Looking for some outside thoughts. I’ve been working with a coach since late 2022 on training peaks. I’m more of an enduro rider who lifted a ton a wanted to be in better shape as I move towards more alpine and adventure riding as I get closer to 40. I’ve made excellent gains in power outputs and am a way better rider fitness wise. I just did a 50 mile MTB race and didn’t do as well as I hoped. I’m not winning any races ever but competing against myself.
I’m moving on from training peaks and want to do my own training (I miss riding for fun) I think my biggest need is body recomposition. I’ve got good power outputs threshold /FTP is 262, 90 minute power is 220 watts. But i’m 225 lbs and mid 20% body fat, which means my watts / kg is terrible and I feel it on climbs. Since starting training, my weight and body fat according to my scales has changed minimally - goes down a bit with base training, up with SS and threshold - with some definite muscle less (especially upper body). I eat pretty well and know this subject well; I meal prep ever week but do love my pizza too. classic 80% healthy, 20% whatever I please. I used to track everything when I was doing more lifting.
combine that with what I think is an HR that is still higher than it should be for activity I’m thinking of putting myself through an 8-12 week zone 2 and hypertrophy (lifting) program late this fall. I want to lose body fat but try and keep as much of my power outputs as I can. Has anyone successfully “recomped” while maintaining as much power as they can? Looking for advice, guidance, experience.
Evening.
The only success I’ve had was a number of years ago. Bizarrely when I was your age probably thinking the same thing.
I ate less.
My biking wasn’t power monitored so I have no evidence back then from a gadget that my power was the same but I was quicker and could last longer.
My running improved dramatically.
I think there’s a lot made of keeping x or y levels of food in our day to day consumption if we also want to ‘train’. To a point that must be true to avoid actual health issues from too much exercise vs intake. But I have come to my own conclusion that we just eat less and carry on exercising and we’ll soon know if we’re undernourished.
I’m now much older and can confirm eating more again just results in me returning to my younger self weight again sadly. It’s not easy for me to do the ‘less calories’ thing. It did work when I did it though. I did do it with a pal at the time as a ‘mechanism’.
Bit of a late reply sorry. Curious what your cycling training hours per week are? And how did you go with your plan of zone 2 + hypertrophy?
My thoughts would be:
- Lots of zone 2 as a base is a good plan, if you can get enough total bike training volume per week (ie. over 10 hours). I don’t think it’s time efficient enough below 10 hours/week, in which case time spent at sweet spot/tempo range is going to be useful.
- Hypertrophy style lifting might be counterproductive to your goal of improved W/kg, even if it’s lean tissue you’re adding. Would you be better off sticking to strength rep/intensity ranges for your lifting?
- You may still be able to improve your diet. I really appreciated Dr Pfaffenbach’s approach to diet/fuelling. I can strongly recommend this podcast episode as a starting point: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4BwxBCR4Tk46C9gO4XDyMD?si=CK6mxJqPRVaq6a3R3rgANQ.
The only sucess I’ve ever had was with a scale and some kind of calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or MacrosFirst. Aim for a consistent tiny deficit and you can lose weight without any noticeable change in power.
Hi! better late than never. There is still dry single-track by me so I’m doing zone 2 with a tiny bit of zone 3 on the trainer at home for 60-90 min 2x week, and then my long do whatever ride outside (yesterday I did 2.5 hours free riding, got some great slab riding. not bad for November in MT). Once that snows up though, I’ll move to primarily bike trainer with some fat biking so set up will look like this until mid January as I add in some sweet spot and intervals –
2x 60-90 min zone 2 with a small mix of zone 3 but keeping HR in II range
1x ~2 hours zone 2 on Fridays
3x lift days
6 days a week formal training. plus snowboarding on 1 weekend day when the resort opens.
Prior to taking mtb training seriously, I was a lifter and could move some serious weight. I’ve got my own program that’s weirdly similar to Marcus filly’s functional body building set up. I’m focused on slow eccentric and and fast concentric - generally - for my heavy lift. I do 4 sets of 12, 10, 8 and then max out at the weight I used for the first set. then for my B set I do a superset say elevated press and pull-up, C is smaller groups, core, balance, or maintenance style lifting, lighter compound lifts. This usually gets me just over 1 hour. I have 2 days / week of my main set being a LB lift (squat, DL or lunge variant) and 1 day UB (push or pull alt week). My watts to KG is most limited by my body fat % which has not changed at all in 2 years of focused MTB training.
Diet could definitely be better but with pretty good eating I should have seen some level of changes in my body, not minimal if any. I’ve tracked hard before many times and have had varied success over the years. I’ve tried renaissance periodization, low fat, low carb / keto, vegetarian, strict macro/micro tracking, etc. despite being active my whole life I have a hard time loosing fat. I’ve had 1 good cut since my high school days where I was able to drop into to about 17% body fat but I was down to like 1600 calories a day just to achieve that and no thank you to that ever again. that’s have of my daily maintenance.
Cool, that’s some good detail.
Some thoughts/questions (not intended to criticise etc, it’s hard to diagnose health/performance stuff over the internet 
):
- ~4-5 hours total on bike may not be enough weekly time to benefit much from a largely Z2 block.
- I do think that your lifting is more in the hypertrophy range. It’s obviously worked well for your lifting, but depending on whether you are willing to de-prioritise your lifting I think it would be worth trialling a switch to a 5x5 or 5/3/1 style program to: a. prioritise freshness for bike workouts; b. reduce potential excess bulk (muscle and fat) from the hypertrophy stimulus. Or consider an extra bike session per week, condensing your lifting into 2 sessions.
- 2 years of focused MTB training isn’t very long, the metabolic adaptations can take years
- How are you measuring your body fat %?
- What were the macro targets you were aiming for previously? Again, not to criticise but your mentioning re different diet styles and attempts at cutting suggests to me that there might be a lot of room to optimise your nutrition.
- In complete opposition to my previous statement, you might have everything absolutely nailed and it’s just your genetics that want you to sit at mid 20s body fat %.