I mentioned base miles a few posts ago. So every racer has an idea as to what base miles look like. People talk about LSD (long, slow, distance) riding, putting in huge miles without ever seeing the big ring. Just, as it is said, ride lots. More is better, but not necessarily harder at this time of year.
But how long should you really ride? How many miles? At what intensity? The answers to those questions are, unfortunately, highly individual based on your racing level, goals, and available time. A good guideline is to consider annual training hours, as described by Joe Friel (he literally wrote the book on this). When you do this, consider the annual and weekly training hours you put in last year, then look at what you're goals are this year. Are you trying to upgrade? From 4 to 3? 3 to 2? Each of those will require a different level of minimum commitment, can you fit in the 12 hours per week minimum average that a cat 2 racer should be putting in? If the answer is no, you may have some troubles making that upgrade.
But I digress. Let's talk about base.
Aerobic base is built early in the season with longer efforts, most typically in the 20 minute range. Hunter and Allen are all about those. When done right these efforts will stimulate slow twitch muscles to increase mitochondria count, be more responsive to neural stimulation, and increase intracellular glycogen stores. Sounds pretty awesome, right? What will this do for you? It will lay the foundation for your peak season pedal smashing.
So what's the downside? It takes a long time to properly build base fitness, and you have to do long efforts to get there. For those of you who are already time trialists and climbers, this will be your favorite part of the training progression. For those of you who are sprinters or crit specialists, this may be your least favorite. To you I say, convince yourself that you love these efforts. If you can use power when doing them, all the better. At least then you can track any gains you make, no matter how minute. I found it incredibly rewarding when I could squeak out an extra 4 watts for a 20 minute average, something you can't tell with heart rate alone.
Now, if you live in California, like me, you have three options this time of year: focus on cross (I recommend this, if only because my annual training plan is built around the CX season), chill out and have a single peak road season when you start putting in base miles in February like most of the country does, or start getting it in now so you can have a marvelous two peak season and get to smash pedals twice times in 2014.
Happy riding.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Flexible like Gumby. .
So people talk about stretching all the time. How to stretch, when to stretch, why to stretch. There's a lot of conflicting ideas out there. Some people will tell you that stretching is bad, and that it is often, in fact, a source of injury, rather than a prevention. Technically, they're right. Others will tell you that stretching to improve flexibility is important for life long range of motion, minimizing injuries during sport, and improving sporting performance. Technically, they're right too. WTF?
Well, here's the real deal. Stretching when cold, or as part of a warm up is likely to cause injury. Why? Because you have stretch receptors in your tendons that freak out when your muscle becomes too elongated and tell that muscle to contract before it gets torn. Stretching desensitizes these receptors. What does that mean? It means when you stretch before competition, then you kick a soccer ball as hard as you freakin can, and your hamstring gets a little to stretched out, your stretch receptors react too late and you gack a hammy.
To make matters worse, if you decide to stretch before you warm up, you're setting yourself up to actually tear a muscle just by stretching it cold. Example: take a rubber band, toss it in the fridge, take it out an hour later and give it a good stretch. So what's the answer? Don't stretch before a workout.
However, stretching after a workout, when you're still sweating and your muscles are pliable and warm, is a great way to improve flexibility and range of motion. These are good because they will allow you to do the things you do in your sport with more fluidity and economy of motion. For us cyclists it's particularly good for letting you get into an aero position on the bike and not have your back seize up mid-race. Stretching at the end of a workout is a great way to improve general flexibility, thereby improving on the bike positioning, thereby improving speed and power output. This guy has really good hamstring flexibility and core strength. That's a big part of how he crushes pedals on a TT bike.
And in my next post, I'll discuss core strength.
Also, as promised, here's a video of a cyclocross race gone right.
Well, here's the real deal. Stretching when cold, or as part of a warm up is likely to cause injury. Why? Because you have stretch receptors in your tendons that freak out when your muscle becomes too elongated and tell that muscle to contract before it gets torn. Stretching desensitizes these receptors. What does that mean? It means when you stretch before competition, then you kick a soccer ball as hard as you freakin can, and your hamstring gets a little to stretched out, your stretch receptors react too late and you gack a hammy.
To make matters worse, if you decide to stretch before you warm up, you're setting yourself up to actually tear a muscle just by stretching it cold. Example: take a rubber band, toss it in the fridge, take it out an hour later and give it a good stretch. So what's the answer? Don't stretch before a workout.
However, stretching after a workout, when you're still sweating and your muscles are pliable and warm, is a great way to improve flexibility and range of motion. These are good because they will allow you to do the things you do in your sport with more fluidity and economy of motion. For us cyclists it's particularly good for letting you get into an aero position on the bike and not have your back seize up mid-race. Stretching at the end of a workout is a great way to improve general flexibility, thereby improving on the bike positioning, thereby improving speed and power output. This guy has really good hamstring flexibility and core strength. That's a big part of how he crushes pedals on a TT bike.
And in my next post, I'll discuss core strength.
Also, as promised, here's a video of a cyclocross race gone right.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Annual Training Plan, you so smart.
The annual training plan is a beast of a document that lays out a plan for the coming racing season, be it road, mountain, cross, track, or any combination thereof. You'll have to consider things like season goals, team racing requirements, target races, long term goals, available training time, total training hours last season, total training hours required to meet your goal, and other miscellaneous factors.
If you are a road or mountain racer, you are probably beginning to thing about base miles. If you are a cross racer, you should have already put in a good amount of base work. For some excellent guidelines on how much base to put in, consult Joe Friel's book, The Cyclist Training Bible.
General guidelines for base building are that you should put in at least six, but not more than 16 weeks of base building as you prepare for your season. From there, you will likely move into VO2 workouts. If you race XC, or prefer road races to crits, you'll want to make sure to get a good amount of VO2 work in, as this will benefit you most for your racing efforts. If you are a crit monger, like myself, you'll still want to do these, but you'll likely hate them and may find yourself considering taking up cricket, where you'll never have to do another VO2 effort again. However, it will pay off, and it will lay the foundation for doing the workouts we crit racers love, sprints and anaerobic workouts. These workouts are also great for track racers that love points races, madison races, tempo races, scratch races, miss-n-outs, win-n-outs, chariot races, and really, most of the races on track, except pursuit, which will again be best served by VO2 workouts. A good sample VO2 effort would be 3-5 minutes of smashing up a gradual hill so hard you think your lungs are going to implode when you hit the end of the effort. Be careful that you set a pace that will get you there, rather than have an explosive start, then taper quickly because you went out too fast. You'll probably want to do as many of these as you can handle with about 5 minutes rest between. This is an easy to understand workout that will boost your ability to function at VO2, and if you're really lucky, it might even boost your actual VO2.
For us cross nerds, we need some VO2 work, but mostly as a good way to cap off all that base before moving on to lots and lots and lots of anaerobic work. Cross, as I mentioned in the last post, is a lot like playing mid-field in a good soccer match, tons of repeat anaerobic efforts. So, after you have your base, and you've capped it nicely with some VO2, you'll want to do anaerobic repeats. These may take the form of 30/30's, or the newly popularized 30/30/30's, or some other form of big gear, big power, short duration, repeat efforts. I prefer to do some slight variations on the 30/30/30 as prescribed by Hunter Allen. While this is an excellent training effort (30seconds hammering on the bike, 30seconds running, 30seconds soft pedal, repeat for X number of minutes), I don't feel that it's quite specific enough to cyclocross. I do a variation of that for my athletes that, to me at least, makes more sense.
And of course, regardless of what your training is, always be wary of over-training. It's funny how good results and bad results can both motivate racers to bury themselves under a huge workload.
If you are a road or mountain racer, you are probably beginning to thing about base miles. If you are a cross racer, you should have already put in a good amount of base work. For some excellent guidelines on how much base to put in, consult Joe Friel's book, The Cyclist Training Bible.
General guidelines for base building are that you should put in at least six, but not more than 16 weeks of base building as you prepare for your season. From there, you will likely move into VO2 workouts. If you race XC, or prefer road races to crits, you'll want to make sure to get a good amount of VO2 work in, as this will benefit you most for your racing efforts. If you are a crit monger, like myself, you'll still want to do these, but you'll likely hate them and may find yourself considering taking up cricket, where you'll never have to do another VO2 effort again. However, it will pay off, and it will lay the foundation for doing the workouts we crit racers love, sprints and anaerobic workouts. These workouts are also great for track racers that love points races, madison races, tempo races, scratch races, miss-n-outs, win-n-outs, chariot races, and really, most of the races on track, except pursuit, which will again be best served by VO2 workouts. A good sample VO2 effort would be 3-5 minutes of smashing up a gradual hill so hard you think your lungs are going to implode when you hit the end of the effort. Be careful that you set a pace that will get you there, rather than have an explosive start, then taper quickly because you went out too fast. You'll probably want to do as many of these as you can handle with about 5 minutes rest between. This is an easy to understand workout that will boost your ability to function at VO2, and if you're really lucky, it might even boost your actual VO2.
For us cross nerds, we need some VO2 work, but mostly as a good way to cap off all that base before moving on to lots and lots and lots of anaerobic work. Cross, as I mentioned in the last post, is a lot like playing mid-field in a good soccer match, tons of repeat anaerobic efforts. So, after you have your base, and you've capped it nicely with some VO2, you'll want to do anaerobic repeats. These may take the form of 30/30's, or the newly popularized 30/30/30's, or some other form of big gear, big power, short duration, repeat efforts. I prefer to do some slight variations on the 30/30/30 as prescribed by Hunter Allen. While this is an excellent training effort (30seconds hammering on the bike, 30seconds running, 30seconds soft pedal, repeat for X number of minutes), I don't feel that it's quite specific enough to cyclocross. I do a variation of that for my athletes that, to me at least, makes more sense.
And of course, regardless of what your training is, always be wary of over-training. It's funny how good results and bad results can both motivate racers to bury themselves under a huge workload.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Cyclocross, don't tell the others, but you're my favorite.
Hello fellow cyclists and athletes! I'd like to start with something fun and easy to discuss: cyclocross. Cross is my favorite way to race a bike. I love the variety it offers, the physical challenge, battling the elements, and having a great excuse to add two bikes to my collection.
The discipline of cyclocross traces its roots to Winter training rides that road racers did to stay fit. Eventually those rainy, sometimes off-road training rides got a little more organized and eventually became a racing discipline in its own right.
Today there are plenty of rules and regulations as well as official governing bodies that oversee cyclocross racing and try to keep 'cross recognizable as 'cross, without fighting progress (much).
Typical cross races are between one and two miles to each lap, and each category does as many laps as possible in a given amount of time. Beginners may race for only 30 minutes, where experts and pros race for an hour. Given that this is a relatively short duration, the intensity is typically quite high. Actually, the physiological demands of CX are often very similar to that of playing mid-field on soccer team. Lots of high power repeats with little recovery between.
Then there's the barriers. Some like to run them, some will bunny hop, others do neither. Whatever your skill level, it pays to practice both running and bunny hopping as much as possible. At many of today's races promoters are including barrier sections that are hop-able, as well as some that are not. So you will likely need both skills.
Another key element is turning. Learning how to corner may be easier for some than for others. The primary, most effective turning technique involves weighting the outside pedal, shifting as much weight as possible onto that pedal, while leaning the bike into the turn. The technique described and demonstrated in this video are VERY similar to what you want to do on the CX bike.
I know I skipped a lot, and only skimmed what I did touch on, but if you have questions, feel free to email me, or leave them in the comments. Until next week, happy riding!
The discipline of cyclocross traces its roots to Winter training rides that road racers did to stay fit. Eventually those rainy, sometimes off-road training rides got a little more organized and eventually became a racing discipline in its own right.
Today there are plenty of rules and regulations as well as official governing bodies that oversee cyclocross racing and try to keep 'cross recognizable as 'cross, without fighting progress (much).
Typical cross races are between one and two miles to each lap, and each category does as many laps as possible in a given amount of time. Beginners may race for only 30 minutes, where experts and pros race for an hour. Given that this is a relatively short duration, the intensity is typically quite high. Actually, the physiological demands of CX are often very similar to that of playing mid-field on soccer team. Lots of high power repeats with little recovery between.
Then there's the barriers. Some like to run them, some will bunny hop, others do neither. Whatever your skill level, it pays to practice both running and bunny hopping as much as possible. At many of today's races promoters are including barrier sections that are hop-able, as well as some that are not. So you will likely need both skills.
Another key element is turning. Learning how to corner may be easier for some than for others. The primary, most effective turning technique involves weighting the outside pedal, shifting as much weight as possible onto that pedal, while leaning the bike into the turn. The technique described and demonstrated in this video are VERY similar to what you want to do on the CX bike.
I know I skipped a lot, and only skimmed what I did touch on, but if you have questions, feel free to email me, or leave them in the comments. Until next week, happy riding!
Monday, September 2, 2013
Resetting.
Today I mark the start of my online presence as a coach. Which is not to say that I disregard all previous posts, just that I'm turning this blog into one focused on fitness and my coaching programs. If you are a fellow coach or athlete, feel free to submit questions in the comments section, or email them to me. I'll do my best to respond. I'm always interested in potential partnerships, projects, and new athletes.
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