Book Review - Racing Weight Quick Start Guide
Matt Fitzgerald has written a new companion Quick Start Guide to his earlier book, Racing Weight. The idea behind Racing Weight is that your performance in endurance events (and many other sports) is a function of your power-to-weight ratio. The less you weigh, while staying healthy and maintaining muscular strength and aerobic capacity, the faster you will be able to run or cycle.
The trick, according to Fitzgerald, is to calculate your ideal racing weight and lose most of your weight during the pre-season, before you have started training in earnest for a marathon or triathlon. Once you have started your training cycle, losing too much weight can compromise the quality of your workouts and effect your racing. You may lose too much of your hard-earned muscle mass and you may starve your muscles of the carbohydrates that they need to run strong endurance workouts.
I learned this the hard way. This year, I dropped about 10 pounds during my preparation for the Boston Marathon. I think it effected my training and I ended up running the slowest marathon of my career. After the race was over and I started eating normally again, I had some of my fastest times in years.
The Racing Weight Quick Start Guide gets you about halfway to your goal racing weight in 4-8 weeks, depending on how much you have to lose. Then you gradually lose the rest over a longer period of time, while you are training for your event.
The Racing Weight Quick Start diet plan involves a simple grid that helps you to evaluate and improve your Diet Quality Score or DQS to focus on servings of Fruits, Vegetables, Lean Protein, Whole Grains, and Low Fat Dairy products. The book contains sample recipes and meal plans to fuel workouts at various times of the day.
The other key part of the Racing Weight Quick Start program is three types of fat-burning workouts: high-intensity intervals, prolonged fat-burning workouts done in a fasting state, and strength workouts. The book contains specific exercises and workout recommendations for runners, cyclists, and triathletes.
If you are looking to optimize your performance for an upcoming event, the Racing Weight Quick Start Guide is a good addition to your training library.
To download an excerpt and the Table of Contents from the Racing Weight Quick Start Guide, click here.
How has weight loss (or gain) helped or hurt your racing? Tell me in the comments.
Related Posts:
What is Your Best Racing Weight?
Trying to Lose Weight? - Don’t Overdo It!
How to Lose 20% of Your Bodyweight
How to Run Not So Fast in the Boston Marathon
