Cycling Training Tips

Improvements through a cycling career

When you start your cycling career, central adaptations increase your performance rapidly in the first three months. After one year of training you will discover that it takes more time to gain improvements. Now you will have to think more about how to train to keep improving. At this time improvements are often due to peripheral adaptations.

When you have trained seriously for a couple of years, you will experience that more training is needed before you get significant improvements. At this time you get the feeling of a training vacuum. You train more than you have ever done before, but your form does not change at all.

This is a critical moment in every serious riders´ career. The common outcome is that you sooner or later realize that you are not making further progress with the current program. You take the consequences and start making things different. This could be quitting, switching coach, switching club, different training methods, more training, less training, new bike, new wheels, eating nutritional supplements or getting so desperate that you take drugs. But often you will not realize that the problem is a training vacuum, because you have optimized cycling performance through proper training, eating and resting. Instead you victimize your coach, club or material because your performance has reached a plateau.

In the final part of your career cycling efficiency, tactics and experiences play a bigger role. You will use your knowledge about race tactics to eliminate eventually stronger opponents. You can win races without being the strongest rider, but making the correct moves at the correct moments, because of your gut feeling.

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Strength Training Without Additional Body Mass – 1

I often hear that cyclists skip strength training because they are afraid they will gain additional body weight. In this series I will try to explain how cyclists can strength train without gaining extra body weight.

1. Why additional body weight should be avoided
Larger muscle cells (that will say larger square diameter) can generate more power. That is the most commonly known way to increase power, though it is not desirable for cyclists. The problem is that a large muscle mass is heavy to carry and there is a dilution of mitochondrias. Additional body weight will slow you down when you climb or accelerate your bike. Notice that I include accelerations, because many riders forget that their body weight also matters when they accelerate their bike out of a corner. Enthusiasts riding with power meters may have introduced you to the term ”˜power to weight ratio’. That refers to how many watts you can push compared to your body weight. That ratio has a huge impact when you climb (or accelerate”¦)

Read the first part of the series here

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5 Steps For Better Heart Rate Monitor Training

Heart rate monitors have been used by all kind of endurance athletes for the last 20 years. Since there is a strong correlation between oxygen consumption and heart rate, knowing your current heart rate is a great indicator of your current oxygen uptake, thus how hard you work. When you’ve used your monitor a couple of times, you will start to notice that you ride with a low heart rate the pace can be maintained for hours. Riding with a heart rate close to your maximum heart rate can be maintained for a limited time only. This is a very short description of why it can be useful to know your heart rate during bike ride. Read the 5 steps for better heart rate monitor training

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Speed linking – September 2008

Speed linking – September 2008 Read More »

How To Use a Heart Rate Monitor for Cycling

A heart rate monitor is one of the most used tools for pacing strategy during intervals or competitions, analyzing of performance and detection of overtraining. Polar heart rate monitor watches make very precise measurement of the current pulse. This information can be very useful for an experienced user who understands the exercise physiology behind heart rate regulation.

Getting started
One of the best ways to learn to use a heart rate monitor is to use one during training. Don’t buy one of the top models from Polar (cs600, s725 etc.) – these watches are not made for beginners. Instead try one of the basic Polar monitors for a beginning. These watches are cheaper and easier to deal with. There are also several other manufacturers of monitors and some of them are probably cheaper. My point is that for a beginner who has never tried heart rate monitors before, it might be a clever idea to buy one of the cheaper models for a beginning and then buy a more advanced heart rate monitor when you know which kind of data you are interested in. A Polar cs600 is a great tool for experienced riders, but is very likely to be overkill for a beginner.

Notify how your heart rate reacts
When you have bought a heart rate monitor: Get out on the roads! Spend a month with your regular training program, just wearing the monitor, but notifying how the heart rate reacts to the efforts. It is very interesting to study the heart rate and very quickly you will discover that you start to use the monitor for pacing. At this point you are already getting paid back for your investment, since you train harder and are more motivated during the ride.

Watch your own heart rate monitor – not your training partner’s…
The fact is that you can only compare heart rate values with your own previous registrations. The reason for this is that we all have a different anatomy of our cardiovascular system. But these systems are all based on the same physiological mechanisms. Thus, we can learn from each others’ physiological experiences and adaptations, but we can’t compare individual heart rate values. E.g. your resting heart rate is 58bpm while your friend’s heart rate is 42bpm, still I can’t say which one of you are in the best shape nor have the highest VO2 max.

Your maximum heart rate is correlated to your age, but that does not mean that we all fit in to 220-age formula. There is a huge standard deviation because we all are anatomically different. Just like with the resting heart rates, maximum heart rates does not predict performance.

Be patient
It is not necessary to use a special heart rate focused training program when you start to use it. As I said, just wearing the monitor for the first month is a very good education. I remember when I started to use a heart rate monitor for the first time back in the mid 90’s. At that time I had read some literature about general exercise physiology and heart monitors, but I lacked practical experience with the monitor. The result was that I made some target intervals for my heart rate which triggered the alarm system to beep most of the time. After a few of these rides I started to ride without target zones until I knew more about how my heart rate reacted during cycling. The lesson I learned was that you have to be patient and wait a while before you start doing intervals based on heart rate target zones.

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What Are Your Best Cycling Tips for Beginners?

I often get questions about cycling tips from beginners looking for fast improvements. I introduce them to the basic training principles and basic rules for optimal training I know. Training consistently for a long period is a cornerstone in every cyclist’s success and using some principles for recovery accelerates the progress.

Nevertheless, it can be a good idea to hear what you readers say to your friends when they ask you about beginner cycling tips.

Best comment on this post wins $25
The winner will be chosen on June 5th and the prize can be paid to PayPal accounts only. Training4cyclists.com is allowed to present tips entered in this competition in future posts.

Now it is time for competition: What are your best beginner cycling tips?

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Boost Your Performance With Alternative Workouts

Motivation is important when you are a serious cyclist, because you spend so many hours on your bike. The best cyclists have an ability to motivate themselves workout after workout, season after season. But even though you think of yourself as a dedicated and motivated rider, you might sometimes feel that you have ended up in a training vacuum: You train every single day, but you don’t get any better.

Change training strategy
Doing the same interval procedure every Tuesdays and Thursdays are not necessarily the best way to train and certainly not the most motivating to ride. Mixing up your regular intervals with other intervals is not only motivating, but might improve some of the skills that you haven’t touched for a while. If you haven’t done focused anaerobic training that is one of the fastests skills to improve.

Unorganized intervals (fartlek)
Systematic interval training is the cornerstone in many training programs, but even the best training program needs to be mixed up with unorganized intervals. What I talk about is Fartlek, which is a combination of many different intervals with both aerobic and anaerobic events. These intervals are not organized as the intervals you know from regular interval training. Instead you use the terrain, the winds or you friends to get inspired to make attacks of various lengths. It is very challenging to train Fartlek if you train it with a couple of competitive friends.

Long Slow Distance Training
This might not sound like an opportunity if you are fed up with training hours, but if you have done a lots of systematic intervals with your power meter and got bored, there is a chance that doing couple of LSD sessions could be challenging.

Participate in Races
One of the easiest ways to increase your performance is to participate in races. In several countries there are opportunities to ride extra races every week, so that is a great alternative to your regular training. By doing races as training sessions you get targeted training that is very specific for what you aim for.

Even the best training program has limitations
Evaluating your performance is a process that shall continue throughout your career. Your training program must be optimized as you get knowledge about what works best for you. But even the best cycling program must be changed once in while.

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