Quotes from Velopress

But for endurance athletes, doing so is a little different because macronutrient balance also has a major impact on training performance and many athletes do not consume enough carbohydrate in particular to maximize that performance. Any measure that boosts your training performance will also tend to make you leaner.

While it pays to be light and lean in all endurance sports, there is thankfully no single, ideal body type for any specific endurance sport. The variety you see in the physiques of world-class cyclists, runners, and other endurance athletes can be surprising.

For many, the road to becoming an endurance athlete began with a diet. Maybe this is your story. The guy who once had regularly ordered the bacon burger was suddenly rolling out special requests at a restaurant—keep the toast dry, hold the dressing, boil the egg, steam the vegetables. For most successful athletes, somewhere along the way a new lifestyle emerged and the focus shifted from dieting to performance. Performance

Lack of time is the most commonly cited excuse for not exercising. But surveys suggest that those who exercise regularly are just as busy with their jobs, families, and other responsibilities as those who don't work out. So the time excuse is just that: an excuse. We're all pressed for time, yet we all have time for our highest priorities. If exercise is important to you, you will find the time to do it. Consider the case of David Morken, an age-group triathlete whom

Body weight was found to have a statistically moderate effect on total race time, while body-fat percentage had a large effect on total race time and a moderate effect (bordering on large) on swim, bike, and run splits. Both body weight and body-fat percentage were more strongly correlated with split times and total race time than are training variables such as average weekly training time.

The practice of nutrient timing, or consuming the right nutrients at the right times throughout the day, will enable you to partition your energy more effectively and achieve your racing weight.

Many weight-loss diets have been based on the idea that to lose weight, a dieter has to maintain the perfect balance of these three "macronutrients" in daily eating. That none of these diets can agree on the magical macronutrient ratio is not the only evidence that it does not exist.

Concentrating your protein intake in the latter part of the day will maximize muscle regeneration in the evening and through the night.

The common methods of performance weight management work—they improve performance—and are therefore more or less required for sustained success in endurance sports. Dieting, in contrast, tends to sabotage performance, making sustained competitive success difficult or impossible.

the Harvard School of Public Health study found that yogurt attenuated long-term weight gain better than any other food, including fruits and vegetables.

Where do such numbers come from? I'll tell you where they don't come from: They don't come from the body-weight tables and formulas created by health experts. These tables and formulas, which include height-weight charts used by life insurance companies and body-mass index guidelines used widely by doctors, are far too general to help individual men and women determine an ideal body weight.

The problem for these individuals was that, while they did lose a significant amount of weight through dietary restriction, this very restriction seemed to prevent them from gaining any power through sprint interval training. More specifically, Lunn suggested, inadequate protein intake kept their muscles from adapting to the stress imposed by the sprints.

How does lifting weights enhance running economy and endurance? Other studies have shown that it works by increasing the stiffness of the leg when the foot hits the ground (Dumke et al. 2010). The legs function as springs during running. Physics teaches us that a stiffer spring loses less energy when it lands and bounces higher. Your legs will do the same thing if you strengthen them in the gym.

Now it is believed that phytonutrients are actually weak toxins that stimulate the body's endogenous antioxidants through a stress reaction, much as other positive stressors such as exercise strengthen various systems of the body. In any case, we know that men and women who consume high levels of fruits exhibit higher antioxidant capacities, are less prone to chronic diseases, and live longer.

Based on my review of the scientific literature, I suggest that you aim for a daily carbohydrate intake target that is based on your training workload as indicated by Table 6.1. Be sure to use your optimal racing weight instead of your current weight to make these calculations, as you're not trying to fuel your excess fat stores for optimal performance!

You cannot change your height, the width of your hips, the length of your feet, or any of several other anthropometric variables affecting endurance performance that I have discussed in this chapter. You can't change your genetic potential for leanness, either. But you can reduce your body-fat percentage (and thereby adjust your weight) to the level that is optimal for performance in your chosen endurance sport given your unchangeable genetic constraints.

Anticarb sentiment in the endurance sports community is an ideological spillover from the weight-loss diet culture.

Each sport favors a particular body type. The principle of "form follows function" determines the particular physique that tends to perform best in a given sport or in a given position or role within a sport.

Body weight and body-fat percentage have no meaning in isolation for endurance athletes. These variables have meaning only in relation to performance. Weighing 145 pounds is not better than weighing 155 pounds unless you perform better at the lighter weight. A body-fat percentage of 12 is better than a body-fat percentage of 13 only if you're faster at 12 percent.

Consider the example of saturated fat. This nutrient is widely considered to be bad, but the human body uses saturated fats in all kinds of helpful ways. Saturated fat is good. It just so happens that the modern diet contains too much of it. In most cases, what we really mean when we label a certain nutrient bad is that we tend to consume it in excess.

Remember, anything you do as an athlete that helps you perform better is likely to make you leaner as well; including enough carbohydrates in your diet is another example of this principle.