Weighty Matters
By Will Carlin
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 This past winter, Lance Armstrong was interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS’ “The Charlie Rose Show.” As is usually the case when Rose spends an hour with a single guest, the discussion covered numerous aspects of Armstrong’s life, including his performance at the Tour de France and, of course, his triumph over testicular cancer.
At one point, though, the conversation took an unexpected twist. It went something like this:
Rose: Cycling is more popular than ever in the US, and a large part of that is due to you. Do people, when they come up to you, ever ask you for cycling advice?
Armstrong: It happens a lot more now than it used to; in fact, one of your staffers just asked me for some advice.
Rose: Really? I am sorry about that. Do you mind if I ask what he asked you?
Armstrong: No, not at all. In fact, it is pertinent to one of the points I would like to make. He asked me how he could improve his performance on hills.
Rose: What did you tell him?
Armstrong: Lose weight.
Rose: That’s it?
Armstrong: That’s it. Look, that sounds harsh, and it doesn’t have to be all about how much the person weighs, though that is part of it. We have spent five years and a ton of technology working on reducing weight on my bike and my clothes—there is a lot of weight there. But this is why I wanted to talk about this, because this is how having cancer made me the best cyclist in the world.
Rose: Do you really believe that?
Armstrong: I do. Before the cancer, I was one of the elite cyclists in the world, but I wasn’t the best by a long shot. When I had cancer and had to undergo all the radiation and chemotherapy, I lost a lot of weight. Almost 40 pounds. When I came back, I began racing at almost 30 pounds less than before the treatments. I am a pretty willful guy, but I never would have had the self-discipline to lose 30 pounds. But those 30 pounds were the difference between being elite and being the best. Cycling is about moving a body and a bike over thousands of miles, and if you can expend the same amount of energy, but carry less weight, then that energy is all going to go toward going faster. It really is that easy.
Listening to this, it is easy to be struck by how simple and yet full of insight is this thought. And it isn’t a big leap immediately to start asking questions about squash, fitness and movement. What is it that makes someone fast on the squash court? Does speed equate to good retrieving? When we see someone who moves really well, what, exactly, are we noticing?
There are many things that spring to mind, but perhaps they can be boiled down to two factors: the player’s ability to anticipate and to change direction—knowing where the ball is going to go before it goes there and being able to change direction both when recovering from one shot and to go after another.
Anticipation is worthy of its own column, but today, let's focus on changing direction. When you are in the middle of a point and you have moved quickly to get to a ball, you have to do three things in rapid succession: stop yourself from moving, execute a stroke, and start moving back from whence you came. You have to stop your momentum and reverse it.
Momentum, you may recall from your high school physics class, is the product of mass times velocity. The ability to change momentum, whether to stop it or change its angle, takes something called force. Force is the product of mass times acceleration. Notice the one constant here: mass.
If, therefore, you are able to reduce the mass of the object you are moving (that would be you, in this case), you would be able to reduce its momentum and thus the force needed to change the object’s direction. It won’t surprise you to learn that imparting force on something takes energy.
So, if you have a certain amount of energy to expend to create force, but the mass is lessened, then that force will be converted to greater acceleration. In other words, the less you weigh (while exerting a constant amount of force) the faster you are going to be and the less momentum you will need to counteract in order to stop yourself and change direction. It is a double win.
When confronted with a thought like this, it is wise to do a reality check: does this make sense? Think about two of the greatest movers in the history of the game: Mark Talbott and Jansher Khan. Both were relatively tall for squash players and unbelievably slim. They were known both for their fitness and for their phenomenal retrieving ability.
Each had the benefit of long, lean muscles working to move less weight than almost all of their competitors. Thus, they could change directions faster than most and they were able to keep doing it during a match; they were fast and fit. Combine this with superior anticipation and the determination of champions and you have two of the best retrievers in history.
In an age where American society has become more accepting than ever of being overweight, sometimes you need a champion to tell it straight: Want to be faster? Lose weight. Lance said so.
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