If you are looking to improve your power to weight ratio, what is the best way to do it?

You have two options: increase your power or lose weight. If you are carrying a fair amount of additional weight then it’d be beneficial to first concentrate on shedding that through your day-to-day training programme and healthy eating. However, I typically advise my coaching clients to focus on increasing their power (we’ll look at a training session to improve your power at the end of this article) and there are four main reasons for this.

1. Increasing the amount of power you put out will have benefits across all terrains, from the mountains to time trials to rolling roads, and possibly even on descents. The harder you can pedal, the faster you go.
2. Trying to lose weight can often impact negatively on your lean muscle mass and, subsequently, your power output. Dieting is also very stressful on your body and can seriously impact on your ability to recover from hard training sessions. In the long run this affects your overall training load and can result in a decrease in power. By dieting you may have lost weight but you may also have lost some precious watts.
3. Bradley Wiggins is famous for losing weight to increase his power to weight ratio and convert from a Olympic medalist on the track to the winner of the Tour de France – a race where power to weight ratio is absolutely vital. However, he did this after already maximising his power output. Most riders haven’t got to the point where they have maximised their power potential and, therefore, they can still make significant progress in that area. Wiggins was already at his physiological potential in terms of power output and therefore had no other choice than to reduce his weight in order to improve his power to weight ratio.
4. With the increased training load that it takes to improve your power output, chances are you will lose a little bit of weight naturally because you are simply training harder. That, of course, is as long as you are sensible with your food intake.

We aren’t all lucky enough to have a power meter to be able to measure our FTP power and calculate our power to weight ratio. However, if you have a GPS cycling computer then there is another option to estimate your climbing ability and, crucially, help with pacing on long climbs – VAM.