Food, meals - training

Tracey_Smith

I watched a You Tube video yesterday, Lance Armstrong talking about food and what he eats while training. One thing really surprised me, he doesn't always eat, he'll go to bed hungry to maintain his racing weight.

Now I know that I will never, ever, ever, ever be anywhere near as good / committed etc as he is but surely going to bed hungry isn't good, especially when you're cycling the next day????:frown:

Thoughts please??

kerry0521

I have gone to bed hungry, and wish I would do it more often.
If I've had enough to eat that day (I usually eat around 2000 cal a day) and I'm a little hungry at bed time, I just go to bed, wake up and eat breakfast the next day.

I think that we so often fear hunger and feel like it must be dealt with right away. I think I picked this up in a book about the psychological part of weight loss. Hunger is just a feeling...it does not always need to be fixed at the moment we are hungry.

TheBigYin

You'll note he did that IN TRAINING - at that level, most of the GC contenders are borderline anorexics (and I don't use the term lightly - lots do have serious food issues) frankly - they HAVE to be at around 2.5-3% body fat at the start of a grand tour, and they aim for a FTP/Body mass ratio of over 6! So - if you weigh 75kg you'd need to have A functional threshold power of over 450watts - i.e. you'd need to be able to hammer out over 450watts for over a hour at a time! This is how come Wiggins went from a "good time trialist and track time trialler" to a TdF Podium contender - he lost 6 kilos before the 2009 tour - that's a heck of a lot on someone that if you saw them before the weight loss you'd still say was "all skin and bone"

Tracey_Smith

I watched the Tirreno time trial the other day and he is soooooooooo skinny. I was speaking to one to the chaps at my LBS and he said I should lose weight to get up the hills better but honestly, I eat well, though it might be loads but I'm a size 10 (UK) I don't think I could lose the weight required or really want to!! And being hungry scares me. As a kid we didn't have loads of food around, I don't want that again xx

TheBigYin

most of them are SCARY lean - as I said above - 2.5 to 3% body fay is not unusual - which is actually a good long way into the "not very good for your health" region - not enough fat around certain organs of the body - Kidneys for example, makes you very liable to waterworks infections etc., also, at that degree of lean-ness, it's difficult to "support" cold wet weather, and you end up prone to every little bug that's in circulation (I've a mate who used to be a keen body-builder and he'd get down to that level for competitions, then be sick as a Northallerton Donkey for a month after the comp. until he got back to a more reasonable fat level.

It's all about power to weight - have a google around for "tests for functional threshold power" - you should be able to do this on the Tacx Trainer - get some Idea of what power you can hold for a hour on end, and what HR that equates to. Then, for the sportif's try and ride at 80-90% of FTP for the bulk of the ride, only dipping a bit further on the hilly bits... That way, you'll get round, and not blow up...

Do the FTP test once a month, divide the power in watts by your weight in KG's and get your power to weight ratio. Apparently anything over 4 and your ready for the Marmotte (worryingly, my FTP seems to come in at around 193, and at just under 128kg, that gives me a ratio of 1.508 in automotive terms, a bit like a Range Rover with the engine of a Ford Fiesta)

Tracey_Smith

Crikey, at 2.51 I better get my finger out :noway:

TheBigYin

I think that 4.0 was the people going for the gold medal standards...

plcarpenter

He's Lance, what's good for Lance is not necesarily good for the average mortal.