Body Weight and Training Load
Body weight is a very touchy subject with endurance athletes. Many people use exercise to lose weight, and athletes seeking the biggest performance gains often try to minimize their body mass. Although lower weight can be a good thing—both from the health perspective and in performance—athletes can easily devolve into obsessing over tiny weight changes. Unfortunately, this means many athletes express disordered eating or eating disorders that negatively affect training much more significantly than any weight loss might offset.
Body composition, energy availability, and disordered eating are all topics we’ll explore in depth in other posts, but today I want to share something I notice in my own body weight trends. I see some anecdotal associations with my weight and training volume. Many athletes share that they find their body weight goes down during hard training, probably driven by higher volumes and caloric expenditures. My weight seems to do the opposite.
I find that with higher training volumes, my weight tends to increase, and lighter loads lead to a weight reduction. I attempt to demonstrate this with the below graphic, which depicts my weight in the dark line. The red spikes are when my training ramp rate is positive (increasing in volume), and the green spikes below the line are a negative ramp rate (decreasing load).
This could be for a variety of reasons, and these data only show correlation, not causation. The complexity of the human body means that the weight gain during higher volume times could be from increased muscle mass, fat storage from the extra cookie cravings I give in to, or shifts in water weight. Or a combination of many reasons.
I’m human, so I can’t honestly tell you that I don’t feel any negative emotions when I see my weight creeping upwards on the scale in the morning. But what I can tell you is that I work hard to listen to my body and all the messages it sends me. To me, when my weight starts shifting up, it’s a sign that my body is nearing its capacity to endure the current training load. Rather than ignore the signs and just train harder to try and lose weight (I’ve done that before—a full post about my experience with overreaching and overtraining coming soon), I let my body guide my training and tell me when I might need to back off a little.
Thankfully, my body also responds well when I give it a little time to recover. This happens at the micro and macro levels of my training. I like to build a complete rest day into my training prescriptions; Nicole and I call them “supporting days” to avoid the negative connotations some athletes have about “rest.” Within a week, my weight typically rises, peaking on my supporting day. The next day, after a day of rest, my weight typically drops a few pounds. The rapidity of the weight loss tells me it’s probably a shift in water balance, but if it means I shed those extra pounds of water that inflamed my muscles, I’ll take it!
On the macro level, we can see from the chart above that after periods of relatively low intensity, my body weight dropped significantly. At the end of my racing seasons, I drop weight, which is particularly visible at the end of my 2017 and 2019 seasons in the chart.
So instead of fighting against my body, I give it the space to tell me what it needs. It took a long time for me to get to this point of comfort with some of my body’s messages, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Not everybody’s body reacts the same way, and yours may be the complete opposite. But my take home message is that regardless of how your body sends you its messages, take the time to stop and listen.