RMR - Nutrition and new toys!

What an exciting weekend, new toys to play with! We have just received our new VO2 gas analyser from the US…yippee! So we have been testing and experimenting with using it. It’s always interesting to get information and data that provide a new insight into your current training. Some of it reinforces what we really already know, some highlights what we may not have known for sure but suspected and some are real gems that take our understanding of our bodies to a new level.

We got hold of this new piece of equipment on recommendation from Doug Bush an exercise physiologist, who works with Joe and the TrainingBible team in the US. It’s also the same system that Mark Tickner has been working with for the past few years so we felt we had enough internal expertise to be confident in the product.

Having been an athlete and coach for many years and having both had my fitness assessed and worked with athletes in lots of different ways including lab based work using Douglas bags and all that it entails, I was keen to see this new neat, highly portable piece of kit.

I wanted to check out my RMR (Resting metabolic rate) as I have been experimenting with my diet over the past few months. Last year Joe and I had dinner together and we chatted about a book that he had written with Dr. Loren Cordain called the Paleo diet for athletes. The book was a further development from Dr. Cordain’s first book The Paleo Diet; the title is a bit misleading as it’s not really a diet as we have come to know it but more a way of eating. It means eating the foods that our distant ancestors ate or as close as we can with modern farming methods. In a nut shell so to speak, it focuses on moving from energy dense processed foods like bread, pasta, dairy products to nutrient dense foods, fresh fruit, vegetables, lean meat and fish.

I had always eaten bread, pasta and dairy products and had been interested in experimenting with how this would affect my performance in training and racing but also general energy levels and more importantly longer term health. Since using the Paleo approach over the past 6 months my weight has reduced by almost 8kgs so that has obviously had a direct benefit on my running and biking. Joe had suggested from his research and experience that for every excess pound in body weight the cost could be as much as 10 seconds per mile on a run and 3 watts extra to push on a bike. My recent running races confirm a significant up lift in performance. At 46, I had over the past 2 years been running around 42 minutes for 10k, with no major changes to my training my running has improved by over 3 minutes so no real surprises but nice all the same to be back running regularly under 40 minutes.

What I was interested to find out from using the new equipment was what affect the change in eating had on how many calories I now needed to eat to keep my weight constant and how changes to my training would impact my calorific requirement. I had been tested on the same equipment in July so I was going to have some benchmark data to work with.

My resting metabolic rate has dropped by almost 500 calories, so now I know that with out adding in any training my daily calorific intake needs to be 2168 calories to maintain my current body weight. Now having really useful and accurate data like knowing that I burn 11.4 calories per minute in zone 2 heart rate for example helps me to calculate that after an hour steady running I need to put back in 684 calories, taking a lot of the guess work out of weight management. One of the key things having the test highlighted for me was that I need to plan my meals more carefully and especially when I am in the road. I need to ensure that I am fuelling up enough particularly as I am going into my base work period of longer runs and rides. Thankfully Training Peaks counts the calories so I just need to focus on eating them