Fat cyclists – Whats the potential?

Thinking out loud….for an averagely average cyclist (me)

I cycle a fair bit, do a few races, never last but never anywhere near the front and to normalise it I look at Box Hill which I’ve gone up in 7:27 which puts me 16931/87538 on Strava!!! (again very average-ish)

However I am nearly 3 stone (20kg) overweight (need to lose 17kg to get a ‘normal’ BMI) and have been between 2-3 stone overweight for years now.

Just wondering if I could maintain the power and lost the weight how much difference it would make to cycling / racing / going up hills…

massive. absolutely massive difference. do it!

Massive difference. I’m 4 stone lighter than last year and have managed to keep the power up. In losing the weight, your fitness will improve too anyway.

Do it!

Potentially, quite a significant amount of time, more so on steeper and longer hills.

GCN vid on subject, cannot fathom how to embed on the new improved forum 😉

Oh… It auto-embedded just with the link 😆

I was going to give an example of my times up a local small hill (5min38secs vs 4mins11secs) http://www.strava.com/segments/16553448 from Jan/Aug 2017, but on top of me losing ~8Kg over that time (I’ve gone from ~95Kg June 2016 to now being ~76Kg), my Wazoo lost at least 900g from a change to a carbon fork (and maybe more depending upon tube/tyre combo) and my fitness improved hell of a lot in those months (I started my quest to get fit on that Jan ride).

Five years ago I went from 100kg to 80kg. A huge difference! On most climbs I found that each percentage drop was matched by being that percentage quicker, so lost 20% and my climbing times were roughly 20% quicker. Might just have been coincidence.

I’m fat and losing just 4kg makes a noticeable difference.  No power data to back this up, but when I managed to lose 12kg it was a paradigm shift in performance, this came from a backdrop of power-lifting so I would definitely have lost some power as to lose the weight I was purely cycling.  However, it was mainly lard and not the leg muscle I lost.

I need to do this again now, due to cake.

my Wazoo lost at least 900Kg from a change to a carbon fork (

Holy shit I thought my Surly forks were heavy!

And I thought this thread was about the potential energy benefits of being a fat cyclist at the top of a hill.

10% weight drop will be noticeable IME.

It makes a huge difference. Lose 10% body weight and, if youre already overweight, (like me) you’ll notice a big performance step-up.

Eventually, if you dont keep the power training up, your body will re-adapt and your power will drop a bit. Still be faster tho’

All this i proved to myself many years back, but as i like beer and pies alot, i haven’t exactly kept the weight off.

Tsk tsk.

Lots if you work hard.

https://sportsbyte.sunderland.ac.uk/cycling-champs-quest-to-be-a-healthier-father-changed-his-life/

Scroll down to the fastest TT times of 2017 and you’ll seem him next to the 50m TT result. He got some other national titles too (Team BAR)

The secrets of Britain’s fastest time triallists

See also the “Beast of the NE” who dominated the local TT scene for a long time and would ride an E/1/2/3 field off his wheel at crits.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/health/how-rode-19-stone-weight-problem-1414681

and

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/clinically-obese-triathlon-star-how-12829887

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/corpulent-collective-2018/page/1

join us

my main motivation has been a new bike I ordered. This coupled with the power of the collective is strong

I was 95kg but active, riding 1-2 times a week and regularly in the gym. Even so I was 20+kg overweight. Wasn’t happy with the wobbly bits, so set myself a goal to get to 70kg. Never quite made it but got down to 72kg. The difference in my performance on the bike is massive. Not only am I a lot faster but my endurance has improved too. resting HR is down, blood pressure – down. Most importantly though, I now enjoy riding (and all other sports) more than ever.

Go for it!

I’ve lost almost 20kg in the last 18 months and my ftp has gone up when tested on a static bike, on a climb the difference is night and day. So yes there’s plenty of potential.

Definitely makes a difference, especially on longer rides because the total power needed is lower therefore you have more energy at the end of a long ride, if you can cycle commute this is a great way of shifting weight because you are constantly using the energy stores especially if you eat the right things at the right time

Good luck 🙂

I was 76kg and am now down to 63kg, yes it makes a fair bit of difference.

At least in my case.

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Unless you’re 4ft 6 you can sod off 😀

Curious as too how much of this improvement is due to weight and how much is down to the increased activity raising fitness? Did a couple of multi day charity rides with work and as ‘that cyclist bloke’ was expected to be leading from the front, helping everyone along etc etc so I put in a few extra shifts to make sure I was in a good place. Didn’t really lose any weight, but was the fittest I’ve been for ages, put in the most Kms and M of climbing  had for a long while, at better speeds too. Caveat is I didn’t carefully weigh myself throughout so maybe I had lost a few Kgs and just not really noticed, but I’d expect a useful weight loss to be noticeable.

I lost about 7kg last summer/autumn. It made a massive difference. It felt almost like cheating being able to cruise up hills!

I think the advantage of starting from ‘fat’ and losing weight is that actually it’s really easy. A lot of books talk about trying to maintain power whilst losing weight, but they’re talking about serious athletes shedding the last 2-3kg and still outputting the same FTP. Dropping from a BMI of 30 down to 25 on the other hand you could do just by riding more and as a result actually increase your FTP (not just FTP/kg).

I am 17 stone or thereabouts, but consider myself fairly fit, i rode 8500 miles last year and have ridden 500km in a day.

But when riding with a friend who is 9 st 4 ibs on hire bikes in France, we both had power meters fitted, riding alongside each other at same speed, his powermeter said 188 watts going up what i would guess was  a 10-12% climb, i was having to put out 438 watts to same speed as him, which says a lot really!

Brassneck  – 5ft 5in (165cm) ……..76kg starts to look a lot on a hobbit.

OP, I’m in exactly the same position (other health problems notwithstanding) and 40lbs makes a massive difference to enjoyment.  Like cycling with another bike on your back with five bags of sugar in your pockets for good measure.  Don’t worry about the strength just keep cycling, then some more.  Lose the fat and you’ll go quicker, and you won’t feel like a bag of spuds trying to halve itself by sitting down on an axe-head.  Looking fwd to those days…