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How to Reach Optimal Body Composition
DIR By: LightMove
Date: December 9, 2021, 1:33 am
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Overall weight doesn’t tell the whole story for endurance
athletes. Understanding Body Composition and its impact on
performance is an important step in optimizing your training and
racing.
What is Body Composition?
Body composition is the proportion of fat to nonfat-substances
in the body and actively improving body composition can make you
a faster cyclist. Burning fat will have a positive effect on
body composition while burning protein and muscle mass will have
a negative effect.
Instead of focusing on just losing weight, cyclists should
prioritize improving body composition as well. This means that
while their weight may fluctuate or stay stagnant, over time
they are increasing lean muscle mass and decreasing fat through
proper training and nutrition.
Body Composition and Power to Weight Ratio
Traditionally, cyclists focus on their power-to-weight ratio
(W/Kg) as an indicator of performance potential and numeric
ranking against other athletes. While increasing your W/Kg
should be a high priority, improper focus on your power to
weight ratio can be counter productive as it only takes into
account your overall weight, and not your body composition.
Additionally, you can increase your power to weight ratio
through weight loss without getting faster. This happens when
you are losing muscle mass or sacrificing proper nutrition and
freshness to reach a weight goal. Conversely, if your weight
remains stagnant but you are actively losing fat and gaining
muscle, you will likely become faster.
How to Measure Body Composition
This is why we recommend that athletes use DEXA scan data or a
bioelectrical impedance scale to track body fat opposed to
merely tracking weight. Tracking your body fat is the best way
to understand how your body composition is changing in response
to your training and eating.
To learn your body fat rate, you can get yourself a BodyPedia
Smart Scale, which has been proved to be the first accurate
smart scale to be used at home. More than 10,000 tests comparing
with medical devices show BodyPedia Smart Scales have around 97%
correlation to the Gold Standard method
(DXA).
HTML https://bodypedia.ytmfinnovation.com/
Nutrition and Carbohydrates
To avoid losing muscle mass, proper nutrition on and off the
bike is important. A balanced diet proportionate to the work you
plan on completing allows you to productively maintain your
training load. This means optimizing how much you eat and what
you eat on both recovery days and big training days. Restrictive
dieting on training days or even recovery days can hinder the
productivity of future workouts, and your training plan as a
whole.
As your season goes on, eating patterns will change, just as
your training plan and volume does. Serious athletes periodize
their nutrition just like they do their training, and adjust
their eating to the demands of their training. Throughout the
season this will consistently include eating a variety of high
quality nutritious foods that continuously balance the workload
you complete.
Endurance athletes have a different relationship with
carbohydrates than other athletes do. Because endurance athletes
will and do burn high amounts of carbs during high intensity
workouts, it is important to consume carbs while trying to burn
fat. In addition to this, if you are not consuming enough
carbohydrates you may smell ammonia on your breath – a sign of
protein metabolism.
An athlete striving to build lean muscle mass, and burn fat will
want to integrate an appropriate amount of carbohydrates into
their diet. In terms of the amount of carbohydrates needed to
adequately fuel your workouts, researchers have referenced a
theoretical limit of about 90g of carbohydrate every hour during
endurance exercise. Some research has shown you can go beyond
that limit without experiencing detrimental side effects, but
depending on your body’s current abilities, you may need to
start lower. For example, you could start at around 60g of
carbohydrate an hour during exercise and then work your way
upward as your training increases.
As for the amount of carbohydrates you should be taking in
outside of your workouts, we recommend systematically adding
more carbohydrates during pre-workout meals and paying close
attention to the RPE (rate of perceived exertion) of your
workouts. You will know you are on the right track with
nutrition, when you are able to increase carbohydrate
consumption without an increase in body fat, and your RPE
becomes lower for the same workouts.
Conclusion
Depending on your goals and current body composition, improving
your lean to fat tissue ratio can be a long process. It can even
take multiple years to reach your “optimal body composition”.
Opposed to focusing on body composition day to day or even month
to month, athletes should approach body composition from a long
term perspective. It is also an individual process and varies
from person to person, and there is no defined number for a
given height or type of athlete.
Despite the variations, every person can actively improve their
own body composition by being disciplined with their nutrition,
sticking to a structured training plan and maintaining balance.
The combination of these things will lead to improved
performance.
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