurance athletes also have depressed levels of sex hormones, which also has effects on body composition and health.
Athletes whose work is mostly anaerobic, like the wrestlers you mentioned, absolutely do not run long distances. They do sprints; explosive, powerful, short, intense training sessions. They don’t run 20–100 km a week. Doing so would rob them of both absolute strength and explosive power. Sure, they’d weigh less, but part of that would be due to catabolic processes preferentially breaking down muscle proteins. Endurance athletes have relatively low muscle mass because of their training, and if their training volume decreases, they tend to gain weight more easily than athletes whose training preserves muscle mass.
No, they have to work very hard to build and keep muscle mass while minimizing the amount of body fat deposited in bulking phases, and then have to shed body fat to abnormally low levels—while still attempting to maintain the level of muscularity they had while bulking—in the cutting phase. And bodybuilding has very little to do with any kind of performance. Strength is a byproduct of gaining muscle; if they could get big by lifting tiny girly weights, many of them would do that instead.
This is the long, long version of: training like an endurance athlete doesn’t help you lose fat very easily. You can be capable of doing endurance events while still being relatively fat. The bang for your exercise buck is in doing short to moderate distance at higher intensities. Combine that with occasional weight training both to support your ability to do that high intensity exercise, to build and maintain muscle and connective tissue strength, and to induce favorable hormonal responses. From a practical point of view, it’s easier to build strength and later train to increase your endurance, than to train for endurance and later try to increase your strength, even if you don’t care about body composition one bit.
That’s not true. A better predictor of endurance performance is the % of VO2 max at which lactate threshold occurs. Elite marathon runners have VO2 max in the range 65 - 90; for an elite marathon runner, VO2 max has essentially no predictive power.
VO2 max is also expressed per unit body mass, such that reducing body mass increases VO2 max, all else being equal.
The reference you site does not say that. It says that elite sprinters and marathoners have comparable % body fat. This does not imply that the training in each case is comparable for lowering body fat per se - you would need to control for diet, for example.
You cannot be capable of doing endurance events quickly and be relatively fat.
No I’m not. I’m a physicist. I very well know the difference between power and force (strength). What I’m saying is that I’ve heard that claim a million times, always from some weight lifter who I can tell at a glance needs to lose more weight than any of my casual running friends. I always think of that Russian heavy weight weightlifter from the 70s. He had power: he could produce more force in a short period of time than anyone. He also ended up fat.
Your writings on bodybuilding are more telling. It is hard, to the point of almost impossible, to simultaneously build muscle and burn fat. I won’t argue that you need muscle to burn weight. It is clearly true that between two 200 lb men, the one with the higher muscle percentage of body weight can eat more to maintain the weight. (I lift weights, also.) But you are forgetting that running for 1 hour, raises your metabolism for maybe another hour. That is why none of the casual runners I know, who typically run about one hour a day, six days a week, is close to “chubby”. They are all skinny.
VO2-max is not a good indicator of performance. Matt Carpenter, the trail running wunderkind, has the second highest VO2-max ever measured, and that’s at 6200 feet. (He’s weird, because at sea level, he is about the same. Most of us drop off with altitude much faster.) But for all that, he’s never been a threat to make our weakest Olympic teams. The fact is, elite sprinters, elite distance runners, most professional athletes (not offensive linemen, nosetackles, catchers, or sumu wrestelers) have low body fat because they workout all the time, and most eat very careful diets designed to maximize performance at their particular sport. Whatever sport you pursue, you are almost always better if you have low body fat, , so it is not very surprising that they are almost all low body fat.
Ironically, one of my best running friends is a former All-American wrestler, who kept up running to stay in shape as he aged. He does look better without his shirt than the rest of us, though.
This I agree with. It requires a great deal of effort to gain muscle mass while losing total mass. There will be initial gains, because if you’ve never lifted you’re going to gain some real muscles quickly. But then it tends to stabilize. I believe it is best to lift weights and perform some sport for roughly 1 hour a day. (Could be active volleyball, could be running, could be snowboarding) For the OP, who wants to race, she needs to supplement cycling with weight lifting. She should mostly lift weights (and do core body exercises) that will make her a better cyclist.
Except for open water swimmers, this is really, really rare at any kind of level above walking speed. Look at the Olympics where you have athletes of all stripes. If there is anyone,who looks to lose a few pounds, and usually there isn’t a single one, it isn’t the endurance athletes. Look at the top half of the field at any significant marathon, and you won’t see any extra weight, either. Only the walkers will be “relatively fat”.
This is absolutely correct.
The other thing is to minimize long, slow miles. Workout at what is a good speed for you, and train to increase the time you can hold it.
I’m a former racer. casdave has given you some good information so I’ll just add two points:
At some point, you’ll be riding so many miles a week that the weight will come off without you having to really watch your diet. For me that was at 300 miles per week (including races). That doesn’t help you now, but once you can start to ride outside you’ll be able to increase your mileage.
The winter cross training sports for cyclists are cross country skiing and ice skating. If you have the opportunity to do either of these, do it. You’ll bore yourself to death riding a trainer all winter.
You’re right, but I’m thinking more of the entire population rather than the upper echelons of competitive athletes of any sort, much less Olympians. I know an awful lot of people with too much body fat that exercise a great deal. Most of them would prefer not to have that extra body fat so they mostly do aerobic exercise… and it doesn’t usually take all the weight off they would like, even when combined with low-calorie dieting.
Having spoken to my colleague, he seems to feel its your speed you need to work on, and also learn how to do ‘jumps’ sudden accelerations, and not the distance.
You really need to be able to do the 20 mph ride.
Concentrate on getting your rides of around 20 miles up to speed, work on that, and when you reach it, do short bursts of 25mph - this is your main target for winter. You’ll find that some weight will fall off, and you’ll also get that constant companion of the heated leg feeling on your rest days.
Don’t make the mistake of training too often, and be prepared to rest.
Weights will help, but remember that just 30 minutes of moderate weight with high repitition really does blunt your pace the following day, take the edge off your accelerations until you recover fully - this will build up muscle mass.