Training Advice

sometimes, a commute is all you can get, so use it wisely. I try to do sprint intervals now, instead of just the quickest A to B.

That's my theory. I have 2 hours a day training time that just so happens needs to get me to and from work as well. My ride home forces me to do hill repeats, my ride to work on my fixed forces me to spin like a mother :)

There really is no substitute for my long hilly weekend ride though.

Let's see if I get quicker next season or whether I'm jsut spouting a load of crap :)

A note on commuting as training.

I know a rider who used to commute from the outer suburbs to inner London daily - over 200 miles per week (this was in the 70' &80's). He certainly did some other training, including chain gangs, some track and heavy duty early season weekend training rides; however the work riding formed the core of his programme. He says, and no one doubts the truth of this, that his lifetime commuting mileage is at least 250,000 miles.

In his racing career he won (among other things) several national time trial championships and at least one international road race.

I hasten to add that this schedule would have been useless for me: I would have been completely knackered before I got to the start line if I'd tried it.

My friend is now in his seventh decade of life, but he's still out there on his bike - if you happen to meet him don't try to half wheel him unless you're feeling really fit.

yeah, I've learned to never judge a rider on their age or appearance.

especially true in track and BMX racing.

Generally, climbing ability is the first thing to go, but even here it's possible to get a nasty shock.

You shouldn't be doing any "very high intensity" work during winter if you want to race track. You should be doing your aerobic component and maybe weights to throw on some muscle mass. As the season nears, you reduce the weights and distance and increase the speed work and actual track drills. Same principles as road with more emphasis on strength (upper, core and lower - not just legs!) and leg speed.

Fartleks are aerobic work.

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartlek[/ame]

Yes, you're supposed to keep it below 80pc HR, but you still alternate moderately paced work with higher paced work. Forgive me the slight exaggeration.

Re gym work - erm, for some people it's actually slightly more convenient, hence the suggestion.

You shouldn't be doing any "very high intensity" work during winter if you want to race track. You should be doing your aerobic component and maybe weights to throw on some muscle mass. As the season nears, you reduce the weights and distance and increase the speed work and actual track drills. Same principles as road with more emphasis on strength (upper, core and lower - not just legs!) and leg speed.

sorry but this is rubish, you should keep some speed elemnt in your training all year round, max rev outs and interval sessions etc during the winter should be part of every training plan of those who want to suceed.

That's not what I've been told and it all depends on which coach/study you believe.
You still have intensity during winter (I do turbo sessions) but for me there's no 'max' efforts of anything.

EDIT:
Hang on, reading again.. "some speed training". Yes I agree, it shouldn't all be slow miles. But I also said no "very high intensity" work.
The other consideration is motivation and mental fatigue. You can't expect to maintain 100% focus all year. So winter, with generally less key events, becomes a good time to wind down the training, recuperate, get the hunger back, etc.

Bunch of winter training opinions here:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/fitness/?id=winter_training3

When I was doing winter base miles on club runs, I'd still attack climbs in my own inimitable style - as 'max' as you get outside of competition. Even a handful of short intensive maximal efforts has a huge effect on maintaining your edge during the off-season, without risk of burning out by the Spring.

There are plenty of people out there putting the hammer down during winter crit series or cyclo-cross races (or roller races!) who manage to get podium places in the summer.

I think this mainly applies to seasoned athletes though, rather than people building longterm base cycling fitness/strength for the first time.

How many people on here are seasoned athletes?

Mmm peppersteak..

I wonder what the true figures are of people winning in winter and summer? I wonder if they'd win more important races in summer if they didn't race in winter? I wonder if the level of competition in winter is less? Like I said.. it depends who/what you believe. If your goals are in summer I see no reason in going into the red in winter.

You might say there are two basic schools of thought - ancient and modern.
Modern:
In a nutshell this is the Peter Keen/Chris Boardman approach. It involves lots of measuring, gym work, turbos etc. It works (see olympic results). However, it is expensive and doesn't sound much fun.
Ancient:
Just do lots of miles. Then do some more: every mile pays a dividend.
Historically far more races have been won with the old method than the modern technique, but this may not always be true in the future. However, I hope the reason anyone reads this forum is because they actually like riding their bikes, and this seems to fit in better with the traditional way of doing things.
Just a few suggestions to help with all those miles.

• Join a club. If you find one that suits you it will change your life.
  
• Be flexible about the discipline you want to take part in. Track has been on the TV a lot recently, but its not suitable for all. If climbing is your strongest suit you won't be able to show it off on the velodrome. Everyone should aim to do some road racing, but if you can only measure improvement by going from DNF to FMB, you won't find it very encouraging. For this reason I suggest everyone should do some time trialling. Virtually all the big names in British cyclesport,from Leon Meredith to Boardman himself have had an involvement with time trialling; the improvement in your personal bests give you something concrete to put in your training diary (you'llneed one of those).
  -I'd say for most people 5000 miles per year would be a absolute minimum for racing fitness.
  That's quite enough for one post.
  
  

Sorry lot of mis-information in here, what is expensive and not fun about about training intelligently!? More varied training is far more mentally stimulating than doing the same long rides all the time!!!

Boardman and Keen are not the only ones with a modern approach as you call it and in fact you are way behind the times as neither of these guys have any coaching involvement in the current gb set up and haven’t for some time.

As for doing lots of miles once you have gone past a certain base level of fitness necessary to allow you to actually train properly, lots of miles going slowly is only going to train you to be able to do lots of miles going you guessed it, slowly.....

Specificity is the key, the person who will win, will be the person on the whole who has the most speed relative to the distance of the event, be that a 100 mile road race or a one lap sprint.

Train to be fast, as I mentioned earlier you need a certain level of fitness to be able to train hard, what was commonly known as base miles (although for track sprinters your base actually mainly comes from the gym) seem to for most people to cover the entire off season, then they try and actually get fast during the racing season, when they are tired from racing! Not ideal

Instead have a fairly short road block say 4-6 weeks followed by concentrating on speed development and power development, examples being riding distances shorter than race distance at a higher than race pace to improve your speed, some times with large rest periods to allow full recovery other times with short rest to improve your ability to recover(these short recovery sessions do a huge amount for aerobic ability too) while still keeping some longer rides in also, sometimes as recovery where you go at a 2/10 pace other times more tempo which might be 6-7/10 pace

From time to time stick in another road block to keep the aerobic fitness, however these can be shorter than the main off season one.

Oh and apart from the sprinters most top enduro riders don’t do gym, they do their strength work on the bike with over gear efforts, however I would certainly do a couple of core sessions a week off season and one a week in season to maintain.

As for saying a certain mileage a rider needs to do to achieve race fitness once again rubbish, everyone is different and responds to training differently, however most riders will gain endurance fitness easier than they will speed, so weight your training accordingly, studies have shown that for most once you go over 90mins in a ride you are just training muscular endurance and not improving aerobic fitness(your body’s ability to use oxygen as a fuel) so there isn’t much need to do that many rides over 90mins unless your racing will last longer than this.

Also apart from time trials most races end in a sprint!! don’t neglect this in your training, contrary to what most people think sprint training isn’t just doing short efforts(short being 30s or less-ideally around 10s), it is doing short efforts with complete or near complete rest, any shorter and you wont be able to complete each effort with the intensity necessary to improve, for most people we are talking 15mins plus between sprints, also once your performance starts to drop finish a sprint session, you wont be improving and you will just tire yourself more than is necessary for the next training session.

Oh and the reason more races have been won on the old method is because they didn’t know better! As soon as riders did they trained more intelligently and went faster, that is why racing is getting faster! Do you think the racers of today would use the methods their say 1950's and 60's counterparts used now just because it worked then?! I don’t! and if they did they would lose plain and simple.

That's not what I've been told and it all depends on which coach/study you believe.
You still have intensity during winter (I do turbo sessions) but for me there's no 'max' efforts of anything.

Hang on, reading again.. "some speed training". Yes I agree, it shouldn't all be slow miles. But I also said no "very high intensity" work.
The other consideration is motivation and mental fatigue. You can't expect to maintain 100% focus all year. So winter, with generally less key events, becomes a good time to wind down the training, recuperate, get the hunger back, etc.

Bunch of winter training opinions here:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/fitness/?id=winter_training3

If you are not going max don’t bother training! You get better by hard work! To improve you have to train harder, rest well(this includes recovery rides eg active rest) and eat well. You don’t improve by sub maximal training all you do is keep training to go slow.

How many people on here are seasoned athletes?

Mmm peppersteak..

I wonder what the true figures are of people winning in winter and summer? I wonder if they'd win more important races in summer if they didn't race in winter? I wonder if the level of competition in winter is less? Like I said.. it depends who/what you believe. If your goals are in summer I see no reason in going into the red in winter.

I for one am a seasoned athlete and also coach, you can use races to train you know.... and as long as the training overload envelope is carefully managed training hard all year round is not just possible it is necessary if you want to really improve.

These things are proven facts not just who you want to believe, what your saying is you are only prepared to train properly half a year and that’s fine but don’t be surprised when others who train more intelligently surpass you.

thanks for your input Lee.

guys, FYI, babydinotrackboy has coached a couple of people who have recently been offered places on British Cyclings Olympic Academy Sprint squad.

he knows his shizzle!

I don't care, he told hippy he was talking rubbish.

Cheers rpm

sorry if you found my posts rude Ant, I should have been more subtle and apologise

I just get a bit frustrated when I see incorrect information on these forums where guys are looking for advice

However im sure Hippy is a big boy and can look after himself, he is welcome to justify what he has posted and tell me why I am wrong

Lee

I think that's just it Lee. While the total belief in your method of training is admirable and probably goes a long way to explaining your success, I really don't think that the world of physical training for sports is black and white.

No harm done, but calling hippy a big boy might be asking for it, he's sensitive about his weight :)

I suppose there will always be different methods, and differing advice.

But then there are different things that people want to train for.

I'm guessing the commuter who wants to lose his belly, the improving Cat 3 racer and the seasoned track sprinter all have different aims and should train differently.

From what I know about cricket, and to some extent, football, teams who succeed do not have "off seasons" or long training breaks. They play all the fucking time, at a high level.

I've a hunch that little-and-often resting is more effective than a big lump and the associated tapering.

(that last bit is not about hippy's bowel movements! )

I've got faith in Joe Friel's methods at the moment and that's what I am using for my training plan. Also the diet he co-authored is doing wonders for my energy levels and weight.

Cheers for your very informative post babydinotrackboy

I have found that swimming regularly to the absolute maximum of my ability so it feels like I am about to die, has improved my cardio fitness more than was achievable on the bike alone

Hey Ant

never met Hippy(that I know of) so no idea about his size! I ment big boy as in man enough...

As for total belife in my way of training, I dont have a way of training per say, I do however know when some one is saying some thing that is factualy incorrect. And to be fair to Hippy Wayfarer's post was worse as his ideas are decades out of date and he didnt actualy responed to the original posters request of help with training for track racing.

Of course there are many different ways of training and each rider I coach will have a different program even if they had the same overall objectives because they would each need to train in a different way to get there.

But poeple need to understand the fundimentals of training and what they are trying to achieve, to improve you need to stress your system more than you have before, in a way thats specific to your aims with the correct fuel(diet) and rest to allow your body to addapt to these new stresses. Then do it again and again to improve. This cycles through the year with different priorities at different times.

Now there are many ways to cause an addaption, be it more load(more training), overloading(bigger gears) or more intensity to name a few. A good coach will use these principles to continualy addapt their programs and gain improvements from their athletes.

However I am always open to new ideas which is why I work with local sports scientists, coaches and athletes from the GB squad. If the posters above I have disagreed with can tell me with proven science why their ideas are right I would be happy to learn from them.

As for anyone else that would like to ask me questions they are welcome to fire away. I am happy to help as much as I can, I certainly dont have all the answers, but I might be able to point people in the right direction and help stop them going down avenues that will waste their time or not benifit them.

Thanks mikec

in what way do you feel the swimming has improved your cardio fitness? How are you measuring this increase?

Lee

ps I must also say swimming is a great off season exercise in my opinion much better than running as there is no impact and it strengthens the whole body.

Ant

I too respect Joe's work and I dont think you will find anything I have posted will contravine what he preaches.

Rpm I totaly agree, the most modern theories on training have riders staying closer to their top speed all year round rather than a long off season where they will lose loads of form. They do have regular breaks however and most top riders take two weeks off at the end of the season, total rest from training.

What I like doing (brace yourselves) is nurturing the inner zombie. I'll elaborate...

When training, I concentrate, very intensely, on form. I try to be as phsyiologically and psychologically self-aware as possible, sometimes focusing on individual joints or muscles or movements or mental processes, other times on combinations of these, and sometimes holistically. It's all a part of building a neuromuscular scaffold.

But in competition, I let go, relying on automatisation - the unshackled ability of the unconscious mind and unhindered muscle memory.

Well, that's how it goes on a good day. If I'm in a bad mood I can undo months of scientific training with the destructive power of my ego.

Lee, sorry mate it was just a joke about hippy's size.

I have a question for you based on Friel's approach. If you have an event on June 1st that you would mark as A priority but there is something the weekend before that whilst not A priority is likely to be tough and fast and you know you wont be able to hold anything back. Would you be better to move the peak back to the week before and try to maintain form through the A priority event?

this is a purely academic question as I'm not in that situation and if I was I'd still be really slow in both races anyway :)

No just see the race the week before A event as training, its about when you rest up most for, and the rest following the tough event the week before and leading up to the A event will be enough to let you get a higher peak on A event day.

In fact its quite useful to be able to have a hard race/training session a week out from main event some times.