Form and Fitness
Jumping right into it – I’ve outlined my goals for the racing season, both macro and micro, in Goals Outline. I discussed my methods of self-promotion and the emphasis on winning key races throughout the season. My next step is to discuss how I will achieve the form and fitness required to win.
“Form”-ula
Recently in an article on VeloNews.com, Dirk Friel astutely pointed out that form is the difference between fitness and fatigue. He provided this crazy algorithm. Try and keep up!:
Fitness – fatigue = form.
Assuming we cannot get negative fatigue, our best chance of achieving optimal form, relative to our fitness, is to bring fatigue to its absolute minimum – zero.
(Fuh-teeg)
Fatigue comes in many forms: physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion (burnout or overtraining), illness, and injury.
By getting adequate recovery periods between workouts and competitions, and making sure to get enough sleep at night, you can prevent many factors that lead to physical exhaustion and illness. I know that for me personally, I have a tendency to get respiratory illnesses if I don’t get enough sleep. So, being in bed on time and not drinking caffeine to stay awake, are vital to my overall form.
I’m also of the belief that caffeine’s mask on fatigue is not a good thing for athletes. It’s difficult to know exactly how tired your body or mind is, if you’re wired to stay awake. Having an occasional coffee before a ride is good for liposis (fat metabolism) and overall performance. But, using it as a crutch to wake up in the morning or stay up at night can prove detrimental to any athlete that is trying to stay in tune with his/her body.
Here’s the way I determine if it’s ok to have coffee or caffeinated tea (other than simple desire): If I’m going to be doing physical activity within the next couple of hours, it’s ok. Otherwise, drink herbal tea, water, or orange juice, it’s much better.
Another thing that I do in regards to illness-prevention, is take vitamin supplements. Every morning, I consume 500mg of Vitamin C, and 400 IU of Vitamin E. Also, after particularly long, or otherwise physically draining rides, I take 1 teaspoon of powdered L-Glutamine (an Amino Acid). During my undergraduate studies in physiology, I read multiple studies that showed in endurance athletes a tendency towards getting URIs (upper respiratory-tract infections). However, athletes that supplemented their diet with the amino acid L-Glutamine, had much less chance of getting URIs.
Here’s the reasoning that I have concluded from my years in studying endurance training: When glycogen stores in your muscles run out, and your body runs low on blood sugar (anywhere from 1.5 hours – 2 hours for the average athlete), your body starts to metabolize its amino acids (proteins) to produce glucose. One of the first places the body strips of amino acids is the respiratory tract, and the immuno-protector L-Glutamine. This leaves your body susceptible to infection specifically at the respiratory tract after chronic (or even very acute) glycogen-depleting endurance activities.
Since I have been taking L-Glutamine as an immunity supplement, I have had no URIs that I can recall (since 2003). However, prior to that, I used to constantly walk around with a cough and raspy lungs during racing season.
Sticks and Stones will break your bones…
For injury prevention, I try not to train in adverse weather conditions. Also, when I’m out mountain biking alone, I make sure to give my spouse my precise location, and don’t use the downhills as major training challenges.
When I was 14, I had a training partner who was a few years older than I. We both raced Expert Juniors, and he was always faster. Well, one day he went out training on his own, and accidentally careened off the side of a singletrack trail and hit his head pretty hard. He went unconscious for an unknown duration of time, until some hikers happened to find him. He was lucky, and ended up ok. But, that experience always left an impression on me. So, whenever I’m out riding on my own, especially mountain biking, where there may be no one for hours or even days to come along, I make sure that I am careful on dangerous descents.
Overtraining
I will address mental rest, recovery, and “training” in a future post on psychological training.
Ships weren’t meant to stay in harbor
Of course, I could completely minimize my fatigue levels by getting adequate rest and not even riding at all…but that’s not the point! Plus, it completely ignores the first half of the equation (fitness). So, my goal is to make sure that I minimize my fatigue whilst maximizing fitness. And, on race day, I need to make sure that the equation yields the highest result.
Fitness
This is the point that everyone focuses on. I also love to focus on training methods. But, I felt as though everything I have covered thus far is a necessary precondition.
To improve cycling-specific physical fitness, there’s nothing better than going out and riding your bike. Duh! However, there are many methods by which an individual can glean the most from their rides and/or prepare their bodies for riding, when not able to go out and ride.
To eliminate as many outside variables to physical fitness training as possible, I will make the assumption that road biking, mountain biking, track cycling, group and solo, and indoor vs. outdoor cycling are all the same. I know this is ridiculous, but consider the factors that I removed like position differences, environment, drafting, traction, strategy, group riding, weather, etc., I sliced and diced until I could focus optimally on the body + the machine as much as possible.
Pedalpusher
To make it easier to understand the training methods that I am about to describe, I am not discussing riding a “bicycle.” Rather, let’s call it a “pedalpusher” machine. The pedalpusher looks exactly the same as your favorite racing bike, but only exists in a theoretical world, where there is no wind-resistance, no cars, and no saddle-chaffing. Also, since the absolute value of watts, gears, miles-per-hour, and heart rate are next-to-meaningless here, I will try to only write in terms of percentages.
Also, with normal cycling, you are trying to achieve maximally sustained speed, and speed involves many factors such as terrain, drafting, aerodynamics, and body weight. So, instead of speed with the pedalpusher, we are trying to achieve maximal sustained wattage – since that can be directly measured as a result of form.
To optimize physical fitness for the pedalpusher, it requires strength, endurance, and leg speed. Because the pedalpusher has gears, options of varying leg speed and resistance are available to individuals who ride the pedal pusher. One rider may choose to pedalpush at 60 rotations-per-minute with a resistance level of 5, while his friend may choose to ride at 100RPM at resistance level 3, and they both achieve the same watts. Due to this option, there exists levels of individuality. However, not all options have the same effect on the body.
Here I’m going to inject myself into the theoretical world of the pedalpusher, so please don’t be disturbed: Let’s assume I have a current capacity and potential capacity for RPMs, force output, and endurance. For example, I can pedal anywhere from 1-100% of my RPMs (most likely anywhere from 1-180RPM in absolute values, currently).
Since my goal is to achieve 100% watts, I need to understand that watts is derived as a combination of leg speed (RPMs) and force output. If I want to sustain my maximal power for a given period of time, I also need to factor in endurance.
If I were to be only measuring the sustained power output over a period of time with no changes, I would just find the highest combination of RPMs and resistance that I could maintain that yields the highest wattage, and then design a training plan on increasing that combination over the fixed-variable of duration.
However, I am using this pedalpusher to train for mountain and road bike racing. So, to better simulate the mountain and road biking needs, I need to have intervals of high watts/recovery/high watts/recovery with varying interval lengths (downhills, uphills, drafts, sprints, etc.).
I have added a few more variables in regards to my training. Not only do I have to be able to achieve my maximal power during the intervals, I also need to be able to recover quickly enough to do it again during each subsequent interval. So, while-riding recovery is very important. This brings us to the pillars of physiological muscle training – force (resistance or gear), duration (interval length), repetitions (RPMs), and recovery time.
Training
“Training” involves stressing a tissue, organ, or organism at a level higher than its normal operating level, letting it recover, then repeating. The physiological process of adaptation raises the tissue, organ, or organisms functioning levels, allowing for increased levels of stress. This is how an individual trains their body to improve in an activity.
Force
Force can be trained by isolating it among fixed variables of duration, repetitions, and recovery. If I take my normal operating range of the fixed variables, and focus on increasing force, my force capacity should increase while the other variables should maintain.
I train force by going for a ride on the pedalpusher, and do intervals. During the intervals, I steadily increase my force requirements, keeping my RPMs in my normal operating range (70-80), giving myself a fixed interval and recovery time to use (1 minute interval, 2 minutes rest), and continue for a fixed duration that is approximated by my force dropping out of training range (muscle exhaustion).
How can you determine how much force your are outputting? If you have a power meter, and you keep your RPMs in a relatively close range, an increase in wattage is resultant from an increase in force.
Duration
Duration can be broken down into interval duration and workout duration. It can be isolated by fixing the levels of force, RPMs (repetitions), and recovery.
Interval duration can be trained by using a pyramid structure of increasing interval length, while fixing force levels, RPMs, and recovery time.
Workout duration can be trained by increasing the overall number of intervals or – effectively – the overall workout time, while keeping all the other factors the same.
Repetitions
Repetitions, or for our sake – RPMs, can be isolated in a workout by fixing force, interval and workout duration, and recovery time.
When I was 14 and 15, I would train for a large part of a season, then when a peak race would come along, I would spend a couple weeks of doing my normal rides, but all in the “granny gear” or small chainring, even downhills. I was aiming to jump-off my season of increased force/endurance/recovery and now also increase my speed or RPMs. I did this a month before the 1994 UCI Pan-American Championships, and spun to a surprising 1st place, using the same range of gearing that I would normally be using, but with an increase in turnover rate. Over the years, I have incorporated this type of training into my workouts to improve leg spin.
Doing intervals with fixed force, duration, and recovery, but increasing your cadence, will train “repetitions.”
Recovery
Like all the others, isolating recovery can be done by fixing all of the other variables (force, duration, RPMs).
Training recovery comes from decreasing your needed recovery time in-between intervals.
Tie it up
I will now no-longer be discussing the pedalpusher, as it served its purpose in isolating my training factors (Force, Duration, Repetitions, Recovery).
So, how do I bring all of these factors together to create the perfect training plan on my bike? Aside from the fact that “it all depends” is a correct answer here, I will give you what I do.
My Training
I live in the Northwest – Oregon to be exact. And, our winters here suck for riding outdoors. It’s rainy, snowy, and just plain cold. Given that one of my main prerogatives is to not get sick or injured, riding outside this time of year is very, very limited.
Since the upper limits of my workout duration are somewhere along the lines of 5-9 hours, I will most likely not be training duration until it dries up and gets sunnier around here.
I have learned from past years of racing that training repetitions (RPMs) and recovery this time of year is practically useless as my body has yet to adapt to the true test variable – force.
Force is usually the determining factor in cycling hill climbs, and hill climbing is where most time is gained in races. So, I start off my season training force.
Plus, force training usually doesn’t require as much time to workout as the other variables. And, this time of year, I spend a lot of time training indoors on stationary bikes/trainers. I prefer to keep my indoor training limited in duration as it is taxing on my mental fatigue (to be discussed later).
So, I orient my training season into the following sequence:
- Force
- Workout Duration
- Interval Duration
- Recovery
- Repetitions.
I then take my goals outline and aim to be at the end of my Repetitions training phase by my first peak event (Oregon State Mountain Bike Championships June 28-29th).
This allows for approximately 5 months (from now) for 5 phases. I bet you can’t guess how I divvy it up! Yeah, about 4 weeks per phase.
I plan my workouts only about 1 to 2 weeks ahead of time. I have done further-ahead in the past, and I now think this ends up being to much of a hassle. Your boss doesn’t make you plan what you’re going to be doing on May 7th (or maybe he does), so why should I?
I incorporate the training methods that I described to isolate particular variables during my training phase. But, I also remember to keep having fun and enjoy it all. If I’m not enjoying it, then I might as well be training to be the best garbage-picker-upper, it probably pays better.
Soon I’ll describe psychological “training” and some more specific workouts that I will be doing this season.
Otherwise, Peace!
-Andy
