Cycling Fitness – Losing Those Last Few Pounds – Part 4

Posted on January 13, 2013 by

So here we are, mid January. The holidays are behind us and the race season is 30 to 60 days in front of us for most. Now is the time to start to make that final push to your desired racing weight or if you don’t race, just your desired weight for riding. I usually don’t try to stay on any structured eating plan during the holidays because it usually just leads to frustration and guilt, so i don’t even try. However, as we get into January, all of that crazy binge eating is behind us and it is a time where you have much more control over what goes into your mouth. Lightweight bicycle parts can only do so much, you are going to have to help by dropping some poundage.

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Being able to control what you eat is a big factor in dropping those last few pounds. I am a firm believer in the “you cant manage what you cant measure” way of thinking. So, in order to manage your weight you need a way of measuring what goes in your mouth. There are thousands of crazy weight loss plans out there that claim all types of miracle foods or magic pills will make you lose weight, but weight loss is really pretty simple. It really just comes down to that dreaded word, calorie. Yes there are factors like the glycemic index of food and the actual nutritional value of stuff and what your body does with the food. Those are all factors in the food cycle but the bottom line of weight loss is calories in versus calories out. Yes it is the dreaded calorie. That word that no one wants to talk about. No one wants to measure them. No one wants to count them. They are the truth of all food. Calories are nothing more than a measure of heat units that a particular food generates when consumed. When calories are stored by the body to create heat units in the future there are about 3500 calories that equal one pound of body weight. This is pretty common knowledge. So, in order to induce weight loss there is only one sure fire way to do it, and that is to create a calories deficit on a regular basis. Wait! Don’t leave! I know no one like to count calories. I used to hate to count calories, i still do. But the truth is, if you can handle the truth, until you measure you will not be able to manage.

Look, i hate counting calories as much as the next guy. You are not unique in this. But if you are serious about losing those last few pounds, you are going to have to face the truth some day, and it might as well be today. The good news is that there are some very good tools out there nowadays that make calorie counting breeze. I tried a lot of them but the one i found that works the best is:

Myfitnesspal.com

Let me state right up front. I am in no way associated with myfitnesspal.com i do not receive any commissions or compensation of any kind from them. I just think they have a great little app and it is free and it makes counting calories at lot less painful than it used to be. the app lets you set up a profile with your current weight and your desired weight and it figures out how many calories you need per day as a base rate, and keeps track of everything you eat to calculate the surplus or deficit at the end of the day. It has a built in food database that is simply amazing and if you use the smartphone app, you can just scan the barcode on many foods and it will automatically add the food to your daily log. The app also includes a database of exercises that you use to plug in your ride or run for the day. Calorie counting couldn’t be easier. I use this app everyday during my weight loss periods and find that it really encourages me to stay on target. Try it out, and tell me what you think.

In the next part i will share with you some of the foods that i use to control the amount of calories that i take in per day. And i will share with you some of the methods that i use to determine how many calories i am going to consume that day. Now go burn some calories and let know how its going.

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Cycling Fitness – Losing Those Last Few Pounds – Part 3

Posted on December 22, 2012 by

Ok, so here we are at part 3 of how to lose those last few pounds. In part 1 we talked about how as cyclists we think we can eat everything we want and still lose weight, and as we get more fit we start to plateau in our weight loss. In part 2 we introduced the eating method of paleo as a method to get our eating habits corrected by eating food that our body knows what to do with and it can actually use to nourish us through our rides.

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There are many great websites out there about paleo foods. Find one that you like and start eating live a caveman. You will be surprised how well you feel all day, without the roller coaster effect of the carbs spiking your blood sugar and crashing you down an hour later. When you first start introducing your body to paleo, start out slow as your body will fight back and want you to give it processed sugar and salty foods. Start by just replacing one meal per day with a paleo meal. Usually breakfast is the easiest meal to be very consistent with. Eat meat and fruit. Like eggs and a banana, apple etc. No dairy or grains. Do this for a week or so, then add lunch. Meat with a salad and veggies, and fruit. Then finally add dinner.

You will have low energy for about two or three weeks as your body fights back from the overloads of processed sugar and salt that it is used to. By week three or four you will start having amazing energy as your body starts to realize you are not going to give in and your blood sugar stays stable throughout the day. I used the paleo eating method to get my body weight down to where i wanted it to be. For the first six months i stayed like 99 % paleo, with an occasional stray into the non-paleo when i couldn’t find that right food or i needed to eat something just to be social-able. But other than that i stayed the course during the weight loss period. Once i reached my desired weight i went into the maintenance period and stayed about 90% paleo to accommodate eating with other family members and friends.This overall strategy worked very well for me and it wasn’t very hard to do and i didn’t feel hungry as i was doing it.

So, once you are eating the right foods you will see the pounds start to drop as you continue your cycling miles. In the next part i will talk about some of the tools that i used to drop the pounds, and some of the foods that i use to maintain my desired weight.

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Cycling Fitness – Losing Those Last Few Pounds – Part 2

Posted on November 25, 2012 by

In Part 1 we talked about how as cyclists we tend to think we can eat anything we want. In part that is true, but there comes a time in most serious cyclists life when they have plateaued in their fitness and in their weight loss. It can be a frustrating time as you try to increase the miles in the saddle to increase weight loss, but life only allows so much saddle time, right?. I found that looking towards my diet, dangit there is that word again, was the key in cycling nutrition to losing those last few pounds that i really wanted off. I hate the word diet, as it usually implies calorie deprivation, so lets just use the term eating method as it describes the process in a better light anyway.

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As cyclists, we think that we need to pound down lots of carbohydrates. Actually, if you look at a typical American diet it is already hyper-loaded with carbs. That is why we see so many folks walking around with 60 inch waistlines. Also, most of the carbs that are being consumed are empty carbs with little to no nutritional value, leaving you more hungry than you were before you ate, after the sugar rush wears off. The truth is even cyclists don’t need as many carbs as we are consuming except during a century ride or similar. In addition, the type of carbs we are consuming are usually just adding more weight gain as they have little nutritional value so your body doesn’t know what to do with it except store it on your left hip.

Adopting good eating habits will allow your body to use the food that you give it, and will make you less hungry. Your body is very smart. It knows what it needs to maintain a balance. But if you are always reaching for processed foods that are heavy in salt and sugar, you are not giving your body what it needs, and your body will react by increasing hunger pangs.

So, how do you develop good eating habits? Its really pretty simple. Give your body what it was designed to consume. Before the age of industrialization and before our agricultural geniuses figured out how to genetically modify our food so that insects wouldn’t eat it so they could yield ten times the amount of food per acre than before, before all that we just had real food. I guess the insects are smarter than we are. Then the food geniuses figured out how to take out all the nutritional value of the food, and add back in loads of sugar and salt, and that would increase shelf life ten fold, so they could put food in a box. So, how do you get through all the non-food to get to the stuff your body really needs? One word. Paleo.

Paleo is an eating method that is natural to your bodies digestive system. It will help with weight loss and it stabilizes your blood sugar so that you are not always looking for more snacks. It wont leave you hungry as most diets do because you will be giving your body what it needs and what it knows what to do with. What is paleo? Really simple. Meat, fruit and vegetables. Thats it. Pretty simple. If it is meat, eat it. That includes beef, pork, fish and poultry. If it is a fruit, eat it. That includes apples, oranges, bananas, strawberries, any and all fruits. If it is a vegetable, eat it. That includes broccoli, squash, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, asparagus and anything that looks like a vegetable, eat it. By the way, corn is not a vegetable, it is a grain and as such not designed for human consumption in its natural state. Also potatoes, although some claim them to be a vegetable, there is debate over that, are also not designed for human consumption without processing. A real vegetable can be eaten in its natural state, without processing. So, pretty much everything else is fairly straight forward. Meat, fruit and vegetables. One more clarification, eggs are considered meat. Paleo is an eating method that is easy to figure out as it only has those three main components. Everything else, is not paleo and hence not originally designed for human consumption. Yes that includes all diary and all grains. We were not designed to consume these things and we have all types of health maladies because we insist on eating them.

Paleo has many health benefits, not the least of which is weight loss without being hungry. I wont go into great detail here as there are many websites out there that have tons of great information on the subject, but suffice it to say that my weight lose journey started to work again once i decided that my eating methods needing work also. Here is a great paleo site if you need a place to start

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Cycling Fitness – Losing Those Last Few Pounds – Part 1

Posted on November 17, 2012 by

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If your like me, and you probably are because you are reading a cycling blog, then your in pretty good shape. You have been riding a while and you have probably lost some weight. You probably haven’t lost all the weight you wanted to lose, but you have lost some and you feel pretty good about it. And you should. Over the years i have tried many different ways to keep my weight in check and cycling has by far been the best and the easiest method to stick with. When you first start cycling you begin putting a big workload on your body that it is not used to, and consequently you begin to lose weight and get excited about it, and press on with more riding. This works great as a motivator and the weight continues to come off. However, as your fitness level goes up and your body weight goes down, you will eventually start to plateau. Your body wont be working as hard as it used to, even though you are putting in the miles in the saddle. You increase the number of miles and time in the saddle, and that will work for a while, but there are only so many hours a day that you can devote to riding that eventually you plateau again. Your workload is just not great enough to shed those last few pounds that you really ant gone. Sound familiar? Yup, you may even start to gain some weight back even though you are riding a lot. Physical exercise will only get you so far in your journey to lose weight. The other component is diet. Yes its that dreaded word, diet.
I hate that word. I actually prefer the term eating method, over diet. Diet has a negative connotation to it that usually brings up thoughts of starvation, so i try to stay away from that word and just use eating method. So, if you have been paying attention, you can probably see where we are going with this; after cycling there is your eating methods to deal with.

When i first started cycling, i lost about 20 pounds pretty easily. I started out in the high 190′s and went down to the high 170′s. But after riding for nearly 15 years, the pounds were starting to creep back up little by little and before i knew it i was back in the mid 180′s even though i was putting in the miles. Nothing seemed to work. As cyclists, we think we can eat whatever we want and stay trim, and to some extent that is true, when you compare our metabolism to mast folks, but there comes a time when our fitness is so good that our physical exertion from riding is not as great as it used to be, and we begin to plateau or pack on the pounds again.

In the next post on this topic i will get into what i did to get those last few pounds off, and it wasn’t that hard. I will show you a few tools that make it a lot easier. I am now where i want to be, in the low 170′s and i think you can probably be where you want to be too.

Cycling Nutrition

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Building Muscle Off and On The Bike

Posted on November 14, 2012 by

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Building muscle can be quite the challenge for just about any human. It takes hard work and serious dedication to a routine to develop the muscle mass that many people dream of. There are tips in this article that can help you with this challenge and make it a bit easier to succeed.

If you want to build your muscles, the most important thing to do is start a rotation. It is not feasible to work on the same muscle group every day. Doing so is a quick way to ruin your work as well as burn yourself out very quickly at the gym.

Make sure you are getting enough proteins in your diet. You need about one gram of protein for each pound of body weight every day. If you cannot eat enough meat, think about drinking a supplement such as soy milk or even taking a powder supplement. Eating more proteins than you need will not help you build muscles faster.

Consider using a creatine supplement. The consumption of five grams a day may make it possible for you to lift longer and harder, leading to maximized growth of muscles. This particular supplement should not be used by teenagers, and avoided altogether by anyone with untreated health problems. To be safe, check with your doctor before beginning use.

Try varying your grips. Once you become experienced in working out, your muscles will start to resist any growth on exercises that are familiar to them. Different grips can help to make these familiar exercises different, which can cause additional muscle growth. Examples of exercise where you can change the grip are barbell rows, barbell curls, pull-ups, and bench presses. Try using wide grips, close hand grips, reverse grips, and even mixed grips that include having one hand up and one hand down.

Cycling Fitness

One of the best things that you can do to gain muscle is resistance cycling. This means that you will sit on a bicycle and pedal with a higher level of resistance and tension than usual. This technique will help to strengthen your legs, which is a core component in your body.

Utilize the helpful information that is included in this article to plan out a successful workout routine that you can use to build muscle in the rapid, yet safe manner that you hope for. Keep positive thoughts and remain patient and you are sure to reach your muscle building goals.

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Mountain Biking Requires Full Body Fitness

Posted on November 11, 2012 by

Smart Ideas To Keeping A Healthy Level Of Fitness

Physical fitness is important for many reasons and especially if you like to ride a mountain bike Being fit can make you more attractive, fight depression, improve self-esteem, and improve physical health. If you’d like to get fit but aren’t sure how to start, look no further! Read on for some easy tips to get started on fitness.

To improve your fitness levels more quickly, go slow. This means, when you are lifting weights, slow down the contraction phase of the lift. Take ten seconds per repetition, and you will see improvements more quickly than if you take two seconds. Try it for six weeks, and you should see visible results.

Use a combination of different exercise to work out similar muscles. Muscles can sometimes be complex structures because they consist of both pulling and pushing muscles. When you work out with one specific exercise it may not necessarily “hit” or stretch all of the available muscles. It’s important to work out with many different types of exercises.

If you don’t have enough time to work on your fitness in one block of time, it is possible to break up your exercise into smaller parts. This means you can run for 20 minutes in the morning before your shower, and then, after work, do a quick bodybuilding session that lasts 30 minutes.

Looking to increase muscle mass? Use simple math: multiply the total weight of your current sets by the amount of times you lift each set. Your goal is to increase that total number as much as possible. This can be achieved by adding more weight, increasing the number of repetitions, or by adding on additional sets.

Mountain Biking

In order to get the most out of your mountain biking fitness routine, be sure to shift your weight forward when tackling a hill. This will cause more of your weight to be distributed to the front tire and give you more traction. Learn to get a feel for how much you need to distribute, and you’ll find that you will have much more success climbing.

Now that you know what you can do now to improve your fitness, the only thing left is to do it! Don’t let yourself forget about this article by tomorrow, start acting on what you’ve read now, and get into a habit that will improve your entire life! Good luck!

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Cycling Fitness Starts With Nutrition

Posted on November 9, 2012 by

A Healthy Body Is A Happy Body!

Nutrition has so many possibilities as to what you can use, do and how you can apply it to your own diet. It is rare to find somebody that will have the same nutritional needs as you, so why not take advantage of that fact? This article can help you.

Avoid pre-packaged and prepared foods whenever possible if you are looking for the healthiest nutrition. In almost every case pretreated foods and pre-cooked meals feature added ingredients for preservation that are extremely bad for you. It is far better to prepare your own food from fresh ingredients than to rely on food prepared in a factory.

As part of your nutrition plan, see if you can reduce drinking soda. You’ll reduce your sugar and calorie intake and avoid unnatural, artificial sweeteners. Drinking plain water is unappetizing for some people, but most enjoy the clean, natural taste. If you must, you can add small amounts of fruit juice to add a bit of flavor.

HDL stands for High Density Lipoprotein, which you should eat more of than LDL, Low Density Lipoproteins. The low density forms of cholesterol, LDL, can get clogged up in the arteries of the body. Blocked arteries may present major health problems for people who ingest a lot of red meat or other fatty foods. Because of this, it’s important to monitor the different amounts of HDL and LDL going into your system.

Turn pizza from a very unhealthy choice into a more nutritional meal. A couple of little tricks are to load your pizza with vegetable toppings or if you are a meat lover, make sure to use lean meat like chicken or turkey.

Isn’t creating your own personal nutrition plan helpful? As you have seen in this article, there are a lot of ways this can be done and no two plans or diets will yield the same results. There are also lots of customizable options that can work with your needs and budget. Check our cycling nutrition category for great products

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