Strength to Weight Ratio?

[li10up]

I've been wondering about this whole strength to weight ratio thing. A couple of years ago I got serious about dropping some weight. I've lost 45 pounds but find that the same people that dropped me a couple of years ago are still dropping me now! I thought that I'd see huge improvements in my cycling but I haven't. I'm really pretty bummed about this. Even my running hasn't improved that much. I ran a 10K yesterday and only took off about a minute and a half off of my previous 10K.

What gives?

[jessmarimba]

As far as the running...taking 90 seconds off of a 10K is like taking about 15 seconds off per mile. Which is a lot harder to do than you realize, especially if you aren't religiously doing track workouts and tempo runs specifically aimed at reducing your 10K time. It's hard enough for me to run a mile or two at 15 seconds faster than my race pace - much less 6.2 of them in a row! Congrats on your work so far

I'm not very knowledgable about bike form, but as far as running, if you want to get faster you may want to have someone videotape you to see if you aren't running in a way that reduces efficiency. Slouching or bending forward at the waist, or pulling your chest up and back, overstriding, etc. Once your muscle memory is set it can be difficult to make the little adjustments to posture that make running easier, and we always feel like our posture is better than it is! Good luck!

[Wahine]

Congratulations on your improvement on your 10 km. 1.5 minutes is not insiginificant!

Congratulations on your weight loss as well.

Strength to weight ratio is an important factor in speed but it affects you mostly on hills. The steeper the hills, the more it affects you.Think about carrying a 25 pound bag of groceries up a flight of stairs vs across flat ground. Your legs will get much more tired going up the stairs. So if you're riding mostly flat roads, you may not notice as much of a change with your weight loss. You should still notice that you can accelerate faster, but going hard on the flats at a steady pace will take close to the same amount of work. And if there is a lot of wind, you may even feel like you have to work harder because you don't have as much momentum carrying you forward.

But you also have to teach your body how to go faster. How fast you go is related to speed and strength of muscle contraction, the gear you are pushing and resistance (be that air resistance and/or gravity). We've already talked about the effect of gravity on you when climbing. But what about speed and strength of muscle contraction? If your strength of muscle contraction is the same you could potentially go faster using the same gear at the same cadence especially if you are working against gravity, but not necessarily if you're on the flats and wind is a factor. The only way to get faster there is to work on pushing a bigger gear and/or increasing your cadence. This will take working on intervals and cadence drills. It's not just about muscular effort against resistance, it's also about training your nervous system to send messages fast enough and in a coordinated manner to your muscles. That has nothing to do with body weight.

Also, if you've been losing weight quickly (more than a pound a week) you may be losing muscle at the same time. Or at the very least, you will have trouble storing glycogen in the muscle. That will affect your performance. It's usually very difficult to make improvements in performance while limiting caloric intake. Once you're down to your goal weight, try going onto a maintainence level of caloric intake and see if you can up the intensity of your riding. In conjunction with this, try to take in about 200 cal within 20 min if finishing a workout, this will help restore the glycogen levels in your muscle more efficiently.

I hope that helps.

[Sky King]

Wahine, love your guidance. I wonder about increasing lung capacity as well or does is that just a mental thing related to better fitness? As in because fitness has improved it seems like capacity has improved (by capacity I mean the ability to breathe better and go longer without running out of air)

[Wahine]

Wahine, love your guidance. I wonder about increasing lung capacity as well or does is that just a mental thing related to better fitness? As in because fitness has improved it seems like capacity has improved (by capacity I mean the ability to breathe better and go longer without running out of air)

This seems like a simple question on the surface, but really it's not. I think what you're referring to here when you say lung capacity is cardiovascular fitness. Making that assumption, you're right, as cardiovascular fitness improves, when you ride at a given speed or power output, all other things being equal heart rate and breathing rate should go down as you improve.

Lung capacity can refer to different things but if I remember my pulmonary function stuff correctly, by definition it refers an aspect of lung volumes. This doesn't change readily with exercise the way that efficiency of oxygen transport does. So really what's improving is not how much air you can get into your lungs, but how quickly and efficiently you can get the oxygen out of the air, into your bloodstream and utilize it in your muscles. That changes a lot and quickly with exercise. So you get more oxygen to your muscles with less effort from both your heart and your lungs, therefore you feel less out of breath as you exercise.

Does that answer your question?

[bluebug32]

Congrats on your weight loss! Just some food for thought...climbing (and increased speed actually) is also quite skill based, so even if you have the power and less weight to pull up hill, you might want to work on things like carrying momentum into a hill and pacing your efforts during climbs. When you're riding with others, are you hiding in the pack as much as possible to save energy and utilize the draft? Are you targeting your weaknesses, pushing yourself on the bike, doing intervals, etc. or just riding?

[li10up]

Lots of good info and input. Firstly, I did and have been losing the weight very slowly. I've been riding for about 6 years so I think I'm pretty good at riding smart...drafting, hills, etc. I am a little better on the hills but still get dropped. It just seems that when they pour on the power for any extended length of time on the flats I just can't hang on. I run on Mon/Wed, swim and do group bike rides on Tue/Thur, rest on Fri. and then Sat./Sun do a semi-long run and a semi-long bike. So no, I don't really do bike specific training...just hard group rides. But I do try to do hill or interval work and tempo training on my runs.

I'm going to have to pay more attention to if it's cardiovascular or legs. But as of right now I'm thinking CV. A few years back I had a lung function test done because of some other concerns (nodule in lung...benign) and they said I was borderline COPD and/or that I "might" have exercise induced asthma. I'm thinking maybe this is my limiting factor and that maybe I should address this again with my GP on my next visit that's coming up in a month.

It's just really frustrating to have worked so hard to lose weight and it not paying off as much as I thought it would...

[Wahine]

I'm going to have to pay more attention to if it's cardiovascular or legs. But as of right now I'm thinking CV. A few years back I had a lung function test done because of some other concerns (nodule in lung...benign) and they said I was borderline COPD and/or that I "might" have exercise induced asthma. I'm thinking maybe this is my limiting factor and that maybe I should address this again with my GP on my next visit that's coming up in a month.

This could quite possibly be the answer.

[Bethany1]

Check out the exercised induced asthma or COPD. I just got my inhaler a little over a week ago and the difference has been amazing. Hills are SO much easier and long distance (for me as a newbie) rides have gone so smoothly.

It took me forever last summer to get past 6 miles and finally made it up to around 20 miles round trip near the end. In a week, I've pulled off two 10 mile trips, one on hills and one on a bike trail. I would have done more, but I rotated my hip last weekend and haven't been up to riding until Friday.

I'm still taking it easy, but cycling is turning to be amazing now and not a grueling test of oxygen intake like was last year and when I would go over the winter.

Good luck!