REAL WAYS TO LOSE WEIGHT FOR CYCLISTS | Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast 573
Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast - Presented by TrainerRoad
TrainerRoad
4.9 • 4.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 86 minutes
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Summary
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// TOPICS COVERED
(00:00:00) Welcome & Why Recovery Between Hard Workouts Matters More Than You Think
(00:02:00) How Training Timing and Recovery Windows Affect Performance
(00:06:25) Listener Question: Why Am I Struggling With Body Composition Despite Training?
(00:07:55) The Biggest Reason Athletes Don’t See Nutrition Results: Inconsistency
(00:11:40) When Underfueling and Hormonal Stress Stall Fat Loss
(00:13:20) Why Daily Weight Fluctuations Can Derail Progress
(00:15:30) Practical Nutrition Habits That Actually Work Long-Term
(00:17:10) Building “Minimal Effort” Meals for Busy Training Weeks
(00:20:55) How Meal Prep and Portion Awareness Prevent Missed Fueling
(00:23:05) Managing Hidden Calories From Oils, Fats, and Cooking Methods
(00:27:55) Fueling Workouts to Control Hunger and Improve Body Composition
(00:31:10) Why Carbs During Training Improve Both Performance and Recovery
(00:36:30) How to Support Friends Working on Nutrition and Weight Goals
(00:44:05) The High-Carb Fueling Debate: Is 90–120g per Hour Safe?
(00:49:00) Individual Carb Tolerance and Why Fueling Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
(00:57:20) Jonathan’s Leadville Weight, Power, and Nutrition Strategy Breakdown
(01:08:45) Making Nutrition Sustainable Without Perfect Meal Prep
(01:18:10) Setting Calories, Protein, and Macros Without Chronic Hunger
(01:24:35) Final Takeaways: Performance First, Weight Follows
In this episode, Alex Larsen and Coach Jonathan focus on fueling, recovery, and consistency as the real drivers of endurance performance and body composition. They explain why underfueling, poor carbohydrate intake, and not allowing enough recovery time leave athletes feeling flat, and how high-carb fueling, smarter meal planning, and simple, repeatable nutrition habits improve workout quality and long-term progress. The discussion covers weight management without obsession, scale fluctuations, busy-athlete nutrition strategies, and how to fuel training and racing properly so workouts feel sustainable, productive, and repeatable. At the end they go over Jonathan’s Leadville plan and what he’ll need to do from a nutrition front to make his goal of 7hrs.
// RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Alex’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexlarsonnutrition
- Alex’s Nutrition Coaching Services: https://alexlarsonnutrition.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast presented by Trainer Road today. |
| 0:03.0 | We're going to talk about real practical ways cyclists can lose weight. |
| 0:06.2 | And we have Alex Larson from Alex Larson nutrition with us. |
| 0:08.6 | So up, Alex. |
| 0:09.2 | Hi. |
| 0:09.3 | Hey. |
| 0:11.5 | You've been training. |
| 0:13.5 | I have been training, yes. |
| 0:15.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:15.7 | And the new AI update, like, pumped my FTP up quite a bit, and I almost died that first. It was like a super |
| 0:25.5 | threshold workout. And you guys were really gracious and messaged me on Instagram about it, |
| 0:31.2 | because I had posted about how I was dying. And they gave me some good context. And this week, the workouts actually have been pretty doable. |
| 0:41.1 | But I did kind of back away a little bit on my strength training. |
| 0:44.3 | I noticed that if I strength train, it's really hard to kind of hit the watts I need to. |
| 0:50.5 | So I need to kind of figure out how to balance that. |
| 0:53.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:11.5 | Look, like, I don't want to be little that concern. And I think that we kind of like subconsciously do sometimes. You're like, yeah, I just, you know, add your strength training in, do it on the hard days. And yeah, like the principal is always like, do it after. But with a person with an already full cup. Yeah. And thenflowing let's panis it's overflowing yeah yeah good point when you already have all that |
| 1:16.4 | stuff going in then you add in strength training it's tough like I don't know this is probably something |
| 1:21.2 | that will like build out more in the product in the future but the one thing one of the bigger |
| 1:26.5 | more impactful learnings I've had from |
| 1:28.4 | our, from the model from train and row, because we're learning from it. That's the crazy part about |
| 1:33.0 | this. It's like, you know, we're training these models. We're doing it to achieve like a very |
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