Q:    Here is an interesting problem. Recently I have been carefully monitoring my food intake. I have been eating frequent meals and supplementing my diet with Gator-Lode every few hours. The result is that I feel great during my workouts and am recovering well from all my strenuous efforts. Yesterday I ran a decent workout of 3 x 1 mile (5:30 pace) with one-minute rests, 2 x 400m (66,67), and then 1 x 800m (2:27). The only problem is that I now weigh 184 pounds. The running seems to be going okay, but I can guarantee you that if I went on the PR or Zone diet I would lose 25 to 30 pounds.

In fact, every time I have gone on the diet my weight has dropped down to about 155. Now you can argue that that's all water loss associated with glycogen depletion, but I have raced best in the past at this lower weight. Certainly the extra 29 pounds can not be helping my cause. I am not as fat as a 'swollen chipmunk', but there is a lot of extra weight I'm carrying around. Should I go for the lower weight or the constant high-carb nutrition?
Frank Oswald, Wolverhampton

A:    Good questions! Without knowing your actual body composition and overall health at the two different weights, I can't answer very well, but my best guess is that you would be better off with the high-carb diet and a somewhat lower weight. Bear in mind that carbs and water can account for only a small fraction of that 29-pound difference that you are describing. For example, let's say that your body can store a maximum of 500 grams of carbohydrate (not an unreasonable estimate). For each gram of carbohydrate, your body also stores 2 grams of water, giving you a total of 1.5 kg of stored H2O and carbohydrate (3.3 pounds). Thus, almost 90 per cent of the 29-pound spread must revolve around protein and fat. If you are somewhat fat at 184 pounds, then there's no question that losing weight would be helpful - perhaps not to 155 but to some intermediate figure, say 165 to 170 (I'm just guessing).

I can't recommend a low-carbohydrate diet like the Zone diet, because it could easily lead to muscle-glycogen depletion and protein loss, which would not be good for you. Remember that if you're at 155, there's less weight to move around, but if your muscles are low on energy and somewhat banged up because they don't have enough fuel for repair and for protective contractions, then the benefit of being at 155 won't last long. I would guess that you might be able to run very well at 155 - but just for a short period of time.

I do think that you have to be careful with the Gator-Lode. It can definitely help your muscles recover from tough workouts, but bear in mind that it has a high glycaemic index, so it can be converted readily to fat if your overall energy intake is high.

Q:    I attended one of your recent neural conferences, and near the end of your last lecture you suggested that the 'core' strength exercises should be performed once a day. That surprised me, as I perceive the core exercises to be not unlike weight training, and I would expect that you would recommend such training no more often than every other day to allow recovery. Do you really mean every day? On another topic, I have been doing one-leg cycling up a slight incline twice each leg, alternately, i. e., R-L-R-L with a rest down the hill between each rep. I have been doing these at a moderate cadence of about 60 rpm, and I have been doing them to near exhaustion, which takes about two minutes. The purpose of the exercise, I believe, is to build strength and, neurally, to develop the difficult-to-attain, super-efficient, 'round' pedal stroke so desired by cyclists but - truth be told - rarely attained. From what I learned in your class, I should perhaps split the sessions: on one day, I could use a relatively slow rpm with a higher resistance, either a steeper hill or higher gear, and on a different day I should concentrate on working with less resistance at a higher cycling cadence of about 90-95 rpm, for no longer than say 75% of the maximum time I can maintain that cadence with good form. In that way, I can increase both force production and rate of force production. But how do you determine how long the high-load intervals should be and how many reps I should complete? And what about the light-load, high cadence intervals?
John Bonnycastle, Detroit

A:    I believe you can carry out the core exercises six days a week, because the routine is of such short duration and - after the first few sessions - the trauma to the muscles and connective tissues is slight. You are on the right track with your bike intervals (and it is ingenious to use one leg at a time - are you Scandinavian?). By performing some workouts with heavy resistance and slow speeds, you'll greatly enhance your strength (because you have used the heavier resistance), but this strength will be most apparent at modest cadences (around 60 rpm). By working at the higher rpm, you'll upgrade your coordination and efficiency at high movement speeds - and ultimately your strength at high speed, too (you can take the basic strength you've gained at slower speeds and use it efficiently at fast speeds as well). Strength training should - as much as possible - be both movement- and velocity-specific.

Your final two questions are 'million-dollar' ones. Truthfully, I don't know the right answer (there's not much in the scientific literature to guide the way). But - I think that with the high resistance it would be reasonable to start with 5 x 30 seconds with each leg and work up to 10-12 x 30 seconds (by the way, super-setting immediately comes to mind here; you could work all out for 30 seconds, be ready to fail, and then slightly lighten the resistance and continue on for another 30-45 seconds without stopping). Once you are up to 10-12 x 30 seconds, you might edge up to 45- or even 60-second intervals against great resistance, backing down on the number of reps at first, of course. For the high-speed, lower-resistance, one-leg efforts, you could begin with 5 x 2 minutes and eventually progress to 4 x 5 minutes with each leg.