7 Tips to Manage Your Weight During the Offseason

You just finished a great cycling season and now you're ready to bask in your accomplishments and enjoy some well-earned rest. Not so fast.

While rest and recovery are important, you'll also want to consider how to maintain your body weight when your cycling volume and intensity decrease. This will make getting into the spin of things next year that much easier and help you avoid the temptation to play catch-up, which can result in overtraining.

Here are seven tips to manage your weight and fitness during the offseason.

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Keep Riding

During the winter, you can and should reduce your cycling intensity, but try to ride four or five days a week after your season-ending recovery phase (2 to 3 weeks where you do relatively little riding, all of it at a very easy pace).

Most of these rides don't need to be long either. Just get out and spin for an hour or so. If you're in an area where it gets too cold to ride outdoors during the winter, ride on an indoor trainer or stationary bike for 45 to 60 minutes.

Think Long and High

As a general rule of thumb, try to do one long ride and one hilly ride each week. This will allow you to burn plenty of calories while also getting in some much-needed moderate-intensity riding.

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Consider Cross Training

Incorporate a few alternative forms of exercise, especially if you're in a cold-weather locale. Not sure what to do? Try something new: Consider running, swimming, skating, cross-country skiing or aerobics classes.

Just remember to begin slowly and make sure you stretch properly. It's easy to overdo it when you try exercises or sports that you aren't used to.

Try Strength Training

This is a great time of year to start a full-body resistance-training program. Two 30-minute strength-training sessions per week will improve your health and fitness and make it easier to manage your weight. Make sure you learn how to perform the exercises properly before you begin. Do around 10 sets per session with 8 to 12 repetitions per set.

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Reduce Your Carbohydrate Intake

As your riding intensity decreases, your body will need fewer carbohydrates and calories. One way to reduce your intake is to eliminate the sports drinks and energy bars you often consume during competition. These are unnecessary when training at lower intensities and for shorter durations.

Manage the Holidays

You're going to eat more than normal during the holidays. You'll also burn fewer calories. This is a recipe for weight gain; however, you can minimize the damage.

The most important step you can take is to develop an eating plan for every holiday party, social get-together and dinner you attend. Decide in advance what you'll eat and what you want to avoid, and then stick to your plan.

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Remember the 5-Pound Rule

It's not likely that you'll maintain your racing weight during the offseason. This is especially true for individuals who achieved their ideal performance weight during their peak competition periods.

You're going to put on a few pounds during the winter, and that's okay. You just don't want to gain too much weight. The rule is simply this: it's okay to gain 5 pounds of fat above your ideal performance weight—but no more!

The term "fat" is used because you may gain slightly more than 5 pounds of scale weight due to the fact that you'll likely be more hydrated and may eat a larger volume of food (but hopefully not much larger).

You probably won't want to go past 5 pounds of fat because you'll have to worry about cutting the weight once the season approaches. If you only put on 5 pounds, this weight will come off naturally once you start training at a higher intensity. If you gain more than 5 pounds of fat you'll need to come up with a weight loss strategy, which can negatively impact your training during the season.

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