I had Dr Sam Impey back on the podcast this morning and we deconstructed Remco's weight loss for the Tour.

If you missed the story, Remco took about four kilos off before July. Off a 65kg frame that already looked race lean at the Classics.

Then he finished on the podium in Paris and put the "Remco can't ride GC" critics to the side for good.

The bit that caught me is how hard that actually is.

An amateur with ten kilos to spare can diet without losing power. He'll be grand.

Remco can't. He's already at or below ten percent body fat. There's barely any fat left to give.

So Sam reckons 50 to 60 percent of what came off was muscle. The stuff that makes the watts. If Remco wasn't nervous about losing power, Sam said, he should have been.

How do you pull that off then?

Slowly, mainly. Sam's theory is the altitude camps were doing double duty. All that racing Remco skipped post spring bought him long blocks of low intensity work at altitude. That kind of training shifts you towards type 1 muscle fibres. Smaller, more aerobic. Less of the bulky type 2 fibre Remco naturally carries.

The deficit itself surprised me too.

I assumed you'd protect the big training days and make the cuts on the easy ones. Sam flipped it. A rest day for Remco is only 3,000 calories, and pulling 500 out of that is miserable. You feel it at every meal. A six hour day is 6,000 calories, and taking that to 5,000 doubles the deficit with half the hunger.

They may even have lowered his protein on some days. From 2g per kilo towards 1.5. You won't hear that often, but if muscle needs to come off, you stop defending every gram of it.

And they measured everything, daily. Resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, skinfolds, morning urine tests. Because without controlling for hydration and glycogen, the scale tells you nothing.

One rule never bent though. The hard sessions get fuelled fully. Threshold, VO2max, sprints, TT work. Underfuel those and you won't complete the session, but you still take all the damage from trying. Now you owe the recovery and the session.

So what should you copy, if you're 85kg and want a few kilos off before your next gran fondo?

The timeline. Half a kilo a week is Sam's absolute ceiling, and slower is better. Give four kilos five or six months.

The fuelling. Full carbs for every hard session, and let the deficit live on the easy days.

And watch more than the scale. Resting heart rate, sleep, how the intervals feel. They'll tell you whether you're losing weight or losing form.

Sam calls it the boring nutritionist answer. Consistency, done slowly. Boring, and it works.

I enjoyed the chat, it’ll be out on Youtube next week

Anthony

Ps.

We’ve sold out our road training camp in girona but there are still places left for the gravel camp. Would be great to see you there (link below)