 Riders: Hayden Mosa & Quinn Wentzel Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach There is a saying in Track and Field, "fat don't fly." And what that essentially means is, excess body fat on your frame, does absolutely nothing to improve performance, especially in sports like motocross. There are sports where some extra added body fat can increase mass size of the frame which could yield some benefit, but for most, excess body fat is just extra weight you're carrying around on your frame.
What's important to realize, when it comes to losing weight as a racer or any type of athlete, you want to lose as much of the body weight you can from body fat only. We don't want to put you on a meal plan where you drop significant amounts of body weight really fast where you begin to spare a bunch of lean muscle throughout the process just to see the scale go down. Just because "fat don't fly" doesn't mean muscles can go too. Muscle provides function, energy (stored glycogen), blood flow, and body heat to yield performance outputs on the track. This is why when a racer all of a sudden drops a bunch of weight, doesn't always equate to better on the track performances. There are many ways of achieving your goals, but there's also a lot of wrong ways of achieving them too. When we speak on weight drop, we want the discussion to be around dropping body fat. Every athlete/racer will have a certain level of body fat where they will feel best at. Some racers can live off of McDonald's and will walk around with 6 pack abs and others will have no visible abs and "eat clean" 24/7. It's really a case-by-case situation on how much body fat a racer should have based on how they feel. Typically speaking, anywhere from 8-12% body fat will most likely leave you in a fantastic spot. You don't need ripped abs, you just need a "flat stomach." And if you can grab a small handful of body fat from either your abs or obliques (love handles) or a thick pinch from your quads, hips, chest (men), or triceps (women), then you have some work to do. Some of you are reading this now, already know that you got some work cut out for you, without evening having to grab your body fat. The Skinny on Fat Loss for Moto In order to drop body fat, you must respect the law or thermodynamics. Energy in vs energy out. You must be able to burn more calories than you are consuming. Metabolically, fat loss is simpler than muscle growth—but still requires precision and discipline. But you must realize, that fat loss itself, is a stressful process to the body, that's why professional coaches/trainers don't recommend being in fat loss phases for long periods of time. Get in, get the job done, then return to maintenance to stabilize. Even though you may be thinking right now, I'll just start eating less and body fat will come off; fundamentally yes that's true, but there's better ways of just cutting calories especially as a competitive racer. Cutting a bunch of calories without a thought process can and almost will always either wreck your racing/training performance and many times can actually stall fat loss too. So instead, I'm going to share two real world action steps if you find yourself needing to drop some unwanted body fat from your body frame. These examples will both be great roads to go down as they will help optimize your performance in the short and long term range of your fat loss and racing career. When it comes to dropping body fat, we want to look at things like body weight, dropping 1-2lbs a week, clothes fitting better, and waist and hip measurements decreasing each month. For more specific detail on your body composition, if you have access to things like a Dexa Scan or a Bod Pod will help clarify body composition levels for you over time. Action Step 1: Clean It Up & Build Awareness Racers, don't gain unwanted body fat by eating a super strict diet. You didn't gain extra fat from eating too many bananas or rice. You got to this place from eating too much crap (fried food, pastries, fast food, alcohol, etc.). The body fat was created because of your past behaviors. The very first step you should take is cleaning up your nutrition. Start eating like how an athlete should eat. Go back to my Nutrition for Motocross blog and start refocusing on your nutrition. If you do this alone with what you're already doing, I'd like to believe at least 75% of your body fat challenges would begin to be solved. If you're not even in the right ballpark when it comes to understanding nutrition, I always recommend using a nutrition app like MyFitnessPal (it's free), to help build awareness of what you're currently eating and where you need to make changes. Even if you feel like you have a decent understanding of nutrition, it's always great to do a self audit every once in a while to make sure that you're eating what you really think you're eating. Being aware of what's going on with your body and daily habits, is one of the most powerful things you can give yourself before you make changes. Most people skip over this phase and just end up guessing and guessing until they either come across something that works and get lucky, or they give up due to frustration. Action Step 2: Increase Training Volume After you've taken steps to clean up your diet, if you still need more to go, you can create a calorie deficit by increase overall activity. You can achieve this by increasing aerobic conditioning (start here for racers), ride more/longer, or add in more strength work to build the volume. Start with one area first, not in all three. What needs to be clear, is that it is a lot easier and effective to just cut 500 calories away from food than it is to burn an additional 500 calories. But I don't want you to do that yet. Because, if cleaning up your diet alone hasn't gotten you to where you need to be, even after 4-8 weeks of that, then I'm super confident that you're not training hard enough. I tell some of my racers to eat pizza, Chipotle, etc. just to get enough calories in sometimes to keep up with their workload. So, if adjusting your diet isn't enough, I'm almost certain that you're not working hard enough to burn the calories that it takes to be in the right physical preparedness for racing. And if you're actually eating a clean meal plan and eating whole foods, your calories will easily drop just by swapping out junk/crap food to healthier whole foods. It's really hard to eat 3-4k calories a day from foods like chicken, potatoes, rice, fruit, and vegetables. At this point, start doing more training volume and let the food you're eating now fuel those workloads so that you can generate more energy (movement) each day instead of taking energy (food) away. In theory you should've already reduced calories from Action Step 1 by cleaning up your diet, so from here, we don't want to continue to take away calories (energy) from you, but instead create the deficient from hard training and allow food to keep coming in for recovery and performance reasons. This method works well for the average every day person, but you're a racer who has high degree of physical demands. Many Factors Just like how all riders are going to be at their A-Game at different body fat levels etc., all riders will respond a little differently to how body fat comes off of their bodies. For some, it will fall right off, others, it may take a few weeks until you start seeing a difference. Things like sleep hygiene, hormones, life stress, genetics, and many other lifestyle factors will and can dictate speed and easy of fat loss. However the case, you do need to respect the law of thermodynamics and allow you body to be able to use the stored energy (from body fat) that was stored from calories consumed in the past as energy for the present moment. The good news is, fat loss is fundamentally easy, the bad news is, it's an annoying process to go through for many people. So my general rule of advice, is that once you get yourself to a good spot, don't stray too far away from it. Keep your body weight within a 1-5lb range year round. This will keep you from needing to go into aggressive fat loss phases and you can just focus on doing you and your body itself will be in a real happy place where it can sense consistency and it will work for you, instead of against you.
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