10 Most Common Fat Loss Mistakes In Cyclists

As nutritionists here at FTR, one of the most common areas that cyclists reach out for help with is fat loss. In cycling, particularly, an athlete’s power-to-weight ratio can be an essential component of their performance, so it’s of little surprise that many look to improve this, with a focus on optimising the weight/body composition aspect of the equation.

Whilst it is often viewed as an easy performance win, pursuing fat/weight loss does come with risks, particularly if weight loss strategies are poorly implemented. Here at FTR we frequently see and hear stories of athletes putting huge effort into misguided weight loss practices, which simply result in either a stagnation of performance or, worse, a drop in performance while also negatively impacting their health.

In this article will covers 10 of the most common mistakes we see cyclists making when pursuing fat loss…

1.        Prioritising weight loss for performance when it’s not appropriate.

There are many ways to enhance an athlete’s performance, of which weight/fat loss is only one. Culturally, many sports/old-school coaches use weight loss as a go-to performance enhancer without an underlying understanding of the negative implications that it can have on an athlete’s psychology and physiology.

 For many athletes, particularly those who are already relatively lean, have a challenging relationship with food or generally have a poor approach to fuelling, weight loss should fall towards the bottom of the list/be a lower priority.

 For example, if an athlete is already inadvertently under-fuelling and then looking to pursue weight loss, which requires further dietary restriction, it is highly likely this will negatively impact their health and performance rather than enhance it.

Fat loss can benefit many athletes IF managed correctly, but for many athletes, simply focusing on consistent quality training paired with diligent fuelling and recovery is a far safer and more reliable strategy to enhance performance. 

We also don’t have an accurate way of knowing what an athlete’s optimal body composition is for performance, and losing weight is not always a guaranteed method in which to enhance performance.

2.        Focusing on weight loss rather than fat loss.

Weight loss and fat loss are two distinctly different things. We can achieve significant weight loss (as as a few kilograms) very quickly through dehydration, going to the toilet, or depleting our glycogen stores during a hard ride, to name a few examples. Whilst these may change your mass and the number on the scales, they are unlikely to be meaningful for performance and more likely to negatively impact it. As such, we should be focussing on loss of excess body fat, as in order to improve power to weight ratio we are particularly targeting the tissue that is acting as a ballast and not providing any performance benefit.

The different tissues of the body have different energy densities, of which fat tissue has the highest energy density at 7700kcal per kg, compared to 1300kcal per kg of muscle; this, therefore, means that fat generally requires the greatest energy deficit in order to lose 1kg compared to tissues like muscle.

3.        Adopting too aggressive an energy deficit - Low Energy Availability 

For athletes, adopting too aggressive an energy deficit and trying to lose fat mass too quickly can put them into a state of low energy availability. The energy they have left over from their dietary intake after they’ve factored in the expenditure from training is inadequate to support normal physiological function.

Being in a state of sustained low energy availability can result in a condition called Relative Energy Deficiency Sport (or REDs for short). In the long term, this can have a myriad of negative impacts on health and performance, from a loss of sex drive and menstrual function in female athletes to increased incidence of illness and injury to reduced performance and training progression, to name but a few. As such, a slower and steadier approach, with a modest daily energy deficit, is typically the more optimal approach to ensure adequate energy availability to support health. This also helps to preserve more muscle compared to a more aggressive energy deficit, help drive fat loss and is less likely to impact training quality negatively.

4.        Lack of Dietary Flexibility - eliminating the foods you enjoy.

Many athletes look to create a calorie deficit by restricting entire food groups (e.g., eliminating grains or carbohydrates as a whole) or cutting out the foods and drinks they enjoy. This often simply leads to an all-or-nothing mindset and a rapid depletion of willpower, which can drive episodes of binge/overeating eating along with heightened stress and anxiety.

The key driving aspect of weight loss is a calorie deficit, and within the confines of the energy budget required to create a deficit, no foods should be off-limits. It is entirely possible to still enjoy pizza/beer/insert preferred food options within the confines of your energy budget.

Whilst I wouldn’t recommend following these approaches, extreme examples of this principle include a nutrition professor who lost over 12 kilograms in 10 weeks and improved a number of health markers on a dietary consisting largely of Twinkies (see article here) and others who have lost significant weight on a diet of purely McDonald's (see article here)

5.        Not eating enough protein.

Generally when we start eating in an energy deficit, we don’t just lose fat. We can also lose significant muscle tissue, particularly in an aggressive energy deficit. Muscle is an energetically expensive tissue (i.e. it requires a lot of energy to use and maintain) and, therefore, is often a tissue that is broken down and used as a fuel to a greater extent when we are in an energy deficit (much like switching to a car with a smaller engine in a fuelling crisis).

One key way in which we can use diet to help maintain muscle tissue whilst in a deficit (and also support adaptation to training) is by consuming an optimal amount of protein (ensuring the optimal total amount, timing, and type of protein), alongside providing the muscle with an anabolic stimulus (i.e., muscle growth stimulus through resistance training). Many athletes don’t consume enough protein during weight loss, and as a result, they see muscle mass loss and negative impacts on training and performance.

6.        Lack of patience - Trying to lose too much in a short space of time.

Fat loss can often be a challenge for athletes. Even with a plan for a slow and steady approach, athletes are still humans, and things don’t always progress at the speed we want them to. If we haven’t made adequate progress early on in a fat loss phase, there can be the temptation to try and compact a target amount of fat loss into a shorter window before a key event/race/competition. In the hope that a short-term aggressive weight loss followed by a couple of days with optimal fuelling ahead of the event (i.e. to recover glycogen stores) will induce performance gain. This is often not the case (as illustrated in elite male athletes and trained female athletes). Fat loss has to be carefully managed within a season with adequate time to make progress.

7.        Not adjusting energy based on training load.

A common issue I see with athletes' nutrition (in general and during fat loss phases) is how they vary their fuelling on a day-to-day basis. We rarely do the same sessions day in and day out, and for endurance athletes with huge variability in their day-to-day energy needs, it’s important to adjust their diet based on the demands of the individual session—‘Fuelling for the work required,’ as it’s been coined.

In athletes, I often see athletes having a fairly static approach to nutrition; regardless of the weather, they're doing a 1-hour steady ride, compared to 4 hours of heavy efforts in the hills. The impact this has is that they can create huge energy deficits around big sessions, which can negatively impact training quality and recovery whilst also leading to challenges with hunger/appetite management on subsequent days, negatively impacting adherence and progress. In a diet phase, the strategic management of energy budgets around different days to help maintain training quality, but drive weight loss is a good approach to adopt.

8.        Obsessing over-scale weight.

Our weight (or, more accurately, our mass) on the scales can fluctuate by the hour. When you last went to the toilet, your dietary fibre intake, your salt intake, your hydration status, the phase of your menstrual cycle that you are in, when you last trained, and the amount of glycogen you have stored are just a few examples.

Weight loss is never linear. Individual readings from the scales tell us very little about progress, so we have to look at trends over weeks and months for them to provide any sort of meaningful data. If you have these available to you, it is far better to rely on other, more accurate methods, such as skin folds, to track progress/change.

The stress and anxiety caused by an overfocus on single numbers of the scales is not conducive to meaningful progress and a common mistake I see athletes making. It is far better to focus efforts on consistency around dietary habits that get too hung up on individual reading on the scales, particularly when it doesn’t tell us a huge amount about progress.

9.        Poorly fuelling training - negatively impacting training.

One of the biggest problems with being in an energy deficit is that it can negatively impact their ability to perform quality training sessions, not only affecting the work that can be done during the sessions but also how the body recovers and adapts to the session. This can lead to a stagnation in the improvements that the athletes should achieve from training.  

Many athletes restrict their energy intake in the period before (i.e. skipping pre session meals), during or after the session to drive an energy deficit. However, this approach is likely to negatively impact the quality of the training session.

A more optimal approach is to ensure that each session is still well-fuelled by strategically managing your daily energy budget to prioritise fuelling around the session to limit the impact of energy effects on training.

10. Thinking you have to be in an energy deficit every single day.

When it comes to fat loss, you don’t have to be in an energy deficit every single day to make progress. It’s the average deficit you achieve over weeks and months that will ultimately drive results.

Being in a deficit every day can be tiresome and negatively impact your dietary adherence. Strategically increasing your energy intake around social events, demanding training sessions (e.g., eating at energy balance on the day of a hard session) that would benefit from better fuelling, or scheduling ‘rest’ weeks where you increase your intake to around energy balance can help your adherence in the long term and also positively impact training quality while still making progress with fat loss.

Here at FTR, we give you all the tools and coaching you need to achive your personal far loss goals. See the links at the top of the page for more details.

Coach Ben