Training4cyclists

Cycling Training Tips

Cycling Training Tips from Jesper Bondo Medhus

The 6-Week Training Plan

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I’m happy to announce a new training plan here on Training4cyclists.com. It is a bike training plan developed for serious road cyclists with ambitions to ride a little faster.

This training plan will improve your performance within 6 weeks. It’s going to be a tough training plan to complete so don’t enter this training plan if you feel unsure. It’s a demanding training plan, but its is not unrealistic to complete.

Actually, the 6-week training plan is designed to increase your chances of completing the training plan as intended.

Please bookmark this training plan:
https://www.training4cyclists.com/6-week-training-plan/

Week 1: Tiny increments in training volume
Week 2: Sub-threshold intervals for aerobic performance
Week 3: Add more training volume
Week 4: Keep momentum
Week 5: Reaching a new level
Week 6: New training routine

Week 1 – Tiny increments in training volume

The 6-Week Training Plan is made for riders who train on avg. 7hrs per week. The goal is to increase your training volume over next 6 weeks. Small increments in training volume each week will make a significant improvement when they are all added together. These increments are almost invisible and you won’t notice anything the first two to three weeks. But these increments work as you continue to add more depth to your training volume.

When your training volume per week goes up, you’ll reach a higher level of aerobic performance. As mentioned before, adding more hours is one of the most effective methods to improve cycling performance.

This training plan will make you faster and fitter, and ultimately increase your chances of winning a cycling race.

If you train less than 7 hrs / week, you should adjust your training volume accordingly. Training sessions in orange are the most important parts in this training plan while training session written in yellow can be removed if you need to reduce total training time.

If you train more than 7 hrs / week, you should add more hours to the training plan. In week 1 you can add more volume on all days.

If you are used to a training volume of more than 12+ hrs / week, the 6-week training plan might very likely help you too, but personally I would suggest a more specific training plan based on your current fitness and ambitions. Also, if you have a significant training volume, you should consider to implement some kind of periodization (recovery weeks etc.).

Intervals based on performance test

Before you enter this training plan, you’ll need to estimate or measure your current power output at threshold power. For practical purposes this can be done with a 30-min performance test where your average power. This 30min performance test might at least in theory overestimate your ‘functional threshold power’.

However, from a practical point of view a 30-min test is a secure and proven method used to calculate intervals. During the performance test it might be necessary to adjust your pace slightly, but that’s how performance tests are. Also, remember that a 30-min performance test is a great training session in itself.

You can find more information about training intensities here.

Example, Thursday week 1:
 1.5 hours – 2 x 10min Sub-threshold

20min warm-up (start slowly and work your heart rate up in small steps to about 80%)

10min Sub-threshold (80-87% of maximum heart rate / 80-90% of threshold power)

5 to 10min recovery ( <65% of maximum heart rate / <55% of threshold power). If you need more recovery time for any reason, no problem.

10min Sub-threshold (80-87% of maximum heart rate / 80-90% of threshold power)

30min Endurance training (65-80% of maximum heart rate / 55-80% of threshold power)

10min cool down (<65% of maximum heart rate / <55% of threshold power) 

Sub-threshold intervals are a safe and great method to develop a solid aerobic engine. Because they are performed at an intensity safely below threshold power, you can perform impressive amounts of these without overshooting. 

Also, there is no reason to stress too much about length of recovery between intervals. Most often 5 to 10 minutes would be fine, but you will also achieve great results with shorter or longer recovery. 

I have defined sub-threshold intensity as 80 to 87% of your maximum heart rate indicating that you can make these intervals quite easy as well as quite difficult. There is room for personal fitting. It’s clear that there is quite a difference between 80 and 87% of maximum heart rate. 

Some days you will appreciate a light 80% workout and some days you will push yourself to the limit with a 87% workout.

Use your best judgement to decide the right intensity.

If you use a power meter as pacing tool, I suggest you aim for 80 to 90% of threshold power during sub-threshold intervals. Again, it is worth to remember that there is a significant difference between 80 and 90 %.

It is clear that pacing with a power meter is much easier, but in most cases it is possible to learn how to get the right pace for threshold intervals using a heart rate monitor or simply just your gut feeling. Experienced riders know how to pace themselves in a sub-threshold interval because they have performed tons of them.

However, in the end it is up to you to decide how hard you want to push yourself through these intervals.

Week 2 – Sub-threshold intervals for aerobic performance

Adding more hours to your training volume is a secure way to improve performance. However, if you want to benefit from the tiny increments in week 1, you’ll have to do at least the same in week 2. The magic from these small adjustments to your weekly workload will only happen if you do your best to push a little harder.

In week 2 there are also some minor adjustments to the sub-threshold interval volume. Generally, I believe sub-threshold intervals should be an integral part of any serious training plan. If you want to to build aerobic endurance, it’s difficult to find reasons not to use sub-threshold intervals once in a while.

When you train at this rather safe intensity slightly lower than threshold power, you are able to work for longer time with minimal anaerobic metabolism. In fact this is really great for your chances to reach better performance because you can perform impressive amounts of these intervals without overshooting.

Thus, riding sub-threshold intervals will improve your aerobic performance, but have almost no impact on your anaerobic endurance and minimal impact on your recovery time.

Week 3 – Add more training volume

This 6-week training plan has a goal to increase your training volume from 7 to 9 hours per week. By making this increment in small steps there is a better chance that you will succeed. Therefore, the goal for week 3 is to reach a total training volume of 8hrs. As always, interval training days have the highest priority. If necessary, it is possible to switch training days, but it is suggested to have at least one day off or an easy training session between the three ‘orange’ training days.

In week 3 there is a new interval session: threshold power intervals. These intervals are by definition significantly harder than sub-threshold intervals, but they will also have a deeper impact on your progress.

What are power sprints?
A power sprint is my little input to your neural system because they are so great to make neural adaptations. From a very low speed (0 to 5 km/hr) you should make a very explosive acceleration for about 10 seconds. Use gear ratio 53 / 14-17 teeth.

You can do both seated and standing sprints. You are allowed to use your upper body as well as your legs. You will need a full recovery (at least 5 min) before every power sprint.

By doing these power sprints twice a week you’ll become stronger and make powerful launches of attacks and sprints. Also, there might actually be a little benefit for your endurance as well.

Week 4 – Keep momentum

It takes time to adapt to new training routines, but this 6-week training plan makes so small tweaks to your current training volume that it is almost invincible. However, over time your body will notice that there is rising need of recovery. Therefore, it is very important that you keep momentum and use your motivation to pay more attention to your diet. Weight loss is not a focus point, but you need to give your body the best fuel for serious cycling training.

Week 5 – Reaching a new level

It is important to first adapt to your new training volume before you implement too many interval training sessions and cycling races. It is possible to increase both training volume and intensity at the same time, but there is also a greater risk of overshooting. Still, adding small amounts of VO2 max sessions will be good for your progress so I suggest you implement some VO2 max training in week 5. This is also a very important step towards being fully acclimatized to a higher training volume.

Week 6 – New routine

In the final week you’ll manage a total training volume of 9 hrs including both power sprints, sub-threshold power intervals, threshold power intervals, VO2 max training and endurance rides of more than 3hrs.

Depending on your ambitions you could take a few easy training days after week 6 and then I expect you to be significant stronger than before entering this training plan.

If you like this training plan feel free to share this link with your friends:
https://www.training4cyclists.com/6-week-training-plan/

The #1 Way to Achieve Better Performance

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Imagine if there was a secure and legal way to improve your cycling performance within 6 to 8 weeks…

Think about it.

You can reach a new level if you are ready to take the necessary steps.

Are you ready?

There is one thing that we all know that can possible improve performance: more training.

Yes, it’s obvious and well known. But it is a proven method that has been successfully used for many years.

If you are able to add 20% to your current training volume, there is a good chance that you can ride much faster within 6 to 8 weeks from now.

What does that mean?

If you train 5 hours per week, you should increase your training volume to 6 hours per week. If you ride on avg. 10hours per week, you should increase your training volume to 12 hours per week.

There is no guarantee, but there is definitively a really good chance you’ll get closer to the best physical shape of your life.

However, finding time for more training is a big challenge. Therefore it is not uncommon that many riders say that ‘lack of time’ is the main reason why they don’t perform better.

Even though, I’m a strong advocate for time effective training, I totally agree that you can make significant better results with more training. For example if you are able to add 20% to your training volume, I would be surprised if that did not positively influence your performance within 6 to 8 weeks.

And it’s not that difficult to find 1 to 2hours per week if you try hard enough.

After all, it’s probably the easiest way to improve your performance.

So here is my training advice for you today:
Increase your current training volume 20%. Simple as that.

Interview with Matt Fitzgerald – Author of ‘Racing Weight – How to Get Lean for Peak Performance’

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A few weeks ago I made a review of Matt Fitzgerald’s popular book Racing Weight – How to Get Lean for Peak Performance. I thought it was a great read with many practical examples and illustrations of how athletes can manage their diet to perform better.

However, many readers are not going to read the whole book, but want practical tips that are easy to implement now. So I decided to contact Matt Fitzgerald to ask for some easy digestible tips that you can implement today.

Interview with Matt Fitzgerald

Jesper: Many riders bulk 5 to 10 kg during the off-season. People train less and eat more. What is in your opinion the most valuable advice for road cyclists to limit excess body weight during the winter season?

Matt: Start by giving yourself a limit for off-season weight gain. A certain amount of weight gain is normal and healthy. If you set a numerical cap on it, though, you’ll be less likely to gain too much.

Keeping your diet quality high will help you stay within the limit you’ve set. In my book, I present a diet quality scoring system that makes it easy to stay on track in this regard. There’s also a DQS (for Diet Quality Score) app now available for iPhone and Droid.

Jesper: Can you provide a practical example of how my readers can implement such strategy?

Matt: In the book I talk about something I call the 8 percent rule. According to this rule, you are allowed to go up to 8 percent above your optimal racing weight during the off season. So if your racing weight is 68 kg, you may go up to 73 kg during the off season. This doesn’t mean you HAVE to gain that much weight, and some of it should be muscle, as I recommend maintaining a heavier emphasis on strength training during the off season.

Jesper: In your book you talk about body composition and the strong correlations between fat percentage, body weight and performance. For riders that are new to serious bike training it can be difficult to know what exactly target they are shooting for. Can you provide some numbers that are relevant for road cyclists that want to perform at their best in 2015?

Matt: All cyclists perform at their best when they have close to the minimum amount of body fat that is healthy for them. So even though body weight (or mass) is measured in kilograms or pounds, it’s body fat percentage that really determines an individual rider’s optimal racing weight.

There are several factors that influence the BF% that is realistically attainable for an individual cyclist. These include age, gender, history of being overweight, and genetics. Because so many factors are involved, it’s impossible to rigorously predict a rider’s optimal racing weight. It is possible to make reasonable estimates, though, and I’ve created a tool that does this.

Jesper: What is your argument for using these values?

Matt: The tool works very well. Athletes who actually attain their optimal racing weight (something that few do) typically find that it is very close to the number that the calculator predicted. I should add that the only way to determine what your optimal racing weight really is is to attain it, because racing weight is functionally defined. Specifically, an athlete’s optimal racing weight is his weight/body fat percentage at the time of peak racing form.

Jesper: In your book, you state that ‘the dietary habits and training methods of the world’s best performing athletes define what works’. I like the idea of using the leaders as role models. It’s pretty hard to argue against the nutritional strategy from an olympic champion…

However, there is now evidence that doping play a significant role in professional endurance sports including not only methods to increase endurance for example EPO or blood transfusion but also drugs that will manipulate body composition over time, e.g. insulin, growth hormone, testosterone etc. Should we still follow the leaders (without doping, of course)?

Matt:Yes. The six rules of the Racing Weight program (1. Improve your diet quality, 2. Manage your appetite, 3. Balance your energy sources, 4. Monitor yourself, 5. Time your nutrition, and 6. Train for racing weight) are not only practiced almost universally by elite endurance athletes but also supported by experimental science. They are proven to work just as well for athletes who do not use performance-enhancing drugs as for those who do.

I can assure you that, as a clean endurance athlete, you are not likely to reach your optimal racing weight by lowering your diet quality, failing to manage your appetite, etc.

Jesper: I know that IF there was a magic formula for optimal eating or training, everybody would use it.

However, if you were supposed to re-write your book today, are there any recommendations you would adjust now or expect to adjust in the future?

Matt: Actually, I got a chance to revise the original Racing Weight for a second edition that was published in 2013. I still consider this edition fully up-to-date and therefore would not make any significant changes.

Jesper: Are there any ‘trends’ in nutritional strategies you expect that will get more attention in the future, for example post-exercise practices or use of protein supplement?

Matt: Lately I see more elite endurance athletes engaging in the practice of carbohydrate-deprivation workouts. It entails doing a long training session without what would normally be considered adequate carbohydrate intake before and during.

It is done only occasionally, once a week or so, and its main purpose is to increase the fat-burning capacity of the muscles during exercise, but it may also have a very small favorable effect on body composition.

Jesper: Ok, final question. From my personal experience, practical tips and tricks are more valuable than ‘eat no more than 30% fat’ or similar. Instead, it’s more effective for me to eliminate all the kind of low quality food items I’d better not eat. Simply, make all cakes etc. out of reach.

Matt, do you have any tips in this category that you would share with my readers?

Matt: One helpful tip is a complement to the example you just gave. In addition to keeping unhealthy foods out of reach, try to keep healthy foods always within reach. Have healthy snacks such as fruit and nuts available everywhere: in the car, at your office desk, in your airplane carry-on bag, etc.

Thanks to Matt Fitzgerald for contributing with his knowledge about nutrition for endurance athletes here on Training4cyclists.

If you want to learn more about effective nutritional strategies there is a recent review of ‘Racing Weight’ on Training4cyclists and you can find a couple of other books from Matt Fitzgerald over at Amazon and his personal website here: www.mattfitzgerald.org.

Power sprints – Your Secret Weapon to Powerful Attacks

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Have you ever tried to launch an attack in a cycling race or maybe even an attempt to make a race-winning move? If you have, you have probably also experienced the most likely scenario: the other riders closes the gap without struggling, because your attempt lacks power.

How can you learn the skill to make more powerful race-winning moves?

If we take a look at the initial phase of your attack, all you need to focus on is neural strength. If you watch a power meter file from your most powerful attempts, you are very likely above 1000Watts or even higher.

Such efforts require activation of all relevant muscle fibers available. But you can lift up your maximal power significantly, if you train this speciality.

In this article, I’ll give you suggestions to improve your initial launch of a powerful attack.

Power sprints as part of transition from winter training

In the last couple of years weight lifting has gotten more attention from cycling coaches and athletes. More coaches believe that you can gain advantages if you use weight lifting as part of your winter training.

One of the challenges is to secure that all the time spend in the weight lifting gym can be converted to better performance on the bike. Since road cyclists and mountain bike riders are mostly interested in neural adaptations, choice of exercises should also be very specific.

In weight lifting you get stronger at the movements and lifting patterns you train. So there is only a limited transfer of strength gain from one exercise to other exercises. And you see the same when you jump over at your bike again.

So even if you make a 50% gain in your 1 repetition maximum (1RM) squat, you shouldn’t be disappointed if you don’t pedal 50% higher power outputs during sprints. As I said previously, there is only a limited transfer between exercises.

One of the coolest things about power sprints is that you can easily combine these sprints with other intervals.

There is not much recovery required after a couple of sprints, so you can perform scheduled aerobic intervals later in the same training session. Since these sprints are almost ‘recovery-free’, I use them frequently in training programs both winter season, pre-season and in-season.

Typically one to two times per week and always during the first hour of the training session.

How to improve your explosiveness with power sprints

From a very low speed (0 to 5 km/hr) make an explosive acceleration for about 10 seconds. Use gear ratio 53 / 14-17 teeth. You can do both seated and standing sprints. Full recovery (at least 5 min) before the next power sprint.

Perform five to eight sprints per training session.

Power sprints are great to make neural adaptations. They’ll help you make more powerful launches of attacks and sprints. It is probably the closest you’ll get to heavy strength training on your bike. And it is probably the most specific way you can do strength training.

Thus, I also recommend these power sprints in combination with weight lifting during the winter season.

Please note that this little exercise doesn’t cover all aspects of race-winning moves. So you still have to pay attention to anaerobic endurance, VO2 max, threshold power etc.

Review: Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald

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As a cycling coach and medical doctor you have many niches to master. Nutritional advice is just one of them. In the past years, I have had several requests from road cyclists and triathletes about nutritional advice and strategies to achieve optimal racing weight and performance.

It seems like many athletes tend to ask very specific questions and get lost in all the different advice and products available. So cooking the knowledge into scientific-based recommendations is challenging. And picking the essential advice from hundreds of different studies of varying quality into useful, pragmatic guidelines is even more challenging.

Racing Weight for endurance athletes

Matt Fitzgerald, a journalist with solid insight into endurance training and nutrition has written a book that is highly recommendable. It’s called ‘Racing Weight’ and represents a serious introduction to the available knowledge about nutritional strategies for endurance athletes.

One of the things I like about this book is its pragmatic approach to sport nutrition. It’s not just another attempt to become the sport nutrition bible. Instead, it has a very practical and useful approach to make understandable tools and concepts that actually work for athletes.

Throughout the book Fitzgerald refers to many professional athletes and use their approach as ‘golden standard’. In other words: If a world class endurance athlete uses one nutritional strategy, he is probably doing most things the optimal way. So when african runners are some of the fastest long distance runners in the world, you shouldn’t tell them they eat wrong.

If it works for the best endurance athletes, they must be doing something right

The mantra from Fitzgerald is the following:

‘The Racing Weight system is based on the weight-management methods for endurance athletes most often take to attain their racing weight are by definition the most effective weight-management methods for endurance athletes because the objective of weight management in endurance sports is better performance. The surest way to reach racing weight is to simply copy these practices.’

So in this book, Fitzgerald introduces his own concept to appetite control and weight management. Yes, almost every book about nutrition has it’s own route to success.

Nevertheless, I think the tips to control diet are reasonable and well argued. Also, he keeps telling the differences between serious endurance athletes and regular people that want to lose weight. It’s a different situation and so it should be attacked differently. Losing weight only makes sense as long as it equals better performance.

Even though I like the pragmatic concept to set world class athlete as ‘golden standard’ for what works, I believe it’s wrong to completely ignore the fact that doping is an integral part of world class endurance sports.

History has shown that many of these athletes have used methods that not only improve endurance using injections of EPO or blood transfusion, but also several drugs that manipulate body composition over time – for example insulin, growth hormone, testosterone etc. However, the best athletes in the world do have very sound nutritional principles you can learn from to improve your own diet and performance.

Conclusion: Recommended for endurance athletes that want to optimize their race performance

The overall impression of this book is very good. The recommendations presented in this book make good sense with what I’ve previously studied about nutrition.

So if you want nutritional advice with a slightly scientific touch, I believe Fitzgerald has done an excellent job to cook down many different tips into digestible, practical recommendations for endurance athletes.

You can purchase a Kindle or physical edition of Racing Weight at Amazon.com.