It is important to first understand that I am not a licensed nutritionist, doctor, etc. I am simply a competitive cyclist who strives to maximize his personal potential. This compiled information relative to the Team Carina Website for training, diet, etc. has been gathered from my own experiences, and from the many books I have read or used as reference, and the Internet. It has obviously been compiled with a slant towards cycling.

Basics in a Nutshell when getting Lean

Getting lean really boils down to two basics, exercise and diet. To dig just a little deeper we begin to look at the of exercise and the type of diet. The entire Getting Lean information is wrapped around the diet and will reference training when appropriate. For detailed training information see the Team Carina Training Program.

Why

This may seem obvious but the level of benefit may not.

Lets first consider what many cyclists do when it comes to weight (considering your body and the bike). You may already know this answer, yes, it is to buy a lighter bike, lighter components, etc. One that climbs better, does this or that better, and so on. Well if money is not an object and a good diet seems to difficult this may help some, I guess... We all would like the lightest, fastest, greatest, whatever stuff available but it is very limited and expensive.

If you think like I do, it is obvious that most of us are not PRO cyclists. We could stand to loose body fat and save our money for more important activities like family, race expenses, or whatever. So lets talk about the benefits of being lean for cycling. Clearly carrying less weight is helpful for obvious reasons. It is the extent of benefit that we may miss. Without getting into lengthy calculations 5 pounds lost can be the difference between getting dropped or breaking away with the lead group. This is most pronounced on hills but also applied to fast flat breaks as well, although we begin to get into power / watts generated which is a different discussion. You may recall the 2001 Vuelta a España where Levi Leipheimer contributed his improved climbing ability to loosing a couple kilos which is about 5 pounds. When it comes to body fat, which is weight that only slows you down, loosing a little goes a long ways.

How

This is quite simple as briefly mentioned above. Diet and exercise. Also as alluded to, we must consider not only the quantity but the quality of our diet and training. You probably already know, to loose weight / fat (which I will combine for the purpose of this discussion) we must burn more calories than we consume. Although, just being deficient does not complete the process, we must also consider the quality of our diet. In other words eating junk food but still being deficient will not create the results we are looking for. Since we are athletes who want to perform at our potential, just loosing weight / fat while being overall unhealthy is not acceptable.

What it Takes...