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As the winter season approaches, it’s time to stop thinking about fitness and start thinking about fatness.
You’ve all heard of carbo loading, a training technique where you eat massive quantities of pasta the night before a race or marathon, to make sure you’ve got a goodly supply of calories to burn during the event. And we all know that fat is effective for longer efforts when the carbos have come and gone. So I’ve invented the logical extension to these concepts: fat loading. The idea is to bulk up on fat stores over the winter months to make sure you won’t hit the wall when the spring season starts.
This is not a new concept. Mother nature provides the beasts of the forest with a protective covering of fat and fur in the winter. For the cyclist, this extra layer provides insulation and protective padding for those inevitable spills on ice.
The start of the fat loading season is generally Thanksgiving. Sure, you’ve been training on nachos and macadamia nuts before this, but this is really when you can go whole hog, so to speak. The problem with the traditional Thanksgiving feast is that it is relatively high on carbo, low on fat. Sure you compensate for this by eating five times what you normally would, but this may not be enough. Try slathering everything with copious quantities of butter and sour cream, to get the fat percentage up.
The Christmas season provides one of my personal favorites for fat loading: egg nog. This should be enjoyed laced with copious quantities of rum. Since it’s only available for about one month a year, be sure to drink about five gallons of it during the season. Guaranteed to make you winter coat shiny.
For the goal-oriented, you can assess the success of your training in several ways. A gross assessment can be gotten by weighing in on the bathroom scales, but the gains here can’t all be attributed to fat. Best to try the “pinch an inch” body fat measurement. If you can pinch several inches, you know you’ve done it right.
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