Losing 9kg without losing power sounds impossible, but it's entirely achievable—if you know how to fuel properly. We break down the exact strategy World Tour nutritionist Dr. Sam Impy uses to help athletes hit race weight sustainably, including why eating more on training days actually speeds up fat loss and how to periodize your carbs around your training plan.
Key Takeaways
- Aim for ~0.5kg per week of weight loss (roughly 300-500 calorie daily deficit) if you're training 7-8+ hours weekly—aggressive enough to work, sustainable enough to stick with
- Fuel hard training days generously and reduce calories on easy days; this maintains power output, improves body composition, and prevents the boom-bust cycle most cyclists fall into
- Race weight isn't a fixed number—it's the convergence of how you feel, your power output, training tolerance, and durability; it changes as you get fitter
- Split your on-bike carbs into multiple feeds (rather than one big dose) to reduce GI distress and metabolic stress, though total intake matters more than timing
- Track weight trends over weeks, not days; initial drops are water loss, plateaus are normal, and day-to-day fluctuations happen because carbs hold water and your glycogen tank gets bigger as you get fitter
- You can redistribute some calories from high-volume training days to recovery days for practical reasons—as long as you're not moving 50%+ and you still create meaningful day-to-day variability
Expert Quotes
"Race weight is the eternal question. It's probably a combination of how do you feel, what's your perception of your performance, and would you be confident to back up absolute capacity with a little bit of durability? There really isn't a formula for it. — Dr. Sam Impy"
"If you increase your FTP, what have you done? You've increased your body's sustained capacity to burn energy before you hit a level of fatigue. So unsurprisingly, as you support that through a training block, you're going to support your body's ability to burn fat. — Dr. Sam Impy"
"It feels like an unsexy answer, but can you do something consistently and probably a little bit more measured, a little bit more tapered than everyone inherently thinks you should do it? That's what makes the end result."