Welcome to the Ask a Cycling Coach podcast, presented by Trainer Road. Today we have Alex Larson from Alex Larson nutrition with us, and we are going to talk about cramping. We're also going to talk about periodized carbohydrate or polarized carbohydrate intake. I don't know if we coined a new term with that one. But before we do that, Alex, last week I had a question that caused that ruffled some feathers. You even sent me a DM about this, about like a different

perspective. I did. I took me like I saw a two minutes to bring up the courage to send it to you, but I basically said I disagree with what you said. This will be good. This will be good. Carlos said in a similar question, or I guess about the same topic. He says, hey, Coach Jonathan, I just listened to last

week's episode on losing weight and maintaining power. And I'd like to get some clarification

and brought up another question I have. First, if an athlete is trying to raise their FTP, don't they need to eat more? And if they are hoping to create a calorie deficit with their higher power, won't that be negated or negated by eating more? Which brings me to my next question, I've always thought of raising your FTP from a weightlifting perspective, like raising your one rep max. In order to do this, you need to bulk first. Is this the case for cyclists wanting to raise their FTP? So I'm going to give some context first. Last week, we were talking about how to, like, the tradeoff of like, how do I raise my power and then at the same time lose weight at the same time.

So that was the context that we were talking about. And I said that like just focus on raising your FTP and then things get taken care of.

Alex, your thoughts on that. And then we can go from here.

Well, obviously you're going to still focus on the training, and that's what

Traynor Road is for.

And I'm back on using Traynor Road for the winter, and I'm excited to continue to work

on that.

But when I listen to your response in the previous episode, my first thought was like, some people just don't have that luxury of having the time to

train more, but they do have the opportunity to make some really simple changes in their

nutrition that can really help with optimizing bodycut position.

And my team and I, over the past couple of years,

we've really refined our process in helping athletes maintain that FTP, if not see it,

continue to climb while also bringing their weight down in a nice slow and progressive manner.

And we want it to be slow because we want it to be mainly that excess body fat and

maintain the muscle and strength. So yes, we do have our athletes go at a bit of a calorie

deficit. And this is hard for me to explain because it's really difficult for me to give like blanket advice on podcasts and whatnot because every single athlete that we work with, we take a very individualized approach and we monitor them throughout the whole process so that we are doing this in the most healthiest way possible.

So as you're listening, like, I'm not going to give some,

like, silver bullet piece of advice that's going to help everyone, like, you know, rapidly

increase their power to rate ratio and see, like, the weight fall off. Like, it does take

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