Diary of a Hill Climber | Power-to-Weight
This year I’ve taken a different approach to race weight: getting stronger first, losing the weight gradually, and then focusing on maintaining that strength as I move into race season.
Hill climbing is ultimately about power-to-weight.
The equation itself is simple enough: produce as much power as possible while carrying as little weight as possible up the hill.
But getting lighter isn’t necessarily the same thing as getting faster.
That has been one of the bigger changes in my thinking this year. Rather than spending the whole year trying to stay close to race weight, I’ve deliberately gone in the opposite direction at certain points — allowing my weight to increase, spending more time building strength, and then giving myself several months to gradually bring that weight back down.
The aim has been to arrive at hill climb season strong and fit, not simply light.
Power first
For years, I stayed lean pretty much all year round. On paper, that made sense. Cycling has historically placed so much emphasis on being light that deliberately allowing my weight to increase felt like moving in the wrong direction.
The problem was that winter became miserable.
I was constantly cold, which made training harder, and eventually I had to question what I was actually trying to achieve. If I trained in exactly the same way, maintained exactly the same body composition and arrived at the following season in exactly the same place, why would I expect my performance to suddenly improve?
Something needed to change.
A couple of years ago I came across Ross Edgley talking about the idea of “winterising” — accepting an increase in body weight during the colder months rather than trying to remain exceptionally lean throughout the year.
The idea stayed with me.
After an encouraging hill climb season in 2025, and having spent several years experimenting with different approaches to training and performance, it felt like the natural next thing to test.
So that winter I deliberately allowed my weight to increase.
The intention wasn’t simply to become heavier. It was to give myself the energy to train properly through winter, stop spending every day feeling frozen to the core and, most importantly, create an opportunity to build strength.
Running had also become a bigger part of my winter. I wanted to be able to enjoy a different sport without constantly worrying about injury, so becoming stronger through my legs, hips and core felt like a sensible investment in making my body more resilient to the additional impact.
That meant accepting that staying at my lightest possible cycling weight probably wasn’t the priority during winter.
The long-term goal was still power-to-weight.
I was simply choosing to work on the power side of that equation first.
It sounds straightforward when written down. Build strength through winter, accept some additional weight, then gradually reduce that weight again as the racing season approaches.
Actually doing it was much harder.
When you’ve spent years associating cycling performance with being as lean as possible, deliberately watching the number on the scales move upwards takes a surprising amount of trust. The reasoning made complete sense in my head, but there was still a definite reluctance to start the process.
If I wanted a different result the following year, though, I had to be prepared to do something different during the winter.
The gym became a much more deliberate part of that.
I settled into two strength sessions each week, built around my days off on Sunday and Monday. Sunday was the main lower-body session, normally after my morning ride, while Monday focused more on core and upper body.
There was some thought behind putting the harder leg work on Sunday. I still had Monday off afterwards, giving me another full day to recover before returning to work on Tuesday and spending most of the week on my feet.
I would often follow the Sunday gym session with a longer, easy walk rather than going straight home and spending the rest of the afternoon on the sofa. It wasn’t another training session or an attempt to squeeze more work into the day. I simply preferred keeping the legs moving gently rather than becoming completely sedentary after a hard strength session.
Monday had a different rhythm. During winter I’d normally start with a turbo session before heading out for a five or six-mile run if the weather wasn’t completely horrendous. After training indoors, the run also gave me a reason to get outside and get my fix of being outdoors and in nature. When the weather really wasn’t playing ball, the treadmill did the job instead.
Tuesday, the start of my working week, was then a rest day.
None of the gym work was about trying to become bigger for the sake of it. If I was going to deliberately carry some additional weight, I wanted that weight to have a purpose.
The real challenge would come later, when I needed to remove it again without undoing everything I’d spent the winter building.
Losing the weight without losing the work
In previous years, I tended to start thinking seriously about race weight around July or August.
There usually wasn’t much to lose — perhaps half a kilo to a kilo — but I would attack it fairly aggressively. The number on the scales came down quickly enough, but there were occasions when I arrived at races feeling flat or under-fuelled.
This year I wanted to do it differently.
Having deliberately allowed my weight to increase through winter, there was obviously more to lose, so I started gradually bringing it down in May rather than waiting until hill climb season was almost upon me.
The idea was to give myself months rather than weeks.
The strength work changed with it.
Historically, one of my instincts when trying to get lighter was to stop going to the gym until hill climb season was over. This time I wanted to keep strength work in place, but change its purpose.
The winter programme had been more free-weight focused and aimed at building strength. As the cut began, the emphasis shifted towards maintaining it, with more single-leg work, core and stability alongside the same basic Sunday and Monday structure.
The first month tested my patience.
I was stepping on the scales every day and wondering why the number wasn’t moving. Sometimes it stayed exactly the same. Sometimes it even went up.
What I could see, though, was that I was starting to look leaner.
That was probably the first point where I had to stop judging the whole process by a single number.
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In previous years I’d become used to seeing my weight move quickly whenever I decided to cut. Looking back now, I also think I had taken being lean too far at times. I can look at old photographs and see that being lighter wasn’t necessarily making me look better, feel better or perform better.
So when the scales weren’t moving this time, the temptation was there to default to what I already knew would make them move: eat less, cut harder and stop lifting.
Instead, I kept telling myself to trust the process.
Over the following months the weight gradually started coming down.
More importantly, the power wasn’t disappearing with it.
And I wasn’t getting that same depleted feeling I’d experienced with more aggressive cuts.
Food has been a big part of that, but probably not in the way people sometimes imagine when they hear the words race weight.
There hasn’t been a complicated diet or a long list of foods I’ve banned myself from eating.
Most of the time I’ve eaten the same handful of foods that I know work for me and fit around training and work.
On days off, breakfast might be oats and berries with a slice of toast, peanut butter and banana. Workdays need to be more practical, so breakfast might be oat milk with Fruit ’n Fibre, or yoghurt with berries, banana and mango, sometimes alongside a protein yoghurt or fruit bar.
Lunch has generally been equally uncomplicated: chicken and rice, followed by natural yoghurt and berries.
Before riding home from work I’ll normally have another snack — perhaps a banana or yoghurt — because however much I’m trying to bring my weight down, I still have to fuel the ride home.
That still leaves room for a Freddo or two along the way.
Polos, Fruit-tellas, peanuts and fruit haven’t disappeared either.
That’s deliberate.
I tend to think about my nutrition roughly as an 80/20 approach. Most of what I eat is there because it supports what I’m trying to do: training, recovery, getting enough protein and carbohydrate and generally eating decent-quality food.
But some of it is there simply because I enjoy eating it.
Something else that has surprised me is just how much food I can actually eat when most of it is made up of fairly simple, good-quality ingredients.
It sounds counterintuitive when the goal is to lose weight, but eating things like fruit, yoghurt, oats, rice and vegetables can mean there’s actually quite a lot of food on the plate. Rather than the cut feeling like increasingly smaller meals and constantly being hungry, there have been plenty of days when I’ve looked at the amount I’m eating and wondered how it can possibly fit with trying to get lighter.
I’ve tried the restrictive approach before. Cut everything out, be incredibly disciplined for a period, reach the number you want on the scales and then eventually go back to eating normally.
This time I wanted something I could live with for months rather than tolerate for a few weeks.
The biggest shift has probably been moving away from asking, “How little can I eat today?” and towards asking, “What does today’s training actually require?”
I’m not trying to create the biggest possible deficit every day. Intake changes with what I’m doing, and I treat calorie tracking as an estimate rather than pretending everything balances perfectly to the calorie.
What matters more is the longer-term trend.
Is the weight gradually moving in the right direction? Can I still complete the training properly? Am I recovering? And, most importantly, am I holding on to the power?
If arriving at race weight requires me to spend four months pretending I don’t like chocolate, I’ve probably designed the wrong diet.
The part I can’t answer yet
As of today, I’m sitting at around 56kg.
That sounds light because it is, and I’m not looking to get much lighter from here.
There comes a point where chasing another number on the scales risks costing me some of the power and strength I’ve spent the rest of the year trying to build.
Power-to-weight only works if you still have the power.
So, has any of this actually worked?
The simple answer is: I don’t know yet.
The hill climb season hasn’t started, and that’s where I’ll really find out.
There are some encouraging signs.
My three-minute testing suggests I’ve improved by around 10 watts compared with last year. My eight-minute number is almost exactly the same, although that’s harder to judge because I’ve tested on different climbs.
Finding a road that gives you a genuinely consistent eight-minute effort isn’t particularly easy, so I may still repeat that test on the turbo simply to take the gradient out of the equation and get a cleaner comparison.
There have also been encouraging performances outside of testing.
Recently I took 37 seconds off one of my local climbs on a relatively wind-neutral day, despite riding a different and heavier bike than I used previously.
None of that guarantees anything.
What I do know is that I’ve arrived at the weight I wanted without feeling depleted, and so far the power appears to have remained with me.
That’s already very different from some of the more aggressive cuts I’ve used in previous years.
The real question was never simply how light I could become.
It was how much weight I could lose while keeping the strength, power and fitness I’d spent the rest of the year building.
For now, I think I’ve got reasonably close to that balance.
Whether I’ve actually got it right will become much clearer once I pin a number on and start racing.
Only time will tell.
