Bike World News

With this book, the amateur to professional athlete can optimize their potential with a fairly simple approach to dietary quality.

It would seem safe to say that endurance athletes can be obsessive when it comes to their training. We track everything, analyze the data, continually search for the best equipment and in general look for any competitive advantage. Racing Weight: How To Get Lean For Peak Performance by Matt Fitzgerald would be one more valuable tool in this quest for optimum performance.

The first thing that I like about this book is that it is specifically geared towards the endurance athlete. Fitzgerald tailored this book to cross-country skiers, cyclists, rowers, runners, swimmers, and tri-athletes with descriptions of the body-types ideal for each sport, specific weight considerations for each, and how the beginning athlete could pick one of these sports based on not only body type but also motivation, goal setting, and preferred activity. Anyone coaching endurance athletes will find his comments and observations valuable.

In speaking with the author, he told me that he was “motivated to write Racing Weight first of all by my own experience as an endurance athlete. Through this experience I have learned that I race best at a certain weight, and I do not perform as well when I am heavier. Of course, I interact frequently with many other endurance athletes and body weight is a recurring topic of conversation. It is a concern we all share. In addition, in my work as an endurance sports writer and sports nutritionist I am constantly bombarded with questions from endurance athletes who feel that their performance is held back by excessive body fat, which they struggle to lose. A couple of years ago I was struck by the thought that endurance athletes needed a comprehensive, trustworthy resource for guidance on body weight management for peak performance. I did some research and found that no such resource existed. So I created it”.

The goal of this book is to present to the athlete or coach the components needed to achieve optimum lean weight for a given sport. The author presents his method to achieve this through a five step process that covers improving the athlete’s diet, balancing energy sources, properly timing nutrient intake, managing appetite, and properly training to maintain racing weight. It seems simple and, as presented, actually is quite easy to follow and comprehend. In the words of the author “Racing Weight is different from other books in a few important ways. First, while there are plenty of weight loss books out there, no other book on weight management addresses the special needs of endurance athletes. And while there are plenty of books on endurance sports nutrition, none of these books addresses the important issue of body weight management for peak performance comprehensively. Racing Weight also offers a number of unique and powerful tools that are easy for athletes to use”.

There certainly are plenty of diet books on the market, in fact an amazing amount, so finding one specific to endurance athletes is somewhat rare. Finding one with a simplified system for tracking dietary quality is an added bonus. The authors Diet Quality Score system is worth the price of the book alone. Once again, it’s easy to follow and it makes sense. The additional information on balancing carbs, fats and proteins was also interesting and an eye opener. The logic behind various carbohydrate, protein, and fat ratio’s are discussed and the reasoning for considering other ratios beyond those typically used is fully presented.

The goal to stay as lean as possible in order to achieve maximum potential isn’t the result of one specific plan presented by the author but rather a matter of the athlete using their diet to compliment their training systems so that overtime the athlete is able to reach their goals. The reader will get a great picture of the variety of options in diet as they read through the selection of meal plans used by a variety of well-known athletes.

The super-elite athletes have specifically tailored their bodies through training and diet to compete at world-class levels. With this book, the amateur to professional athlete can optimize their potential with a fairly simple approach to dietary quality. Food is our fuel and properly managing it may be the next component in our training that takes us to new peaks in our performance.

Paperback. B&w photographs and tables throughout.
6″ x 9″, 224 pp., $18.95, 978-1-934030-51-6

My rating: 5.0 stars