Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Koli Moore, joined as always by my co-host, Kyle Helson. Thank you all for listening as always. And if this is your first time listening, please subscribe to the podcast if you like what you're hearing. And of course, a five-star rating really goes a long way wherever you are listening to podcasts. Thank you so much for all of those. Nice review always goes a long way. And of course, especially the big one is sharing the podcast. Thank you, everybody who's been sharing the podcast and recommending it to friends and on message boards and whatnot. really great to hear from everybody. Also, we are ad free. So if you'd like to donate and support the show, you can do so at empiricalcycling.com slash donate, which is why we are not promoting any grooming. products and stuff like that. We're not promoting anything that's green in color or perhaps tastes like the underside of a lawnmower. Nothing like that. So, yeah. So if you want to further support the podcast, that would be the ultimate Patreon that we have, which is hiring us for coaching or a consultation. So that would be your own AMA. Our time is your time. We're doing a lot of those lately. Frankly, they're a lot of fun. So please reach out if you'd like to bounce some questions or have us look at your training or whatever. We can do anything with teams or, you know, our time's your time. Please email me empiricalcycling at gmail.com for any of that. Of course, we have any... Show notes are going to be up on the website, which is empiricalcycling.com as always. And of course, we're going to have some charts and some figures and some graphs and some links to papers that we're going to talk about. We've really only got one today, but Instagram, we've got at Empirical Cycling, in case you couldn't figure that out already. We've got Weekend Amaze up in the Instagram stories, so feel free to ask questions for that. We get a lot these days, which is great. Thank you so much. And of course... At the end of this podcast episode, we are going to be answering questions from the Instagram. So up in my stories, whenever we are going to record, usually a few hours beforehand, I will put up a question box and you will ask your questions about what we're going to talk about. And we're going to get to that at the end of the episode. So we got some pretty good ones as usual. So thank you all for that. Really appreciate the intelligence and attentiveness of our listeners. Really wouldn't be having a good time without all of you. Thanks for participating in that. So today, obviously, the headline is the power versus weight debate. This is something that we've been talking about doing for a long time. And it actually took me a little less time than I thought to put this podcast together because it's something that I've been kind of reading about for a long time. And I've always had this peripheral interest in. And so one of the things that... we're going to get into in this episode is called allometry, which is just basically like the, um, how things scale is a good way to put it. How bodies scale. So, um, before we really get into that, Kyle, why don't we go through a little bit of the power to weight debate and kind of how we hear it talked about? Uh, cause I, I feel like a lot of the time. We hear people talking about, well, if you go on a diet, you're going to lose some FTP, but you might have better watts per kilo and that kind of stuff. So where are we at with all that stuff? I think for a lot of people, especially if they come from a different sport that didn't have, say, power meters or something like a power meter beforehand, they're fascinated by that you get this immediate feedback, this number. And especially for people early on. They're like, oh, how do I just get this number as big as possible, right? That's a really compelling and enticing motivational factor where you're like, ah, I just train more and this number just goes up. And then somewhere along the line, someone is like, well, it's not the actual biggest number that you can generate. What matters more is the watts per kilogram or your FTP divided by your body weight. And you're like, oh, oh. And then you start on this whole, maybe you find that. old chart from Coggin or whatever, which is like the now is maybe an infamous chart where they, they give you a Watts per kilogram figure for five seconds, a minute, five minutes and 20 minutes or FTP or something like that. And then try to predict where you would fall in the, you in the cycling category system, everywhere from untrained novice to, you know, world tour, world-class Olympic caliber. And so I think, A lot of people have this kind of strange introduction or introduction toward like the idea of watts per kilogram from this sort of well actually thing, which happens because they go on a forum or they talk to their friends who have more experience or God forbid they look at that power meter Yahoo group or whatever it was back in the day. The weight weenies one? Yeah. I was thinking the like training with power. Was it Google? Oh, Google groups. That was, yeah, the wattage. And as far as I know, it's still going. I occasionally log in and I'm like, oh, still having the same debate 20 years later. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think there's some knowledge, too, that depending on the event, if you dig a little bit deeper into the idea of watts per kilogram, depending on the event, that figure becomes more or less important. You figure people say, oh, for flat time trials, it matters less because aerodynamics is such a big... big important factor that it becomes something more like, you know, watts per like aerodynamic drag instead. And then for something like Everesting, then it becomes super important because you spend 99% of the time climbing and that is where weight really, really matters. And so this watts per kilogram thing might really, really matter. And then somewhere in between, someone will say like, oh, well, as long as you're like not a cat too, like it doesn't matter. Just get faster. Who cares? Like blah, blah, blah. So yeah. I feel like there are these conflicting viewpoints and some of them come from – try to borrow from maybe what a pro is worried about for time trialing or for climbing where that may or may not be applicable to someone who's a Cat 3 weekend warrior type person. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because whenever I read these debates on forums and I see it in a Discord or whatever, a lot of the time I feel like – Nobody's really wrong either. It's like when you're talking about some sort of very obscure chemical pathway, and I'm like, everybody's kind of right here. It's just that sometimes some people are more right than others, right? So it's like, does aerodynamics matter when you're sitting in the pack? Yes and no. Okay. Debate's solved. So we're going to get into all that kind of stuff on this. We're going to talk about – well, the biggest one is we're going to talk about size and weight because that seems to be the biggest one where somebody is like, oh, well, my friend is – my friend weighs 80 kilos, 85 kilos, and he's got – you know, this 300 whatever watt FTP and I'm 60 something kilos and mine is like 200 something and we're about the same speed, but he's bigger. So it matters here and it doesn't matter. So we're going to, we're going to talk about why that is. Why do bigger people seem to have bigger numbers? And if you decide to get in the gym and get really, really swole, does that make your FTP go up? Kyle, how's that going? How's your FTP doing these days? Oh, that's great. Yeah. It's through the roof. By the roof, I mean like a dollhouse roof. Excuse me. Sorry. By the way, last episode, I edited out like 30 or 40 of my coughs from being sick. I'm still a little sick. And I apparently missed a belch right into the mic. I apologize profusely for that, everybody. That's the perfect way to celebrate a hundredth episode. Let's be honest. I know. I'm so sorry. Anyway, so let's get into this episode. So Kyle, if I gave you a gram of rat liver and a gram of human liver, what would you expect to have a higher metabolic rate? So like we talked about in last episode, our metabolic experiments, like we isolated mitochondria in one of those experiments, right? And we looked at their oxygen consumption. Now, if we take this liver, rat liver and human liver, take a gram of each, and we're going to measure the O2. Easy there, liver king. It consumes, yes. Liver king, rat king, something. There's a joke in there somewhere. I don't know. So what's going to consume more O2, do you think? I would guess that the rat liver would. By how much? Because I'm going to guess by a lot, just because the rat liver is going to be so small. Even though the rat is very small, the liver is going to be extremely small compared to a human. I don't know, maybe like a factor of 10 or something like that. I think it's going to be pretty big. That's my guess. Actually, you're really close. It's seven. Okay. So this made no sense to me at first because I'm not as smart as a PhD physicist. I was like, that's so weird. Why is a rat liver seven times more metabolically active than the same amount of human liver? And the size thing you're talking about makes perfect sense. The liver's smaller, the animal's smaller, but the animal being smaller, doesn't that mean that the metabolic rate, does it scale? Apparently. The answer is from a lot of years of experiments, the answer is no, they don't scale. The cells are the same size. But when we think about what does the rat need to eat relative to its body weight, the rat needs to eat like, you know, I don't know, 10 times maybe more the amount relative to its body weight just to maintain than we do. And so if we've got animals of... different sizes, right? A rat on average probably weighs 150 grams, like a lab rat. And a human is 75 kilograms on average. This is a 500 times difference. So 500 doesn't scale with seven. It's not exactly proportional to the weight, but we're also looking at just one type of tissue. So this is allometric scaling right here. And we're going to have to discuss it. in order to really understand why VO2 max and aerobic power does and does not scale with size. So for example, if you hooked up both me and a rat to a metabolic cart, isn't that cute? A rat on a metabolic cart. Very tiny mask. Yeah, a little tiny mask, a little treadmill. But if you measured our basal metabolic rate, just what does it take to keep me and a rat alive? at you know lying down pace like barely doing anything um i would have the higher absolute metabolic rate but the metabolic rate does not scale linearly with size like we just saw so for every doubling of size you don't get a doubling of the o2 consumed it doesn't doesn't scale like that it actually lags behind so for instance a kyle-sized pile of mice would consume a whole lot more O2 than Kyle. So this is one kind of allometric scaling. This is the basal metabolic rate method of allometric scaling. And allometric scaling really is a fancy way of saying finding a mathematical relationship between size and any other characteristic, like basal metabolic rate, VO2 max, muscle mass relative to body weight. We could do brain size relative to body weight. All of these things have been looked at and they've been... getting looked at since I think like the 1850s or 80s or something like that was the first time somebody looked at this. If you give it a quick Google, if you Google allometric scaling and just look at the image search, you're going to find a whole bunch of charts on allometric scaling. But they all have one thing in common, which is logarithmic scales. All of them. Love me a good log-log plot, I'll be honest. I know. It's my physicist nature. Yeah, it's pretty common in nature to have a log-log plot end up taking something that looks complex and making it something simple like a linear plot, right? Mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah. And actually, it's interesting because I think a lot of things... occur in nature logarithmically that you don't even realize. Your eyes don't see the intensity of light linearly. They see it logarithmically, and your ears don't hear the intensity of sounds linearly. They hear them logarithmically, which is why it's actually... But that's hardwired into your brain, and so you don't even realize that your brain is operating logarithmically and not linearly for those two senses, for example. people might find it interesting to look at some geometry to start with and see why this might happen. So if we take a cube, we have an easy example of surface area going up six times the square of its base or six times the square of L or A or however you want to do that. But the volume goes up as the cube of its base, which is A to the third. And so we want to know the ratio of these things, right? So Kyle, help me out here if I screw this up. So if we plot these on a log log plot and we want to look at the slope of the line for the ratio of a cube's surface area to its volume, we are going to get a slope of two thirds. So in other words, a log-log plot for every 10x that we want to increase the surface area two steps, the volume will go up three steps also on that log-log plot. So did I get that okay? Yeah, and I think one way to think about it is that a log-log plot is looking at what nerds like me might call order of magnitude, where it's a... They're big factors, either factors of 10 or factors of 2, factors of pi, factors of E in between the tick marks, not factor of 1 in between the tick marks. So it's not adding. It's actually a multiplicative factor between the tick marks. Yeah. And actually, WKO5 does this, where if you look at the regular PD model, the power curve, and you look at the timescale, it's actually log seconds. which is why it doesn't make any sense when you look at it. But when you go into the chart settings and you unclick the log of X axis and you go, wow, I can barely tell anything's happening. That's one of the things that's going on. So that's one of the examples where it makes a lot of sense to have it on a log plot. And so another way to think about this is actually, if we're going to think about the ratio of surface area to volume, and we just think about, We can ignore the scalar. Let's put that out front as some constant C. Why not? And we're going to have A for our side or L. We're going to have basically L squared over L cubed. So area, surface area over volume. So that's where our two thirds would come from. So the question is, why is this going to happen? So, oh, here we go. 1883, Max Rubner. looked at the resting metabolic rate of seven dogs from the range of three to 30 kilograms. So he went for an order of magnitude like all good scientists typically do. Yeah, yeah, buddy. It's like to see. Yeah, and he found an exponent. And so when we talk about an exponent, we're talking about how does something scale. So we'll talk about how this scales. So what he found was metabolic rate scaled. with a rate of log two versus the log three for the size. So it's scaled to the exponent of two thirds. So for every log two steps in, sorry, for every log three steps in body size, we get log two steps in basal metabolic rate. So why would this happen? So a big one is actually going to be heat and metabolism generates a lot of heat. So as animals get larger, they gain mass a lot faster than they gain surface area, like think about an elephant versus a mouse. So slowing the metabolic rate is an essential biological fact to maintain the body temperature in a stable range. Because when we think about why this might happen, why can't elephants get used to having a much higher core temperature? The reason is because the physics... of protein folding will not support it. Like it's so highly conserved throughout the animal kingdom that that's something that's not likely to work very well. And obviously some extremophile bacteria could do that kind of thing and archaea, but, uh, you know, in animals it's, it's too highly conserved. Like you would literally melt your proteins. Which is exactly as Nick Lane put it, by the way. And if you are interested in reading more about this, I recommend Power Sex Suicide by Nick Lane, who's probably one of my very, very favorite pop sci authors. So in that book, he's got a long chapter on allometrian scaling. It's a means to an end in that book. But for us, you know, I would suggest that you pick that book up and read it if you want. So anyway, so. Later work over 20 orders of magnitude showed that the exponent for basal metabolic rate and body mass is actually more like three quarters and not two thirds. But two thirds and three quarters actually show up a lot in elementary studies. Like even... things that are like a quarter, like this goes up as log minus one quarter kind of thing, is actually super common to see with allometric studies. And I don't exactly know why. There's a lot of very high-level math I don't understand out there trying to explain it. We're not going to get into it. But what I have done is I linked a paper in the show notes about allometric scaling of what we're very interested in today, which is VO2 max. And so we're not going to cover the paper in detail because there's a lot of detail that's kind of irrelevant to us. But it culled existing literature and found a bunch of mammal VO2 max data. So obvious sources of error might be like you try to get a representative sample of VO2 max and body mass, which might be easy with some really well-studied animals like rats and mice and humans, but it's probably not. you may not have a statistically average pronghorn antelope, for instance. So in this study, the full range is the pygmy mouse, which is this cute little thing. It's seven grams. Like seven grams is what like people will spend thousands of dollars to save on their bike. So you're going to, so a pygmy mouse all the way up to the 500 kilogram horse. So we have a very large range of magnitude in this. How much does it cost to save 500 kilograms on your bike? I don't know. Is it possible to have negative weight, Mr. Physicist? As far as we know, no. But if you do discover negative mass or negative weight, I guess, you'll probably win like a Nobel Prize or you mess something up and you're going to have to attract that paper. Is that sort of like the faster than light neutrinos? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, everybody who thought they were still real. All right. So we've got a figure from this paper, which we've included in the show notes up on empiricalcycling.com podcast episodes. This is log body mass on the x-axis versus log VO2 max in milliliters per minute. So absolute scale, not relative. And what we find is with an R squared of 0.96, they found that VO2 max. has some constant, and the exponent is 0.872. Okay. Yeah, so if we have basal metabolic rate being more like 0.75, this is hugely different. Like 0.872, we're almost at unity. We're almost at one. Yeah, that's a... It might not seem like a big difference. Like, oh, what's three quarters versus eight? It's almost the same. It is actually a big difference. Yeah. Yeah, so basically for every 10 log steps that the body mass goes up, the VO2 max goes up nine log steps. And this is absolute liters per minute, not relative to body weight. So it's nearly linear. And what we've really got here is that the absolute metabolic maximal rate, increases almost in proportion with the size of the body. And one of the big questions for us is why? And this is going to answer so many questions. So Kyle, do you have any speculations on why? Is it, I don't know. Is it because there is a, is it because it, it relies on more than just like, Like if you're looking at like liver, right, metabolic rate of just the liver, it just relies on the liver itself as opposed to having to rely on all of these other systems working in tandem. That would be maybe a guess. I don't know. Yeah, kind of. Like you're getting there. So basically what's happening is when we're at VO2 max, most of an animal's musculature, especially like quadrupedal animals, animals on four legs who run with all four legs, They're going to be looking at having most of their musculature involved in exercise at VO2 max. So, you know, as opposed to humans where running, we're going to evolve a fair amount, but it's not like our arms are really pushing on the ground. We're just swinging them. It's not, you know, it's not a huge metabolic factor. And cycling, you know, it's most, it's, you know, it's the leg musculature, some of the trunk, and we've got some of the upper body, but it's not. It's not nearly as hugely taxing as like an elephant running where we can imagine all of its muscular here damn near is involved in this. So once we hit VO2 max, what's happening is we've got so much muscle involvement that the muscles represent almost the entire metabolic load for the animal. And so... At VO2 max, what we're seeing here is basically muscle seems to scale with an exponent of just about one. Interesting. It's very interesting. Where basal metabolic rate does not scale like this because we've got so many other systems involved in maintenance. And so what's the consequence of muscle mass? if we just estimate an animal's muscle mass is like 50%, just to have a nice round number, it might be lower for humans and higher for, you know, some jacked people and jacked animals. Like you've seen those, the dogs and the cows with the myostat mutation that are like, they just, they just, they look like Phil Heath. So, so what's happening here with muscle mass? So in, In Wattstock number 40, when we talked about mitochondrial density, remember the main goal is to keep ATP homeostasis in the cell. And so with more mass comes more metabolic need from the animal. And especially as you've got a larger animal who needs more muscle mass to move, you are going to have an almost linearly increasing metabolic need at max pace. So the authors of our paper here now decided to break out, quote-unquote, athletic species that are highly active, like dog, mouse, horse, et cetera. And presumably other species not quite so active. I don't know if they've got a sloth in there, but I assume a sloth or like a panda would not make the cut for an athletic species. Yeah, track sprinters would not make the cut for an athletic species. Hey now, hey, hey, hey. Um, and so one of the other things that they look at is, um, okay, well, so if we're looking at VO2 max scaling with size, what they find that remember our exponent previously was 0.87. Um, now if we break out just athletic species, we find out that the exponent gets even higher. It's 0.94. So for every 95 steps. For every 100 steps you take up in body mass and log body mass, you're going to take 95 steps up in log VO2 max for athletic species. So they have even higher metabolic rates than like non-athletic species. Maximum metabolic rates, of course. So they also look at mitochondrial volume. Guess what? Mitochondrial volume. in these species scales with VO2 max to a similar exponent around 0.95. So having more muscle to service means having to service that muscle with O2 and mitochondria, right? So yes, that's exactly what happens. And so the question is, Why can't we just lift a bunch of weights and get super swole to raise our VO2 max? We have higher metabolic demands, right? We're measuring it relative to body weight, right? So if our body weight goes up, how come our VO2 max doesn't go up? Isn't that kind of what we're looking at here with these animals? The answer is, unfortunately, no. So what's happening? So what I think we might need to do here, we... probably need a translator. We need to be able to turn our elementary study and knowledge into useful knowledge about performance. Because elementary here, our studies, we're looking at averages. We're looking at average animals. We're looking at average people. Like if we looked at a person in an elementary study, we're probably going to find an adult male of probably 70 kilos and VO2 max of about 40. Perfectly average, probably. So one of the things that we can think about in terms of this is we're looking at also other animal species that are average. If you go to somewhere and you pluck the average looking antelope off of a plane and you measure its VO2 max, it's probably going to have a VO2 max within a pretty small range of other VO2 maxes that you could find if you sampled a whole bunch of antelopes. And so these antelopes are averagely active. We're not looking at what is the most athletic antelope in terms of aerobic ability versus what is the most strong antelope. If we've got an antelope doing push-ups or whatever, or bench press, what do antelopes do for strength training? Anyway, we're not talking about that. We're talking about what's average. And so this is how we translate this knowledge into human performance. is we realized that what drives the VO2 max of the animal is not just the muscle mass. It's the size. It's how hard the heart has to work to pump blood. The heart gets feedback from about the size of the body that it's in. And in fact, we did hours and hours and hours of podcasting on VO2 max that if you're listening to this, you've probably heard. And do you remember what didn't come up? Muscle mass. That's right. And what we're talking about here is how come, okay, so if the heart senses how much body you have to grow, how come adding muscle mass doesn't change this? Well, ask any power lifter or bodybuilder if they're winded when they get up the stairs. Just ask any track sprinter who doesn't have a naturally high VO2 max. It doesn't have that effect. It has that effect to some degree, like, yeah, like lifting weights, if you're barely on the couch, sure, it'll raise your weight to max a little bit. But you need actual proper aerobic training and muscle mass does not become a factor in that. In fact, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, it can actually become detrimental. So when we're talking about allometry versus training, when we're looking at training, we're looking at something very different than our allometry studies, but we're also not. Because when we realize that we're talking about muscle mass in animals, if we want to translate this to humans, if we take – sorry to use men. We always use men. But if we take a guy who's 100 kilograms of – and you look at him and you think, okay, this guy's got the same musculature as this other guy who's 60 kilograms, you have a very good shot at, I would say – Nine times out of 10, the larger person is going to have the higher absolute VO2 max, not relative to body weight, but absolute. And the smaller person is going to have a lower absolute VO2 max. This is what we're talking about. And so how much does that translate into what is their potential? That is what we've been talking about this entire time. That's what all training is about. But when we're talking about allometric, when we're talking about size and power, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about this person is larger, so they can probably, probably produce more absolute power. This person is smaller, they can probably produce less absolute power. That's all we're saying. And honestly, that's probably all you can say with any reasonable degree of certainty. So if we have an 80-kilogram rider with a VO2 max of 90 and a 50-kilogram rider with a VO2 max of 90, the 80-kilogram rider has an oxygen consumption rate, a maximal rate of 7.2 liters a minute. But our 50-kilogram rider has a maximal oxygen consumption rate of 4.5 liters a minute. So now the question is, Can we take a 70-kilogram rider with a VO2 max of 70 and get it up to 90 by lifting weights? So like we said, no. But why not? Well, I mean, generally, my first thought would have been, oh, like lifting weights doesn't actually – lifting weights is not aerobic training otherwise. Okay, it's not aerobic training. That's a big one. But according to our elementary, if we have more muscle, if we have more size, shouldn't the VO2 max go up relatively? Now, I think when we just look at people in general, if we look at a bunch of men who are like 70 kilograms heavy, they're going to have a range of VO2 max. And this is actually the starting point of what's our usual performance limiter is genetics and time. So if we are going to add a bunch of muscle mass to a 70-kilogram rider to try to get their VO2 max up to 90 milliliters per minute per kilogram, we're probably actually going to make that worse. And one of the reasons is that they're not doing the aerobic training. Because the heart has to service a lot of muscle mass in order to grow, but people who are working hard to maintain muscle mass... cannot usually dedicate a lot of time to good quality aerobic training. So this is why Chris Froome never got super, super swole in order to get his VO2 max up high. Like Teddy Pagachar never had to get in the gym and put on a bunch of muscle to get his VO2 max up. Like these are people who are very, very slim. You look at, you know, Mariana Voss, you look at, um, uh, enemy convoluted, very, very slim people who are never, You know, trying to bulk up like, oh, I got to raise my VO2 max by putting on some muscle. That actually gets it backwards despite what the allometry is talking about. And exploring this relationship is what we're going to spend the rest of the episode talking about. So the authors note that there's actually a large spread of VO2 max in species for the same size class, right? Which makes sense. We see the same thing in humans where VO2 max. in humans of about the same size can span not an entire order of magnitude, but I would say roughly close enough. So your size doesn't guarantee a certain VO2 max or even a certain potential. That would be nice though, right? That'd be an easy way to spot future amazing athletes to just find someone who has similar size, like height and weight stats to current. amazing athletes. Like, done. Your athletic scouting is so easy then. Yes. Yeah, it would be. But it's not. So one of the big questions I think we have is why does a larger body require a larger VO2 max? And one of the things is, you know, obviously because muscle scales a certain way, but we haven't really talked about animals that have a lot of muscle versus animals that have a little muscle. Because when you look at the animal kingdom, like the animals look somewhat homogenous and people, you know, compared to even some animals are relatively homogenous. Um, so, okay, maybe that's not a great way in for this. Um, let's, let's try it. Uh, let's try it another way. Um, the heart has to pump with a certain amount of, um, you know, the heart's under a certain amount of stress on aerobic training. And it has to adapt to that. And so a person with longer limbs, a person with certain characteristics is going to load their heart more because the heart's got to work harder to get the oxygen out to the limbs and then back, right? And we've got, you know, things like muscle pump to help it get back and whatnot. But here's a good example is I remember I was listening to a podcast with, oh God, who's that weightlifter guy who got the heart transplant? Um, the, it's still your motherfucking set guy. Uh, CT Ali Fletcher. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah. I know. Um, and so he was saying, cause he got a heart transplant and he said the doctor told him that the heart was too small. Um, and he's a very large man. And I think he got it from like a, a small Asian woman or something like that. Just a small woman's heart. And over time, the heart grew. Because when you put a smaller heart into a larger body, the heart's under certain stresses that's going to make it grow, right? And so if you've got a larger heart and you put it into a smaller body, you're probably going to find the opposite. Like, wow, this person's VO2 max really went up. Because remember, VO2 max is centrally limited. It's not peripherally limited. And so for instance, when you put a smaller heart into a larger person's body, So that heart to grow is going to be experiencing a VO2 max-like stimulus. It's not going to be experiencing a VO2 max stimulus per se the way that we would think about it in terms of training, but it's going to be experiencing a lot of like, oh, wow, this person's got a lot of blood volume. Wow, this person's, I've got to push pretty hard to get the heart back. It's going to have those kinds of experiences and stresses, and it's going to grow until those stresses stop. And that is actually a great way to think about the basal level of VO2 max for a smaller person versus a larger person. And in my experience, I think a lot of it comes down to plasma volume as well. How much blood do you have to make your heart grow? And so that's why when we're talking about elementary versus we're talking about training, the things are similar, but they're also different. And once the heart essentially gets to a certain point, it no longer has a reason to grow. And adding muscle mass, frankly, is not a very good reason for a heart to grow. And so the authors of this paper that we're peripherally looking at here looked also, they didn't actually put up a figure for this, but they mentioned it in the discussion. How does body weight and VO2max scale when VO2max is relative to body weight? The exponent is negative 0.13. Negative 0.13. Negative 0.13. So as body weight goes up, the VO2max relative to body weight goes up with an exponent, a log exponent of negative 0.13. So it's going to drop. relative to body weight as the body weight goes up. Right. But in absolute terms, it keeps going up in raw, like, liters per kilogram or per minute or whatever, you know, like, whatever that number is that everyone likes to talk about. Like, oh, mine's 110 or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So being larger means that you have a better chance of having a higher absolute VO2 max, but it does not guarantee it. Like, there are... you know, small people in the world tour who have a much higher VO2 max than I do. And they weigh 50 kilograms. Like what's Eddie Hall's VO2 max? Probably not amazing relative to body weight, but it's probably fine relative to himself. And, you know, who knows if he's taking any special supplements for that kind of stuff either. I don't. Maybe for Strongman, I could see that actually being useful, which is why Strongman doesn't test as far as I know. Anyway, so being larger, yeah, you pretty much have a higher absolute VO2 max in liters per minute, or the distribution would say that. But the odds are, and this is because this is not a guarantee, right? Like we cannot, we're mostly talking averages here. But, you know, if science is kind of, you know. always dealing with averages, we also need to think about the distributions of these things. We can't always assume that, you know, your FTP is X percentage of your ramp test peak value because you are probably not average. Stuff like that. So this brings us to our first main point. You cannot raise view to max or FTP by adding muscle, but you can do it with aerobic training. 

Which makes sense, right? I mean, that makes sense. In order to get better aerobically, you might consider aerobic training. I know. I'm sure we're only – only like 5% to 8% of our listeners are like blown away by that fact. I think probably early on in my learning of this stuff, I might have been surprised by that. But yeah. So not to pass judgment on anybody who is surprised by that because – there's a learning curve for everybody. So relative VO2max is going to increase by lowering your body weight and adding aerobic stimulus. But this comes at a cost, which we're going to talk about in a second though. So healthy men of even very slim size have enough muscle mass to comfortably produce 400 watts for a long period of time if they can supply the oxygen. But you can't. Can you? And neither can I. Maybe if we combine our aerobic system. Yeah, if we can combine our aerobic systems. So being larger gives you a better shot at getting to 400 watts, but having a high relative VO2 max is still a rare event that requires good genetics and good training and recovery, of course. So can't go with podcasts without mentioning recovery, can we? So remember VO2 max is supply limited. We are not muscle mass limited. We are not utilization limited. So way back in our VO2 max series, let's go over this real quick. If we have more capillary density, we can serve as the same muscle mass with a little more O2. which is going to lead to a better fractional utilization. If we have more efficient muscle fibers, like more type 1 fibers, this is going to lead to better fractional utilization because we can turn more of that O2 into useful work on the pedals. But we cannot improve this by adding muscle mass because one of the things that happens is Okay, let's say you can get the same amount of O2 into the muscle, like into your quads, let's say, and we are adding quad mass. Because we're centrally limited, like let's say we're providing four liters a minute to both quads, adding muscle mass is not going to get you to five liters a minute. it might get you to, you know, you might be able to increase fractional utilization by 4.05 or something like that, if indeed that is something that you could do. It would be better for you to decrease that muscle mass if you want to increase your relative VO2 max, because you now have a smaller amount of muscle to service with the same O2, which just... on his face would lead to better efficiency of this. But the heart still has to deliver the O2 in the first place. So I hope all this is kind of making sense. Yeah, I mean, I would say it's interesting if you compare someone like, you know, Ganna, who's like 6'4 and 80... 85 kilograms? 84, 85, I think is what I have. Yeah. And then like someone like Castroviejo, who is also a very good time trialist, who's like, you know, five, six and like 65 kilograms or something like that. Yeah. He has such a good TT position. He's just like a little beak. Yeah. So. But you think like they're traveling at similar speeds despite. I know, right? A pretty big span in mass and height. Yeah. Okay. So our last point on this little journey before we continue it is, so how would you get the largest relative VO2 max? And so my answer would be, you have to be slightly above average height. You have to be very slim and you have to do a ton of aerobic training and you have to have the potential for a good absolute max, which is why So many Tour de France winners are about 180 centimeters tall and 67 kilograms. It's like Tadej Pagachar, Vincenzo Nibali. I know we can't really use him, but Lance Armstrong, Geraint Thomas, I think is a little taller. Brad Wiggins is a little taller, but about the same watts per kilo. So you have large people who have low body weight. And when you look at like a longer climbing stage, like remember Quintana versus Froome? Quintana put in a bunch of time into Froome. So Quintana being smaller is going to have a better watts per kilo on a relative scale, even though when it comes to a time trial, Froome is going to have better watts, like pure watts. So I think we shouldn't shit on muscle mass too hard though, because it definitely has advantages that we need to talk about. This is why track sprinters aren't little twigs, right? They're huge and they have 2,500 watts peak power. They have to be strong. And so, you know, we're not going to talk too much about what makes good peak power, good sprint power in this, but it definitely is a factor because one of the things that we know for sure is that muscles don't get weaker for their size. And we put them into people and we got rate of force development. We've got, you know, lever length attachments and all that kind of stuff. That stuff, yes, that has a factor. But we're going to have to pretend that everybody's equal in these respects for a minute. So muscles are going to scale for force in terms of parallel contractile units, which means thicker muscles means more force. And so a larger person or animal. can generally produce more absolute force from thicker muscles, which is how track spurners and why track spurners get so big. They need to produce more force. But this person is not going to produce more force per their body weight because of how the thickness does not really scale with size because of... It's the weight of the muscle itself and also the weight of the animal that has that muscle. So this is where Kyle is actually much more of an expert in terms of weightlifting numbers. So you've got some interesting stats on this stuff for us. Yeah. So I remember back when I took biology in college, they talked about this like two-thirds, roughly two-thirds power law scaling as why. Giant ants or Godzilla or these big monsters don't exist and could never exist. Because if you think about, if you scale an ant up to 300 times its size, whatever, like a human-sized ant, they're probably like 500 times, whatever, like a thousand times bigger. That ant is going to weigh, look how skinny ant legs are. And those ant legs are going to stay relatively very skinny as the weight just keeps... going up much faster than the cross-sectional area of those legs get, right? And that's why you can't have giant ants. They literally couldn't support themselves. And that's why you see weird things like giant creatures underwater that could not exist on land because the water actually helps reduce the amount of force and because of buoyancy that their limbs would have to support. Anyway, so this is commonly looked at in... Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting as how do the amount you can lift in raw kilograms or log of kilograms scale with body weight in kilograms or log of body weight in kilograms. And generally, Olympic weightlifting is two lifts now. It's the snatch and the clean and jerk. And then powerlifting, it's three lifts, right? It's the squat, bench, press, and deadlift. And if you look at all of those, relative to body weight categories, they all follow two-thirds-ish laws. Like, it actually seems like there are some older papers that looked at the world records and things like that from the 20s and 30s, and those much more closely followed the sort of two-thirds law than it seems like numbers today, whereas numbers today definitely seem like they're... more in the like below 0.6, you know, sort of 0.55, 0.6-ish, 0.58, things like that than they are with the naive expectation of 0.067, which would be your two-thirds. But generally speaking, some of that could be due to the fact that if you include some of the outliers, like the super heavyweights, their actual body weight is very high, like close to 200 kilograms for some of the super heavyweight men. And they're not lifting 400 kilograms, for example. And then also, some of it may be due because especially for the snatch and the clean and jerk, there is a much larger skill component in there than there is for just the squat and the bench press and the deadlift. And so you'd probably expect the squat, bench press, and deadlift to... be closer to that ideal two thirds and the snatch and the clean and jerk with the skill component and a speed component to be somewhat less. Um, yeah, it's like, it's like thinking about, um, like just in terms of deadlift, like Eddie hall or Thor Bjornsson's like world record deadlifts, like, you know, we're talking like 1100 pounds at something like 400 pounds, 450 pounds body weight. So like we're, you know, we're not exactly into Steffi Cohen territory because she did a deadlift at like, what was that? Like five and a half times her body weight at like, what was she like? 120 or 130. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's the kind of scaling that we're looking at here. Yeah. And yeah, the, the, the raw eye popping numbers are, are great, but yeah, the, and then, and then there are, there are these other metrics that people have come up with to try to take this into account to give you a better chance, better ability. to look at numbers directly between two different people who are in two different body weight classes because neither metric is perfect, right? Raw total is not perfect and percentage of body weight is not perfect because each of those favors the high end or the low end. And so they come up with these different metrics like Wilkes or Dots or these other things to try to make it easier. Yeah. Yeah. And so all of this is exactly why grasshoppers can jump, what, like 10 or 20 times? their height and or more. Yeah. Right. Or more. Yeah. And humans, we can, if we tuck our legs really well, we can barely get our own height. Yeah. We're not great jumpers. We don't have great power to weight compared to really, really small animals. And that's one of the things that doesn't quite scale, um, because the strength doesn't scale because of the weight of the muscle and the animal, uh, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, a long time ago, uh, JBS Haldane, and if you're not aware of JBS Haldane, I highly recommend going to read any of his writing. He said that if someone, quote, whose muscles developed no more power, weight for weight, then those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet. That's like 1.3 meters or something like that. It's, yeah. So that's the kind of scaling that we're talking about, which is why If you had a human-sized ant, the ant would look like Phil Heath, right? It would be the Ronnie Coleman ant, and we'd all be terrified, which is why, remember those old movies like Them with the big ants? Those movies should have been twice as scary. Just jacked ants. Yeah, because muscles, they've got to bear their own weight as they get bigger, and also all the other organs. Because all the other organs... and stuff that comes with the animal does not scale one-to-one like muscle does. This is all going to bring us to our second big point here, which is that absolute maximal strength and power will generally be higher if you are larger. Obviously, there's a range, but generally speaking, bigger people will have larger absolute power and strength. Because muscle mass, also, we're going to look at peak power too. Muscle mass and some other things, but we'll have to talk about that in another episode because we're uncovering a lot of stones to unturned in this episode here. Sorry. So muscle mass and strength is a limiting major factor for sprint power and anaerobic capacity. And I think, actually, I remember on the podcast forever ago, you talked about Grant Thomas. going from a track racer to a Tour de France winner, and his peak power in one minute tanked, and his 20-minute kind of started going down, but his watts per kilo, his FTP all kind of stayed about the same, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He published his numbers after his win. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing that we're talking about. It's when you lose the muscle mass, you're going to lose some peak power, you're going to lose some anaerobic capacity. So the question is, if you want to add some muscle, because it doesn't improve your aerobic training or even potential, if you're going to add muscle, you should have a good performance reason why the added muscle and weight is going to help you rather than hinder you. Because if you are doing something like, if you're racing like Olympic cross country, you're going to have a lot of climbing to do. So if you are going to be putting on some muscle, you need to make sure that it's going to be worth it to have that muscle. And also it's one of those things where I've certainly trained people to get some muscle mass and improve their peak power in one minute for starts and stuff like that. And at the same time, a lot of the times we can actually optimize their aerobic training as well. So we can actually improve their power without adding too much body weight, but we can also greatly improve their aerobic training, which also increases their watts per kilo on an absolute scale. So it's something that can be done, but it's difficult to do. And I actually did a WKO5 webinar just talking about this kind of thing. Maybe I'll link it in the show notes, talking about some of the tools that I use and whether I consider some of these things short-term or long-term. Like in the short-term, just a little preview, working on strength and maximal power and anaerobic capacity, peak power, one minute stuff, relative to aerobic stuff, to me in the short term, that's a, what are you doing in terms of training time? Because what you put your training time into, that's what's going to improve more. On the other hand, if you are looking at something more like, like in the long term of like years, like, okay, maybe this is where we're going to look at, okay, maybe if we add too much muscle on this, it's going to decrease this aerobic. performance factor if we don't think we can improve you aerobically. So we got to make sure that you've got that buffer room to make sure and et cetera, et cetera. So we've got to weigh all those options very, very carefully. So we've got to think about the time. We've got to think about the fatigue. We've also got to think about injury potential too for weightlifting because the potential for injury is absolutely non-zero. I've injured myself several times in the gym as have a lot of people lifting weights. So it definitely happens. I mean, I've even even had weird twinges where like you're doing a squat and it feels normal, feels fine. And you do something wrong and you like tweak something in your back and then you're like, oh, that actually really sucks because you need your back for everything. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't like I was doing something extreme when these things happened. It wasn't like I was trying something I'd never done before or, you know, going for a PR or something like that. sort of inexplicably, you know, you know, you're standing up and you're like, Oh, what was that? Like, yeah. Like there's some underlying thing that we're not aware of. That's like, or maybe there's like a weak spot in a muscle that we're exposing somehow. Cause I remember like my worst back injury so far, all I did was I picked up the weight out of the rack and I felt, and I went, Oh, I put the weight back down and I had racked it and went home right away. Uh, then had to go get muscle relaxants. So yeah, that's a big consideration in the long term with all this kind of stuff. I think too, I think the recovery thing is maybe underappreciated because I think people sometimes don't realize how hard, even if you're not squatting 400 pounds and doing all this stuff, how much it is actually tiring you because you're still lifting a heavy amount relative to your ability to your maxes and things like that. It is actually quite tiring even if you don't feel like that same level of tire that you would feel after like a six-hour ride or something like that. It is still tiring and you need to recover from it appropriately and you can't just throw weightlifting sessions in on top of your training plan and hope it goes fine. You can do that. You just shouldn't. Yeah, for sure. And if you want to do that, fine. Be realistic about it and be realistic about what's happening when you add that stuff without changing anything else. Because a lot of the times, well, anyway, if things are not going quite right, that would be a good reason to reach out for a consultation, for instance. We can help you suss that stuff out. So the next thing to talk about here is CDA, not linearly scaling with body mass. is sort of like, you know, via two max, we could probably have a rough estimate of CDA per body size. Like I actually couldn't find a good one, uh, about how these things scale because especially with aerodynamics being, um, you know, being kind of on a nascent, uh, science as it were in cycling, um, compared to, you know, via two max stuff. Um, I couldn't find a great thing for this, but I think it's a really good opportunity if somebody out there wants to do a study on this, because I would love to see how it scales. Because that seems like, yeah, the power gain outstrips drag, which is why Ghana, you know, at like 82, 83, 84 kilos and like two meters tall is a top tier time trialer. But we've also got, you know, other examples like Indurane and Cancelara, who are also, you know, you know, Tony Martin. very relatively large people for cyclists. Yeah. And I think aerodynamics gets even harder because then you have these weird things with like body proportions, like how wide are your shoulders? How good is your flexibility? Like a lot of that stuff won't necessarily be sussed out just by body weight, right? Like what is the relationship between body weight and like low back flexibility? You know, it's just not much. Yeah. Yeah. But I think actually this is a good opportunity to talk about acceleration versus top speed versus like speed per power. Because in cars, like all the car people out there know this already, a car's weight is a very large factor in its zero to 60 miles an hour time or zero to 100 kph. But it does not factor into top speed. Right. Yeah. So when you're thinking about sprinting, in sprinting, a large portion of it, especially on the track, is actually acceleration. It's not necessarily holding top speed. It's getting up to top speed. And what's the very first equation we learn in Newtonian physics? It's force equals mass times acceleration, or acceleration equals force divided by mass, force per weight. And so that's why... like, uh, remember 2016 Callum Skinner with his abs, like warming up between, uh, I was like this motherfucker. It's God damn it. Why can't I look like that? Um, and he was still, he was still over 90 kilos, right? Like he had, he, he was like, and he's not that, he's not that tall. He was like taller. Uh, you know, he's like, I think he was over, he's over six foot, but like, he's not, he's not six four. Right. So he was like pretty, pretty ripped as far as, uh, cyclists usually come. Yeah. He's not that, like that, that Russian Israeli guy, um, who is, what is he? Yeah. Yeah. He's like six, six and like a hundred kilos or he's almost, he's almost like a metrics meters stick where he could be two meters tall and a hundred kilograms. Yeah. Oh my God. Um, yeah. So, uh, I remember in an interview, Callum Skinner said that the lightest he was was at the 2016 Olympics. Like he was getting lighter down to the Olympics. And he had to, of course, maintain the power and everything. Because when you accelerate yourself, it's power, it's forced to wait. It's power to wait. Like those are the big metrics. So when you are also thinking about adding mass, think about do I have to accelerate my ass out of a corner or like up a short rise or like. you know, up to speed on the track. Like these are big factors in performance and it's not just, I need to be bigger to be heavier because, you know, I've been, you know, 220 pounds and really strong, but that was not the fastest that I've been. Yeah. It's interesting too. Cause like you think this is where, you know, people all like, it's just silly when people talk about trying to save. 200 grams or something on their bike or 200 grams on wheels because, oh, they're going to accelerate out of every corner in those 200 grams. You're like, ah. You did a 10-minute tip on rotating mass not being a big factor. Yeah, and people always talk about this, right? Like your body weight far outstrips your bike even for the lightest people. Your bike could be 6.8 kilos, and even the lightest cyclists are – Eight times heavier than that? Yeah. Yeah. So I would recommend if you've got – well, I would say if you've got the money to spend on that and you'd rather spend that money than diet, I fully respect that choice. I really do. Food is – I wish I could spend that kind of money, but I would rather eat personally. Up to a point and then, yeah, you've got to diet sadly. That actually does bring us to our last point, which is dieting. And we're not going to go too deep on the actual diet, how much to lose and all that kind of stuff. But I want to talk about this at least in terms of performance and from where I sit as a coach because I've coached a lot of people who are dieting. And I've seen, I've talked to, and I've consulted with a lot of people who are dieting as well. And some of the time, it goes fine. A lot of the time, it does not go fine. So let's talk about this kind of thing because one of the things that I see the most often is people talking about FTP dropping when you lose weight. Why would this happen if muscle mass isn't important? I think this is actually a pretty important question because this is actually the health of a lot of riders. Kyle, you've heard about this quite frequently, probably as much as I have, right? Yeah, and I think something that people don't realize or maybe don't initially think is that if you're doing hard FTP efforts or FTP tests and things like that and you're dieting, by definition, you are not eating enough to fully recover in between. sort of definitionally, because you're trying to lose weight. And so if you're eating enough to just maintain your weight, that would be enough. But you are in a caloric deficit. And if you do that too badly, you're just not going to be recovered. And so that can manifest as, yeah, is your RPE going up for the same power, your FTP dropping, your sleep getting worse, things like that. Yeah. And the question is, we don't know the mechanism. of exactly how this happens either. We know that there's a drop in muscle contractile force when not recovering or when muscle glycogen stores are low, but we don't know exactly what's happening. We've got some theories. I've got some theories too. Everybody's got theories. We don't know exactly what the deal is. So every once in a while, I've had a client and I'm not going to name names, but everybody listening, if this was you, you know who you are. Sometimes people will just decide to like not eat during training. And a lot of the time, most people aren't weighing themselves every day that drives everybody nuts. I understand that. So when recovery seems impaired, like I can tell from where I sit and I'll say, are you eating enough? You should probably eat more. And then after a little bit, sometimes it comes out, oh, I've been trying to lose some weight. Okay. First, it's a good thing to tell your coach if you're trying to do that. And I've had – occasionally I've had people who say, well, I need to be this weight for this road race, which is very climbing, and it's like a month and a half away. Like we're talking six weeks. That would be the wrong time to start. Yeah, and especially the wrong time to do it while you are doing training that's relatively new to you. Like if you've done a crash diet previously, like up to a road race or whatever. Um, you've been doing the training that you gave yourself. Like you can find a middle ground, like you can find somewhere where it's like, okay, well, I don't feel great today, but I should just not ride or I should ride easier or whatever. Um, when I'm giving you training and I think that you are eating enough, um, you know, things can go really, really wrong. Um, and I, I had one client who was like, well, I've got this race. I'm going to crash diet. Keep giving me the normal training. And I was like, are you sure? Are you really, really, really, really, really sure? He said, yes. So under my protest, he did this crash diet and he pretty much quit the sport not too long after, which is one of the things that sadly happens a lot of the time. And I don't like it. And I learned from that to say, no, we're going to figure this out. We're not just going to let you crash diet while I give you normal training. Yeah, that seems like a – I mean, I think a lot of people listening have probably tried this where if you think for the first week it's going good and the first week you're still pretty enthusiastic, like you're motivated about, oh, I'm going to lose a little bit of weight. I'm going to keep training through. It's going to be fine. And then like 10, 14 days in, you're like, oh, this kind of sucks because now you've had a few days, a week, two weeks maybe of not quite recovering as much as you used to and not feeling quite as energized before all these workouts and it just sort of chips away at your mental motivation there. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, so one of the things to look at when you are trying to lose weight, because obviously fat mass doesn't contribute to performance and it doesn't. It doesn't add anything. And even very slim people, everybody knows, have a lot of fat in them to utilize. So having low body fat is advantageous to performance. And we're going to talk a lot about this in a future episode. But for now, from where I sit in my coaching chair, I think everybody should think that their aerobic markers of performance should not... drop while you are on a good diet. Like FTP should still feel like FTP. Some sessions might get a little hard if you're trying to add time and zone and you get to a point where, oh, maybe I can't quite add time and zone. Now you've got a couple options, like maybe decrease the workout frequency. add in some more easier days, you could decrease or you could change the timing of your nutrients. So you recover more in some days and that deficit in other days. And we're going to talk to an Amrita about all that kind of stuff in a future episode, hopefully not too far in the future. And this is another reason to do dieting when the workout intensity is low and it's easier to recover because higher intensity stuff on a deficit that. chews through glycogen. It's super high stress and a diet itself is high stress enough. Like, like every time I've dieted and I've, I've gone through a couple of diets cause I was, I was, I was way too much person for quite a while. Um, and at the end of every one of my diets, uh, I am, my body's just under enough low level stress that I retain, I retain water weight. Like I'm in the same deficit. I'm doing the same routine, but my body weights like starts to stabilize. And, you know, on my body fat impedance scale, like the body fat starts to stabilize. And I'm like, I know that now I know that my body is like really, really like, hey, what are you doing to us? And as soon as I get off the diet, my body weight stabilizes and that body fat percentage on the scale drops. And oftentimes I'll like lose that last like kilo that I've been like waiting to lose. So that can happen. That's how much stress your body gets under just on a diet and, you know, moderate activity. Like I don't exercise. 20 hours a week. I'm doing like, you know, 10. Yeah. I think if people think like, oh, then how do, how did these like bodybuilder, like Olympia people do it? And it's because when they are dieting so hard and getting like so shredded, they are not getting fitter in the gym. You know, they are, they are working out to working out very hard just to maintain. And then also doing just a ton of cardio and like, you know, Listen to an interview from people who've done bodybuilding, gotten really shredded. Like mentally, they're like really not there. Like it's really hard, right? Like it's not fun for them, right? And that's like the hard part of their – and they're not training for maximum squat bench, deadlift, clean and jerk, stuff like that. It's just for aesthetics. So the raw numbers for them do not matter at all, right? It's just about – maintaining muscle mass that you've already built. Yeah. The raw number is how many striations can you see in your tiny little glutes? So I think another thing to think about here is like when a lot of the times the number on the scale, and this is another thing that we're going to talk to Namrita about, the number on the scale does not reflect your fat mass. It's not like... Um, cause there's, there's a lot that goes into this because a lot of weight as an athlete is water and your water rate can fluctuate quite a lot. And for somebody who weighs, you know, 85 kilos, like I do, it can, it can fluctuate like, you know, uh, in a huge, huge range. Um, as somebody who's, uh, you know, like a 110 kilo bodybuilder, it can fluctuate in an even larger range. So, um, so one of the things that you think about. As you train, or if you're going to be dieting, you've got to make sure that just the number on the scale is not the only thing you think about. Because making sure that FTP feels like FTP, and even if it's going up, that's great too. That's also a sign that you're in the right direction. Because when people I'm training are dieting and they're doing it well, they can get fitter. So at some point... you know, the diet might at some point need to be hard enough depending on the person. And I haven't yet run into this, but it might be that, okay, we've got to put the diet early season when you're not training. So that way when you train, you can recover and blah, blah, blah. That might need to be a thing. But for most people, if you are trying to lose weight and your FTP is dropping, it's too much too fast. If your body weight's going down on the scale. Chances are, if your performance is compromised, you are way low on glycogen, you are way low, you're dehydrated, and you're not here to dehydrate yourself and look like a bodybuilder. You're here to go fast on a bicycle, and you need power for that. So I remember a while ago, I was talking to somebody on a forum who said, you know, he was like, I was 160 pounds or something like that, but I was my fastest at like 170. And, you know, 10 pounds, about, you know, four or five kilos, that's... a pretty good chunk of weight, but you know, what was probably happening with him was that when he was losing weight, a lot of what he was losing was water weight. And that was something that was really compromising his performance. And so knowing the difference between water weight and actual fat mass is a big difference. And so also when you think about going and doing like a low intensity aerobic session, like let's say, I know you're always burning some carbs, but mostly we've said on the podcast many times, burning some fat or, you know, we basically say you're burning just about all fat at low intensity aerobic exercise. Does that mean that when you get back, you don't need to eat anything because that's just fat. We've got a lot of it. No. The answer is no, don't. Because like we've said before, the body is a really good energy accountant. So empty fat cells change leptin levels, and that leads to signals of hunger. Empty fat cells also take a while to go away. Like if we're dieting, if we're dieting too fast, what happens is we have too many empty fat cells at once. And this can be a big reason that diet rebound happens. is you lost too much weight too fast. You've got a bunch of empty fat cells and they are grumpy and they are like standing there at the edge of your bloodstream with pitchforks going, feed us, feed us. So that's a definite thing that happens. It's also one thing. It's also one reason why if you are dieting and you're being consistent, sometimes you won't just see like a nice linear daily, like, oh, down another quarter of a pound, a quarter of a pound, a quarter of a pound. And all of a sudden, sometimes you're dieting and then you're, body weight staying the same, and then it drops two pounds from one day to the next, and then it stays the same, it fluctuates, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. So a good diet has a relatively low rate of loss. So that way you can try to recover. Your muscles will recover as best as possible. And you don't lose too much fat too quickly because when you do, you get the diet rebound. When you don't, the fat cells... It's enough where you can overcome that signal of like, hey, I need to eat because it's not that bad. And you're recovering. Your performance is okay. So it's all right in the long run or well, in the short run. We'll talk about diet likes and stuff also in the future. But when you're losing at a good rate, you've got some fat cells that are empty. They're kind of grumpy. It's not a big mob. And they're going, hey, feed us. And you're like, no. And after a while, they're like, you know what? I think I'm not needed here. I'm just going to get out. I'm clearly. I'm clearly just taking up space. I'm empty. Like, what am I doing here? It takes some time to lose fat cells like that. And so that's why losing too much too fast is bad. And so here's the other thing about diets and recovery and everything like that. So during recovery, the nutrients that we absorb, they make it into the bloodstream and they're... available to both muscle and adipose tissue. And so here's the thing. We all know about the glycogen window, like for a little while after exercise, muscles are super hungry for glucose uptake. Yes, that's the thing. For most really hard exercise sessions, they cannot uptake enough to fully recover their glycogen stores. Fully recovering glycogen stores for both muscle and liver can take, you know, a day, two. It's a long process, which is one of the reasons why when we talked to Namrita about how much carbs should you eat, the answer was always it depends. Because if you've got two sessions in a day, you need to eat immediately after your first session so you can recover as well as you can for your second session. If your next session is in three days, it's not nearly as important. So when you short yourself too much food, Both fat and muscle tissue and liver and all your other organs, they don't recover fully. And so that's something else that makes dieting really tricky when you're riding a lot or even a little. And that's also one of the other things that happens when people get super fat like I did, is when you eat too much, all that nutrients, they're as available to muscle as it is to fat. And if you've got more fat than you've got muscle, they can certainly... they could certainly gain at equal rates. And this is one of the reasons that strongmen get fat because you've got to keep recovering and keep recovering. And it's like, well, how come they're just not building muscle? Because your fat has access to that too. And so it also goes the same the other way. So a lot of the time, if you're actually, if you're trying to diet and you're, if you're someone who's like heavier, like me, when I was at a hundred kilos and try to drop weight, It wouldn't have benefited me to put on muscle because I was going to gain fat at a very high rate because I had so much already. Slimming down before you gain muscle like that is also a good thing because most cyclists don't need to think about that because most cyclists are pretty slim already. If you're not, this is also something to think about. If you're going to bulk, if you're like, I actually need to put on some muscle, but you've got a lot of fat tissue. you might want to lose some of that fat tissue first. So anyway, so we're getting more into diets than I had planned. But I think the last thing would be losing weight and losing your sprint in one minute power. So this is also something to be expected because again, when you're shorting yourself some food, a lot of the time you're shorting yourself enough to you know, maintain your muscle mass. So I think this is pretty normal. Like for bodybuilders, Kyle, like don't a lot of them lose quite a bit of muscle. Like you said, they were, you know, when they're getting ready for a show, they're just training to not lose. I think a lot of bodybuilders do lose a bit of muscle, right? I would assume so. Like it's, it's, it's unavoidable, especially if you're trying to get, you know, stray at glutes or whatever, uh, your, your, your body eventually is just not going to hold on to, you know, even in the, and they, and they even are, doing all that they can, eating a ridiculous amount of protein, using some special Soviet sports supplements, and it's still not possible to ensure that you only lose fat. There's no way for you to control exactly your diet to cause yourself to only lose fat. It's not possible. Yeah. So one of the things that you can actually do is you can use your peak power for your sprint because glycogen stores being... mostly topped up or fully topped up actually has a big impact on your, uh, on rate of force development, like how fast you can contract your muscles. Um, and so if you are looking at your peak power, like if you do like a couple of sprints a week or something like that, you know, short three, five seconds, not too much. Well, your peak power, if your peak power is tanking and your FTP is also tanking, these are bad signs for your diet. They're very bad signs. If your peak power is looking okay, it might not be amazing. If it's looking okay, all right, now we're talking. Now, you know, if you're maybe lifting a little bit of waist to keep some muscle on, okay, now we're talking. Now, if your sprint's not dropping, that's one of the things I look for when I'm dieting and training is I look for my peak power to not drop. If it's dropping, I'm like, uh-oh, I'm in trouble. I need to eat something regardless of what my weight is. Yeah. And I think that the two, like, it's... Yeah, you don't have to slam those sessions. It's just, you know, try a couple sprints in your warmup. That's an easy way. They don't have to go ham for 20 sprints or something like that, just two maybe. And if the first one is like, you know, call a warmup. The second one, if the power is the same or better, like that's good. If it just like keeps going down because you did one and you depleted what little glycogen you had left and it just keeps going down, then maybe that's a problem, you know? Yeah, it is a problem. And you can feel, If you're like feeling powerful in your sprints or not too. Like whenever I'm done with a diet and I'm reconstituting and I'm like getting my muscle glycogen back, like when I get on the bike, I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to rip my handlebars off. It's too strong. Which is an actual nightmare I've had many times. So I'm not kidding. I like, I go and I retorque all my head tube bolts and everything. And once in a while when something's like off, like a Newton meter, I'm like, oh no. Anyway, so here's an example. So last year, I started with a new client. His FTP is around 340 watts, 76 kilos, about four and a half watts per kilo, doing okay. So he trades for a few months, we get his FTP up to around 360, and he's down to around 73 kilos. So good power to weight at about 4.9 watts per kilo. So he's three kilos down, he's up 30 watts of FTP. This is good. Then... He's riding a lot. Oh, no. Yeah, he's riding a lot. Dramatic pause, yeah. He's feeling aerobically fit, but he starts failing intervals. Effectively, his FTP drops to about 330 watts. So basically back to where he started. And he's now down hovering around 70, 72 kilos in that range. And his low days are definitely about 70. So his... At best, his FTP is like 4.7 watts per kilo, but his sprint, gone. Top end power, gone. Like he had been doing previous season, I think it was like 1,500, 1,600 watts or something like that. Yeah, like regular 1,400, 1,500. He's like cracking 12, maybe 13 on a good day. So that was not good. So we chatted about it. We get him eating again. I'm like, I don't care. Just eat. Just eat. Just eat for performance. Eat for recovery. Just eat food. And over a couple months, he gets up to about 78 kilos. His aerobic power comes back up because he can recover from workouts and he can actually do workouts. His watts per kilo stays at around 4.75 the whole time as it's coming up. So his power is coming up. Because he can now train and adapt to the training, and he can recover. So now, this year, okay, we negotiate. If you're going to lose weight, we set up some new rules around training. And also, we've got Nemrita managing his diet now. And we changed some of the training focus and objectives. And on paper... Everything said should have worked. Guess what? It worked. So he's losing weight and he's gaining power at the same time. So he's currently comfortably and sustainably down to 72 kilos. And his FTP is now about 400 watts. So about five and a half watts per kilo. So diet's still happening and power's still improving. So overall, when managed right, it's definitely possible. to lose weight and gain power at the same time. But it's easy to do wrong. Very easy to do wrong. So would you say he's having his cake and eating it too? He's eating so much cake. So much cake. And by cake, I mean FTP intervals. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing is, I'm also not a nutritionist, obviously, especially not at this level. We're going to get an Amrita on the podcast, like I said, to talk about strategies to achieve this kind of thing. We're going to talk about dieting, loss rates, water weight, maintaining or losing muscle mass, optimal race weight. That's all going to be in a future podcast. I'm sorry if everybody wanted us to get to it here, but I am not a professional nutritionist. This is not my strength. I know the training stuff, and this is why I sub out. to people who know their shit. And Emerita definitely knows her shit. So if you would like to get in touch with Emerita, let me know. I hope I'll give you her email so you can either get her to manage your diet or, you know, do a consultation or something like that. She is well worth talking to. So, and full disclosure, I do not get a kickback for that. So it's not sponsored. Anyway, so. Let's go over our main points here today. Aerobic power is not limited by muscle mass in healthy individuals and even in super slim ones. Remember Michael Rasmussen? Yeah. Oh, God. The chicken? I remember that picture. I forget what stage that was where he won some hilltop finish. And I swear his arms are the same. diameter from his wrists to his shoulders. Like most people, their arms get a little bit bigger as you get closer to their, like your shoulder and it's like the same diameter. I know. Um, or, or that famous picture of Chris Froome, uh, like with the basically see through Jersey and he's so slim. Um, and everybody's like, Oh my God. Like, but you know, when you're at that level, you've got people to help you manage performance and body weight, or I, I, I at least assume so. Uh, it's, there's too much money on the line to, to just be like, ah, whatever is fine. We just wing it. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is, yeah. At that level. I know it's not quite like F1, but, um, you know, hopefully there's good people helping that kind of stuff out. So, or like jockeys, like horse racing, like where it's like, oh, you know, you have to be very skinny. Yeah. Yeah. Which is why they're all very short people. Um, so, um, so being larger puts you at a greater potential for greater raw numbers, but it doesn't guarantee it. And being smaller puts you at greater potential for better Watts per kilo, but also does not guarantee it. Um, like one of my clients who's had the highest peak power Watts per kilo ever, 135 pounds. And he can do like, like well over 1400 Watts. And when he sprints, he is just gone. Like, he can accelerate. Like, he can really accelerate. So, anaerobic power is limited by muscle mass, among other things, of course. So, anaerobic power being like sprint, kind of like up to one minute. Once you get up to two minutes, VO2 max power, anaerobic capacity, how well you can deal with that kind of stuff. This is, you know, gets to be a limiting factor too. It's kind of complicated, obviously. Yeah. So when you're talking about power and weight and dieting and muscle, remember that muscle does not help you move oxygen to your muscles. Your heart does, but muscle will determine how much force you can put on the pedals. And so where you lie for your best performance and all of that kind of stuff really depends on what disciplines you are racing and where your personal best is. Obviously, if we were all, you know, if men were all like 8% body fat, women were all like, you know, 16% body fat, like, would that be, you know, the best performance for everybody? Maybe, but don't kill yourself to get there. For sure, it's not worth it. Being able to train and adapt, that's worth it. Yeah. And don't, like, we've said it a couple times, but don't discount the amount of mental, increased mental stress that trying to diet really hard. Yeah. Induces. If you've never done it before, you know, people who've done it know what we're talking about. But yeah, if you've never done it before, it is surprisingly difficult. Yeah. And you know what else is difficult is managing your feelings of self-worth when you do that diet rebound. Yeah. It does not feel good to look on the scale and be like, well, back to where I was. Got to do it all over again, but better this time. If I decide to do it at all, that's a real debate I had in my head, was am I just going to be okay being 100 kilos and that's it? I honestly did not feel healthy at 100 kilos and 24% body fat or something like that. It was not good. What, three? What was it? Anyway, feeling much better now. So the other thing about fat and muscle mass is, like we said, way at the top is heat. When you have a smaller path for heat to go from the inside of your muscle or the inside of your core to the outside, this is better for heat ventilation and actually leads to better performance. So especially if you're in a hot environment, even if you're like racing flat crits, having less body fat is a performance advantage for this reason. And so you don't necessarily need to lose muscle. But again, when you start thinking about doing this kind of stuff, you got to do it carefully. So if you're going to take anything away from this podcast in terms of diet, is do it carefully, do it slowly, do it smartly, and hopefully do it with professional guidance. Yeah, for sure. Training adjustments would need to be made for dieting too. And remember, the number on the scale can also reflect water weight. So when people start training again, for instance, Like whenever I – because my training is so inconsistent. I'm like back – I'm getting back in the gym for the first time in weeks like several times a year. And so that first like two or three weeks, I know I'm going to gain like two kilos just from like glycogen stores. And if I start riding again, like endurance riding, I know I'm going to gain another kilo or two in plasma volume from that too. So once you get to that point. Don't get discouraged. These are things that add to performance. So then you can think about, okay, maybe we'll think about performance dieting. And so if you lose sprint power, if you lose, well, a little bit of sprint power during a diet is kind of expected. Trying to maintain for at least a sprinter is a good idea. If you feel like your aerobic power is dropping, that is a red flag emergency. It really is. So that's something that you don't want to do. So what else do we got before we get into Instagram questions? Yeah, I would say that and just, you know, be honest with yourself. Don't try to like, you know, tough talk a computer or whatever. Like, you know, if it's training peaks, if you're following some online training plan, whatever it is, like, you know, whatever electronic browser window is not going to think you're. a hard ass because, you know, you did this workout and it was actually like a nine out of 10 effort, but you check the box of like seven out of 10, that doesn't get you anywhere. You know, like it's cool to think, oh, I just like put my head down and just like bash away. Like I understand, you know, that is, there's, it's glamorized and things like that, but it just try not to do that. Yeah. I mean, and, and if you're working with somebody like me, I've seen thousands of workouts at this point. Like I can just look at the power graph. I can just look at how the workout went, look at the power, look at the heart rate, just look at everything else, cadence. And I can see pretty immediately, did this go well or not? And then I look at the comments and most of the time I'm right. And when something is disjointed, like somebody is like, well, this didn't go great. Usually the answer is, are you stressed? Did you sleep enough? Have you had enough food? Like those are the usual questions. And most of the time people address that and it's like, okay, mystery solved, moving on. So, yeah. So don't fool, especially if you're working with a good coach, you cannot fool us with that kind of stuff. You can fool us for, you can do it for a little while. If the workouts are going well and you're saying things are going well, we're going to believe you. But, you know, honesty in that kind of relationship is going to be better in the long run. for performance and for managing things. Because, you know, like people who don't tell me that they're dieting, that's a problem. Because at some point I'm like, oh, well, these workouts aren't going that well. Oh, I'm trying to lose weight. This is my deficit per day. And I'm like, oh, yikes. I would have done the last like four weeks very differently if you had told me that. All right. So Instagram questions? Yeah, let's do it. Why am I so fast when I'm fat? Fat and happy. Fat and happy. Cultivating elite mass. Yeah. I think this is one of those things where people who are happy and motivated, even if your watts per kilo aren't as good, are in a better spot. Because one of the things that happens – because endurance is a – a lot of it's a factor of mitochondrial mass and all that kind of stuff we talked about in Wattstock 40. Having full glycogen stores being topped up and having good training can really, really be motivating. And having a bunch of workouts going really well can be motivating. And so a lot of the time, even if your diet hasn't gone well, if you are eating for performance and not overeating, obviously, because that's also easy to do, unless you're riding 50 hours a week, in which case it's basically impossible to do. But most people aren't at that point. If you were just eating to be motivated and be happy and, you know, you're mostly hitting your macros and occasionally you're, you know, having the slice of cake or a pint of Ben and Jerry's or whatever, you're going to be faster. So a lot of the time, if, you know, especially if you're like an amateur, if you're not getting paid to ride your bike, being happier for me is way better than being as slim as you could be. I just checked the Instagram. Interestingly enough, Mike Isertel just made a post of, if you diet down during strength phases, make sure to also reduce your load progressions from week to week by about half of their usual amount so you don't accumulate too much fatigue and overreach prematurely. Your weight loss dieting makes fatigue reduction way harder and you have to take this into account. I mean, truer words have never been spoken. They were typed, so, you know. Yeah, like the same thing happens with aerobic training, by the way. So if normally you're able to add like five or 10 minutes time and zone for like FTP in a week or sweet spot even or over-unders or whatever it is, maybe cut that progression in half if you're in a deficit because you can definitely get stronger, but the rate will be reduced for sure. So the number of hard workouts you might want to do in a day or not a day, in a week would be reduced. In a day, two HIT workouts a day for three weeks. Hey, you've seen the Vietta Max training I give people. Benefit for low weight on flat terrain. Yes, body weight. Also, there's some component of aerodynamic drag I would expect. But yeah, heat loss would be a really big one. Bigger legs equal bigger glycogen stores. This helps, question mark? Yes, but also no. So having more glycogen stores, like we talked about in Wostok 40, because we tackled this from a lot of different perspectives. The reason that World Tour pros can do like, I don't know, 6,000 kilojoules of riding many days in a row, like basically the tour. The reason that they can do that with assuming their glycogen recovery rates aren't that much higher than an average person or even if they are quite higher, like their storage is lower because their muscles are smaller. And so having like five times the glycogen storage isn't the difference in endurance. It's mitochondrial mass and being able to aerobically oxidize fats. as opposed to your own glycogen stores. And we saw that basically you don't get to spare muscle glycogen with eating food. You burn more of your exogenous carbohydrates, yada, yada. But basically in the studies that we looked at, your endurance is basically mostly related to the glycogen stores you have and also your mitochondrial mass. And so when you are thinking about bigger legs, meaning more glycogen stores, yeah, this is going to be a big impact for really short-term performance. Like if you're going to raise a kilo or a standing 500 meter or something like that, yeah, it's going to have a big difference. If you've got a couple of repeated sprints, sure, this can make a big difference. Like if you're in a track Omnium, yeah, bigger legs can sure help. It's not going to bring you endurance. You know, aerobic training is going to bring you endurance. You know, better for you to max, it'll bring you endurance. If only it was just leg radius. I know, we'd be so strong. We'd be so fast aerobically. Why do some pros have massive legs if cycling isn't strength training? They only look massive, relatively speaking. I'm sure a lot of people have seen the road sprinter, Andre Greipel, versus the track sprinter quads shot. Yeah, Fosterman. Yeah, geez. Well, he's also, you know. He's a little larger than normal. But even then, like if you just look at the average track sprint podium quads versus like the road sprint podium quads, like they only look big relative to the slinky little climbers. They're really, really slim still. And like the fact that, you know, somebody's, I don't know, like 180, 190 centimeters tall and like 85 kilos, like they've got bigger quads than average. Okay. They're not doing strength training. That's what they have genetically. Like I naturally have large quads. I'm not doing, I wasn't doing strength training. I just had bigger quads than other people. And that was just, you know. Yeah. Same. Like I, you know, I even, even coming, I mean, I came out of swimming in doing like a pretty leg. dominant stroke and like breaststroke, but still like, even from high school, you know, I sure I was lifting weights in high school for like football and things like that. But even then, you know, had relatively big legs. I remember going into the first day, the freshman year of high school, like learning how to squat or whatever. And I could do 95 kilos, 95 pounds, not 95 kilos, 95 pounds for, you know, sets of 10 first day in the gym for squats, just never squatted before, never touched a barbell. Yeah. Yeah, it was about the same. I was doing, I think, sets of – I think I was – my first time squatting, I think I was squatting like 155 or 165 pounds for like sets of like five to eight or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, before I had ever – I didn't know anything about anything. And I was – and I pretty quickly got into the 200s. So, you know, and there are some people who have never strength trained. Some world-class athletes who can hit like 300 pounds or plus their first time in the gym. And those people are assholes now. Okay. Gaining lean mass, an effective strategy for gaining raw watts over a full power curve? Yeah, we've kind of beat this one to death. But again, the answer is no. Gaining lean mass is going to add the top end of your power curve, like anaerobic power. and the force that you can produce, but it's not going to help add FTP or anything aerobic. So that's it. So the same person follows up, how might one strategize weight gain for the full spectrum of raw watts gain, but doesn't care about watts per kilo? So raw watts gain in terms of aerobic power is a lot of riding, VO2 max training, FTP training, the usual stuff, just do a lot of it and recover well. And for the top end, yeah, sure. You want to gain some sprint power, get in the gym and periodize it. And if you are not entirely sure about how to do that, reach out empiricalcyclingatgmail.com for a consultation. Can you cover what watts per kilo goals should be for each category, mountain bike versus road and pro and amateur? Wow. No, we cannot do that. We made fun of the chart already. Yeah. And the thing is, people who are really good at racing will outperform what watts per kilo you would expect them to have. And some people who are not good at racing would underperform their watts per kilo because they're spending energy in all the wrong places. Because a lot of the times, once you get to a pretty high level of racing or even a pretty decent amateur level of racing, energy expenditure becomes a really, really big deal. And somebody who's like not entirely – like somebody who's like overspending their energy and is probably like underperforming, somebody like Wout. So Wout at like 80% to 90% is better than almost everybody in almost every situation. Motherfucker. So if you're in that position, okay, sure. But he's still – Racing pretty smart compared to like what I would do, for instance. How do you help your athletes find their optimal race weight? Now, this is a good question. We usually diet in small spurts and making sure that the performance isn't very impacted. And when it is, we switch to maintenance type kind of dieting for a little bit, especially if the training periodization. For instance, if somebody is, this has happened a couple of times in the past where we get into the point of somebody's periodization where they've been dieting and doing like, you know, endurance riding and threshold work. And then it gets time to start doing VO2 max work. A lot of the time, we've got to switch them into like maintenance mode for the VO2 max work. Then they make it through the block, they gain the power, and then they can go back to dieting. So that's how something like that might happen. And then we would do that a couple of times until somebody's... basically until the performance gets too impacted, even with a fairly small loss rate. And that's something that we haven't really run into yet because most of the time when people are doing that kind of stuff, because I remember I had a prospective client at one point who I was like, if you want to race at X level, you've got to think about dieting over the course of the next two or three years. It wasn't like it's got to happen this year. I was like, this is a long-term thing. And he was like, well, I can't really be lighter than I am now. And I'm looking at this, well, person with some significant extra weight. And I was like, well, then you're dieting too fast because you came from wrestling. So when you diet and wrestling, you're just like, you just want the scale to be low. Like you're spitting into a cup. Yeah, and then you're rehydrating later, and then you're heavier. You're never actually that weight, whereas for cycling, you need to actually be that weight for realsies. Yeah, imagine if MMA had to weigh in like five minutes before the fight. Yeah, that'd be terrible. Yeah, they would be punch drunk out there. Yeah, be so dehydrated. Let's see. So, yeah, caloric deficit to lose weight and fat mass while training to improve power number is possible. Yes, absolutely it is. But again, like we said, like Mike, I should tell. So, well, he didn't really put it succinctly, but as he put it, you've got to reduce your expectations for rates of improvement sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. Should you improve power numbers until your genetic ceiling and only then consider losing weight? No. Because sometimes it can take like five or 10 years to really hit your genetics. Yeah. So, and you've got to, you know, make your way through the bike racing world at that point, especially if you want to go like, you know, pro conti or world tour or something like that. Yeah. You're going to have to lose weight in, in little bits as you go. Which is why I've taken the last like, you know, two years to lose like 15 kilos. Sometimes it's just not a right time to diet. So that's, it's a long-term prospect. 

Should you separate weight loss periods from hard training blocks? Yes, absolutely. We've gone into that quite a bit. Or hard racing blocks as well. Yeah. Yeah. If you're racing, you do not want to be dieting. Oh, my God. Unless you're prepared to suck. Sure. Maybe. No, it's one of those things where one of the things I've seen Nemrita do with people is if we're in the middle of a diet period with somebody. and they've got some races before their big goal race when they want to be light, it'll be a couple days of maintenance and even some glycogen loading for sure. That definitely happens, especially if you're going to like Joe Martin or you're going to like a UCI race or like a Redlands or something like that. You don't want to go there half depleted and kind of have to bow out on day three. That's no fun. That's no good. That's not good training. It's not good racing. You're not helping your team. So yeah, you've got to look at the big picture with that kind of stuff. And look at the long-term picture rather than just, I need to lose 10 kilos this year. That's a lot. Have you seen people with muscle mass being the limiter for VO2max, rare or never? Yes, in unhealthy people, it happens. Yeah, if you're one of those muscle-wasting diseases, that would be one of them. Yeah, you create the demand in your muscles. for central delivery. And then once central delivery taps out, yes, there you go. Now you've got VEA2 Max, it plateaus. But again, this is one of the reasons that VEA2 Max is different for sports and muscle mass utilization. recruitment, et cetera, et cetera. So we went into that a lot in the via to max series. So listen to the whole thing. If, cause I know some people cherry picks of the episodes, uh, all the background stuff, if you're curious about this are worth listening to. Um, Oh, here's an interesting one. So which FTP is better? 250 at four Watts per kilo. or 262 at 3.8 watts per kilo, my run is better at a lower weight. Running is actually quite different than cycling in these regards. And so a lot of people have looked at running and body weight, and pretty much being lighter is almost always better with running, but also, you know, it... can get to a point where this is one of the reasons a lot of runners get like bone and tendon injuries is they're not eating enough because they're trying to keep that low body weight. And so, um, I remember a friend of mine, she was barely eating anything and she was running super, super fast. Uh, and then she got injured a whole bunch. Um, and I was like, what do you expect? You're not eating anything. She's like, I'm so fast. I'm like, I'm going to come over there and shove Hershey's bars down your face. At what cost? Yeah. Yeah. But no, that was, that was me joking with her. We actually had a really serious conversation about it, but, um, yeah, but she, uh, she didn't really want to, um, yeah, there was professional help involved with that kind of stuff. Um, but yeah. Um, yeah. The thing is like, if you're, if you're like losing, this is one of those things where like, if you are like, okay, if my body weight has me at four Watts per kilo at 250 Watts or. 262 watts at 3.8 watts per kilo. Um, if that is, if those are your alternatives, you, this is one of those things where like your body weight, like your loss there, you might be faster on your run. Um, but you are definitely shorting yourself some body water. I can tell right away with that, with those stats. Um, so you might want to look at a longer term kind of weight loss thing, get some professional help for that. Sure. Um, If watts per kilo stays the same, no matter the weight, should you aim to be as heavy as you can be? Well, in our example where my client came up from 330 watts to like 373.80 at maintaining 4.7 watts per kilo, yeah, you would want to be healthier. You don't want to be heavier because that's healthier. Because if you are getting to those low numbers at lighter body weights, Um, it's, you would definitely, almost definitely have not gotten there in a very healthy way. So if you were to constitute yourself and, um, and your power is coming back up with your body weight, that is good. That is a good thing. Um, and actually men are at a disadvantage with this kind of stuff because with women, um, who have periods, uh, so like pre-monpausal women and et cetera, et cetera, like you lose your period when you are in too large a caloric deficit. And so it's a pretty easy tell. For men, it's actually a lot more difficult. So it's one of those things where it could be harder for men to discern when too much is too much, I guess. If your family starts being worried, that's a sign. When your coach gets worried, that's also a sign. As girls, shouldn't we worry less about gaining weight as muscle since men's are bigger and faster? Just because... Actually, I think... I'd rather flip this to address something that I see guys saying all the time that I think is stupid. I see guys saying all the time, like, cat three men going, wow, I could win a women's world tour race. No, you can't. Yeah. No, you can't. There's no way. Coach Katie went to Wells Ave last year, and she did the A race, which usually has somebody doing about 400 to 500 watts on the front for most of the race. And Katie at 230, 240 watts FTP was bringing people back in the break. Like, she's chasing people. Like, your watts do not necessarily mean that you cannot go fast. You know, women are very, very fast. And just about anybody who's been on a group ride with Chloe Diger, you know, what's her FTP like? The 300s? Nobody's like, wow, Chloe's so slow. She can only do 330 watts. No, she's fucking crushing people. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, what was it that like, you know, the Kristen Faulkner like threw up that thing before. pro TT nets where she was like, Oh, two by 20 at like three 50 today or something. And you're just like, yeah. Yeah. But you're like, yeah. Okay. Cat three man at 150, 145 pounds. Like go do that. Have fun. You know? Yeah. Good luck to you. Yeah. Um, yeah. And like most of the, um, you know, most of the, the heavier, uh, quote unquote heavier. Cause. In absolute terms, they're still very light and same with the men. A lot of the heavier women in the world tour are in the high 200s, low 300s, maybe even mid 300s in terms of Watts FTP. And yeah, they're really fast. So women should never compare themselves to men in terms of speed unless you're kicking their asses in a race, in which case you absolutely should gloat about it because men need to be taken down a peg. Let's be real. So where are we at? Oh, I actually have one more note in our show notes that I think might be interesting to address. So I was talking to somebody and they were doing a bunch of weightlifting early season to add muscle mass. Uh, I think Kyle, I think you were there for this discussion. So it was, um, um, I asked, you know, or everybody was kind of asking why, uh, what's, what's the, what's the periodization scheme. So it's okay. We're going to add more muscle mass, which means we get more mitochondria and then we can also do the aerobic training in season to convert it to slow switch. Hmm. So. I ask you, Kyle, and you, listener, under what theoretical framework would this be correct? Well, that would assume that the weight training, that hypertrophy training, if you're going to put on mass, is actually going to produce the metabolic demands to make you make more mitochondria. And it seems like if you did that and then stopped the weight training, you'd end up losing a bunch of that mass and then you'd convert whatever the muscle fiber conversions will happen. But yeah, it seems like you're assuming that the you're going to get those mitochondria for free because you're doing three sets of 10. I don't know. Yeah, kind of. So the way I could see this working, the theoretical framework would be if you think mitochondria. and mitochondrial mass has a limit per unit muscle mass. And so by our elementary stuff, that would be the case because they weren't looking at training. And Nick Lane's book, which I mentioned, does in fact mention training in terms of muscle capillary density. and these things being malleable. And so also we know that muscle mitochondrial mass is highly trainable with a lot of endurance riding and aerobic training. Like middle intensity training is super, super good for building mitochondrial volume, like threshold training, for instance. So when we think about what limits VO2 max, if you have the idea that there's a limit to muscle mitochondria, And then if mitochondria also determine, like if the peripheral utilization is determined by mitochondrial mass rather than central delivery, like the heart stroke volume, then you could see why this framework might make sense, right? Yeah. Except we know that this is actually incorrect. I'm sorry, I know, but somebody wrote recently, Koli, at first I thought you were an arrogant bastard. Then I kept listening. I was like, oh, thanks, I guess. But yeah, so if that sounds like an arrogant bastard statement, I apologize, but we've been through all this stuff on the podcast a lot. So yeah, it's just one of those things where, and I was not the only person piling on this poor guy who was just trying to defend his coach. And, you know, it's one of those things where I was like, we were like, okay, well, if it works, it works. Technically, it's wrong. But, you know, it's one of those things where if you do this, that, and the other thing, and at least it's better performance, okay, fine. I'm not going to complain about it. But, you know, it's such an interesting framework of, you know, the way that... You know, if you have, you know, if you know certain things about physiology, you would say, okay, well, this is technically incorrect. But if you don't know certain things about physiology, you can come up with real interesting training methods. Like I'm going to build more muscle mass for more mitochondria and then we're going to convert it to slow twitch. So I actually, I think this leads to one more thing, which is usually the smaller motor units, slow twitch fibers. They're not really that impacted by strength training. It's the big motor units. Those are the ones that really build muscle fibers. So the question of whether we can even get into those by doing normal aerobic training and aerobically train those new muscle fibers way up at the top, does that happen? That's a good question. Probably not. Another long one. So thank you, everybody, for listening as usual. Thank you all for the Instagram questions. And thank you for listening. Thank you for all of the five-star ratings and the nice reviews, even the not-so-nice reviews we think are funny. We don't have enough of them to do a podcast episode about them, but maybe we'll read them on the podcast one of these days. So thank you all for those, even if they're not so nice. Remember, we're ad-free. We are no longer – well, no longer. We are never going to be advertising anything. So if you'd like to support the podcast, you can donate at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. And, of course, if you'd like to hire us for coaching or consultations, that is our very expensive Patreon, as it were. Email me, empiricalcycling at gmail.com. And, of course, we've got up on the website all of our show notes for this episode. So we've linked our study and probably going to link some weight training stuff on the power to weight and all that stuff. That's going to be really cool to look at. And, of course, Instagram, Empirical Cycling Weekend AMAs up in the stories. And we are going to be asking, as usual. questions about every podcast that we record. So thank you everybody for your questions and thank you everybody for listening and we will see you in a future episode. Thanks everyone.