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The "What's Up with All the Skinny Talk?" Thread

Coach RichCoach Rich
in General Training Discussions

Lot's of skinny talk in the forum, dashboards, etc with people discussing how to achieve their body composition goals. I wanted to step back and add some perspective:

Body Composition is the 5th Sport of Ironman

  1. Swim
  2. Bike
  3. Run
  4. Execution (includes race day nutrition)
  5. Body Composition

That is, if you can race at 175lb vs 185lb, 152 vs 158, 118 vs 122, all things being equal, you will be faster. Of course, the usual caveats apply: everyone is different, there's definitely an unhealthy vs healthy weight for all of us, can't lose too quickly because training and recovery will suffer, etc.

So as long as we are spending so much time, money, effort, SAU's, and more on the items 1-4, we might as well apply similar focus to #5 because it can only help us.

We have a killer tool to help us

We exercise a LOT = burn a lot of cals. When I first started LoseIt last year, what jumped out at me was just how difficult, basically impossible for me, it would be to lose weight if the ONLY tool you had was to not eat. If you don't have the habit of exercising, burning cals every day, then you don't have anything working for you on the cals-out side of the equation. Fortunately, we have that in spades. Your lightest day, as an EN athlete training for Ironman will likely be a swim-only day. Probably about 600-700cals for an hour of swimming (total SWAG). Most other weekdays will be 1-2hrs, or about 600-1200cals. Weekends? Personally, in a 4hr ride I'll burn north of 3000 cals.

So in the end, all you gotta do is:

  • Hit the ground every day with your EN training plan. Do it, burn cals.
  • Track what you eat and focus on making better choices. Lots of help in here about what those choices are, how to make better, and better tasting, choices, etc.
  • Realize that # of cals we burn (a lot) gives us some slack to not have to go all crazy with making whack choices, on the weekends in particular. I understand that my on my run-only days it will be tough for me to stay inside my budget and I won't sweat going over a bit because on my cycling days I won't have any problems at all meeting or exceeding my goals.

Comments

  • penlynwilsonpenlynwilson
    Great post Rich. I wanted to add that if you are tracking your food, working out, etc. and the scale isn't moving you should:
    1) re-evaluate your body composition goals - are they realistic for your body. You're not going to be able to get back to the weight you were when you graduated from high school.
    2) get a complete physical with bloodwork including for things like thyroid function. There could be a hidden reason the scale won't budge.
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