On thursday I will participate in a group meeting that is going to plan a seminar or conference for cycling coaches involved with elite cycling in Denmark. Our work group is made of the national team coach, a couple of coaches from UCI Continental teams and me. I joined this work group because I believe that education and knowledge-sharing is very important to maintain a high level of cycling coaches. Hopefully we can make a program that will attract many coaches to participate.

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T-Mobile Team has selected SRM and Traning Peaks software for their training analyzes. In a press release at Cycling Peaks official blog, T-Mobile and Cycling Peaks comments on this partnership:

“Training Peaks functionality will allow the T-Mobile Team Management to monitor, analyze and plan all aspects of a rider’s training program. “We are very pleased to be a part of the T-Mobile team for 2007. By using Training Peaks products the T-Mobile management and the riders have a one stop shop for collecting and analyzing data. T-Mobile Directors will also be able to easily manage travel schedules and race programs all within the Training Peaks platform. We believe we have the perfect solution for T-Mobile to stay on top of team performance,” said Training Peaks business development director Dirk Friel.

“T-Mobile Team improves the work and communication between riders, coaches, sport scientists and team doctors to set a new standard in training. The combination of Training Peaks & SRM is the perfect tool to collect and manage the data and will help to reach a higher quality of training and performance.” said team doctor Lothar Heinrich.

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If you have decided to enter the weight lifting gym this winter, implementing squats in your training program is difficult to avoid. This exercise is the best way to increase your leg strength in a very functional way. If only have the time to do one exercise, please make some good squats. In a cyclist’s strength training program, squatting should be the bread and butter. Actually squat is often mentioned as ‘the king of exercises’.

Heavy weights matters
Well, first of all you have to reconsider how you can make your muscles stronger. The short answer is that you have to lift heavy weights frequently. If the weights aren’t heavy enough, they will not force the muscles to make neural adaptations nor hypertrophy. You can read more about neural adaptations in the post: How a muscle develops force. The good thing about squats is that it is possible to work with heavy weights, which put an enormous stress on legs, calves, hamstrings, gluteus, abdominal and back muscles. As you can see most of your body is working in coordination to manage to lift the weight. Can you imagine what this exercise will do to your overall strength? You will get a great boost not only for your leg extensors (m. quadriceps) but also several other important muscles at the same time.

Functionality
As I previously described in a post about typical mistakes, non-functional exercises are very difficult to convert to something useful in your cycling. This is because strength training is a kind of teaching for your nervous system. I will give an example: If you compare an elite tennis player with a pro golfer: Who will win the match if these elite sport people play badminton? That would probably be the tennis player, because tennis is a racket sport that has similar movements like badminton. Thus, the tennis player gets an advantage because his nervous system is optimized for movements that are similar to the ones in badminton. It is easier for him to convert his skills from tennis to badminton, than it is for the golfer to start playing a racket sport.

Squatting is a lifting style that is close related to pedalling and therefore gives you the best opportunities to convert strength gains made in the weight lifting gym to a better cycling performance. On the other hand, commonly used exercises as leg extensions (or even worse leg adductions or abductions) are single joint movements that are very difficult to convert to cycling power. Leg extensions should be used only by cyclists with injuries and otherwise left available for regular people that don’t know the power of squats.

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I have found a couple of links about cycling training that I would like to share with you:

Interview with Bobby Julich about what to do off-season. Blog about a Norwegian time trialist. For the power meter enthusiasts there are plenty of interesting posts at Cycle Jabber and a Jeff´s blog about power meter training (hard core power meter training… yeah!)

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In an article in International Herald Tribune there is an interesting theory about hiding of EPO abuse. Scientists in laboratoriums in Switzerland work to develop a test that can prove a special powder used to destroy traces of the drug EPO (erythropoietin). In the past year there has been a significant increase in the number of tests showing no EPO at all. The scientists have the theory that the riders use a protease that can brake down proteins in the urine.

“We have no proof so far but there are indications that a powder exists. It can happen that people who excrete less EPO than others have a result where there is no EPO but it is unusual. And over this last year we’ve seen some suspicious cases of EPO-free urine samples, where we did not understand why suddenly it was undetectable.” Said Martial Saugy, the head of the Swiss anti-doping laboratory, to International Herald Tribune.

Small amount of protease can remove EPO
It is possible to remove EPO from the urine by putting protease on their hands, then urinating on their fingers. Only a small amount of protease is needed to brake down all EPO in the urine.

This theory might explain why so relative few riders have delivered a positive EPO test compared to how many riders have been caught with an enhanced hematocrit.

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October is a month without much activity for European cyclists. In most countries race season end now or has already ended. From now on there is winter break for almost 5 or 6 months depending on what country you race in. There are some things that I have learned that are nice to do at this time of the season that might help you to achieve better results in the next season. I have also made some mistakes in my career that I will warn you not to do.

Evaluate your training diary
Evaluate your season with your coach or cycling buddy. Talk about the expectations and goals you had before the season started and discuss whether the outcome was satisfying. What went better than expected and what could have gone better? Try to figure out why things did go well or why they didn’t. I think it is a very good idea to look at your training reports in your training diary because that tells more about how you felt, how much you trained and suffered than just looking at the result list. Also it is worth to find out if your peaking strategy for specific races worked out.

Take a break from training
A very common mistake is when a rider ends a season with a good result in a race. I remember once I won my first race the weekend before the season ended: I started to train very hard immediately after the season ended to maintain my good form and prepare for the next season. That went well for about a month and then I finally could hear that my body was screaming for rest. At that time I had to take a break from my cycling training instead of starting up slowly on my winter training. The lesson I learned was that it is necessary to reduce your training amount significantly when the season ends, because it is not possible to maintain the same high level of performance all year around.

Make a plan for the next season
Now you have the time to write down goals and make a detailed plan for next season. I normally recommend that you select two or three specific race days (or periods) where you want to be at your highest level. Find out how much time you can spend on training and how you can get the best results with the time you have. When you know what your goals are and what time you have to achieve your goals, it is time to make a detailed training program. I will recommend that you discuss your training program with a cycling coach to get a second opinion on your plans. It is important that both your goals and your training plan are realistic. Otherwise you will very likely get disappointed.

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